In the center of a slightly raised circle ringed by stones, a ladder protruded from a square hole. "This is a kiva," Vince explained, motioning toward the opening. "The kivas were--and are--ceremonial chambers hidden and kept secret from outsiders. This particular community had six kivas, although this is the only one we're opening to the public." He pulled a small squarish flashlight from his back pocket. "If you'd like to go down and check it out, be my guest. It's pretty small, so when we have regular-sized tours, I only let in one guest at a time while I stay up here and hold the ladder. But if you'd like, I could go down with you."
"That's okay," Glen told him. "I'll feel better with you up top. Just in case the ladder breaks or the place collapses or something."
The guide laughed. "It's not likely. But I'll stay here anyway and try to describe what you're seeing."
There wasn't much to see. A round room with smooth walls and a sooty ceiling. He thought about the couple in the restaurant. The man was right. Going down into the kiva was fun. But the woman was right, too. There was something spooky about it, and he came back up the ladder pretty quickly.
Despite having grown up in Arizona, Glen had never been to any Indian ruins before. There were some off Washington or Van Buren or one of those presidents' streets in Phoenix that he remembered passing as a child, but his parents had not been big on cultural or historic sites, and they'd never stopped.
Now, looking at these crumbling adobe structures, he realized for the first time how new America was, how recent the arrival of white people. According to Vince, this Indian settlement had already been abandoned for hundreds of years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. The knowledge made him feel small and insignificant somehow, and when Vince asked if he had any questions, he simply shook his head, and the two of them rode back to town in silence.
"Well, thanks," Glen said as the guide parked the Jeep in the alley behind the museum. "That was interesting."
"You're welcome. Hope you enjoyed it."
The two men climbed out of the vehicle.
Glen wiped the sweat from his forehead with his hand. He felt dehydrated. He'd brought his forty-four-ounce Coke with him, but most of that had been used up on the trip over, and he'd been too embarrassed to ask Vince for a sip from his canteen. The skin on his face felt tight, and he knew that he'd gotten burned. He should have listened to the guide and put on sun block.
His discomfort must have been obvious, because Vince said, "There's some cold water in the museum's fridge, if you'd like some."
Glen nodded. His car was parked on the street and he had to pass through the building anyway. "Thanks."
Vince unlocked the back door and turned to the left, where a small square refrigerator sat underneath a cupboard next to the bathroom. This close to the swamp cooler, the air actually felt good. Pulling a Styrofoam cup from a package inside the cupboard, Vince handed it to Glen, then took a plastic pitcher of water out of the refrigerator and poured. The water tasted cold, fresh, nice. Glen downed the cup, then had one more.
Vince put away the pitcher, closed the refrigerator. "Listen, are you by any chance looking for a job?"
Glen frowned as he crumpled the cup and tossed it into a wastepaper basket. Looking for a job? Did he appear in need of employment? He didn't think so. He was cleanshaven, and before he'd gone out on that Jeep ride, his hair had been neatly combed. Granted, he wasn't wearing his best clothes, but he had on his usual weekend outfit: jeans and a short-sleeve shirt. Typical leisure attire.
Although, come to think of it, he hadn't had much time for leisure the past few years. And when he examined his clothes more closely, he realized he had a slightly frayed collar on a style of shirt that had not been in fashion for the past half decade.
"See, my friend Al's overseeing a dig up near Bower. It's a pueblo site they discovered last year when the county was looking for a new landfill location. The job would only be a summer gig. Al teaches at ASU, and he spends his summers doing field research, conducting archeological excavations. Usually, he just recruits students, but I guess this year the pickings were pretty slim." Vince chuckled. "Why a young healthy coed wouldn't want to spend her three months of freedom earning minimum wage, living in a hovel, and digging in the desert is a mystery, huh?"
Glen smiled.
"So what do you say? You interested?"
