Cameron felt a faint stirring of hope. "What if you are, too? Nothing happened to you in Springerville."
Vince nodded wonderingly. "Nothing happened to any of us. Not to Glen, not to Melanie, not to us. Not only that, but we're all trying to figure out what's going on and how to stop it, and we've all ended up together. What if that's because we were meant to? Or what if some . . . higher power has brought us together?"
Cameron's mouth felt dry. "Higher power? You mean like God?"
"I'm just thinking out loud. Don't take any of this as gospel."
But Cameron could tell that his uncle was not merely thinking out loud. He had only just thought of it, but he believed it, and the expression on his face was almost one of relief. Cameron himself was filled with a renewed optimism. Maybe they could fight back. Maybe they did have a chance.
The two of them sat there for a moment, not speaking.
"What's going to happen to me when this is all over?" Cameron said quietly. "Are you going to . . . adopt me?"
His uncle clearly hadn't thought that far ahead. But he recovered nicely. "Of course," he said.
"Does that mean you'll be my dad, then?"
"No. I'll still be your uncle. But I'll take care of you. I'll do . . . all those things your dad would've done if he was . . . here."
Cameron nodded. He thought of his mom's tooth inside the porcelain carrot that looked like the dust devil. His uncle and the police had broken open the other carrot. While Cameron had said he didn't want to know what they'd found, he'd been able to think of almost nothing else for two days, and now he finally asked, "What was in there? The carrot?"
Vince looked at him for a moment as if weighing options, making a decision. "Your dad's ring finger," he said finally. "With his wedding ring."
They didn't say any more. The image was fixed forever in Cameron's brain without his having to see it or hear any more details.
His parents really were gone.
He stared out the motel window at a father in the shallow end of the pool hoisting a young boy onto his shoulders and flipping him into the water. The boy, laughing, splashed upward. "Again!" he said, holding out his hand to his father. "Again!"
And Cameron started to cry.
4
When George Black returned from the grocery store, his house was not his house.
Oh, it was his house on the outside. When he got out of the car, bearing the grocery sack of syrup and lettuce and spaghetti sauce and orange juice that his wife had sent him to buy, he was in his own driveway in his own front yard. And when he stepped up the stoop and opened the screen door, nothing was amiss. But the second he stepped inside and saw a long dark hallway with corroded metal walls that reminded him of the bowels of the ship that had taken him to Korea, he knew he was far, far from home.
"Margaret?" he called, but only out of obligation. She wasn't here. No one was here. No one he knew.
From someplace far ahead came a deep bass thumping, as though a slave were pounding on a giant kettle drum. George dropped his groceries and turned around, hoping he might be able to get out the way he'd come in, but the doorway was gone. Behind him was only rusted metal.
He walked slowly forward, past puddles on the floor, oily pools of stagnant water that reflected back blackness and turned the dim yellow light from the dirty caged bulb in the ceiling into dull rainbow colors.
Why was this happening to him? He'd been on board from the beginning. Bower had changed and he had changed with it, and when the city council began recruiting volunteers for the wars, he had signed up immediately--despite Margaret's protestations. He had even helped make weapons for the warriors, he and Brian Babbitt both, the two of them basing their designs on pictures from recently uncovered pottery.
So why was this happening?
Why did anything happen? Just because. This was a random world. Bad things happened to good people and vice versa. The churchy crowd might think that God had a plan for everyone and that everything that happened was God's will, but the truth was more haphazard. They'd found that out lately, hadn't they? Would all of this be happening if those county workers hadn't dug up that Indian ruin, if that ASU professor hadn't come out to investigate? He didn't think so. But accidents occurred and accidents had ripples and sometimes the shit hit the fan.
The pounding was softer now, moving farther away. George stepped over the puddles, around the puddles, in them when he had to. He nearly slipped, pressed a hand against the wall to steady himself, and was surprised to discover that the wall was not metal. It felt like the latex-painted stucco of his own hallway, and for a brief hopeful second he thought that this was all a mirage. That hope died fast. His hand came away grimy and greasy, palms and fingers smeared with a dark foul-smelling substance. He could see a streak on the wall where he'd touched it, and it had a tactile dimension that he knew no hallucination could possibly imitate.
This was real. This was happening.
He stopped where he was, heard the pounding retreat even farther. It sounded as though it was going underground. He wanted to get out of this hellish place more than anything he'd ever wanted in his life, but he was afraid to continue on, afraid of where this hallway might lead, afraid it led not out but deeper in. He turned around, intending to go back, but it was darker than it had been. He saw shadows where there should not be shadows and they had shapes he did not like. Nothing about the hallway behind him seemed right, and he started forward again, moving more quickly this time.
The corridor curved, and soon he could see where it ended: a dimly lighted room with a faded yellow floor and filthy once-white walls. The doorway entered the room from the side, at the back, so he could see only a flat expanse of floor, the rear wall, and a portion of the opposite side wall.
He hurried through the oily puddles and the ever-darkening hall, stepping through the doorway onto dry yellow linoleum.
