Author: J.Armstrong, Word Count: 666
Featured in Spooky Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – 2025
Dr. Misfortunato is a boastful, egotistical, malevolent man who has created a vast
trove of publications, holds a prestigious seat as a grand poohbah of a professor, and
above all has been granted tenure – everything I hate in a man. Whereas I, Monty
Lado, am a po’ boy, a sand hog with a career of tunneling through infested overgrowth
and decrepit, tottering, vermin filled stone passages while battling bouts of Rocky
Mountain spotted fever and hantavirus. When he died he would be lauded and
honored. When I died I would probably be wearing somebody else’s clothes while
digging in an old privy for bottles in Baltimore. He even dared to scoff at my few
publications setting forth pioneering work into the feathered serpent across cultures,
and my account of undergrad adventure searching for Blackbeard’s treasure. He had
derided the role of alcohol in my accounts, but now the worm had turned with his
dissipation. I had plotted my revenge and my revenge had become The Task of Monty
Lado.
I contrived to meet Dr. Misfortunato at the carnival of the Southwest Symposium
where I spotted him dressed in a motley worthy of a pop culture swashbuckling
archaeologist. He was imbibing quantities of fermented agave based beverages and
chatting up young nubile students with bellies full of beer. I gained his attention through
the purchase of tequila and mezcal shots, which he willingly downed. I used the topic of
fermented agave beverages to bring up the subject of my latest find, a collapsed burnt
subterranean ceremonial chamber called a kiva which held numerous ancestral
puebloan monochrome mugs and sealed ollas, clay pots, of ancestral fermented agave
based beverages. I offered to guide him to this unbelievable find which was not far
distant. With the offer of a bottle of mezcal, I sealed the deal.
We were soon driving down a bumpy, rutted, dirt road into the moonlit
unpopulated areas where many sites of ancestral pueblo villages had been found. I
pulled off the road near a bridge of an abandoned railroad. I explained that it was here
that I had discovered the vessel by the trestle with the clue to the brew. As we
descended the trail in the moonlight, I maintained his interest in climbing over the rocks
and vegetation by offering him swigs from the bottle of mezcal at inconvenient stopping
points. Presently it was easier to keep going down than it was to return up the trail.
The bottle was nearly empty. Dr. Misfortunato staggered towards the village ruins
which we could now see silhouetted by the stars in the distance. The swine even had
the gall to swallow the worm with his last swig of the mezcal without offering me nary a
taste of the liquor.
We had to climb over various boulders, avoid survey pits and the scattered tools
which underpaid and overtired workers had just left behind when porject funding was
cut. My mind wandered but not far with a maximum of 666 words allowed. I feigned
disorientation but quickly proceeded towards the kiva so as to not lose the doctor’s
rapidly deteriorating interest in finding the mugs and sealed ollas of fermented agave
nectar. I reminded him that this particular liquor hadn’t been tasted in 1,000 years and
was rumored to bring the most vivid of wondrous hallucinations to the ancient shaman.
I found the rooftop entrance to the underground kiva and lowered a ladder into
the murky dark interior. A ray of moonlight shone through the burnt timbers and
everlasting clouds of dust to illuminate the mugs and sealed ollas strewn across its
floor. Graciously I let him descend into the pit first and blearily take stock of what he
found. As he broke the seal on one of the ollas, I silently but rapidly pulled up the
ladder leaving him no means of escape. The last that I heard of him were his muffled
screams as I dumped a wheelbarrow load of disapproved theses proposals into the pit.
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