Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

  “You know what this is,” Beiyoodzin said. “This bag holds the Mirage Stone of the Fathers. The most treasured artifact of the Nankoweap People. Once, you treasured it, too. I offer it to you as earnest of my promise. Stay here, trouble our village no more.”

  Slowly, reverently, he opened the bag, then held it forward, his outstretched hands trembling, whether from fear or age Nora could not tell.

  The skinwalker hesitated.

  “Take it,” Beiyoodzin whispered. The matted figure moved forward and reached for it, leaning outward.

  Suddenly, with lightning speed, Beiyoodzin thrust the open bag toward the skinwalker.

  A heavy cloud of dust erupted from within, flying up into the figure’s mask, spraying in long gray lines across the bloody pelt. The skinwalker roared in surprise and outrage, twisting around, tugging violently at the mask, growing more and more off balance. With the agility of a cat, Beiyoodzin leaped from the outcropping of rock back onto the trail. The skinwalker kicked frantically, teetering a moment at the edge of the precipice. Then it went over with a howl of fury. Nora watched the plunge into the violet, moon-drenched shadows: matted pelt flapping crazily, limbs scrabbling at the air, mask pulling free as the blood-curdling cry meshed with the roar of the flood beneath. And then, suddenly, it was gone.

  There was a moment of stasis. Beiyoodzin looked at Nora and Smithback, and nodded grimly.

  Painfully, Nora helped Smithback up the trail toward Beiyoodzin. He stood at the switchback, looking down into the abyss.

  “I’m sorry to have scared you like that,” he said quietly, “but sometimes, the only defense left us is to play the coyote, the trickster.”

  Still looking downward, he reached out and took Nora’s hand in his. The old man’s grasp was as cool, light, and dry as a leaf.

  “And so much death,” he murmured. “So much death. But at least the evil has burned itself out.”

  Then he looked up at her, and Nora saw kindness and compassion, as well as an infinite sadness, in his eyes.

  For a moment, there was silence between them. Then Beiyoodzin spoke.

  “When you are ready,” he said, in a small, clear voice, “let me take you to your father.”

  Epilogue

  Moving at a steady, easy pace, the four riders made their way up the canyon known as Raingod Gulch. John Beiyoodzin, atop a magnificent buckskin, led the way. Nora Kelly followed, riding abreast of her brother, Skip. The massive form of Teddy Bear padded alongside, his back almost grazing the bellies of the horses as he weaved in and out beneath them. Bill Smithback brought up the rear, his unruly hair imprisoned beneath a suede cowboy hat. The exhausting course of antibiotic treatment he and Nora had undergone ended two weeks before, but beneath the hat brim the writer’s skin was still struggling to regain a healthy color.

  The late August sky was sprinkled with light cumulus clouds, drifting over a field of brilliant turquoise. Wrens flitted about, filling the sweet little canyon with their bell-like cries. A merry stream, shaded by fragrant cottonwoods, ran sparkling across a bed of soft sand. At almost every bend in the canyon were small alcoves, Anasazi dwellings tucked inside them: none more than two or three rooms, but lovely in their humble perfection.

  Nora let her horse keep its own pace, concentrating on nothing but the sun beating down on her denimed legs, on the murmur of water nearby, on the swaying of her mount. Every now and then, she smiled to herself as she heard Smithback behind her, leveling curses at his balky mount, who stopped frequently to nibble a patch of clover or bite off the top of a thistle, completely ignoring the dire threats and imprecations of his rider. The man just had no talent with horses.

  She realized how lucky she was to have him here; how lucky she was to be here herself. Briefly, her thoughts returned to their struggle out of the wilderness a month earlier: Smithback weak, Nora herself growing steadily weaker as the fungal infection took hold. If Skip and Ernest Goddard had not met them halfway down the trail with fresh horses—and if there had not been a powerboat waiting at the trailhead, or helicopters idling at Page—they would probably have died. And yet, for a time, Nora almost thought it would have been easier to die than to tell Goddard the news: how their incredible discovery had turned into such a terrible personal tragedy for him.

