The Vanishing

by Bentley Little

  He walked around the small building a second time, in case he’d missed an entrance. It was difficult to see on the far side, where the moonlight didn’t shine, but he felt the walls as he passed by and found nothing but mud and straw. Back at the front of the hut, his eye continued being drawn to that bone. It looked like it was from the leg of an adult, but as far as he could tell there were no corresponding parts of the skeleton anywhere about. Maybe it really had been in the mud used for construction and its presence here was meaningless.

  He didn’t really think that, but Marshall would not allow himself to dwell on the subject. All of a sudden, it had become extremely important to him to find out what was inside the hut, and he made his way back to the horses, took his ax from one of the packs and brought it over to the building. The moon was higher now, its light brighter, and he could clearly see what he was doing.

  He hefted the ax and swung it hard against the wall. The mud was thick, and while he didn’t break through it, some of the hardened dirt crumbled. Marshall continued to swing, and by degrees the chip in the wall grew deeper, larger in circumference, until finally, in a single burst, it collapsed before him, creating an opening big enough for him to crawl through.

  James Marshall was not a timid soul. No man alive could say that he lacked for courage. Yet he was afraid to poke his head through that hole in the wall, afraid to look into that darkness, afraid of what he might see. He backed away, retreating to the spot where he’d tied the horses, and with trembling fingers withdrew a match and a candle from one of the packs. Taking a deep breath, girding himself for whatever he should find, he lit the candle and, crouching down, still holding his ax, climbed through the opening he had made.

  The flame of the candle combined with the moonlight streaming through the hole in the wall, illuminating nearly all of the space within. The hut was devoid of furniture, its single low-ceilinged room empty of everything save a large leather bag filled with human bones. The open bag sat in the far corner, framed by its own oversized shadow, its contents spilling onto the surrounding floor. He was afraid of that bag, frightened the same way he would be by a ghost or a demon, although such a reaction made no logical sense. In his mind was the notion that the sack was alive, an independent entity, that it did not belong to anyone, had not been made by anyone, that it had always been here and had seduced people into killing each other and depositing the bones of their conquered victims.

  A small bone fell, clattering against the others on the hard dirt floor, and Marshall jumped, hitting his head on the low ceiling, clods of dirt crumbling into his hair. He was instantly ready to flee, but no further movement followed, and though his muscles remained coiled and tense, he decided that the bone had fallen naturally, as a result of being precariously balanced. He kept his eye on the bag, however, and as he did so a cold wind blew out the flame of his candle.

  Only the wind did not come into the hut through the hole leading outside.

  It came from the corner.

  The interior was darker now by half. The bag seemed as black as its shadow, which had grown to engulf a third of the room, and the bones seemed to glow in the diffuse bluish light of the moon.

  His perception of the sack shifted. No longer did it seem like the repository of vanquished enemies’ bones. Instead, it seemed like the source of those bones, and in his mind he imagined them bubbling up from its depths like water from a spring then overflowing onto the floor.

  Cold wind came again from the corner, pressing fetid air against his face, its force so strong that it pushed him back, causing him to trip and fall.

  More bones dropped to the floor, their sound almost musical.

  The wagon train had been right to move quickly through this land, and it was his own fault that he’d been seduced by the water and led into this trap. Marshall had never before been so frightened, and if he were allowed to live through this ordeal, he vowed to become a changed man. He attempted to stand, and once again a powerful wind blew from the corner (the bag?) and knocked him down. This time, the force felt less like propelled air and more like invisible skeletal fingers.

  He took a deep breath before trying to get up. And then . . .

  . . . it was morning.

  It seemed to happen in an instant, the shift from night to day, but he knew that such a thing was impossible. Turning to look over his shoulder, he saw only harsh whiteness through the hole in the wall that led outside, the sun so bright after the dimness of night that it blurred his vision and made his eyes water. Standing up, he saw that although the bag was fully illuminated, its umbra frame gone, it had lost none of its threatening malevolence. A stray ray of sunshine highlighted a curved rib.

  Marshall wondered if he had somehow been mesmerized. Although by what? The room? The walls? The bag? There was nothing here that could conceivably have put him in a trance. He had no memory of sleep, however, and no sense that time had passed. He had not even changed position while the shift occurred. The only difference he noted was a newfound belief—no, a certainty—that there were riches in California, treasures, unfound gold that was there for the taking. Such an idea was absurd to all but the most feebleminded. Whoever heard of an ordinary citizen finding gold? Or keeping it, for that matter. That was the province of governments and potentates. Nevertheless, the concept was embedded in his mind, impossible to ignore. When had the notion occurred to him, though? Or had it occurred to him? It did not feel like his own thought, and he considered that it might have been imposed on him through mesmerism or some other type of mind control.

  He looked again at the sack of bones.

  There was no wind blowing from the corner as he turned and ducked through the opening in the wall, exiting the way he had entered.

