Chapter 4: American Myths

I closed Professor Grant’s diary and felt the world tilt beneath me, the fluorescent lights in my office buzzing like angry hornets. My mind raced back to the John Gable story—the one I’d read in Mrs. Howard’s third-grade class in Cincinnati, the one everyone knew.

Once, the story went, there was an old man named John Gable. Two mountains blocked his front porch, keeping him from reaching the wider world. So, he gathered his kids and grandkids, and they started digging—hauling rocks in wheelbarrows, dumping them into the Atlantic Ocean, year after year.

He told his family, "If we don’t finish, our children will. If they don’t, our children’s children will. Someday, these mountains’ll be gone."

He worked until the angels took pity, and a mighty spirit came down to haul the mountains away. It was a story about grit, persistence—the American way.

Images three and four on the mountain—people digging, a giant hauling the peak away—lined up perfectly with the legend. But the first image? The mountain coming down from the sky? That wasn’t how the story went.

And then there was the second image. Giant snakes, dressed in overalls like some surreal version of a county fair, bowing to the mountain. That detail had never shown up in any schoolbook or campfire tale I’d heard.

Could it be that, long before humans, there’d been another civilization—a nation of snakes? My skin prickled at the thought, some ancient part of me recoiling.

Instinct told me this was at the heart of Professor Grant’s disappearance. Shaking, I flipped the diary open again, bracing myself for what came next.

The next entries chilled me to the marrow.

What they’d found beneath the sea wasn’t a mountain at all. Not even close.