The Return

by Bentley Little

  "Even with the Ron situation?"

  "They can't hold that against Al. Besides, that's just a sideshow. And it's not something Al knew about or had any control over."

  "But why both of us? Why not just you? Or me?"

  "I don't know," she said. "Because it's a long drive?"

  They reached the New Mexico border by mid-morning, gassed up at Gallup, then continued on. Chaco Canyon was a national historical park, but it was not easily accessible and not located near any town or city. According to both Al's written directions and Glen's AAA map, the quickest and most direct route was fifty miles down a state highway and then another forty miles or so over a dirt road that led to the Indian ruins. But the state road was closed, not merely blocked off with cones, but obstructed by a berm of gravel, and when Glen looked at his map, he saw that the only other way to reach their destination would be to continue on to Albuquerque, then head north through mountains and a series of small towns until they reached another thirty-mile dirt road that would bring them in from the east. It was a long and roundabout route, adding several extra hours to their trip. But there was no way to avoid it.

  "We'd better get moving," he said. "We have a lot of miles to cover."

  They ate lunch in Albuquerque, stopping off for burgers and a bathroom break at a roadside McDonald's before once again heading out. The gas tank was still half full so he did not fill up, a stupid decision he regretted when they found themselves passing through towns that could more correctly be called hamlets--small communities that did not appear to have electricity, let alone modern gas stations.

  New Mexico seemed poorer than Arizona, and another world entirely from California. The towns they drove through could just as easily have been in old Mexico. There were no fast-food joints, no supermarkets, no shops, or banks, only old adobe buildings of indeterminate function and small wooden homes adjacent to open fields. He saw outhouses in back of the homes, saw dark-skinned men actually riding horses along the side of the road.

  One of the villages--a nameless community situated among the green trees of a narrow, river-carved valley--did have an independent service station, a hand-painted sign on top of the faded shake roof announcing simply: GAS.

  Glen pulled into the station, running over a length of black cable that caused a loud bell to ding somewhere inside the rundown building. They both got out of the car and stretched. The lone gas dispenser was the old-fashioned kind. There was no place to swipe a card, no automatic bill taker, only a locked pump with a skinny nozzle. When it became obvious that no one was going to come out and meet them, Glen walked into the open office. "Hello?" he called. "Anyone here?"

  No one was behind the counter or the cluttered metal desk, and he poked his head into the dark garage. "Hello?"

  The place appeared to be abandoned. He walked out of the office and around the side of the building. No one stood near the air and water hoses. There were only metal racks filled with bald tires out back. He returned to the car, puzzled. "I can't find anyone."

  "Maybe the attendant went out to get some lunch or something," Melanie suggested. "This is a small town. People don't lock their doors." She looked around. "Why don't we try over there?" She pointed to an adobe house that had been turned into a Mexican restaurant.

  "Okay."

  She grabbed her purse out of the car, and they trekked across the sun-baked asphalt, not only feeling the heat but seeing it in the thick wavy air that emanated from the road. Above, the sky was a deep perfect blue, although an army of puffy white clouds was advancing from the north.

  The utter silence seemed odd. He heard cicadas and the scuttling of lizards in the dry grass, but no human voices disturbed the still air, no music or machinery marred the quiet. The town seemed empty, abandoned, and Glen suddenly had a bad feeling about this place.

  The door to the restaurant was open, although the interior of the building was dark. Two white plastic tables on the porch were unoccupied, new place settings atop one, dirty plates and glasses on the other. Glen and Melanie exchanged a look but said nothing. They walked up the porch steps and into the restaurant. Here again, they saw a mixture of used and unused tables, and here again there was no sign of life. Glen stepped behind the cash register, peered into the kitchen. "No one," he reported.

  "What do you think's going on?" Melanie asked.

  "I don't know," Glen said, but he was thinking about the skull.

