Night Chill

by Jeff Gunhus

  Jack took a deep breath. “All right. Go on. I’m listening.”

  Lonetree shuffled over to the next panel, about half way around the circumference of the stone structure. Shaman was depicted horizontally, surrounded by warriors hacking at his body. “Wow, looks like they got tired of whatever this guy was giving them,” Jack said.

  “Or greedy for more of it. No one knows, but my father’s theory was that the warriors demanded something and the Shaman refused, so they decided to force it from him.”

  “And so they killed him,” Jack said.

  “According to the notebook, that didn’t end the terror. The Sumac continued the ritual sacrifice. With one small addition.” Lonetree pointed to a scene where decapitated bodies were stacked up. Next to the table to was a round hut, a smaller version of the stone structure in front on them.

  “What’s that?” Jack asked.

  “A new part of the ritual they incorporated after the shaman. An idol. A temple, something like that. My father wasn’t sure. He thought maybe they put the Shaman’s body there. Whatever it was, it’s obviously an earlier version of this structure here in the cave, so it had to be important to them. Anyway, to keep the rituals going they needed more victims. For years, they lived in a constant state of war, ranging far to find new tribes, killing the men and capturing the women. My father studied Native American folklore all over the Eastern seaboard and up into the Great Lakes. Over and over he found stories that matched up with this. Even the plains Indians of the Midwest have references in their mythology of a tribe of cruel and evil warriors. A tribe who enslave women and who could not be killed by an arrow. They called the Sumac the ‘ones who walk with dark spirits’.” Lonetree cleared his throat. “Anyway, it wasn’t long before the Sumac destroyed the tribes nearby. Others simple moved away to avoid the danger. So without an easy source of people for their sacrifices they had to get more creative.”

  “So they grew people. Like growing a crop,” Jack muttered.

  “They bred them in captivity. Primarily women since that was what the ritual called for. They no longer had to hunt. They had a renewable supply for their sacrifice. This worked for years until a man from a distant tribe discovered their secret.” Lonetree pointed to a spot on the carving. “It shows it here. This warrior goes back to his own tribe and returns leading a war party.”

  “To free the slaves?”

  “It’s a nice thought, but unlikely. The tribe probably wanted the power for themselves. In any case, they failed. You can see it right there. At the end there isn’t a single man from the invading tribe standing. They slaughtered them all. But the village sustained heavy losses themselves.”

  “I thought they you said they couldn’t be killed?” Jack said.

  “I don’t think they thought so either. But with massive enough injuries they died like normal men. There’s a difference between infinite longevity and invincibility. They could live forever, but they had to be careful. Accidents, war, anything that could inflict a massive trauma could kill them. Understanding this changed everything.”

  Jack traced his fingers over the rock, resting his hands over the scene where the crowds of women were herded into a hole in the ground. “So they went underground to keep it secret,” he whispered.

  “And to keep out of harm’s way. Look, it shows they brought the round structure down with them. They must have built this new building later.”

  “But how did they get in here? They couldn’t have come the way we just did.”

  “Maybe, this whole area is unstable. Most of the tight spots we came through are that way because of cave-ins. There might have been an easier way in that’s since collapsed.”

  Jack looked around at the great cave, especially at the jagged stalactites pointing down at them from high above. “So this place could cave in at any time?”

  “Possible, but unlikely. The smaller tunnels are a greater risk. This whole area is a giant catacomb. There’s a similar system in West Virginia that’s over a hundred miles long. Who knows how far some of these tunnels go.”

  “But it’s stable?”

  Lonetree shrugged. “The drought this year makes cave-ins more likely. The water table is low and that can cause shifts.”

  “Shifts are bad?”

  “Yeah. But I wouldn’t worry about it. This place has made it this long, right?”

  Jack pushed aside the thought of being crushed by millions of tons of rock and returned his attention to the stone structure. “How long did they use this place?”

  “See these panels here? These moons represent time. There are seven hundred and ninety of them.” He held up the notebook. “My father assumed they were months, that the cave was used for about sixty years.”

  Sixty years. Jack couldn’t imagine it. If true, it meant that generations of children had been born and lived their entire lives underground. Most would have been sacrificed in the ritual but others would have been spared and allowed to grow to adulthood. These would be the breeding stock. His thoughts turned to the adult skeleton in each cage. The poor souls. Jack couldn’t imagine an entire lifetime down in this place, imprisoned in a cage. “You said your father assumed the moons in the carving represented months. The way you said it, you made it sound like his assumption was wrong.”

  Lonetree cleared his throat. “My brother was methodical where my father was more instinctive. It made sense that it would be months. Almost every primitive society learned to mark time by the waxing and waning moon. But my brother wasn’t satisfied. And he had access to more sophisticated instruments. He conducted more tests. He was always careful, always needed specifics...” his voice trailed off.

  Jack turned away from the rock wall and moved into Lonetree’s line of sight to get his attention. “And?”

  “They’re not months. The moons are years. Each one is a year.”

  “You mean to say that…” Jack turned in a circle to look at the cave. Its stone cages. Its darkness. Its terrifying isolation.

