by Lukens, Mark
But Cole had never even thought about sacrificing David to that thing out there. He had even killed Jose to save David. Maybe Cole was smart enough to know that the Ancient Enemy would never let them go if David was killed. Maybe Cole knew they would be even more vulnerable than ever. Maybe he had been using David as a shield. But once they got away from the cabin, he could have run so many times. And he didn’t need to come after them after they had run out on him at the Mountainside Inn. He had already been in Bruce the salesman’s SUV by then with the engine running—he could have just left the parking lot. But he hadn’t, and she thought she might love him for that, too.
Cole touched her hand.
Stella looked at him. He smiled at her like he’d been reading her thoughts.
Joe came back from down the hall into the living room. His footsteps were so light, he hardly made a sound on the old floorboards of his trailer. He held what looked like a three-ring binder a kid might take to school. He entered the kitchen and sat back down at the head of the table.
On closer inspection, Stella realized that the binder was actually a cheap photo album with a dark vinyl cover. Joe opened it up and she saw news clippings from magazines and newspapers carefully positioned behind the clear plastic covering the thick white pages. There were also internet printouts that had been cut to size to fit the pages. There were articles and photos and also many pages of notebook paper in between the white stiff pages of articles and photos; the notebook paper was filled with small, neat handwriting.
Joe flipped through the pages, looking for something. “What is happening now,” Joe said as he flipped through the book, “what is happening to David … it has happened before.” He looked up at Stella, and then at Cole. He left the book open, apparently having found what he’d been looking for. “I don’t have proof of every occurrence in the past, but I have enough to recognize a pattern.”
He still hadn’t shoved the book Stella’s way, but she could see the open pages and she saw what looked like three articles and photos that had been cut out from internet printouts and newspapers, all situated neatly under the clear plastic sheet. On the opposite page was a piece of notebook paper secured in the three-ring binder. The notebook paper was filled with small, neat handwriting.
Joe was still looking at them, his hands clutching the edges of the photo album protectively. “In September of 1891, something like this happened not too far from here in a town, a settlement really. A lawman and bounty hunter named Jed Cartwright apprehended a fugitive, a half-Navajo named Red Moon, who was wanted for twenty murders along with robbery, horse thievery, and various other crimes. Jed and his partner, a man only listed as Roscoe, and a younger man named Stephen Dobbs, caught Red Moon in the northwestern corner of Arizona and they were taking him back to Smith Junction.”
Joe sighed, pausing a moment. “Jed never showed up at Smith Junction. The story goes that somehow between where Jed and his men had apprehended Red Moon and Smith Junction, they were jumped by a band of Navajo pretending to be skinwalkers. Roscoe and Dobbs were killed … mutilated, and Jed made it to a ranch where he found a whole family slaughtered … the only survivor was a young boy. A boy named David.”
Joe slid the photo album across the table to Stella. She stared at the grainy black and white photograph of a boy who could’ve been David’s twin. There were other people in the photo with the boy.
“That’s most likely David’s family,” Joe said. “His mother, father, and older brother.”
Stella looked at Joe. “This is … he looks just like …”
“Now you understand my reaction when I saw David.”
Stella slid the photo album across the table so Cole could see the photo. He stared down at the photo for a long moment, and then he looked back at Stella. “This looks an awful lot like David,” he agreed. “But it could still be a coincidence. I’ve had people come up to me before and swear I was someone else.”
Joe nodded. “Yes, I thought of that. But it’s the rest of the story that might sound very familiar. I wrote it down, piecing it together from various sources.”
“What’s the story?” Stella asked.
“When Jed Cartwright got to the ranch and found the family slaughtered, he took the boy with him. They took two horses and began to ride to Smith Junction. But they didn’t make it all the way there. They stopped in a small town along the way, seeking shelter from a sandstorm. It wasn’t long before the members of that town were wiped out.”
“Did the boy live?” Stella asked. “Did he survive?”
Joe shrugged. “No one knows. Jed never turned his bounty in and the slaughter in that town was attributed to either a rogue band of Apache or a part of Red Moon’s gang seeking retribution.”
“But you said there was more,” Stella reminded him.
Cole pushed the photo album back to Joe.
“There’s another account,” Joe said. “Not too much information on it, but about a hundred and twenty years before that, in 1771, a whole village was wiped out. The people were slaughtered, mutilated in the most horrendous way. I have a few clippings of people telling their story, but there are no actual newspaper accounts of it like there is with what happened in 1891. And there are stories of similar happenings a hundred and twenty years before the 1771 event, all the way back to the late twelve hundreds.”
“When the Anasazi disappeared,” Stella said. “When they had supposedly walked away from the cities they had built into the sides of cliffs.”
“Yes,” Joe said.
“Archaeologists like to give many reasons why the Anasazi walked away from those cities,” Stella said. “They cite conflicts with the Spanish explorers, but there was no record of the Spanish ever reaching this far inland before 1300. Other tribes attacking them doesn’t make sense to me because the Anasazi were the most sophisticated and advanced culture at that time in the area. Some archaeologists cite drought and weather changes … but if that’s true, then why did they head south into the Arizona and New Mexico deserts, where the drought could be worse? Some archaeologists say inner conflicts destroyed the Anasazi because of the evidence at these cities of mass killings and cannibalism.”