  "Don't you think it's kind of weird? I mean, here we are on this mission, and we run into a situation that seems to parallel our pueblo dwellers? What are the chances of that?"

  He wanted to simply go back to the gas station, get in the car and drive on. Of course, he'd noticed the parallel, but he'd hoped that she hadn't. Now he was afraid that she would want to stay and explore, look for other people, try to find out what happened.

  Sure enough, he felt her hand on his arm. "I know we should get out of here," she said. "I'm sure you want to get as far away from this place as possible. Which is probably a very sensible idea. But don't you think we ought to at least look around a bit and make sure there's no one . . . hurt?"

  "What I think we should do," Glen said, trying to sound logical, "is call the state police from the next town up and let them figure it out. Who knows? Maybe this really is a little ghost town with only one or two guys living here. We're assuming that everyone disappeared, but that might not be the case. Maybe the gas station has been abandoned for years and that's why no one's there--"

  "This restaurant was obviously not abandoned years ago. Those dirty dishes look pretty new."

  She was right.

  "Why don't we give ourselves ten minutes?" she suggested. "If we haven't found anyone by that time, we'll leave."

  "All right. Ten minutes. Starting now."

  They walked out of the restaurant and down the porch steps. "Which way?" he asked.

  Melanie looked around, then pointed up the alley-sized dirt road to the left of the restaurant. Twin rows of shacklike houses headed away from the highway. "There," she said.

  "We can't just walk into people's homes."

  "No, but we can knock on doors."

  Knock they did, on several of the more likely looking candidates--houses with cars or trucks parked in front of them--but no one answered, and they heard no noise from inside any of them. They walked past a small orchard of cherry trees. At the end of the road was a small adobe church. There seemed to be a lot of such churches in New Mexico, Glen thought. It was obvious even to him that they predated nearly every building he'd ever laid eyes on. Melanie explained that many of them had been built before the United States was even a country, some of them before the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth Rock.

  "History is written by the victors," she said as they walked up the dusty street. "That's why we're always told American history through a British-centric lens. It always starts in the East and moves west. But the truth is that America was settled here first. There was a governor's mansion and a sitting Spanish governor in the civilized city of Santa Fe when the Pilgrims sat down to their primitive first Thanksgiving. But that doesn't fit into the myth. We're supposed to think the brave colonists tamed a savage land occupied only by a handful of nomadic natives and that after they fought for their independence and set up a stable democracy, they moved inland and settled the Wild West. We're not supposed to realize that there was already a cultured European civilization here."

  Glen laughed. "Sounds like your classes are probably pretty interesting."

  "I get complaints from parents," she admitted.

  Theirs were the only voices on this silent street, and the sound of their footfalls echoed off the flat fronts of empty houses.

  As they drew closer, Glen realized that the church was of very primitive construction with a narrow windowless design. This was a Christian house of worship, but there seemed something pagan about it, as though the needs and requirements of an older religion had been incorporated. He recalled reading somewhere that Christmas an
d Easter were appropriated holidays, that no one really knew when Christ was born or died and the way the early church had recruited believers was to piggyback their sacred days on earlier, earthier celebrations. There was something of that here, and it seemed an uneasy mix. Glen felt a faint chill as he walked toward the building, and he had the sudden desire to turn around and leave. He did not want to see what was inside.

  They walked up the short wooden steps.

  Opened the heavy double doors.

  The interior of the church was dark, but sometime in the last century electric lights had been added, and Glen found a panel of switches in the vestibule. He flipped them on. The chapel was suddenly illuminated by two wrought-iron chandeliers that hung on thick chains from the arched ceiling, with frosted bulbs made to resemble candle flames. The nave was empty, as was the chancel at the head of the church, and Glen looked up the aisle between the pews toward the altar. The front of the chapel seemed strange and it took him a moment to realize why. The steps. They were flat and wide, made from rock rather than adobe or cement, and they seemed far older than the surrounding floor. Large interlaced stones of various hues formed vaguely geometric patterns on the way up to the altar. They looked just like a series of steps they'd uncovered at the pueblo, steps leading into what Al said had been a ceremonial chamber. Spanish builders must have constructed their house of worship on the remains of a much older site.

