Ancient Enemy

by Michael McBride

  I pictured my grandfather down here, much as I was now, running through the same thought processes and reaching the same conclusion. I wondered if he had stalled like I was doing now, for I knew exactly what I needed to do next and could think of nothing on the planet I wanted to do less.

  I switched off the flashlight, drew the rattle, and started to shake it.

  SEVENTEEN

  I immediately saw the bluish-purple smudges on the floor near the remains. I walked closer and knelt over them. They were little more than collections of crusted flakes and powder, but they still held their original shape. Maybe not perfectly, but unless I was just seeing what I wanted to see, they looked a whole lot like palm prints. Identical smears surrounded the ventilation duct where the enemy had shoved the rocks inward when it breached their defenses. There were other spatters and drops in no apparent pattern on the ground and across the walls, as though flung from a swinging arm. I had expected to find the walls positively covered with petroglyphs as they had been in the House of Many Windows, but didn’t see a single one.

  There had to be something I was missing. I mean, why bring me all the way down here just to show me a bunch of dead bodies?

  I walked a circuit around the chamber, shaking the rattle as I went. I stared at the floor and at the walls. Stood on my tiptoes and tried to see up into the crevices between the trunks that formed the ceiling. I leaned over the rubble and peered up into the ventilation duct through which the enemy had attacked and saw only more upside-down handprints on the stone walls.

  I tried to picture how the massacre had unfolded. The men had been barricaded down here for some significant length of time before they had been discovered, long enough for the firepit to have seen more than a single use. They must have only burned it during the day, when their adversaries were holed up in the darkness, until at some point the passage of the sun lost meaning and they in turn lost track of it, allowing their blaze to burn just a little too long.

  I envisioned smoke rising into the twilight as the red sun slid behind the mountains and shadows emerged from a hole high up on the sheer face of a cliff and inhaled the scent of roasting flesh through flared nostrils. A pause of recognition as they turned toward the source of the smoke and scurried down to the canyon floor. Sprinted like ghosts through the trees, until they converged upon an old, abandoned pit house fallen to ruin, one they had seen many times before. Only this time, fingers of smoke twirled skyward from a ventilation hole its prey had concealed by filling it with stones. Blood flying from their hands as they shredded the skin on their fingers clawing at the stones, hurling them back over their shoulders and casting them aside until the hole was wide enough for them to slither down the ventilation duct, their hands slick with their own blood. Shoving through the final barrier toward where they could hear the panicked breathing of their prey, who, for whatever reason, had chosen to hide rather than fleeing…

  I stopped where I was, cocked my head, and stared down at the body curled into a fetal position behind the smoke deflector.

  Why hadn’t these men run? Knowing their enemy only hunted at night, they would have had at least twelve hours—even in the dead of winter—to distance themselves from these killing grounds, which, on horseback, would have surely given them a large enough lead that they could have outrace any pursuit through the coming night and subsequent day. So why hadn’t they done just that? Why had they chosen to stay here where they had no means of defending themselves and even less hope for survival?

  I thought about the prevailing theories of what ultimately happened to the Anasazi after their sudden abandonment of these mountains and how it was speculated that their numbers were simply absorbed into the neighboring tribes. If those who had somehow survived the battles—assuming any actually had—vanished into the hills, why had these men not gone with them? What was so important that they had stayed behind, knowing that eventually they would exhaust their finite supplies? Did they think there was a prayer of outlasting their hunters? That somehow their rations would last longer than those of their enemy?

  The two halves of my bloodline—Navajo and Ute—had waged a war of attrition, basically starving each other to death for the same federal government that subsequently swooped in and stole their land. Could that have been what happened here? And if so, why had these men remained here specifically?

  The enemy I had seen was a nocturnal predator that feasted upon our livestock, and when its hunger was sated with flesh, it continued to gorge itself on their blood. Was it possible they’d simply hunted every living thing in these canyons to near extinction and these men had hoped to outlast them? And what of the dead creatures in the cave, tied to the stalagmites and entombed beneath centuries of accreted minerals? Had they been left there as a warning to those who would come in the future, the same as the inverted spirals carved into the wall over the sealed tunnel that presumably led to whatever den they inhabited in the heart of the mountain?

  This enemy had been defeated, or at least imprisoned in the earth. So had the Anasazi, though, save for the remaining few who walked away from their civilization to vanish into the surrounding Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Zuni populations. So why had these men chosen to hole up down here when the rest of their tribe either fled or prepared for whatever final battle led to the sealing of the hole in the cavern? Why had they chosen to hide—?

  That was it. They didn’t come down here to hide.

  I looked at the weapons near the fallen bodies, at the stores stashed at the back of the recesses in the walls where I believed they slept. They hadn’t barricaded themselves in this kiva in an effort to hide. They’d come down here to protect something, something so valuable it had been worth all of their lives to defend, something that I couldn’t help but wonder if it was still somewhere down here with me. Something precious enough to justify being buried down here for nearly a millennium, a secret closely guarded by the few people who had been inside this dwelling.

