The Return

by Bentley Little

  Glass shattered loudly as first one, then the other smashed through the front door and moved onto the sidewalk outside. He did not know what form of locomotion propelled the figures. They were each carved from a single piece of basalt and had no real legs, only the suggestion of legs on a tapered bottom of chiseled stone. Yet they sped quickly forward, not wobbling or lurching, but advancing smoothly, as if on wheels or rollers.

  Behind them, a straw basket rolled over the lip of the door, followed by a waddling metate and a host of pottery shards.

  He thought of calling the police, of calling Dana Peters, president of the archaeological society, but those artifacts were moving. Instead, Vince quickly grabbed the digital camcorder he'd placed in the side pocket of his backpack for easy access and hurried outside, stepping over flapping sandals and chittering strings of carved shells through the hole in the door, careful not to cut himself on the jagged glass.

  It was a different world on the street. He'd lived in Springerville for the past nine months, since landing this internship, and something had changed tonight; there was an undefineable sense that things were not as they should be. The town seemed empty, abandoned, and as the contents of the museum moved onto the street, a horde of antiquities crossing the highway, they encountered no one else. Someone was always on the road, heading to or from New Mexico, and this absence of human activity was eerie.

  Vince stayed a safe distance behind, taping. He hazarded a glance between the commercial buildings to the houses beyond, glad to see porch lights and the flickering of televisions, but hoping for a glimpse of an honest-to-God person. He knew he was being paranoid, but he wanted to know that everyone in town had not vanished into thin air.

  Paranoid? Who was he kidding? He was chasing Anasazi relics down a highway in the middle of the night after they'd broken out of a museum. It was a very short leap to the mass disappearance of a townful of people.

  From behind the chain-link fence of the junkyard, he saw the glowing eyes of Cliff Rogan's black Labrador staring at him, oddly luminescent in the moonlight. Ordinarily, the guard dog went into a jumping, barking frenzy if so much as a breeze disturbed the air. But now the animal was silent, unmoving.

  Vince increased his speed, moving a little closer to the artifacts in order to get away from the dog.

  Still no movement, still no sound.

  The basalt figures veered left, off the highway, down a small dirt road. As the rest of the relics followed, he suddenly knew where they were going.

  The ruins.

  Or back to the ruins. For they had been excavated from Huntington Mesa, had been there for most of the past millennium. Now, apparently, they wanted to go home.

  The road ended abruptly, but the artifacts continued onward, into the desert, toward the mesa. They obviously had no intention of taking the roundabout Jeep trail up to the pueblo. They were heading straight to the site.

  They had intention?

  Everything about this was horribly, crazily wrong.

  Vince walked several paces past the end of the road, still taping, then stopped, shutting off his camera. There was no way he was going up to the ruins. Those kivas were creepy at the best of times, and the thought of being there alone at night, while those two statues and their followers moved through the ancient rooms, chilled him to the bone. He'd done enough, he'd done more than enough, and in the morning he would download what he'd filmed and turn it in to the archeological society, the police, the sheriff's office, and whoever else wanted to see it.

  There was movement off to his right, and he jumped, heart lurching in his chest. An old Indian man was sitting on a rock, watching the scene. Like a living racist stereotype, he was wrapped in a Navajo blanket and held in one hand a bottle of whiskey. He did not seem scared, did not seem surprised, but was simply watching calmly as though this sort of thing happened every day.

  Vince was about to ask the old man why he wasn't shocked by the animation of these objects when the Indian pointed toward the top of the low mesa. "They come."

  A chill passed through him. There were indeed figures on the mesa, strangely shaped forms with horns and hair and lumpy bodies illuminated by moonlight. They were walking, not on the edge, but on what Vince knew was a footpath, heading west, away from the ruins.

  "But who are they?" he asked, and for some reason he was whispering.

  "The Others."

  The Others. He didn't like that. It occurred to him that this old man was a ghost, an apparition sent to explain all this to him and tell him what he was supposed to do. But the smell of the whiskey was real--and strong--and the same intermittent night wind that ruffled his own hair sent stray strands of the old man's salt-and-pepper mane flying.

  "Who are 'The Others'?" Vince asked.

  The old man took a swig. "Don't know. Not exactly. Only know they ain't us."

  "But you've seen something like this before? You know what's happening here?"

  "Nope."

  "What about--"

  But the Indian was already wandering off, not toward the mesa, not back toward the road, but through the boulder-strewn ground toward the light of a far-off ranch house, moving with the exaggeratedly careful steps of the inebriated.

  "I just--" Vince called after him.

  The old man held up his hand for silence, and kept walking.

  Vince turned back toward the mesa. The figures on top were gone, and the artifacts had disappeared into the darkness of the night. A gust of wind blew cold against his face. He looked down at the digital camera in his hand, took a deep breath to steady himself, then started toward town.

  In the morning, he drove up the trail to the top of the mesa, not knowing what he would find, just wanting to see if there was anything unusual after last night's . . . incident.

  He wasn't prepared for the sight that greeted him.