  Here, thirty-odd miles northwest of the ruin of Quivira, the countryside seemed built on a smaller scale: friendly, verdant, well-watered. John Beiyoodzin had paused in his long story—he had paused frequently during the ride, giving his narrative time to sink in.

  As they rode on through the sunlit silence, Nora allowed her thoughts to move gradually from Goddard to her own father, and of what she had so far been able to piece together of his own last trip up this canyon. He had taken very little from Quivira. In fact, far from being a pothunter, he had carefully refilled what excavations he had made in a way that would have pleased even Aragon. But in doing so, he had exposed himself to a concentration of the fungal dust, and grown sick. Riding north in hopes of finding help, his sickness had worsened to the point where he could hardly sit his horse. Nora wondered how he would have felt. Would he have been terrified? Resigned? As a child, she remembered hearing him say that he wanted to die in the saddle. And he had done just that. Or almost: eventually becoming too sick to ride, he had dismounted. Then he turned his horses free and waited to die.

  “It was my cousin who found the body,” Beiyoodzin said, resuming his story. “It was lying in a cave at the top of a small rise. Seemed to have been there about six months. The coyotes couldn’t reach it, so it hadn’t been disturbed.”

  “How did your cousin find it?” Skip asked.

  “Looking for a lost sheep. He saw some color in the rock-shelter, climbed up to take a look.” Beiyoodzin paused to clear his throat. “Next to the body was the notebook—the one Nora has now. Sticking out of the front shirt pocket was a letter, stamped and addressed. And beside him was a satchel holding the skull of a mountain lion, inlaid in turquoise. So my cousin went back to Nankoweap, and he was a talker, and soon the entire village knew of the dead white man in the canyon to the south. And because of the turquoise skull, they also knew this white man had found the city we had kept secret for so many years.”

  His voice trailed away for a moment before returning, softer, more thoughtful. “This was not a city of our ancestors. Those few who had been there—my grandfather was one—said it was a city of death, of oppression and slavery, of witchcraft and evil. There are stories in our past of a people who came out of the south, who enslaved the Anasazi, and forced them to build these great cities and roads. But they were destroyed by the very god who gave them power. Most who went to the city came back with ghost sickness and soon died. That was many, many years ago. None of my people have returned to the city since. Until recently.”

  Beiyoodzin deftly rolled a cigarette with one hand. “The discovery of the body caused a problem for the tribe, because the secret of the city lay with the body of the man. To reveal the presence of the body would be to betray the secret of the city.”

  “Why didn’t you just destroy the letter and notebook?” Nora asked.

  He lit the cigarette, inhaled. “We believe that it is extremely dangerous to handle the effects of the dead. It is a sure way to get ghost sickness. And we all knew what the white man had died from. So, for sixteen years, the body lay there. Unburied. It just seemed that the simplest thing to do was to do nothing.”

  Beiyoodzin stopped his horse abruptly and turned toward Nora. “That was wrong. Because we all knew that the body in the cave had a family. That somebody loved him, wondered where he had gone and whether he was still alive. It was cruel to do nothing. Still, doing nothing seemed the easiest, safest course of action. But doing nothing caused a small imbalance. And this imbalance grew, and grew, until it ended in you coming here and all these terrible killings.”

  Nora reined in her own horse beside Beiyoodzin’s. “Who mailed the letter?” she asked quietly. It was the question she had been
burning to ask for many, many weeks.

  “There were three brothers. They lived in a trailer outside our village with their alcoholic father. The mother had run off with someone years before. These were smart boys, though, and they all got scholarships and went down to Arizona for college. They were hurt by this contact with the outside world, but hurt in very different ways. Two of the boys dropped out and came back early. They were disgusted with the world they had found, and yet changed by it. They had grown restless, angry, eager for the kind of wealth and power that you can’t come by in a village such as ours. They no longer fit in with the rest of my people. They began turning from the natural way of things, searching out forbidden knowledge, learning forbidden practices. They found an old man, an evil man—a cousin of the man who murdered my grandfather. He helped them, revealed to them the blackest of all the arts. The village began to shun them, and they in turn rejected us. In time, they turned to the greatest taboo of all—the ancient ruins—and eagerly picked up what dark hints of its history still remained among our village.

