The Return

by Bentley Little

  It was down five feet.

  Two years' worth of melted snow and rainfall.

  This wasn't the Rockies. In this little corner of Colorado, there was no year-round snowpack. Water was scarce, and it was the job of the SWCWD not only to ensure that water was free of contaminants and toxins, but to make sure that there was enough water for all of their customers: agricultural, residential, and business.

  This was a problem.

  No, not just a problem. A disaster. Within the past two weeks, wells had been drying up throughout the district, not merely dowsed sites but solid stable wells mapped out and drilled by the USGS, and there was talk back at the office of aquifer depletion. They couldn't afford to lose any water at the reservoir. Not this year.

  Alex stared across the basin at the bare berm opposite the pump house. He thought he saw pictographic shapes in the hardpacked dirt, large organic circular forms that could have been natural, could have been intentionally made. He was wearing his sunglasses, but he was still squinting against the sun, and from this angle it was impossible to tell exactly what he was seeing.

  He walked several paces to the left, until the sun was partially blocked by a bushy juniper. The shapes in the dirt did look man-made, and while they made no sense to him, their intentional placement on the berm indicated that they did to someone. He could see the last of the shapes, the end of the line, halfway down the opposite side of the reservoir, some sixty yards north, but the first ones were hidden from view, the beginning somewhere around the curved side of the berm at an inlet. He wasn't sure why he was so interested in the pictographs, if, indeed, that's what they were. They couldn't possibly be connected to the reservoir's sudden unexplainable loss of water. But his gut told him that they were connected.

  His gaze focused on a strange-looking spiral directly across from the spot where he stood, a spiral that was reflected in the still water. The two of them formed a shape that he almost recognized and definitely didn't like. He looked quickly away, fumbled for his keys, and hurriedly locked up the pump house.

  He tossed his clipboard in the pickup, got in, and started the engine. Throwing the truck into gear, he took off down the dirt road on which he had come. He'd tell one of the supervisors about the defaced berm. And the shocking loss of water.

  Let them deal with it.

  3

  The two towns met on the field of battle, their war judged and overseen by an idol of bone.

  How in God's name had this happened? Will Greenburg wondered.

  Oh, he knew the facts behind the fight, could recite the rising progression of insults and assaults and strikes and retaliations that had brought them to this point. Intellectually, he understood it all. But it was as if, emotionally, he had amnesia. Steps and escalations that had seemed sensible reactions now seemed unfathomable and completely illogical. It was as if he'd just awakened to find himself standing above a murdered body, holding a bloody knife.

  And, really, that was exactly what had happened.

  Will looked up at the idol. Taller than the tallest tree on the field, it had appeared this morning as if by magic, an elaborate construction of bones and skulls that resembled an ancient Mexican god, a wide squarish figure filled with static malevolence. The face was fierce: grimacing mouth, beetled brow, angry eyes.

  Only there weren't any eyes. Not really. There were only angled openings above the nose that somehow kept out the morning light and captured the shadows of night.

  On the opposite side of the plain, past the downed bodies and the current wave of combatants, the other town's reinforcements prepared for battle. Hundreds of people--sales clerks, nurses, roofers, teachers--were checking their weapons, getting into their customized attack vehicles. Those who weren't naked wore animals pelts. Many of their faces were painted with blood.

  A burly man wielding an ax broke through the line of defense, yelling wildly, and Will shot him in the head. The man went down in a spray of blood.

  Will mentally notched his gun: fifteen.

  Behind him came the roar of engines as the motor crew arrived. He turned to see SUVs with armed gun turrets, re-equipped fire engines with Caterpillar tires. Police vehicles and captured National Guard jeeps, he knew, were circling around through the trees in order to box in the enemy. Hostilities were about to escalate.

  Good. This skirmish had been dragging on all morning, and he wanted to end it. They'd already defeated two other towns this week--Sundance and Curiale--and once they finished off West Fork, they'd be able to rest awhile before stepping up the campaign and bringing death and destruction to Beltane, Holbrook, Winslow, Flagstaff.

  Or would they be able to rest?

  He looked up at the idol. The bone figure didn't speak, but its wishes were clear.

  Where did it come from? he wondered again. Who had made it and why? And how had it just . . . appeared? He had no illusions that it was a real creature. Despite its horrible appearance, it was an inanimate object, intentionally constructed. And yet . . .

  And yet it was more than that. Dark eyes not only looked down upon him, they watched him. And surely he was not the only one to believe that the figure was judging them, evaluating them.