Ordinarily, his response would have been an automatic no, but he'd been operating on a different, less logical level since leaving work Friday afternoon. Chance and intuition had been calling the shots on this trip, and he saw no reason to change that. He would just go with the flow and see where it led.
And it seemed to be leading him to say yes.
He'd always been an underachiever trapped in an achiever's body. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination an overachiever. He had not gone to Harvard and graduated at the top of his class and started up a multimillion-dollar Internet company. But he had gone to the perfectly respectable UC Brea and had gotten a good job with a major software firm. He had always felt like something of a fraud, though, and he had to admit that the idea of digging through dirt, looking for arrowheads and pieces of pottery for the summer, appealed to him.
He was still not used to his new--
midlife crisis
--lifestyle, was still stuck in his middle-class mode of thought, and he wanted to explain to Vince that he wasn't a bum, that he was only available for this work because he had voluntarily quit his well-paid corporate job to travel around the country. Like Bronson. But he realized that the other man would not care In this world, his past and pedigree weren't important.
"Yes," he said. "I'm interested."
"All right, then. I'll give Al a call, and we'll set you up."
Two
1
Cameron had been wanting to ask the question for three days, ever since they'd come to the Boy Scout ranch, but he hadn't wanted the other boys in his troop to think he was a wuss, so he'd held his tongue. He'd been nervous, though, worrying about it. Finally, this afternoon, after lunch, when he found himself alone with one of the scoutmasters, he asked.
"When are you going to tell us about the Mogollon Monster?"
It was what the ranch was famous for, what attracted most of the scouts to it, the high point of the entire week for a goodly portion of boys who came here each summer. But Cameron had never liked ghost stories or horror movies, and being out here in the wilderness was spooky enough without having to hear about real life, honest-to-goodness monsters that roamed the area.
The scoutmaster chuckled, mistaking his anxiety for anticipation. "Don't worry. We'll get to it. No troop has left here yet without hearing the story of the Mogollon Monster." He leaned forward, and Cameron thought there was something threatening in the man's eyes. "And no troop has ever heard the story and not been scared of Jim Slade's cabin."
Peach-fuzz hairs bristled on the back of Cameron's neck. He looked to the left, just outside the ranch gates, where the dilapidated cabin sat underneath the deep shade of the giant ponderosas, half buried beneath overgrown vines. Even in broad daylight the place was creepy. The doorless entryway and too-small windows held in an inky blackness that, shade or no shade, should not have been anywhere near that dark. There was a cracked and broken rocking chair on the ramshackle porch, and it was the rocking chair that freaked Cameron out the most. Dil Westerly, a scout from Tempe and one of his cabin mates, said that a boy from Cabin 10 had seen the chair rocking by itself, and ever since, Cameron had lain awake at night, listening for the creak of old boards. The thought of the monster was scary, yes, but somehow the ghosts in that haunted cabin seemed even scarier. Monsters roamed around, wandered through the forest, came and went. The ghosts and the cabin were always there, right next to the ranch, visible from almost any spot day or night. He looked into the shadowy doorway of the cabin and shivered. He would rather listen to the story of the Mogollon Monster every night than have that cabin so close by.
That changed at t
he evening campfire.
It was The Night, and they all knew it. One of the scoutmasters must have let the news slip, because word traveled fast. By the time the sun went down, they were all seated around the big fire. Everyone knew that tonight they were going to hear the story of the monster.
Scoutmaster Anderson was in charge of the evening's entertainment, and he started off in a roundabout way.
"Any of you ever hear of Zane Grey?"
In the front row, Toby McMasters raised his hand. "My dad belongs to his book club. He writes westerns."
"Wrote westerns," the scoutmaster corrected. "Zane Grey died in 1939. For a while he lived near here, in a cabin at the foot of the Rim. But something scared him off, and he left Arizona never to return." The fire crackled, snapped, then dimmed a little, making the surrounding forest creep a little closer. "It was the Mogollon Monster."