  Outside, the plain was filled with multicolored flowers. They had sprung up in the meadow overnight and coveredeverything, even the hut, a rainbow of blossoms so thick that it was as though a blanket had been laid over the land. Marshall stared with wonder at the remarkable scene before him, overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of the earth, aware for perhaps the first time, in a very profound way, of how little he and everyone else in this country actually knew of the world in which they lived. Outside of the cities and towns, in the vast open wilderness that comprised the bulk of the United States and its territories, were secrets undiscovered, wonders both dark and light that had yet to be experienced by civilized man.

  A path wound through the flowers, a clearly defined trail that began at the hut and led West, away from the rising sun. At the bottom of the hillock, his horses, all of them, were peacefully nibbling at the flowers, seemingly content.

  The feeling he’d had over the past several days that he was being watched, that sense that others were monitoring his progress, was gone. The menace that had hung over the plain was gone as well, buried perhaps under the flowers, and Marshall felt lighter, freer and more optimistic than he had since the beginning of this journey.

  He gave the mud hut one last look, shivering as he saw the blackness within the jagged opening and thought of that leather bag filled with bones. He started down the gentle slope toward the horses. Would he tell anyone else what he had found? Would he describe to them the fearful darkness of the structure’s windowless interior? Or would he pretend that none of it had happened?

  He did not know. He would face that when he came to it.

  Marshall reached the horses, untied the mare and mounted up. He glanced one final time at the small building atop the hillock, its squareness rounded by the soft layer of flowers that draped over its walls and roof, its muddy brownness hidden by the rainbow of blossoms, and started down the trail, following where it led.

  He reached the others just before noon.

  Eight

  On Friday, Brian met with Dr. Lisa LaMunyon, professor of linguistics and recognized authority on written languages, in her office at UCLA. After talking on the phone the day before and detailing all of the questions he had, Brian had e-mailed Dr. LaMunyon scanned p
hotos of his dad’s letter and the messages scrawled at the murder sites. He’d expected to wait weeks for an answer, but to his surprise, the professor had called back early in the morning to set up a meeting. Although admitting that she had no real news, she still wanted to see Brian in person, and after filing a story on the mayor’s reaction to the governor’s response to the president’s new immigration policy, Brian drove up the 405 freeway to UCLA.

  Lisa LaMunyon was younger than Brian had expected. Although at first glance she looked more like a suburban mom than a tenured academic, the softness of her appearance did not diminish the intellectual confidence she projected. The professor rose from her chair enthusiastically when Brian knocked on the frame of her open office door. ‘‘Brian Howells?’’

  ‘‘Guilty.’’

  Dr. LaMunyon motioned him in. ‘‘Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. I know you must be busy.’’

  Brian glanced around the office. The professor not only had the e-mailed photos of his father’s letter and the blood-scrawled crime-scene messages showing on a computer monitor, but she had printed them out in various permutations, electronically cutting and pasting the figures and symbols to create new characters. The resulting pages were tacked onto a cork bulletin board that covered one wall.

  ‘‘I see you’ve been busy, Dr. LaMunyon.’’ Brian motioned toward the board.

  ‘‘Yes indeed,’’ the professor said eagerly. ‘‘And call me Lisa.’’ She picked up a piece of paper from her desk, turning it over in her hands, looking at the printed symbols right-side up, sideways and upside down. ‘‘I cannot tell you how glad I am that you sent me all this. These writings are really remarkable. I can’t make heads or tails out of them and can find no repeating pattern that would enable me to decipher these characters, but it’s clear to me that this is indeed a shared form of communication, quite possibly a code or even, as you suggested, a language of some sort. The stylistic similarities between the symbols are just too pronounced to be entirely coincidental. Last year, I helped develop a computer program designed to analyze various forms of writing, but the computer is stymied as well. Whatever this is, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. I plan on running it by a few of my colleagues, but to be honest, this is my field of expertise, not theirs, so I don’t expect them to decipher any of it. I just want to show it to them. Fascinating.’’

  Brian sighed. ‘‘I was hoping you’d come up with something.’’

  ‘‘I’m sorry. I thought I made it clear over the phone that I hadn’t—’’

  ‘‘Yeah, I know. It’s just that that letter was from my dad, whom I haven’t seen in some twenty years. And it looks just like what those killers wrote. In blood. So, as you can probably guess, I have a little bit of personal interest in this.’’

  ‘‘I’m going to keep working, but it’s challenging, to say the least. Do you know of any other linguists or cryptologists who are trying to decipher these messages? Someone with whom the police are working, perhaps?’’

  ‘‘No,’’ Brian admitted. ‘‘I have no idea what’s going on at that end. I noticed the similarities on my own and decided to find out what I could for a possible story— and for myself. When I asked around about linguistics experts, especially people who study written languages, your name came up, so I contacted you. If there’s anyone else working on this, I don’t know about it.’’

  ‘‘I’m going to do my best,’’ Dr. LaMunyon promised. Once more, she turned the paper in her hand before setting it down next to the monitor. ‘‘But, like I said, I have nothing so far.’’ She called up a screen on her computer and, pointing with her pencil, began enumerating attributes of the symbols that she believed would eventually lead to a usable key. Brian asked a few obligatory questions, but it didn’t seem to him that the professor was anywhere close to interpreting the writing.