“And of course when scientists can’t figure out what happened to an ancient culture, they always cite religious reasons,” Joe said. “Why were people sacrificed in the Maya culture? We don’t know. Must’ve been religious reasons. Why were those gigantic designs drawn on the Nazca plains in South America? We don’t know. Must’ve been religious reasons.”
“But the killings and cannibalism at the Anasazi sites,” Stella said, getting Joe back on track. “What if those people were told to kill and mutilate? What if a dead person had been sent back as a messenger, demanding things until they gave up what the Ancient Enemy truly wanted?”
“Someone like David,” Joe said.
“And if they sacrificed someone like David,” Stella continued quickly, “then they were completely vulnerable to the Ancient Enemy.”
Joe nodded and sighed.
“So we know there’s a cycle,” Cole said. “We believe there has been at least one boy like David a hundred and twenty years ago, and other similar instances going all the way back to when the Anasazi disappeared. We know the Ancient Enemy or Darkwind or whatever, is most likely some kind of alien creature that we can’t possibly understand, a creature that slips through from its dimension into ours with the help of a true shaman like David, a true shaman that can hurt it, possibly destroy it, so the Ancient Enemy must force someone to kill David before he grows up and becomes powerful enough to kill it or send it back. We know all of that, but what do we do now?”
Stella and Joe looked at Cole, and then Stella looked to Joe for the answer.
“I have been preparing,” Joe said. “I have been praying very hard as I performed The Enemy Way ceremony. I know that I must give David a crash course in medicine.” He looked at Stella. “You said when you were at the cabin, David wrote down symbols … ancient writing.”
“Yes,” Stella answered. “I don’t have the notebook with me; it burned up in the cabin. But I recognized the symbols as the written language of the Anasazi—they were the same symbols I saw on the tablets that Jake and I got from the dig site, buried deep in that cave where we found a city buried inside.”
Joe huffed in disappointment. He looked away like he was in deep thought for a moment. And then he looked back at Stella. “Have you ever asked yourself why David showed up to you where he did? Why he came all the way to your dig site?”
CHAPTER 57
Joe Blackhorn’s trailer
“Of course I’ve wondered why he came there,” Stella answered. “I never knew how he found us or why. I never knew where he came from. He would barely talk to me. I figured something traumatic had happened to him. Maybe a car accident or something. Like I told you earlier, we sent a man named Jim Whitefeather to go for help … but he came back as a messenger for the Ancient Enemy, asking for things from us. Later, David eventually told me that his parents weren’t here anymore and I assumed they were dead, only by then I knew their deaths hadn’t been an accident … the Ancient Enemy had gotten them. I could never get much more out of David. But now you say he lived with his parents in Iron Springs. I know where that is, and it’s pretty far away from the dig site. A lot of treacherous walking to get to us.”
Joe nodded solemnly. “Yes. And David didn’t seek out help in Iron Springs, or at any of the ranches along the way. He went straight to you … or I should say straight to the dig site.”
It was dawning on Stella suddenly. “The dig site … he was drawn to it.”
“I believe so,” Joe said. “Whether he ever realized it or not, I think it was a place of safety for him.”
“And this dig site is where you found samples of the Anasazi writing,” Cole said.
“Yes,” Stella answered, the word coming out as a whisper as she thought back to it. “It was a huge discovery; the first collection of writings from the Anasazi culture. If those writings could be deciphered, then the story of the Anasazi could finally be told, perhaps even the mystery of why they had abandoned so many cities finally solved. Finding those writings was like finding the hieroglyphics in the Egyptian ruins. Like finding the Rosetta stone.”
“And David wrote some of those symbols down in that notebook in the cabin,” Cole said, obviously going somewhere with this line of questioning.
“Yes,” Stella said.
“Then maybe David saw those symbols at the dig site. Maybe he copied down what he’d seen at the dig site in the notebook at the cabin.”
Stella shook her head, already dismissing that idea. “No, that couldn’t be possible. Those symbols he drew in that notebook were perfect copies of the Anasazi writings. No way he could’ve copied them so perfectly.”
“Maybe David’s a savant,” Cole said. “Possibly autistic. He shows the signs.”
“He also shows the signs of a traumatized child,” Stella argued. “And his behavior’s changing. He’s opening up to us now, talking more, relating more. He could be autistic, I don’t know, but as far as the writing, we hadn’t even taken most of the evidence out of the cave yet. And David had never even been in that cave.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Stella snapped. “I was leaving the cave when I found him, so I know he’d never gone in there.”
“Unless he snuck inside the cave in the middle of the night.”
Stella already knew where Cole was going with this. David had left the cabin in the middle of the night when the electricity had gone out. “We never found him outside at the dig site like we did at the cabin,” she said, but then she thought of the night she left. She thought about David being outside the trailer, staring at the cave in the distance. Had she told them about that?