  Glen and Melanie walked forward, cowed into silence by the sacred atmosphere of this place. They passed the heavy pews and a wrought-iron stand of unlit votive candles.

  The church was small and narrow, and the transept consisted of two shallow alcoves. Tall dark wood panels of considerable age formed triptychs on the indented walls, their painted pictures faded by time but still clearly visible. The scenes depicted were not of Jesus and the crucifixion, or Adam and Eve in the Garden, or any other traditional subjects. Instead, they were strange, almost surrealistic paintings featuring at least one figure who was very familiar.

  "My God," he breathed. "That's me."

  He turned toward Melanie, but she seemed to be in shock, the expression on her face mirroring the way he felt.

  Glen stared at the left transept wall. The panels seemed to tell a story, and while he wasn't that familiar with the Bible, he had the feeling that the tale told here was not a parable from the Good Book. In the first scene, he was standing beneath a canopy, surrounded by low, tan half-walls. A bright sun shone in the sky. At his feet was a pile of bones. The panel depicted the excavation at Bower, and Glen stared at it, his head reeling. It had been a leap for him to acknowledge that there was something odd about the pueblo and its artifacts, but this was a quantum leap beyond that. He had quit his job, tooled east with no destination in mind, and through a series of flukes had ended up working at an archeological dig. Yet a couple of hundred years ago, some artist or monk or priest way out here in the wilds of New Mexico had painted a picture of him at that site. He must have had some sort of vision about it.

  It all involved such a complicated and convoluted series of coincidences that it boggled the mind. Had all of this been somehow preordained? Was he supposed to be here at this time? Was he meant to find these paintings? Glen didn't know, but he felt manipulated, a pawn in the grip of some omniscient force able to bend reality to its will and orchestrate seemingly random events into a grand design.

  He was a hairsbreadth away from hopelessness, ready to concede his utter lack of free will, when he suddenly realized that he was looking at this all wrong. There were always multiple explanations for everything, endless possibilities even for seemingly connected events and facts and conclusions that appeared to be set in stone. Sure, his being here to see these paintings could be the culmination of some elaborate plan, but it could also be entirely accidental. Or there could be some explanation that he was just too stupid or myopic to see. Hell, maybe the figure wasn't even him. Maybe it was some historical character that just happened to resemble him.

  No. He knew that wasn't true.

  His eyes moved on to the second painting in the triptych. In this one, he was again at the ruins of the pueblo, only he was facing a bright white light, a radiating circle that almost looked like a star. Into this light, twin rows of men and women in both ancient and modern dress were walking.

  In the final panel, he was not depicted at all. Instead, the clothes he'd been wearing, some sort of brown suit, lay atop a monstrous pile of bones ten times the size of the one in the initial painting. The white light was to the left of the bones, and against its backdrop a strange-looking figure was silhouetted: a thick, powerfully built man with a mane of wild orange hair.

  Glen walked immediately across the church, past the front pews, to the right side of the transept. Here, the paintings were, if anything, even more bizarre. In the first one, Glen was back, this time with a young boy. Both of them were walking, passing a group of kneeling Indians and a pack of twisted, deformed dogs. In the sky above, the wild-maned man stood on the sun.

  The second panel showed dead trees and fallow fields next to a deserted city with square, nearly identical buildings. The only figure in the scene was the man on the sun, still in silhouette.

  In the final picture, the orange-haired man was in a cave or a darkened room, facing Glen and the boy, who both held what appeared to be lengths of rope with jagged bolts of lightning shooting out the ends. The wild man was screaming, either in terror or pain. On the wall behind him was a stone wheel covered with carved symbols.

  "What does this mean?" Melanie asked. Her voice was hushed, reverent.