The boys grew hushed, wiggled in their seats, and settled in to hear the tale. Cameron felt cold and sweaty at the same time. He didn't want to be here, wanted to be home with his mom and TV and nice soft bed, but he was stuck. If it wouldn't have marked him for life as King Pussy, he would have plugged his ears. Instead, he focused his gaze on the campfire and tried not to pay attention to the words being spoken.
"Back then it was called the Tonto Rim, not the Mogollon Rim. 'Mogollon' was an Indian word, and no one used Indian words back then except Indians. But, still, everyone called the creature who lived up here the Mogollon Monster. And that was because it had been in these parts so long that only Indians knew what it really was. And it was so horrible, so terrifying, that there were no English words that could even describe it.
"Zane Grey wrote westerns, books about cowboys and gunfights, and maybe he'd read too many of his own stories because by the time he moved out here to Arizona, he thought he was a tough guy. That's why he lived in a cabin so far away from town. People tried to warn him, but he was a mean old cuss and wouldn't listen to anybody. Or maybe he did listen and just wanted to prove how unafraid he was. They told him that strange things happened on the Rim at night, that scouts and trappers had heard terrible inhuman screams, that animals had been found slaughtered and ripped apart limb from limb, that even trees had been torn out and uprooted. But he didn't care. He bought the cabin and went out there to live.
"Old Zane used to hunt in the daytime, and write at night by candlelight." The scoutmaster's voice took on a deeper, more ominous quality. "Until one night. The last night."
One of the other scoutmasters threw a branch on the fire and at once, as if on cue, all the boys screamed, startled by the sudden explosion of sparks. Nervous laughter followed immediately afterward. Scoutmaster Rogers, the one who'd put the wood on the fire, grinned, pleased to have gotten the reaction he'd obviously intended.
But Scoutmaster Anderson wasn't grinning. His face bore an intensely sober expression. He was clearly taking his assignment to scare the scouts very seriously, and he was working at it. This was not just an evening's entertainment for him; it was a mission. Something about that seemed wrong.
Cameron had been trying to concentrate on the fire and on not listening to the story, but he had not been very successful. Against his will, he had heard almost every word. And he could not seem to look away from Scoutmaster Anderson's face, glowing eerily orange with the flickering light from the flames.
"No one knows exactly what happened that night. But there was a miner coming in from Colorado and hiking down the General Crook Trail, a miner who'd never been here and didn't know the area and didn't know he was supposed to stay away from the Rim at night. The miner said there were noises coming from that section of the forest that were unlike anything he'd ever heard. He'd been planning to make camp for the night, but he was scared and kept going instead, not stopping until he hit town at daybreak.
"After the people in town heard his story, they got together a posse and went out to Zane Grey's cabin. The door was wide open and inside, the tables and chairs were smashed, the bed and couch ripped open by something with huge claws. There was slime on the floor. And blood. Outside, the ground was hard--it was summer and hadn't rained for some time--but there were footprints in the dirt, the footprints of a creature huge and heavy, twelve-feet high at the least, and terribly deformed. The prints looked like a bear crossed with a person crossed with a spider. Some of the men wanted to leave, but they all stayed, scared as they were, and the posse followed the trail to the barn, rifles loaded and ready. The barn was empty, but it was even worse than the cabin. One whole wall had collapsed, and the hay bales were covered with black mold that was . . . moving. The three horses in the stalls were standing stock still and drooling, with wild looks on their faces. They'd gone completely insane.
"They shot the horses, then burned the barn. And then they got out of there before night fell.
"Zane Grey had just disappeared. There was no sign of him. Everyone thought he was dead, but he showed up in another state sometime later. He refused to talk about what happened in Arizona. The only thing people knew was that after that night, after he saw the monster, his hair had turned completely white."