Laughter echoed off the dirty walls, not wild and manic or hearty and friendly, but low and impossibly constant. In the center of the room was a fat man in a stained apron. He was the one laughing, although there was no smile on his thin-lipped mouth.
It was his grandfather.
He knew it but didn't know how he knew it. George had been born three years after his grandfather's death, and if there had ever been any photographs of the man, they had been hidden or destroyed long before he was old enough to see or understand. If he had wanted to do so, he could have gone to the library when he was older, looked up old newspapers--but he hadn't.
This was him, though, this was his grandfather.
The mass murderer.
The fat man was standing before a battered butcher block covered with dried brown blotches, keeping up that low constant laughter. A nicked, rusted cleaver was clutched in his upraised right hand. To the side of the butcher block was a large tub of wet concrete.
George was more afraid of this room than he had been of anything thus far, but the doorway through which he had entered was gone. There were no doors, no windows, only dirty unbroken wall.
The fat man continued laughing quietly, unendingly, cleaver hand upraised.
There was someone else in the room, or something else, though he had been avoiding it and did not want to acknowledge its presence. It was standing in the far corner, covered by brown butcher paper, and it was short, the size of a child. Beneath the thick wrapping, it was shivering, shaking like a Parkinson's patient, and the paper rattled with the agitated oscillation of its movements.
He knew what was under there, and on some level, he thought, he had known from the beginning, had known from the second he stepped inside his house and saw that hallway that it would lead here, to this.
The crinkling of the paper grew louder, overpowering the laughter of his grandfather.
He thought of the one piece of pottery he had not saved, a piece he had not shown Margaret, had not even spoken about to Brian Babbitt. He'd found it not in the backyard but in the shower. A thin ceramic point had been protruding f
rom between the metal slats of the drain, and he had pulled it up, a long thin bullet-shaped shard that was brown on one side and black on the other. On the black side, etched not painted, was a face, a puckered, buck-toothed, flinty-eyed visage that startled him so much he had dropped it--before picking it back up again, putting it in the soap dish, face-side down, and quickly finishing his shower. The face had been so horrible that he had not simply thrown the pottery shard away afterward, he had destroyed it, smashing it with a hammer in the garage, grinding the individual pieces into powder and flushing the powder down the toilet when Margaret was getting her hair done later in the day.
Maybe that's why this was happening. Maybe he was being punished for destroying what was meant to be the crowning glory of his collection. Maybe whatever power had made all of these artifacts appear and had compelled him to collect them was displeased and angry.
What should he do? Apologize out loud? Pray? Stay where he was and hope the fat man didn't turn around and see him? Walk slowly around the room, carefully checking the walls for hidden exits?
The upraised cleaver slammed into the butcher block with a terrifyingly loud thwack, the powerful blow embedding the blade in the dark stained wood. His grandfather turned around, laughter continuing to issue from that unsmiling thin-lipped mouth.
In the corner, the shaking figure under the butcher paper scooted forward.
"No," George tried to say, but the word emerged as a husky croak.
The fat man was almost upon him, beefy hands outstretched, thick fingers curled into claws, but it was the smaller form that frightened him more. George could see, between his grandfather's left arm and body, the shaking figure skittering toward him. Movement and vibration caused the butcher paper to slip, slide, fall off.
Underneath was the face he'd known he would see.
And he started screaming.
Thirteen
1
The ice cave at Sunset Crater had been closed since the late 1980s, since a roof collapse had destroyed the always fragile entryway and brought the park service's nascent safety concerns into sharp focus. Even before that final collapse, visitors had had to wear hard hats with lights, and crawl over rubble and under wedged boulders, in order to get to the long cylindrical lava tube that made up the main body of the cave. Now the entrance was blocked off, the trail routed around it, but it was still navigable for someone with minimal spelunking skills who knew the terrain.
Like Ryan Ladd.
Ryan flipped on his flashlight. He didn't know why he was jeopardizing his own job by coming down here without authorization, but after hearing Pace Henry's wild theory and seeing how excited Pace was about his Albuquerque story, he'd had his brother-in-law introduce him to a colleague at Wupatki, where he'd done his own informal unscientific research into the rash of unexplained phenomena. Damn if Pace wasn't right. There was something weird going on. These weren't just strange little isolated incidents; they were interconnected symptoms of a much larger development that really did seem to have an Anasazi association.
Afterward, since he was in the park already, he'd driven the loop back to Sunset Crater. Time was when he and Hugh had had races up to the top of the cinder cone, and during the hot summer months they'd usually ended up in the ice cave, where the temperature was a constant fifty-six degrees, to cool off. He had the urge to check out the cave again, and that's why he was wriggling on his belly under a cracked boulder that threatened to crush him.
In the old days, a constant stream of people would be trekking in and out of the cave, bottlenecking in the narrow passages. The more experienced hikers would go all the way back to the end, while families and casual tourists remained within sight of the entrance and the lighted world outside. Now, though, he was the only person here, and the cavern was totally still. The only noises were his own breathing and the scraping sounds of his passing.