  “The third brother graduated and came back home. Like the other two, there were no jobs here for him, and no hope of finding one. Unlike his other brothers, he had converted to the Anglo religion. He despised our beliefs and our fear of ghost sickness. He thought we were superstitious and ignorant. He knew of the body in the cave, and he felt that to leave it there was a sin. So he searched out the body, carefully arranged the man’s possessions, covered the body with sand, planted a cross. And he mailed the letter at a trading post.”

  Beiyoodzin shrugged. “Of course, some of this is just my guess. I’m not sure why he sent the letter. He couldn’t have known if it would ever reach its destination, sixteen years after it had been written. Maybe it was to atone for a wrong he perceived. Or maybe he was angry at what he thought were our superstitions. Perhaps he did the right thing, I don’t know. But what he did caused a terrible break with the other two brothers. There was drinking, there was an argument. They accused him of betraying the secret of the city to the outside world. And the two brothers killed the third.”

  Beiyoodzin fell into another silence. He turned his horse’s head and they resumed their slow journey up the canyon, the horses splashing across the stream at each bend. At one turn they surprised a mule deer, which ceased drinking and raced away from them along the bed of the stream, sending up crystal cascades of water that glittered and fell back through the sun-drenched air.

  “Those two brothers rejected anything to do with the Anglo world outside. But they also rejected the good ways of the people. They saw the evil city as their own destiny. Based on the whispered stories of our people, they eventually found the greatest secret of all—the hidden kiva—and entered it. They would have broken inside only once—not for its treasures, of course, but for its lode of corpse powder. It would be their own weapon of fear and vengeance. Afterwards, they would have carefully resealed the kiva, in the proper manner.” He shook his head. “They wanted to protect its secrets—the secrets of the entire city—at all costs. In all but name, they had already been transformed into eskizzi—witches. And with the killing of their brother, the transformation was complete. In our belief, the final requirement in becoming a skinwalker is to murder someone you love.”

  “Do you think they actually had supernatural powers?” Skip asked.

  Beiyoodzin smiled. “I hear the doubt in your voice. It is true that the forbidden roots they chewed gave them great strength and great speed, the ability to absorb pain and bullets without feeling. And I know the white people think witchcraft is a superstition.” He looked at Skip. “But I have seen witches in Anglo society, too. They wear suits instead of wolfskins. And they carry briefcases instead of corpse powder. As a boy, they came and took me to boarding school, where I was beaten for speaking my own language. Later, I saw them come among our people with mining contracts and oil leases.”

  As they rounded another bend, the canyon gave way to a small grove of cottonwoods. Beiyoodzin halted, and motioned for them all to dismount. Turned loose, the horses wandered off to graze the rich carpet of grass along the stream. Teddy Bear leaped onto a large rock and stretched out, looking for all the world like a lion, keeping guard over his pride. Skip walked over to Nora and placed his arm around her shoulders.

  “How are you doing?” he asked, giving her a squeeze.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “You?”

  Skip looked around, took a deep breath. “A little nervous. But actually, pretty good. To be honest, I don’t remember feeling better.”

  “I’ll thank you to take your paws off my date,” said Smithback, ambling over and joining them. Together, they watched as Beiyoodzin untied his medicine kit from the saddle strings, examined it briefly, then nodded toward a gentle path that led up the side of the hill to a small rounded shoulder of rock. Above, Nora could see the rockshelter where their father’s skeleton lay.

  “What a beautiful place,” Skip murmured.