  Men and women, dozens of them, were crouched down, digging in the dirt with hands or trowels or kitchen spoons, looking for . . . he didn't know what. But it was something specific, because they were setting aside rocks and broken glass and even some decent-looking shards of pottery. They were dressed in their Sunday best, and that inappropriate attire made him wary. He got out of the car and began walking, but they were ignoring him, pretending as though he wasn't there.

  He headed toward the pueblo, staring at the dirt as he did so. He saw no evidence of any of the missing relics, but the hardpacked earth was scarred. At first he assumed the cause was the totemic figures, the metates and arrowheads and other relics, but he realized that none of those objects was heavy enough to create such scoring on solid ground. When he looked closer, he saw what looked like claw marks and giant footprints.

  Could it have been The Others?

  He didn't think so. Admittedly, he'd only seen them briefly and from very far away, but they'd been normal size. In the moonlight, his first impression was that they were monsters of some kind. But since then, he'd had time to analyze what he'd seen, and he'd come to the conclusion that they were not monsters but people: people outfitted in ragged primitive costumes. He had no idea if they were dressed that way to frighten onlookers or as part of some bizarre ritual, but there was no doubt in his mind that they were human. Stupidly, he hadn't filmed them, a fact he hadn't even realized until he'd walked home. It would be a long time before that sight was erased from his mind, though.

  Two juniper trees on the west side of the pueblo were shredded, their trunks cracked lengthwise and bent away from each other as though pushed by giant hands. The ruins themselves appeared the same as they had yesterday morning, the last time he'd taken a tour through here.

  The men and women were still focusing intently on their digging activities. No one was talking, not even whistling or humming. They scooped out spoonfuls and shovelfuls and handfuls of dirt, oblivious to everything else around them.

  These weren't the people from last night. These were people from town. He didn't recognize any of them, wasn't even sure how he knew this was true, but he
did.

  He considered making his circuitous way around the ruins, examining the partially walled rooms of the eastern house and the largely extant building that made up the western complex, but he knew where he needed to go. If anything was to be found here, it would be in the pueblo's ceremonial chambers, the secret rooms where the original dwellers had conducted their rites of worship.

  The kivas.

  He'd been aware since he first started giving tours of the site that many visitors found the single kiva that was open to the public unsettling. Quite a few refused to go in, and oftentimes those who did came out subdued and shaken. He himself had always been a little creeped out by it, but he'd assumed that was because he knew the specifics of some of the rituals that had been performed there.

  Now, though, he was acutely aware of not only the underground rooms' sordid past, but the aura and the feeling he got from them.

  Vince walked past an elderly woman, in a pearl necklace and flower-print dress, kneeling down and scratching the ground with a kitchen spoon and steak knife. He reached the public kiva, stepped up to the raised circle and grasped the top of the ladder, peering down into the opening. The walls of the kiva were slick, wet, slimy, completely coated with some sort of shiny black substance. At the bottom lay a skeleton, a headless skeleton that looked bigger than that of a man and oddly misshapen, too big to fit through the top opening, but nowhere near big enough to have rent the juniper trees or made those huge clawed footprints in the earth.

  Where had it come from? The excavation at Huntington Mesa was ongoing. The archeological society coordinated efforts between several community colleges from various parts of the state, and surely he would have heard if anyone had uncovered a skeleton. Particularly one like this.

  And where was the skull?

  He crouched down, poked his head through the opening, wanting to get a closer look but afraid to descend the ladder.

  The positioning of the decapitated skeleton in the precise center of the ceremonial room seemed ritualistic. Around the bones, the artifacts from the museum, both the ones he'd seen last night and the missing pieces from two nights before, were arranged in deliberate order, forming a rough geometric shape. This is where they'd been going . . . the faithful worshipping their god.

  That was exactly what it was like, particularly with the two carved figures perched to the left and right of where the skull should be.

  He withdrew his head from the opening, standing quickly. To his surprise, the other men and women had abandoned their single-minded digging. They had dropped their tools and were making their way toward him.

  Or toward the kiva.

  He moved aside, off the raised circle of ground, backing toward one of the rent junipers. The people did not alter their course. He realized for the first time that there were no vehicles up here other than his own. Everyone else had walked the several miles from town.

  In their dress clothes.

  The first man passed him, silent, purposeful, and Vince watched as he firmly grasped the top of the ladder and walked down into the chamber. A young woman in a tight red skirt followed.

  The people began lining up, the queue winding around a freestanding adobe wall and around an excavated fire pit. The first man emerged from the kiva with a metate, followed up the ladder by the young woman carrying a basket.

  Two old women went down, one after the other.

  They climbed up a moment later, bearing broken pieces of pottery.

  Two other people went down.

  Vince stood there until each of the men and women had obtained an artifact from the kiva and had started off down the dirt road, on the long trip back to town. He could have stopped any of them at any time--what they were taking was museum property--but he hadn't wanted to--

  he'd been afraid to

  --and he'd let them go, waiting to see what would happen. After the last man left, a tall skinny guy who Vince was pretty sure worked at McDonald's, he gathered up his courage, stepped onto the raised circle and looked down into the kiva. As he suspected, there was nothing remaining. The number of artifacts had corresponded exactly to the number of people. Only the headless skeleton remained: large, thick boned and looking decidedly threatening in the darkness of the chamber. The smooth black walls gleamed wetly.

