The Return

by Bentley Little

Clarke saw him first, and the guard's face showed visible relief as he waved Arthur over. "Thank God, you're here!"

  "What is it?" Arthur asked.

  "Here." Two of the security guards moved aside to let him pass, and Clarke and Kuhn walked into the cataloging room with him.

  Artifacts were moving across the floor. Hundreds of them. They were off tables, off shelves, out of boxes--masks, tomahawks, axes, arrowheads, pottery, carvings, toys, tools, sandals--and they inched along the smooth shiny floor in a uniform direction, toward the door, as if all were imbued with the same purpose. Kel and Mai, two of the museum's researchers, along with a volunteer grad student Arthur didn't know, were huddled behind the big oak desk on the right side of the room. The tide of creeping artifacts had not yet reached the desk, but once it did, the three young people would be cut off, unable to get to the door.

  "What should we do?" Mai asked. She was in shock, her face without expression, her voice robotically matter-of-fact.

  "Get out!" Arthur ordered. "Get out now!"

  It was as if the three had been frozen, encased in ice, and suddenly the ice had shattered. Mai's blank immobility disappeared. She started screaming, and in seconds she and Kel and the grad student were scrambling around the desk, practically pushing each other over in their desperation to get across the stretch of open floor to where Arthur and the guards stood.

  Arthur herded them all through the doorway, out into the central corridor. Everyone kept looking over their shoulders as they passed by him, half expecting a pack of arrowheads to come whizzing through the air. But nothing like that occurred. The tools and toys and relics were moving forward slowly at an unchanged speed. If the workers could all just get out of this room, they'd be safe. None of the objects could open a door; none could even reach the knob. There was no way the artifacts could escape.

  Clarke was the last one out, following close on Arthur's heels, and he slammed the door shut behind him. Keys jingled nervously as he locked it.

  They stood there for a moment, looking at each other. No one said anything.

  But the corridor was not silent.

  Underneath their heavy breathing, from the far end of the partially lit hallway came a steady repetitive sound, a click-tap, click-tap, and Arthur turned to see the Anasazi fetish lurching implacably toward them. It had broken out of its case, and was angrily making its way down the corridor, its stiff bone feet clicking on the polished cement, oversize organ sticking straight out in front as if to ward off all comers.

  Tress and Sergio had followed him, apparently not wanting to be alone with the fetish, and were standing with the security guards, but Patrick was still gone, upstairs in his office getting the camcorder, and Arthur found that worrying. He wanted everyone here, in the corridor, where he could see them. He didn't like the idea of any of his people being alone in far-off parts of the building.

  "What the hell's that?" Kel asked.

  Arthur was about to answer when a muffled bell dinged and Patrick emerged from the service elevator next to the men's room. The bone figure swung around on unbending legs to face the assistant curator. Though the carved object was small, a trick of the light threw an enormously exaggerated shadow before it, dominating the hallway.

  Patrick had started for the gallery, but he saw everyone standing at the end of the corridor, and he stopped in his tracks. He stared at the oncoming fetish. He had plenty of room to pass by on either side of the little figure--all of them had plenty of room to pass by--but everyone remained rooted in place.

  "Get out!" Arthur shouted at him. "Call the police!"

  Patrick was already videotaping.

  Good boy, Arthur thought.

  "What are you going to do?" Patrick called, still taping.

  "There's a whole roomful of them!" Mai yelled, terror in her voice. "They're coming after us!"

  "We're going out through the conference room and the custodial office!" Arthur said. "Finish taping and get the hell out of here! Call the police! We'll meet you outside!"

  Patrick took a step forward, crouched down, then stood again, the arm with the camcorder dropping to his side. "Got it!" he called. "See you there!"

  Arthur caught Clarke's eye. "Let's get out of here," he said. "Move."

  The guard started ushering people toward the side hallway. Murmurs, hard breathing, various sounds of human movement all served to cover up the horrible click-tap, click-tap of the bone figure, but Arthur remained constantly aware of its exact location.