  "I keep a disposable camera in the car," Glen said. "In case I get in an accident. I'm going to go get it and try to take pictures of this. We can show it to Al or his friend. Maybe they can figure out something from it." He started back toward the entrance.

  "Wait!" Melanie said. "I'm not staying here alone!"

  He grabbed her hand, and they stepped out into the sunlight, blinking at the brightness as they walked down the steps, waiting for their eyes to adjust.

  "You want to come with me?" Glen asked. "Or--?"

  Melanie took a few more steps away from the church. "I'll wait here. Hurry."

  He ran down the dirt road toward the highway. The hot sun made him sweat, but it didn't penetrate the bone-deep cold that had taken root within him while inside the chapel. He reached the car, grabbed his camera from the glove compartment, and hurried back up the street.

  He was breathing heavily. "I need to exercise more," he said, wiping his forehead.

  She smiled perfunctorily.

  "Just let me catch my breath."

  "I'll take the pictures," she offered.

  "You wait here," he told her, pulling himself together. He started toward the church.

  "I'll come with you."

  "No. I'll be back out in a minute." He walked up the steps and inside. The lighting was dim and he didn't have a flash, so he took two close-up photos of each panel and three of each triptych. The camera only had twelve shots. He wished it had twenty-four--he would have taken the whole roll--but it probably wouldn't make much difference. Either there was enough light in here or there wasn't.

  When he emerged from the church, Melanie seemed troubled.

  He frowned. "What is it?"

  She looked at him strangely. "I . . . I've been keeping this from you," she said. "I don't know why. It . . ." She reached into her purse, pulled out a shard of pottery. "My father found this in his yard. Back in Bower."

  He took the object from her, examined it. On the clay surface was a crude drawing of a house, a contemporary house. "Is this--" he began.

  "Like the picture of me, it's authentic. At least I'm pretty sure it is. It's Anasazi pottery, and that's Anasazi artwork." She licked her lips. "The thing is," she said, "it changes. The picture. Sometimes there's a . . . a face peeking out of that window. Sometimes the face is smiling. And sometimes it's not. I don't know which is worse."

  "I don't see a face no
w."

  "No. It's asleep maybe, or . . . I don't know. That's my parents' house there, the one I grew up in. I've kind of been thinking of this thing like a crystal ball. Not one that tells the future, but one like in The Wizard of Oz, where the witch lets Dorothy see what's happening back on the farm. That's why I think of that little face being either awake or asleep."

  "You think this thing's living in your parents' house?"

  "No, it's not that. It's . . . oh, I don't know."

  "What's it look like?"

  Melanie took a deep breath. "It's weird looking, and it kind of reminds me of a clown in a way. But it also reminds me of that silhouette in those panels back there." She nodded toward the church. "That thing with the hair."

  The cold within Glen erupted on his skin in goose bumps.

  "Leave it," he said. "Here."

  "What?"

  There's no reason to keep it, is there? Dump it, get rid of it. That thing creeps me out. The skull in the trunk's bad enough, but that's just . . ." He shook his head. "Let's just toss it, get the hell out of here and move on."

  "I don't know. It's part of the pueblo. We might need it to piece together a more accurate history. It wouldn't be right to just abandon it here."

  "You didn't show it to Al, did you?"

  "No," she admitted.

  "And you probably weren't going to. Look, it won't be missed. There's plenty of pottery there. And bones. And more ruins. It's not needed." He looked into her eyes. "I don't want that thing traveling with us. I don't like it."

  "I don't like it, either."

  "But?"

  "But . . . I don't know. Maybe I'm afraid to let it go, afraid something might happen."

  Glen was silent. That was a possibility. He didn't know anything about this stuff. They were equally in the dark here. He handed her back the piece of pottery.

  Melanie's hand closed around the shard. Then she suddenly cocked back her arm and threw it. The object landed in a clump of dried weeds to the right of the church steps.