  He practically jumped off the raised section of ground, almost tripping over a rock as he did so.

  Reaching his Jeep, he watched the last man retreat down the road. He could not shake the feeling that the artifacts had come to the kiva to be blessed--or cursed--by the unnatural skeleton. Now it was the job of the men and women to disseminate the relics throughout the land, to spread the gospel as it were, and as the man's body disappeared and then his head on the downward sloping road, Vince let out a deep and long-held breath.

  3

  Henry Abel stood at the edge of the plateau, above the fire-scarred finger canyon, looking south. The view was beautiful. The Four Corners power plants must be off-line, he thought. The sky was blue, the desert air clear, and for once not even a trace of haze obscured his view of Shiprock. He'd been working as a ranger here at Mesa Verde for twenty years, damn near half his life, and though he'd been offered a transfer several times, he had always turned them down. This place spoke to him--the land, the pueblos--and if he could live out the rest of his days in southern Colorado, he would die a happy man.

  He finished his salami sandwich, folded up the wax paper, and put it in his pocket. This was his favorite lunch spot, although he occasionally ate at other overlooks and even in the cafeteria during particularly wet weather. But he felt most at home here, standing atop the mesa that had once housed the Anasazi's biggest city, looking out over the flat high deserts of northern New Mexico and Arizona.

  It was hot today, and the chaparral brush, the pinon pines, and juniper--or what were left of them after the fires--were alive with the festive sound of cicadas. Hordes of the little critters were chirruping for all they were worth, the staggered sounds of individual insects like an endless musical round. Why in God's name, he wondered, would people choose to live in the concrete canyons of New York or the tamed green suburbia of the East? He'd been born in Ware, Massachusetts, raised in Hartford, Connecticut, but he'd never felt truly alive until coming west, moving to Tucson after receiving a track scholarship to the University of Arizona. He'd been sleepwalking before that, existing rather than living, and after his first semester in the desert, after spending fall and summer exposed to the rough raw glory that was the Southwest, he knew he never wanted to leave.

  He pulled a Snickers bar out of his front shirt pocket. As he ate it, he stared out at Shiprock.

  And it flickered.

  What the hell was that? Henry blinked. He focused on the jagged volcano core, wondering if it was a trick of the distance or a sign that his eyesight was deteriorating. For a second there, the massive geological formation had disappeared and wavered, like a scene on a television with bad rabbit ears.

  Henry continud to peer at the rugged peak, but whatever it was did not happen again. Probably nothing, he told himself.

  He looked at Shiprock one last time.

  Then he turned away, walking over the crunching bodies of dead cicadas to his Jeep.

  That evening, Henry was leading a ranger talk when the cars came. The snaking line of headlights on the road from Cortez was clearly visible from the small outdoor amphitheater where he was discussing the behavioral habits of local squirrels and birds and deer.

  Something was wrong. The park closed at sunset, and only those who were already within its boundaries, those who were camping or staying in the cabins or the lodge, were allowed on the roads. Yet literally dozens of vehicles were making their way up the mesa.

  "We haven't seen any squirrels at all," a soft doughy man wearing hip-hop shorts announced. "No deer, either."

  "And not many birds," an old woman chimed in.

  Henry tried to focus on his discussion. "Since the fires, wildlife within the park has had
to adapt to the changed environment. Many existing habitats burned and the animals were forced to migrate . . ."

  He kept talking, but his eyes remained on the line of vehicles. He was getting increasingly nervous as he watched the slow inexorable approach of headlights. The last vestiges of day had disappeared from the west in the past few minutes, blue fading into deep purple to match the rest of the sky, and the string of lights seemed brighter, more ominous.

  Ending his ranger talk early, Henry tried to hurry everyone out of the amphitheater. He didn't know why, but he wanted them safely in their cabins or lodge rooms or tents before the cars and trucks arrived. He wanted to protect them. The people weren't cooperating, though. Too many were staying in their seats, talking familiarly to each other, looking up at the stars. Others were approaching him, wanting to ask questions. He tried to usher them out, tried not to let his anxiety show, but that was becoming harder and harder as the line of vehicles drew closer.

  The first pickup stopped in front of the amphitheater. It didn't pull into the adjacent visitor's center parking lot, but halted in the middle of the road.

  Behind the pickup, in a chain reaction, the other cars and trucks stopped.

  The people got out.

  They were carrying weapons. Not revolvers or assault rifles, but older, more primitive weapons. Spears, axes, bats, sharpened rocks. The vehicles were still running, headlights on, and as much as anything else, that tightened the knot in Henry's stomach and made him want to flee.

  They approached. Both men and women. Some of them were naked, others dressed in raggedy castoff clothes. Quite a few wore regular everyday duds, but these people, too, seemed peculiar and threatening.

  Some of them had bloody hands.

  Now his audience started leaving: Mothers shielding the eyes of children, husbands hurrying wives back to their lodgings and looking fearfully over their shoulders as they made their hasty exits down dimly lighted paths.