  “That’s what I’m saying. If my brother’s calculations are correct, humans were bred in this cave for almost eight hundred years.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Jack refused to believe what he had just heard. His mind blocked out the revelation as long as it could, trying to put off the implication of what Lonetree was saying. But it crept in, unbidden and unrelenting.

  Was it impossible? Eight hundred years? How many would have been killed during that time? How many babies would have been born in this hole? Generation after generation unaware that the world above even existed. Raised like cattle for the slaughterhouse in the bowels of the earth. Veal locked in cages, blinded by the dark, flesh white from lack of sun, mutated by life without light.

  “Then what happened?” he whispered.

  Lonetree waved the glo-stick at the panels next to the rows of moons. Smooth rock extended beyond the curve of the structure. “Then nothing. The carving stops. But from the look of how they died,” he swept his glowing wand at the vacant stares of the skulls glowering at them from behind their bars, “it looks like the Sumac abandoned the place in a hurry. There’s no sign of a fight in the cave and no male skeletons anywhere.”

  “Didn’t your father have any theories?”

  “According to the notebook, his best guess was that they were struck by the same disease that hit the rest of the native cultures around that time in history.”

  Thinking back to his early American history, Jack remembered that whole populations of Indians were decimated in only a few months after the arrival of European settlers. Suddenly he felt a little glimmer of reality filter back into his life. “Didn’t Indians die from small pox? It was an epidemic, right? Well, if these Sumac could be killed by small pox, then this whole story must be wrong. Maybe this whole thing, the cave, the cages, everything, was just some demented religious ritual. You said yourself that this was common with the Aztecs.”

  “I’m not talking about small pox. Their bodies were not affected by di
sease.”

  “What then?” Jack said exasperated that his rationalization was about to disappear. “What did he think it was?”

  “Black powder. White men with guns. They could not withstand the kind of damage a gun does to a body.”

  Jack still held out hope that Lonetree was wrong. He searched for a breakdown in the logic. He seized on the missing link. “O.K. Let’s suppose all of this is true. The shaman. The lost tribe. These life-giving powers from the rituals. Let’s just say this incredibly implausible and unbelievable thing is true. What in the hell does any of this have to do with my family?”

  Lonetree held out his brother’s notebook. “My brother discovered that this is more than history. This is alive. This is happening now. Someone found the cave and started the rituals again.”

  “Huckley? He’s doing this?”

  “The girl you saw in the truck of his car? She was on her way here to be sacrificed.”

  Jack’s throat was dry, painfully so. He dragged his tongue across is lips. He didn’t want to ask the next question but he could hold it back. “And they believe…”

  “That the ritual prolongs their lives. Gives them powers. So you see, it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. It doesn’t really matter if you believe the ritual works. All that matters is that they believe it works. They believe they’ve found immortality.”

  “But…but that doesn’t explain why they want Sarah. You said yourself that Huckley took an unbelievable risk going after her like that. Why do they want her so bad?”

  Lonetree shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. You know and you’re not telling me.”

  “I wish I did, Jack. It would be helpful. All I know is that Huckley sensed something about her that made the risk worth it. You’ve found out that Huckley isn’t normal. He’s psychic, a telepath. Look, I know this is hard to swallow. This supernatural hocus-pocus drives me crazy too. But some things are certain. Men are using this cave for ritual human sacrifices. These same men tortured and killed my brother because he was getting too close to their secret. These same men are after your little girl and they will not stop until they capture her and sacrifice her.”

  “Why don’t you kill them? That’s what you want right? What’s stopping you? Why are you bringing my family into this?”

  “I told you before, I don’t know who all of them are. I know Huckley and a few of the others. But I know there are more. I know there’s a leader but he’s careful not to expose himself. Even the others only refer to him as the Boss. I need a way to flush him out in the open.”

  A pit formed in Jack’s stomach as he realized Lonetree’s plan. Finally, he understood why Lonetree brought him to this place, why he needed his help.

  “You want to use Sarah as bait,” he whispered.

  “It’s in your interest, Jack. The only way they’ll stop is if they’re dead.”

  “Are you crazy? I’m not going to…you’re out of your mind.”

  “Who knows how many people they’ve killed. Look at this.” Lonetree dropped to his knees and spread out the bundle of loose papers that had been stuffed in the notebook. They were missing person notices. All young girls. All from states bordering Maryland. “This is only from the past few years. My brother plotted the missing persons reports over the past ten years on a map.” He slapped the map over the other pages. It showed a section of the U.S. from Maine to South Carolina and west to the Mississippi. Little dots pinpointed where girls had gone missing. Little clusters appeared around major cities, but most noticeable was a bulging ribbon of color stretching up into Pennsylvania and down into West Virginia and edging into the neighboring states. At the center of the ribbon was the nexus of the disappearances, Prescott City.

  “How could the authorities not notice this?” Jack asked.

  “Multiple jurisdictions. This cluster covers five different states.”

  Jack stood up. “We’ve got to call the police. Tell them everything.”