Joe sipped his tea, watching them silently.
Stella looked at Joe as an idea occurred to her.
He stared at her and raised his eyebrows like he’d been patiently waiting for her to reach the obvious conclusion.
“We need to go back to the dig site, don’t we?” she asked.
Joe just stared at her for a moment. “Or another place like it.”
Stella felt her heart skip a beat. Was there another place like the dig site at the cave? Another Anasazi city waiting to be discovered?
“There’s a sacred place not too far from here. It’s one of the reasons I chose to live here.”
“And we need to go there, don’t we?” Cole said.
Joe nodded again. “I think there are many places on Earth where the barrier is weak … hot spots, if you will … and this place is one of them.”
Thoughts swirled through Stella’s mind. There was another place like the dig site? “Is it an Anasazi ruin?”
Joe sipped his tea again. “Most Navajo don’t go near this place, mostly out of superstition and fear, and many don’t go near it out of reverence. Like I said, it’s a sacred place. It’s a place that must be left alone.”
Stella felt the sting of his words. She could interpret what he meant—he and other Navajo didn’t want this place scoured by scientists.
“Of course,” Stella told him, but she couldn’t help wondering what secrets and discoveries were hidden there. But she refused to pester Joe about it—he wasn’t going to give explanations until he was ready, she had already seen evidence of that.
“Where is this place? You said it wasn’t too far away.”
“A few hours away,” Joe said. “We can get there by horse or four-wheelers.”
“So what are we going to do … use David as bait?” Cole asked, clearly disgusted.
Joe shook his head slowly. “No. We will be using ourselves as the bait. It can’t attack David, it can’t kill David, so it will go after one of us.”
They were all silent for a moment.
“I will prepare us as much as possible,” Joe told them. “But only so much can be done in such a short time against a powerful chindi like the Darkwind.”
Joe stood up. “We should get some sleep for a few hours. Rest our bodies and minds, build up our strength. We will need it. When the sun is up, I will begin working with David.” He walked over to a kitchen drawer and pulled out a spiral-bound notebook, similar to the one David had written on in the cabin. He found a ballpoint pen in the drawer and brought both items to the table. “First, David will need to draw those symbols again, that same ancient writing he wrote down before. As much as he can remember.”
Stella nodded.
Joe left the kitchen. “I’ll get us some blankets,” he said over his shoulder.
Stella and Cole looked at each other as the wind howled even harder outside the trailer.
PART 4
WEDNESDAY
CHAPTER 58
Captain Begay’s house
Special Agent Palmer woke up from the nightmare even before the sun was up. It was the same dream as before. He was back in that warehouse, or building, or whatever it was, that seemed to go on forever. Something was chasing him, something that constantly changed form, some shadowy monster. But it wasn’t a mindless monster—it was smarter than he was, anticipating his every move … and he knew he wasn’t going to get away from this monster.
He’d never had nightmares like this one before in his life, and he felt a little queasy as he sat there on the edge of the bed. But at the same time the thing in his dream seemed familiar somehow, like he had encountered it many times before, like he had seen it several times throughout his life, just glimpses really, but he hadn’t remembered it until now. And now all of those memories were crashing back onto him.
That thing in his dream meant to kill him; it would never stop chasing him. He still felt that sense of hopelessness left over from the dream, the hopelessness of ever escaping it. That thing was everywhere … it could come into our world anytime it wanted to. And in the dream Palmer knew all of this; he understood it all and how everything fit together.
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sp; A shiver ran across his flesh like the dancing legs of a thousand spiders.
Where had that thought come from? He hated spiders.
Palmer sat there on the edge of the bed for a moment longer in Captain Begay’s home … in Begay’s daughter’s old room. Even though Begay and his wife had turned their daughter’s bedroom into a guestroom after she’d left for college, the bedroom still felt somewhat like Begay’s daughter lived there. It had the feel of so many bedrooms that Palmer had seen over the years, museums to missing or dead children.
He wore only his underwear and white T-shirt. His dark suit was folded up neatly on the chair across the room, his suitcoat and overcoat hanging up in the small closet. His ID and badge, cell phone, service pistol and shoulder holster, and a pint of vodka were on the nightstand next to the bed. His duffel bag was on the floor across the room, still opened up and exactly where he had dropped it last night.
After a sip of the vodka, Palmer sat there for a moment longer. The dream was already fading away and his mind was turning to this case he was working on—the strangest case he had ever been assigned to.
He thought of Begay’s “raid” on the property last night. They had been tricked, set up by someone, and Palmer had a feeling Begay knew who it was.
Palmer got up and got dressed in the darkness. He slid his shoulder holster on, and then slipped his service pistol down into the holster; it was a reassuring weight against his body. He stuffed his cell phone down into the leather pouch on his belt. He hid the vodka bottle down in his duffel bag after one last swig, and then he grabbed his travel case with his deodorant, mouthwash, shaving cream, razor, toothpaste, and toothbrush inside. He left the room to use the bathroom in the hall.