  So what was I missing?

  There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the floor. I pushed on the walls, but found no loose stones. I could see nothing through the rocks barricading the other ventilation shafts and nothing under the broken remains of the ladder. I grabbed the knife I’d thrown down ahead of me and hacked at the midden heap and the long-dead fire to no avail. There was nothing down here. Nothing at all. And the only man who had any knowledge of what the hell I was supposed to find was trapped behind terror-stricken eyes and inside of a body that was rapidly failing him.

  I bellowed in frustration and fell to my knees in the middle of the room. I cried tears of frustration and anger. Anger at my grandfather for a condition beyond his control and a situation beyond mine, but mostly at myself for being so stupid that I couldn’t see what at the time must have been obvious. Whatever it was had to still be here or there would have been no reason to keep it locked up and the site concealed. What in the name of God was I missing?

  Something about that last thought gave me a tip-of-the-tongue sensation, as though my mind had made a connection it couldn’t consciously communicate to me.

  I ran through the same thought processes again. Anguish and despair leading to feelings of misdirected anger at my grandfather when I was really mad at myself for my shortcomings with so much depending upon me. I could feel the seconds ticking away toward the coming dusk and I feared I would not be strong enough to protect what little I had left from Lord only knew what—

  There it was again. That sensation of being on the verge of an epiphany.

  I closed my eyes and focused on recreating my thoughts with the utmost precision. From my feelings to my fear of failure to my exasperation at not knowing what the hell—

  That was it. Hell. God. They were concepts unique to Christianity, which didn’t reach this area of the world until well after the Anasazi had vanished into the mists of time. They had believed that they came from the earth itself, birthed from the core and led up into the light. That was why there were so many kivas i
n any Anasazi village from here to Chaco Canyon, why they spent so much time worshipping what most believed were their ancestors, who had risen to the surface from the darkness contained, at least metaphorically, within the sipapu.

  I crawled over to the sipapu. Shook the rattle as hard as I could. In the blue glow I saw…nothing. I reached inside and felt along the smooth sides, ran my fingers across the bottom, where all I felt was a notched divot in the center. There was nothing inside. Nothing at all. It was just an empty hole that literally went nowhere.

  I’d been so certain I had figured it out. And now I had absolutely no idea how to continue. I knew next to nothing about my own heritage, let alone that of the tribe that disappeared before either the Navajo or the Ute settled in this area. A thousand years ago, anyone finding this chamber would have known exactly what to do to unlock its secrets, but now everything was so old that the smears of blood had dried to little more than powder and a layer of dust covered everything except—

  The spear lying beside the hand of the dead man, the one with the notches in its base, and the cross with the hole in the center I’d initially thought was some kind of boomerang.

  I turned on my flashlight again and walked over to where the remains of the man were sprawled behind the deflector. I knelt and looked more closely at how he had fallen. His had been the lone body lying in a fetal position. Maybe he hadn’t been trying to hide in an effort to save his skin, but rather to conceal the spear with his body, his final valiant act. I lifted the spear and was surprised by its weight. It wasn’t made of wood like I’d guessed. It was obsidian—black volcanic stone—chiseled down to the width of a spear, only one conspicuously lacking a spearhead. There was a curious ridge around the middle, like a square ring on a finger.

  I carried it back to the sipapu and shoved its base down into the divot in the bottom. Turned it until the notches aligned. I felt the ground give, however slightly. A harder thrust and I embedded the staff with a clicking sound. Waited for something to happen.

  Seconds passed.

  A half-minute.

  Nothing.

  I gripped it and shoved it downward with all of my might, but this time there was no movement whatsoever. I twisted it and was rewarded with a cracking sound from somewhere behind me, on the other side of the smoke deflector. A cloud of dust shimmered in my beam, swirling on the subtle change in air currents.

  I moved to the other side of the pole and twisted again. It barely moved in my hands, and yet the dust billowed up toward the roof.

  And then everything fell into place.

  I ran across the chamber, took the cross from the dead man, and aligned it with the top of the spear. Slid it down until it latched onto the ring around the middle. I used the arms like a wheel to turn the post. With the extra torque, it spun easily and I listened to the rumble of stone grinding against stone as the dust billowed from behind the deflector.

  When I could no longer turn the handle, I walked around to the other side of the deflector and into the cloud of dust. I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose to keep from inhaling it and waved it away with my free hand. A dark hole appeared near the ground, where a minute ago there had been solid stone.

  I crouched and shined my beam inside, but couldn’t see anything through the dust.

  The clock in my head ticked ever louder as the sun began its descent.

  I balled my hands into fists to keep them from shaking and tried to steady my nerves. When I realized that was a lost cause, I lowered myself to all fours, focused on any sound other than the thunder of my pulse, and crawled into the darkness.

  EIGHTEEN

  The tunnel was maybe a dozen feet long, but I was starting to think it might never end when I finally crawled out into a chamber significantly larger, and less elaborate, than the first. The walls were bare rock and reflected none of the architectural styles I had seen throughout these hills. It was essentially a natural formation that over time had been converted into something more, something I imagined few people had ever seen.