  “And watch these guys disappear? No, we’ve got to do this ourselves. Don’t you get it? If we don’t stop them they will get Sarah eventually. And they’ll go on killing these kids. Sarah is the perfect—”

  “Never. I’m not going to put her in danger. I…I would never…what the hell?”

  Jack’s voice trailed away. He felt the muscles in his stomach tighten. Up on the wall behind the stone structure he saw a light. Dim at first, like a reflection off shiny rock. There then gone. His first thought was that there was someone else in the cave. But the light glowed brighter. It was coming from the rock.

  Lonetree turned to follow Jack’s line of sight. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you see it? A light up on the wall.”

  “Where?”

  “There. Right in front of you. Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”

  “I don’t see anything. What are you talking about?”

  Jack didn’t reply. He was mesmerized by the light, glowing brightly now, rolling down the side of the cave wall. It was beautiful, like how he imagined an angel might appear when he was a child. He felt the heat of it against his face and breathed in deep as if he might fill his body with its warmth. He could hear Lonetree yelling at him but he couldn’t understand what he was saying. He tried to tell him to speak more clearly but when tried to turn toward Lonetree Jack realized he couldn’t move.

  Jack willed himself to move but his body didn’t respond. He was helpless as the light moved closer and closer toward him. It pulsed, growing larger with each beat. He no longer felt any warmth from the light. It was replaced by a cold fear that something terrible was about to happen.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Stark branches faded into grey ghosts behind the fog heralding the approach of night. The cold air rolled over the mountains, damp and heavy, an invisible wave about to crash against the homes lying in the valley. The sun slipped below the horizon without fanfare, the only testament to its passing a slight darkening in the shade of grey that blanketed the sky. It was the worse time of year for living things. The time of the longest nights, where the sun escaped its life-giving responsibilities by drifting south, day after day, relinquishing its province to the night.

  And the cold. The ever-present chill that seeped through any protection Nature devised to guard Herself. Thick fur, layers of feathers, rough bark, all impeded the intruder but never stopped it. This was not a time for comfort, not like the fair days of the other seasons. This was a time for survival, a concept foremost in Lauren’s mind as she readied her eldest daughter to leave.

  Becky allowed her mother to adjust the straps on her coat, fix the stocking cap that pulled down over her ears, push her gloves up over her fingers. She didn’t say a word and averted her eyes whenever her mother’s face drifted in front of her.

  Lauren took her little girl’s gloved hand, gave it a squeeze and walked her out the door. She had exhausted every way to make her daughter understand why she had to go but without luck. Becky still pouted as she shuffled her feet toward the waiting car. Lauren wished she could make her understand, but ultimately all that mattered was that she was going to be safe.

  Lauren loaded her daughter into the back seat of Sushma Bhasin’s Lincoln Navigator, made her promise to call when she got safely to Baltimore and gave her a kiss good-bye. Sushma, her diminutive frame and youthful dark skin making her look more like a hospital intern than the leading women’s health specialist that she was, stood a few steps away, careful not to intrude on their time. When Lauren closed the door Sushma pulled her friend into her arms and hugged her tightly.

  “Thank you for coming up, Sushma. You don’t know how much I appreciate it.”

  Sushma stepped back and looked at Lauren in the eye. “Don’t even dare thank me. I’ll take care of Becky. I’ll let her do all the things you won’t. She’ll love it.”

  “It’s just that she’s been at your house before and she knows you and…”

  Sushma held her much taller friend at arm’s leng
th. “Listen. It’s all going to work out. O.K?”

  Lauren smiled and wiped away the tears she hadn’t realized were sliding down her cheeks. “How’d you get so tough?”

  “Medical school. Brings out the animal in all of us.”

  They shared a soft laugh, the reality of what brought them together hanging over them like the remnants of a nightmare. They hugged and said goodbye. Lauren waved at Becky and told her she loved her. She wasn’t surprised when her daughter gave her the cold shoulder. Not surprised, but still it hurt.

  She watched as the car pulled out of the lot and disappeared into the fog. A thread of doubt flapped around in the torrent of thoughts flooding her head. Was she doing the right thing sending her away? Making that decision without talking to Jack about it first?

  She stopped pulling the thread. It was done. Becky was safe, far away from what was happening here. She trusted Sushma completely. As a doctor, her mind was trained to compartmentalize problems, focus on the patient in front of her, not the patient that came before or the one that came next. With Becky safe, she pushed that worry into a box, closed the lid and moved on. The next compartment to open was like walking into a double trauma without a staff to assist her. Jack and Sarah both missing. Her husband in the middle of a bizarre emotional crisis. Her baby stolen out from beneath her.

  She needed to get a hold of herself. Exhausted even before she had come to the hospital, the emotional ride of the last few hours had pushed her to the edge. In her frazzled state, the conversation with Janney kept replaying in her head. The faces of the other police in the room, so poorly hiding their judgment of Jack. Maybe she was the one being blind.

  She hated herself for the doubts that crept through her head, but she couldn’t deny the possibility. On some level she hoped it was Jack. Even if this was a continuation of his delusions, they could work on it, get him help. At least their baby would be safe. There was no way he could ever hurt their little girl. Nothing in the world could make him do that.