He emerged from beneath the boulder into a narrow closet-size space that he would have assumed was the end of the cave had he not been here before. Shining his light up, he saw the small opening was still near the roof of the tiny chamber, and he scaled the pile of rubble before him, an almost vertical climb, crawling over the top of the dislodged rocks and dropping into a passage that appeared remarkably untouched by the cave-in.
It was cool down here but humid, and he stopped to rest against a boulder and wipe the sweat from his forehead before it started dripping into his eyes. On an impulse, he shut off his flashlight. Suddenly he was surrounded by blackness so deep he could see nothing whatsoever. He brought his hand to his face, but could not see his fingers, even when they were touching his forehead and nose. It was disorienting to exist in such a total absence of light, but it was not unpleasant, and he decided to remain in darkness a little while longer.
He listened to the sound of his breath, listened to the sound of his heart. Opened and closed his eyes, saw only black. He remembered the way the ice cave used to be and tried to figure out exactly where in it he was.
And whether he was really alone down here.
Of course, his thoughts were turning toward the macabre. How could they not, after what he'd heard? Dave Lentz at Wupatki had told him of a museum curator in Flagstaff who'd been bludgeoned to death after hours by an invisible assailant. A female intern over at Montezuma Castle who had stripped off her clothes in the visitor's center rest room and sexually assaulted herself with an Anasazi ulna. Lentz had also related a story about the Wupatki blowhole just down the road. The blowhole, a deep shaft in the earth from which cool air issued, even during the hot Arizona summer, was at one time a type of natural air conditioner for the pueblo and was now the most popular tourist destination at the park. Two days ago, voices began sounding from within the blowhole, a cacophony of speech uttered in a guttural language that even their experts did not recognize. They'd shone lights into the opening, had even sent down a cable-cam, but the source of the voices was deeper than they could reach--although the cable-cam seemed to capture a swirling movement of darkness, a twisting confluence of shadows toward the bottom of the narrow shaft.
Was that why he had come? Some thrill-seeking desire to discover monsters in the earth? He didn't think so, but Ryan couldn't rule it out. He was a bit of a daredevil, and Sunset Crater was part of the same park as Wupatki and the blowhole, and maybe somewhere in the back of his mind he'd thought he might come across something interesting. He turned on the flashlight, grateful to be able to see again, and pointed the beam around the chamber. As he'd hoped, there was only rock.
He pushed himself away from the boulder and continued on, ducking under the increasingly low ceiling as he neared the end of the cave.
And suddenly it wasn't so cool.
Ryan stopped, frowned. It seemed warmer than it had only seconds before, the air thicker. A faint smell of sulfur emanated from the shadowed area before him, and when he touched a hand to the wall on his right, the rock was hot. For a brief irrational second, he thought maybe he'd died and was approaching hell. But reason instantly reasserted itself as the ground beneath his feet started rumbling. This wasn't supernatural, this was a geological occurrence.
The volcano was becoming active.
But how could that be? Events like this didn't just happen. There were signs, indications, gradual escalations in earth movements and measurable increases in ground temperature. Even if he had not heard about such episodes--which was highly unlikely--Hugh would have, and his brother-in-law would have told him. No, this was not expected; this was completely out of the blue.
The rumbling continued, the shaking not merely below his feet now but all around, and from the dark far end of the cave came a sharp blast of steam that seared his face and hands and made the clothes pressing against his skin feel like they had been soaked in boiling oil. Screaming, Ryan turned around and tried to run, but the quarters were too close and every time he bumped into the wall, agony shot through his body, nearly incapacitating him. Even his throat felt burned, and he tried to close his mou
th, tried to swallow and keep his throat lubricated with saliva, but he could not keep himself from crying out as he attempted to make his way back.
He lurched against a fallen boulder, dropping his flashlight.
Up above, their instruments were probably going crazy. Geologists and vulcanologists from all over were being called up and patched in. Within the next day, a team of scientists would doubtlessly be dispatched down into the cave to set up new monitoring equipment and investigate, but for now he was on his own, all alone, and no one knew he was here.
Around him, the rumbling grew stronger. The floor shook, jerked, and though he couldn't see the movement, he could feel it. It was as if the entire cave had abruptly slipped to one side. Rocks rained on him from above, hitting his shoulders and arms, one glancing off the side of his head. Warm blood gushed out. From ahead, somewhere between him and the entrance, came a deafening roar followed by a dusty wave as a piece of the cave collapsed.
He was going to die in here, he realized. For some reason the knowledge did not panic him but made him calm. He sat down where he was, and it didn't hurt. His buttocks had not been seared by the steam blast, and it felt good not to be bumping against rock, not to have his burned skin assaulted.
He closed his mouth, swallowed saliva, and waited for death.
2
This wasn't possible.
Alex Rodriguez checked his gauges. Double-checked them. The reservoir had not only dropped since last month's inspection, it had dropped precipitously, though there was no logical reason for that to have occurred.
It had, though, and he didn't really need instruments to tell him so. A visual appraisal was enough to show him that the basin was down. He could even see the line of last month's watermark.
Five feet.
The Return Page 28