  Like the preceding room, this one was roughly circular. The ground sloped away from me into the darkness. I turned my flashlight upon the wall to my left and spotlighted the first in a procession of petroglyphs that encircled the chamber and appeared to tell a story. The carvings were so faint they were almost invisible in places. I saw stick figures emerging from what I guessed was meant to be the underground based on the direction the spiral beneath them turned and the crude representation of what I believed to be the sun above and a crescent moon below. One of the figures had a round head and large ears. Its long, upraised arms formed a W and its short, bent legs looked like an M. The other was shaped like a sarcophagus with curved horns growing from its head. There were dozens of animals around them, from deer with lightning-bolt antlers to birds and snakes and scorpions and bighorn sheep.

  To its right was another petroglyph. This one featured many more of the round-headed, big-eared people with the raised arms and bent knees that reminded me of monkeys, surrounded by more animals and all sorts of small handprints with short thumbs and disproportionately long palms and fingers. Above them was the lone sarcophagus-man with the horns. He now had a straight mouth, slanted eyes, and the ears of a goat.

  There was so much menace and resentment captured in that simplistic expression that I shivered and had to look away.

  The next carvings in line were at first difficult to interpret. They were of a slightly different style and obviously carved by a new hand. What I initially thought were supposed to be the footprints of a large bird were actually trees from which four-legged animals that looked like deer and bears hung, suspended upside down. Above this forest of death was a crescent moon, beside which a plus sign inside of two concentric circles had been drawn. I could not decipher the design that separated it from the next petroglyph, which featured the monkey-men, now thicker and more proportionate, standing on some sort of level ground and surrounded by deer and bison. The sarcophagus-man was inverted beneath them, his feet touching those of the central monkey figure, as though he were its reflection upon a placid lake. There were others like him now, only smaller and darker and with holes for eyes.

  The next etching reminded me more of the first, except for the style in which it had been carved. The men now had trapezoidal bodies with ovular heads and rode horses through fields overflowing with wild game. They danced and played flutes of some kind amid what could either have been stylized wheat or maize.

  And then came the sarcophagus-man, beside whom other sarcophagus-men with the horns of different animals erupted from the ground like a geyser. A crescent moon shined down upon a forest from which animals and men alike had been hanged by their heels.

  The subsequent petroglyph depicted men armed with shields emblazoned with clockwise spirals, spears, and bows and arrows on what looked like a cliff, underneath which a ladder led downward to where the trees now stood with empty boughs and the ground was littered with dead animals. The sarcophagus-men hung upside down from beneath the trunks of the trees like roots.

  There was no mistaking the next few panels, for I already knew this part of the story. There were battles between men with shields; the trapezoidal men with their clockwise-spiral shields and the sarcophagus-men with counterclockwise spirals on theirs. The House of Many Windows with small faces looking out from each and their spirits rising from above its roof into a sun with extremely long rays. Men on horseback with large bundles of their possessions and a mass exodus into the trees, leaving behind a band of warriors whose depictions demonstrated an increased amount of care and detail. I couldn’t help but think that was because they had been the ones who carved the more recent drawings.

  The next picture showed these men descending from beneath the sun and the trees into darkness represented by the moon. Each stood on an invisible stair, as though captured in the moment of descent toward where the sarcophagus-men hung upside down like bats. There was no sign of a struggle, only the victors holding high
the horned heads of their enemy and binding them to the stalagmites that would eventually absorb their bodies and serve as a warning to all who entered. And then the passage was sealed with a stone upon which the plus sign inside two concentric circles had been carved and placed beneath the counterclockwise spiral.

  When I reached the end, I stopped and looked back toward the beginning, at the two figures first emerging from the darkness into the light, now halfway across the chamber at the farthest extent of my beam’s range. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, but felt as though I’d followed the flow of the narrative well enough. I just stared at the sarcophagus-man, whose primitive depiction stared back at me through eyes carved with such care that their ferocity was impossible to mistake.

  The next images were in a different style and an undeniably different hand, but were no more recent. There were seven men: one held out a palm from which smoke rose, the second a staff, the third a plus-wheel, and the other four combinations of weapons and shields. I had a pretty good idea who they must have been. This time it was they who were underground and a lone sarcophagus-man standing above them, outside of a house surrounded by trees and beneath a crescent moon. And then there were only four, lying on the floor of a circular room. The fifth stood over them, holding high a horned head.

  Then there was the plus-sign stone again, sealing off the hole in the mountain once more.

  A part of me rebelled against the idea of a literal interpretation of the storyline. Here I was, trying to make sense of eight-hundred-year-old petroglyphs of monkey-men and horned sarcophagus-guys in an effort to understand what was happening now and find a way to make it stop. The notion was almost laughable. We probably just had some rabid coyotes running wild and I was wasting time I didn’t have poring over legends and superstitions when I should be back home setting up snares around our trailer—