  ‘‘I have something I want to ask you,’’ Dr. LaMunyon said. ‘‘About your profession. And I apologize in advance if it’s rude.’’

  ‘‘Go ahead,’’ Brian told her. ‘‘Shoot.’’

  ‘‘Why aren’t there any real journalists anymore?’’

  Brian was about to give a glib, jokey response, but he sensed from the professor’s demeanor that the woman was serious, that she genuinely desired an answer. Brian paused. Why aren’t there any real journalists anymore? It was the sort of question he often asked himself, the sort of question that reporters frequently asked of each other—usually after several rounds of drinks—and it deserved an honest reply.

  ‘‘I’m not speaking of you in particular,’’ the professor said quickly. ‘‘I’m not familiar with your work, and I’m sure you’re an excellent reporter. But I mean in general. It just seems to me that most journalists don’t do their job these days. They’ll quote someone on one side of a story, then get a quote from someone else on the other side, print them both and pretend as though that’s a balanced article. There’s no attempt made to check the facts, to do a little research and determine which side is right. I’m not talking about opinions here. I mean articles on nuts-and-bolts subjects that have been settled for years and that have a verifiably correct answer— something I might put on one of my tests, that my students are supposed to know—and yet contemporary reporters act as though both points of view are equally legitimate. This really drives me crazy.’’

  ‘‘Me, too,’’ Brian said. ‘‘But, Dr.—’’

  ‘‘Lisa.’’

  ‘‘Lisa. You didn’t ask me to your office to discuss journalistic ethics. And everything else you told me we could have easily discussed over the phone. So I have a question for you: Why did you really invite me over here?’’

  The professor hesitated, and for a fleeting instant, Brian thought he saw an expression of fear on her features. ‘‘I guess . . .’’ Dr. LaMunyon looked embarrassed. ‘‘I guess I wanted to meet the son of the man who wrote that letter.’’ She motioned toward the monitor.

  Brian frowned.

  ‘‘I know how that sounds,’’ she admitted, raising a hand. ‘‘And after all my talk about the importance of science and facts, what I’m going to say next is going to seem completely crazy. But . . .’’ She took a deep breath. ‘‘I’m afraid of that language.’’

  Brian wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘Those characters. There’s something wrong with them or, more precisely, something wrong about them. Make no mistake; I intend to decipher those symbols, find out what they mean and discover everything I can about them. But—and I know this is going to sound insane—they scare me. They make me feel like I’m a little kid. When I’m studying them, I have to have the door open and the lights on. I get goose bumps. I start jumping at shadows. It’s all in my imagination, of course, but I can’t help feeling that the characters are the cause of it all, that they make me think of such things. Which makes this all the more intriguing and makes me want to decipher their meaning even more.’’

  Brian was silent. He hadn’t realized it until this very second, but he shared the professor’s misgivings. Dr. LaMunyon had articulated perfectly a feeling that Brian had not known he’d had, and he understood that it was not merely their connection to his dad that disturbed him but something about the nature of the symbols themselves.

  There was little to say after that. On the freeway, on the way back, he wondered if the two of them should have discussed things more, if he should have been more forthcoming about his own reactions. But that sort of touchy-feely sharing felt awkward and unnatural to him.

  He would have to just wait and see if Dr. LaMunyon could translate that alien language.

  Alien?

  He pushed the thought from his mind. He wasn’t even going to go there.

  At the Times, a new assignment was waiting for him, an interview with a prominent Latino activist that was supposed to run next to his story on the mayor’s immigration stance, and he was so busy the rest of the day that he didn’t have time to think about anything else
.

  It was nearly nine o’clock before he arrived home, and as he walked into the silent, darkened condo, Brian decided that he needed to find someplace to live that was closer to work. Someplace in LA. With the assignmentshe’d been getting and traffic the way it was, it was rare that he got home before eight or eight thirty. Sometimes, like tonight, it was even later. And in the morning, he had to be on the road by six in order to get to the paper by eight, which meant that he had to get up at five. Basically, all he was doing was sleeping here, and thanks to his schedule, he wasn’t even doing much of that.

  Brian checked his answering machine while he got a beer out of the refrigerator. For the third day in a row, his mom had left a message asking him to call her back as soon as he got home. He felt guilty as he erased it. But he couldn’t phone her now, he told himself. She was asleep already. He’d be waking her up. It would be better to call on the weekend, when they both had more time.

  He was rationalizing.

  The fact was, his reconciliation trip had turned out to be a disaster. Not just because of his dad’s letter— although that was a big part of it—but because he and his mother simply did not get along. Alone together, in close quarters, they were like oil and water. It was what had kept him away from Bakersfield all these years, and any hope he’d had that things had changed in the intervening decade had died his first night there. As much as he tried not to offend her, and as much as she tried to overlook their differences, the two of them ended up insulting each other, hurting each other, fighting, and what should have been minor disagreements escalated into epic battles of will. She still treated him as though he were a rebellious teenager, which was exactly how he reacted to her, and that dynamic was not healthy for either of them.