  Behind them was a loud thump and then another as the first of the artifacts hit the closed door of the cataloging room.

  They hurried down the hall, through the conference room and the custodian's office to the exit. Arthur was the last one out, and just before he stepped through the door, he heard an impossibly high-pitched whine, a grating, screeching noise that sounded like a bird being dragged to its death by the braking metal wheel of a train. The terrible sound spoke to him on some level, and he had the horrible feeling that it was the fetish, calling out to him, trying to entice him back. He quickly slammed the door and followed the others outside, away from the building, toward the safety of the street.

  Seven

  1

  They were on the road by seven the next morning, eating breakfast burritos in the car, having purposely chosen a route that would not take them through that empty unnamed town. They had called Al to tell him about the delay, but only got his answering machine. They'd also left a message for Pace Henry.

  Melanie glanced over at Glen as he drove. She'd expected their lovemaking to make a difference today. And it had, in the hotel, in the bed, before they'd gotten up, when they were still holding each other. But now, in the car, in daylight, it was as if the sex had never happened.

  No, that was not true. It had happened; they both knew it, and it would probably happen again tonight. But he was one of those men who compartmentalized their lives, and she knew that he was not capable of fully integrating their new status into their working relationship. At least not yet. He saw her looking at him, gave her a quick uncomfortable smile, then took a sip of his coffee and focused his attention back on the road.

  The car skirted the southern edge of a low mountain range. The road before them stretched across an open sloping plain, landscape shifting from the high desert of the Santa Fe area to a much starker terrain. They'd gone through a lot together yesterday, and the experience had drawn them closer. That was good. She did not know what sort of future this relationship had--if any--but at least she knew that the attraction was not merely physical or the result of circumstances.

  She spotted a dead carcass by the side of the road. Not a coyote or a squirrel or a skunk as she'd seen throughout this trip, but a cow. Two vultures suddenly flew up out of its open rotted rib cage, feathers flapping.

  Melanie followed the carcass with her eyes, watching it through the window as they passed. As her head turned to the rear, she caught sight of the car's trunk. She quickly faced forward, trying not to think about the skull. She suppressed a shiver. They hadn't talked about the skull on this trip, had talked of everything else, yet she knew that both she and Glen felt the same way about the object.

  They drove on for a while in silence. Finally Glen said, "Why was I in those pictures at the church?"

  "I don't know," she said.

  "Why was your parents' house on that pottery?"

  "I don't know."

  They were heading into an area of low buttes and sculpted rock. They passed a pair of twin sandstone hoodoos that looked like elephants' feet.

  "The camera's still in the glove compartment, right?"

  She checked. "Yeah."

  "Good. I want to get those pictures developed and show them to someone. I . . ." He shook his head, at a loss for words.

  Melanie put her hand on his arm. "I know."

  It started to snow an hour later, while they were traveling through a series of low eroded hills with the earth-tone striations of a Georgia O'Keeffe landsc
ape. It was hot outside. They'd been using the air conditioner since they got into the car this morning, and the small flat clouds stretching endlessly across the sky were white without a hint of gray.

  Yet snow was falling, light swirling flurries at first, then an ashy-looking curtain of white that cut down visibility to a matter of feet. Glen slowed down. "Where the hell did this come from?" He turned on the headlights, but if anything they made visibility even more difficult, highlighting the falling snowflakes to the exclusion of all else.

  They crept forward slowly, the speedometer oscillating between fifteen miles per hour and an even slower speed that the needle registered as zero. The snow was starting to stay on the ground, rocks and sand and an occasionally visible thistle disappearing under a blanket of white. Luckily, the road remained clear, the asphalt retaining enough warmth to melt whatever fell upon it.