There was a pause in the story as the scoutmaster drank from a glass of water. A warm breeze had sprung up, and it bent the campfire flames to the left, caused the branches of the pine trees to susurrate. The boys murmured among themselves. Darren Holstrom, next to Cameron, whispered that he thought he'd heard a scream from somewhere far atop the Rim the other night. He was pretty sure it was the Mogollon Monster.
"The monster went wild after that," Scoutmaster Anderson continued, and though his expression remained serious, there seemed to be a certain glee in his voice. "All of the ranches along the foot of the Rim were abandoned as it started attacking the people who lived there. Cattle were mutilated, turned into piles of bloody bones and scraps of flesh. Babies were stolen and eaten, only their skin left behind. Horses went mad and some even killed their owners.
"The Indians said that the monster sometimes went on rampages, angered by people trespassing on its territory, but even the oldest of them could not remember anything like this.
"And then it was over. The attacks stopped, and eventually hunters and trappers and fishermen started going back into the forest along the edge of the Rim and then even on top of it. Nothing happened to them. No one saw anything strange; no one was killed or hurt or chased away. After ten years or so, people even started moving back to the ranches.
"Everyone in town--not the Indians, but everyone else--thought the monster had either died or moved on. There was talk of Bigfoot in California by then, and some people thought that the monster had moved there.
"And then Jim Slade built his cabin."
Cameron couldn't help it. He glanced to the right, where the cabin sat in vegetative darkness beyond the boundary of the Boy Scout ranch, and he shivered. He didn't want to hear the rest of the tale.
"Jim Slade grew up in these parts. He knew the story of the monster just like everyone else. And just like everyone else, he thought it was over with, a thing of the past. Maybe he even thought it wasn't true, that it was just a made-up tale to scare little kids with on hot summer nights.
"It was true, though.
"There were hints. Shortly after he built the cabin, he found a dead bear on top of his woodpile--with its head missing. The pond where he watered his horses--where our pool is now--went dry overnight, and in the mud at the bottom were weird claw prints that looked like nothing Slade had ever seen. And strangest of all, there were no birds or bugs or mice or pests of any kind on his property. None of the usual forest critters would come near his place. It was as if Nature herself was afraid.
"The monster killed him on his wedding night."
Scoutmaster Anderson looked down at the ground, as if trying to decide whether or not to continue, and Cameron felt the urge to shout out to him, to tell him to stop, not to go on. But, of course, he kept silent.
"It was a girl from town, a girl he'd grown up with. Her name was
Maria and she was the daughter of the Baptist minister. She didn't want to live so far from town, and she told him that she was afraid of the Mogollon Monster, but he said she was being stupid and backward. This was where he lived and this was where she would live, too. The Mogollon Monster was just an old superstition. Maria didn't believe him, but her love was stronger than her fear, and they got married in a big ceremony at the Baptist church with her father performing the rites. Half the town showed up for the wedding. After the reception, Maria and Jim rode back out to the cabin.
"A storm blew up that evening. A big old summer monsoon. But there was something weird about it. The thunder didn't always sound like thunder. Some of it did--but some of it sounded like a creature, a big creature, growling. It was their night and they tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong. They tried to be happy and content, but the storm was getting wilder, the noises were getting weirder. There was no electricity out here back then, only a generator Jim Slade set up in back of his cabin. All of a sudden the lights started flickering. They went off, then came back on. Went off and came back on. During one of those weird growling thunders, the lights went off for the last time, and the sound of a huge crash came from the back of the cabin.
" 'Don't go out!' Maria begged him. 'Stay here and wait until morning!'
"But Jim told her to sit there and wait, and he got out his long rifle and stormed out the back door of the cabin.
"He never came back. Maria waited and waited, growing more and more scared, and finally she couldn't help it and started screaming out his name. There was no response. The storm seemed to be tapering off, but she was afraid to leave the room to see what was going on outside. There was no phone, so she couldn't call for help, and the lights still had not come back on, so she waited in the darkness, unable to sleep, until morning.
The Return Page 3