  Beiyoodzin led the way up the path and over the last little hump of slickrock. Nora paused at the top, suddenly reluctant to look inside. Instead, she turned and let her gaze fall over the canyon. The rains had brought up a carpet of flowers—Indian paintbrush, sego lilies, datura, scarlet gilia, desert lupines. After much discussion, the two children of Padraic Kelly had decided to leave the body where it lay. It was in the redrock country he loved so well, overlooking one of the most beautiful and isolated canyons of the Escalante. No other gravesite could provide more dignity, or more peace.

  She felt Skip’s arm around her shoulder again, and she turned at last to face the shelter.

  In the dim light of the interior, she could make out her father’s saddle and saddlebags carefully lined up along the back wall of the rockshelter, the leather cracked and faded with age. Beside them was the turquoise skull, beautiful yet vaguely sinister, even here, far from the evil pall of the Rain Kiva. Beneath a thin layer of sand lay her father’s bones. In places the wind had blown the sand away, revealing bits of rotten cloth, the dull ivory of bone, the curve of the cranium; she could see that he had died looking down into the valley below.

  Nora stared for a long time. Nobody spoke. Then, slowly, she reached into her pocket. Her fingers closed over a small notebook: her father’s journal, taken from the body by the witch she had shot and restored to her by Beiyoodzin. She opened it and removed a faded envelope she had placed between the pages: the letter that had started it all.

  The letter had been addressed to her mother, written just before he had entered the city. But the last entry in Padraic Kelly’s journal had been addressed to his children, written after his discovery of the city, in this very rockshelter while he lay dying. And now, in the presence of both her father and Skip, Nora began to read his last words.

  She stepped forward, stopping at the foot of the grave. The cross was still there, two twisted pieces of cedar lashed with a rawhide thong. She felt Smithback’s hand come forward to grasp her own, and she returned the pressure gratefully. After the horror of the last days at Quivira, and even in his own sickness and pain, the writer had been a kind, quiet, and steady presence. He had accompanied her to Peter Holroyd’s memorial in Los Angeles, where she had left his own battered copy of Endurance beside the stone marker that stood in the stead of a grave: his body had never been found. Smithback had returned with her for a memorial service for Enrique Aragon on Lake Powell, when they boated out to the site where, beneath a thousand feet of water, Aragon’s beloved Music Temple lay.

  In time, she knew, they would return to Quivira. A handpicked team from the Institute, armed with respirators and environmental suits, would make careful video documentaries of the site. Sloane’s discovery—the micaceous pottery of transcendent beauty and value—would be carefully studied and documented back at the Institute, under the direction of Goddard himself. And perhaps, in time, Smithback would even write an account of the expedition—or, at least, the part of the expedition that would not bring unendu
rable pain to Goddard.

  She sighed deeply. Quivira would wait for her. There was no chance of its location ever being divulged, or becoming public knowledge—the poisonous dust would make sure of that. Almost all those who knew of its location—with the exception of the Nankoweap—were now dead. Those who lived, she knew, would keep its secret.

  Nora watched as Beiyoodzin leaned over the skeleton, untied the little buckskin bag, and bowed his head. Pinching out some yellow cornmeal and pollen, he sprinkled it on the body and began a soft, rhythmical chant, beautiful in its simple monotony. The others bowed their heads.

  When the chant was done, Beiyoodzin looked at Nora. His eyes were shining, his creased face smiling. “I thank you,” he said, “for letting me put this to rest. I thank you for myself, and for my people.”

  It was Skip’s turn. He took the letter from Nora, turning it over and over in his hands. Then he knelt down, gently smoothed the sand away, and placed it into the pocket of his father’s shirt. He remained kneeling for a moment. Then he slowly stood up and returned to Nora’s side.

  Nora took a deep breath, steadied her hands. Then she turned to the final entry in her father’s journal and began to read.

  To my dearest and most wonderful children, Nora and Skip,

  By the time you read this, I will be gone. I have been stricken with a disease, which I fear I contracted in the city I discovered: the city of Quivira. Although I cannot be sure this will ever reach you, I must believe in my heart that it will. Because I want to speak to you through this journal one last time.