  And then suddenly the snow was gone. They were back in the blazing sun of the desert, white clouds in the blue sky above, and the car was being buffeted by winds so strong that Glen's hands tightened on the wheel at ten and two. His knuckles whitened as the vehicle was pushed from the shoulder to the centerline and back again. "Jesus!" he said.

  His voice showed his annoyance, but something else as well: surprise with an edge of fearfulness. Melanie knew because she felt it, too.

  Theirs was the only car on the highway, and the wind harassed them all the way to the turnoff for the dirt road that led to Chaco Canyon.

  Where it died completely.

  As they crossed from pavement to dirt, the powerful gusts disappeared, not lessening, not slowly abating, but stopping instantly, as though the off switch to a monstrous fan had been thrown. They had only thirty miles to go, and when the car started bumping along the washboard road, free from the rocking pressure of the outside winds, they thought their weather problems were over.

  But then it started to rain. Again, they could see no rain clouds in the sky, only the benign blue and billowing whiteness that had been with them since Santa Fe. Yet in a matter of seconds, they were caught in a torrential downpour that made it difficult to see and threatened to turn the road into mud.

  "What if we get stuck out here?" Melanie asked. "You don't have four-wheel drive in this thing, do you?"

  "No."

  "So what if we get stuck in the mud? What are we going to do?"

  As if to illustrate her point, the rear end of the car fishtailed.

  Glen once again gripped the steering wheel grimly. "We'll make it."

  Then the hail started.

  There was something . . . biblical about this weather, Glen said. Or at least she thought he said. It was hard to hear above the clattering of the hail on the roof. Such abruptly changing and clearly delineated meteorological phenomena seemed deliberate, as if something was conjuring up obstacles to keep them from reaching Chaco Canyon.

  The skull.

  That abomination in the trunk was the sole reason they had come, but she wished they could stop the car, toss that damn thing onto the side of the road, and speed on. She had the crazy feeling that if they did so, all of this would stop, this weather weirdness and whatever came next would be over.

  Whatever came next.

  Yes, she realized. She expected more.

  There were a surprising number of cars by the Chaco Canyon visitor's center, more hardy souls than she would have thought having braved the weather and the bad road to get here. Or had they? Glen's white Saturn was spattered with mud and looked as though it had been in some sort of off-road endurance race. The other vehicles in the parking lot merely looked dusty. Had all of these cars and trucks been here overnight and avoided the snow and rain?

  She thought not.

  Maybe they'd come from the opposite direction.

  No, that road was closed.

  Only they had experienced the storms.

  Glen and Melanie left the skull in the trunk and walked into the visitor's center. An old couple was chatting with the uniformed ranger behind the counter, while a girl, who appeared to be their granddaughter, spun a rack of postcards. Several other couples and a family with two smirky teenage boys were looking at exhibits in the center's museum, and two women were reading through souvenir books in the adjoining gift shop.

  Glen walked up to the counter and waited until the ranger finished talking to the old couple.

  The ranger--STEVE M. according to his name tag--bid good-bye to the man and woman, then turned toward Glen, smiling. "Welcome to Chaco Canyon."

  "Hello," Glen said as Melanie sidled in next to him. "Could you tell us if Pace Henry's here?"

  "Pace? I think he's off right now. Let me check." The ranger went through the doorway behind him, into an office, and spoke quietly to an older man at a desk.

  "We're from Dr. Wittinghill!" Glen called out. "Dr. Al Wittinghill! We're expected!"

  Steve returned a moment later. "He's out at site three, our active excavation. I could page him for you if you want."

  "That'd be great," Glen said.

  Melanie wandered into the gift shop while they waited. The other customers were looking through postcards and Native American knickknacks, but she headed over to the wall opposite the window, which was lined with dozens of thin, photo-heavy books about Chaco Canyon and other national parks and monuments throughout the Southwest. She picked up the Chaco Canyon book with the best cover shot and started flipping through it.

  When Glen joined her, Melanie asked, "What do you think that was? With the weather?"

  "I don't know."

  "But you don't think it's normal?"

