Echoes of Awakening

Throughout human history, certain moments have marked quantum leaps in our consciousness—times when the boundary between what we were and what we could become grew mysteriously thin. In this masterful collection of three interconnected yet independent stories, Hector M. Rodriguez explores those pivotal moments when humanity's understanding of itself changed forever.

In "The Girl in the Painting," an eleven-year-old girl in 1872 California orchestrates an intricate revenge against her father's murderers, only to discover something far more ancient and dangerous beneath the gold-rush mountains. When her story resurfaces through a mysterious portrait in 1994, the deadly secrets she trapped beneath a ghost town begin to stir once more, suggesting that some knowledge was never meant to be unearthed.

"They Were Only Kids" follows a group of extraordinary children pulling off impossible heists in modern-day Portland. But their supernatural abilities and mysterious agenda mask a deeper truth about human potential—and about powers that ancient forces have hidden within our DNA. As a detective with his own classified past races to protect them, he discovers that humanity's next evolution might not come from a lab, but from those society has forgotten.

In "The Tiger's Gift," we journey back to humanity's dawn, where a young shaman's apprentice with no memory and a woman who speaks to tigers discover their forbidden love could bridge the gap between beast and human. As their paths cross beneath skies lit by a consciousness-altering meteor, they unlock genetic secrets that will echo through generations.

Throughout these tales stalks the enigmatic presence of the human spirit represented in both humanity's primal nature and its potential for transformation. Ancient wisdom, genetic legacy, and the evolution of consciousness weave through each story, suggesting that the greatest mysteries we face aren't buried in the earth, but in our own forgotten potential.

From prehistoric caves to modern city streets, from sacred ceremonial chambers to sophisticated security vaults, these stories explore moments when the veils between past and present, between beast and human, between conscious and unconscious grow mysteriously thin. They remind us that sometimes the most profound archaeological discoveries aren't the artifacts we unearth, but the ancient truths we rediscover about ourselves.

THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING

(Excerpt)

By

Hector M. Rodriguez

~

Copyright 2025

“M’Liss”

THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING

CHAPTER 1

The Painting

Some stories find you when you least expect them. Mine found me on a bitter autumn morning in 1994, tucked between cast-off memories at a yard sale in Kamloops, British Columbia. I almost missed her – a girl’s face emerging from layers of aged varnish, her eyes so alive they seemed to follow me between tables of tarnished silver and moth-eaten quilts.

The painting wasn’t beautiful in any conventional sense. The canvas was torn along one edge, paint flaking from its corners like autumn leaves. But there was something in those eyes that stopped me cold – a fierce intelligence, an old soul’s wisdom trapped in a child’s face. She couldn’t have been more than eleven, this girl from another century, her untamed black hair framing features that managed to be both wild and aristocratic.

She sat before what appeared to be a cave mouth, though something about the darkness behind her suggested a mine entrance. Her clothing told its own story: a frayed red wool shawl that might once have graced a fine lady’s parlor draped over a forest green dress with a turned-up hem. No shoes. Golden maple leaves swirled at her feet, each one rendered with obsessive detail, as if the artist had been trying to capture something more than just falling leaves.

“Five loonies,” said a quiet voice. I turned to find a young woman watching me, her expression oddly like the girl in the painting. “She’s been in my family since my great-grandmother’s time.” Her fingers traced patterns on her sleeve – a nervous habit, or something more? “Mom used to say there was blood in that painting’s history. Said it brought both fortune and misery to those who owned it.”

I handed her the five loonies, trying not to notice how her hand trembled apprehensively as she took the coins. As I lifted the canvas, something fluttered from behind the frame – a scrap of paper that danced on the morning breeze before I could catch it.

“Might want to be careful with that one,” the woman called after me as I carried the purchase to my car. “Some stories are better left buried in the California hills.”

Later, under the harsh light of my study, the painting began to yield its secrets. Hidden in the shadows of the cave entrance, almost lost in the artist’s heavy brushstrokes, were what appeared to be numbers – coordinates perhaps, or a date. And there, in the bottom corner beneath flaking paint, a signature emerged: Edwin Long, 1872. But it was what I discovered in the original frame that changed everything. Tucked into a careful hollow in the wood was a fragment of paper, its ink faded to near-invisibility. Only two words remained legible: “Remember Melissa.”

I didn’t know it then, but I had just purchased my way into one of the gold country’s darkest stories – a tale of murder, greed, and revenge that had waited over a century to be told. The girl in the painting was Melissa Smith, and she had been both witness and avenger to events that would shake the California gold fields to their foundation. That night, I dreamed of her eyes watching me through layers of old varnish, waiting for someone to finally uncover the truth she had buried beneath Red Mountain’s blood-stained soil.

The next morning, an envelope arrived with no return address. Inside was a single gold flake and a yellowed map fragment. Scrawled across it in faded ink were words that would launch me into months of research: “Smith’s Pocket lies deeper than any mine.” The mystery of Melissa Smith was just beginning.

CHAPTER 2

Shadows of Red Mountain

History leaves clues, if you know where to look. Red Mountain itself still exists, though you won’t find it on modern maps – just another ghost town lost in the folds of the Sierra Nevada, two hundred miles east of Sacramento. But in 1872, when Edwin Long first set eyes on it, the town pulsed with gold fever and darker hungers.

My research led me first to the California State Archives in Sacramento, where yellowed newspapers and mining records painted a portrait of a place where fortunes rose and fell between sunrise and sunset. But it was in a dusty courthouse basement that I found the documents that would change everything – the personal papers of Dr. James Clapp, Red Mountain’s doctor and coroner.

Clapp’s cramped handwriting revealed a town built on fault lines deeper than geology: two saloons facing each other like gunfighters across the main street, the “respectable” National Hotel and the notorious Empire Hotel, a Presbyterian church whose white-washed walls stood in stark contrast to the rusty iron-rich soil that gave the mountain its name. But it was his notes about the cemetery,