  Glen looked up from the book. "No," he admitted. "You?"

  "No."

  They went back to flipping through the pages, not wanting to talk about it anymore.

  Pace Henry arrived much sooner than they expected, coming in through the door that led out to the ruins trails. The fact that he was out of breath when he entered the visitor's center showed how anxious he was to see what they'd brought. Ranger Steve motioned toward them, and Pace walked over. "You're Glen?" he said. "And Melanie? I'm Pace. Al's colleague."

  He looked different than she thought he would. He was much younger than Al, for one thing. He looked more like a college student than a professor, albeit a college student from the seventies. There was something familiar about him, and in a blink Melanie figured out what it was. He looked like Jeff Bridges in that godawful remake of King Kong; long hair, full beard, and all.

  Pace frowned. "Did you bring it? I thought Al said--"

  "It's still in the car," Glen told him. "I'll go get it."

  Pace wanted more details, or at least a different perspective than the one provided him by Al, and he asked Melanie to tell him her version of how the skull was discovered.

  "Glen's the one who actually found it," she explained. She described to him what happened and what Al had said and how excited he'd been. She told him about the wacky weather on the way over, not specifically stating that she thought it was connected to the skull, but letting him draw his own conclusions, and she was about to go into their adventures yesterday when Glen returned, lugging the heavy wood box. Pace immediately rushed over to help, both of them holding on to the box and sidestepping across the open floor.

  "My workroom's around back," Pace said, nodding at Melanie. "Could you get the door?"

  She moved in front of them, opened the door, and Pace led them around the side of the building and through a separate entrance into a large room with cinder-block walls, numerous shelves and glass cases, a pair of deep metal sinks with a green garden hose in between, and long wooden tables on which were sorted various bones and artifacts.

  "Let's set it down here," Pace said. They placed the box on a cleared section of the table closest to the wall, and he picked up a screwdriver and started prying open the sealed top.

  "Did you get ahold of Al?" Glen asked.

  Pace shook his head. "Tried a couple times last night and once this morning, but no response. I left messag
es on his machine."

  "Us, too."

  "A lot must be going on if he hasn't called back," Melanie said. In her mind, she saw Al unearthing a burial chamber in which something dark and tall and slimy was buried but not dead.

  She pushed the thought away.

  "Maybe we should try again," Glen suggested.

  "Go ahead. The phone's on the shelf next to the sink." Pace motioned behind him.

  Melanie and Glen walked over, and Glen took the number out of his wallet and dialed. She could tell from the long wait that there was no answer on the other end. Once again, he left a short message, telling him that they were at Chaco Canyon.

  Across the workroom, Pace had carefully unpacked the box, withdrawn the skull, and placed it on the table. He was expertly using an X-Acto knife to slice open Al's tightly wound bubble wrap.

  The skull had lost none of its ability to unnerve. Melanie looked at the oversize teeth, the slanted eye sockets, the snout. Whatever it was, the thing had been hideous, more monster than man, and she could think of no animal or living creature to which the skull corresponded.

  Pace was momentarily at a loss for words. He stood there, examining the skull, tracing its contours with one wary finger.

  "Wow," he said finally. He looked up at them. "Hey, were you able to get in touch with Al?"

  Glen shook his head. "No answer."

  "Too bad."

  They all stared for a moment at the oversize skull.

  Pace started quizzing Glen about his unearthing of the object, wanting his side of the story. As he spoke, Pace examined the skull more thoroughly, turning it over, using a magnifying glass and a thin hooked instrument to study the sharp, disproportionately large teeth.

  "So neither of you saw the burial chamber Al described to me, is that correct?"

  "I . . . didn't want to see it," Glen admitted.

  "I didn't go either," Melanie said. "But Al was very excited, and I have to admit it sounded impressive. I know photos were taken."

  "Photos? Damn! He should have sent them to me."

  "We'll make sure he does when we get back," Glen said.