  All of a sudden, he didn't like the idol. It had emerged into the open only this morning, but perhaps it had been behind the battles from the very beginning. If it had not existed, there would have been no attacks. They would have all just gone on with their normal lives and right at this moment he would be on his coffee break at the DMV.

  Now that world was gone forever.

  He looked at the idol with hatred and found himself wondering what would happen if he fired a couple of rounds into the interlocked bones that formed the mouth, the nose, the eye sockets. He smiled as he imagined the face being blown apart, collapsing in on itself as struts and supports gave way and fragments of bone went flying into the air. That wouldn't stop the battle--things had gone too far for that to ever happen--but it might make everyone pause, might make them think, and maybe this would turn out to be the last battle. Maybe they would all come to their senses and go back to the way things were--

  An arrow penetrated his chest, pierced his heart, moving too fast to see, making a noise like a hummingbird's wings. The pain was explosive, immediate, spreading outward from the point of impact like a shock wave. He saw the shooter as he fell, a young man not unlike himself, who was already stringing another arrow and aiming for Cindy Albano. Will wanted to call out to Cindy, warn her even as he fell, but he had no voice, and he realized that he was not just dying but was nearly dead.

  All of this happened instantly, in a second that seemed to take an hour. The elongated time of the dying, someone had called it, and wasn't that the truth. He hit the ground hard, and his head bounced sharply and came to rest with the dead weight of his body.

  In his last second of life, Will stared up from where he lay, and, with dying eyes, saw the idol smile.

  Fourteen

  1

  Pace woke up, cradling the skull.

  He'd been dreaming of Penelope Daneam, a girl he'd dated briefly in college, and in the dream they'd been making love outside, next to a mountain stream, on grass that was softer than any bed. But when he woke up, he was lying on the hard earth of the dry well, his arms around the skull, clutching it to his chest.

  He let go, pushed it away, crawled over the pieces of porcelain to the other side of the shaft. From above, he heard cackling, the crazed laughter of Christiansen Divine, and then he was drenched with warm slop, a revolting concoction of thick brown liquid and what looked like pieces of rotten vegetables that splatted on his head and shoulders and soaked through his shirt and pants to the skin. He felt like vomiting, but he refused to give Divine the satisfaction. He did not even bother to wipe off the disgusting goop dripping off his hair onto his face and down to the ground. He remained in place, waiting for the old man to leave.

  "Suppertime!" Divine cackled, and behind him Pace heard the laughter of the others.

/>   He looked up, and saw not only Divine peering over the rim of the well but the one-armed woman and the dwarf. Absalom and Jesse. The woman must be Jesse, he thought. That was one of those names that could go either way. Absalom was definitely a male name.

  Another head poked over the edge. The little girl, still sucking her thumb.

  He should be quiet, he knew. Conserve his strength and not antagonize them. But he jumped up anyway and did a little jig. "A little girl! With spina bifida!" he sang to the tune of "Saginaw, Michigan." "Spina bifida!"

  They stopped laughing, and though he couldn't see expressions on the sky-silhouetted faces, their necks and heads stiffened in anger.

  Good.

  He wiped the slop from his forehead and cheeks, wiped his hands on a small clean part of his pants. "Fuck you, you midget dwarf freak!" He addressed himself to the faces above. "That mummy hair's not making you any taller, is it? And I don't see you growing a new arm, missy!"

  He felt guilty for saying such things--it was not how he thought about the less fortunate, it was not the way he'd been raised--but he was filled with a desperate rage, and a base, vindictive part of him felt good as he hurled the insults.

  He looked over at the skull. Was he being influenced, corrupted, made to think and behave in ways he ordinarily wouldn't? It was not only possible, it was likely. Like plutonium that remained radioactive for thousands of years, these things--the mummy, the skull--remained strong. Neither he nor Al had had any idea how their unnamed creature had caused an entire people to vanish, but power that potent did not disappear, not even with death.

  Maybe that's why his legs didn't hurt. He didn't even feel any residual pain from the baseball bat blow.

  A rock flew down, thrown not dropped, missing him by inches, smashing one of the larger pieces of porcelain.

  They were angry.

  "Spina bifida!" he sang.

  Another rock sailed down, this one hitting him on the shoulder, drawing blood, though he pretended it didn't hurt.

  On an impulse, he dropped to his knees, clasped his hands together. "Oh, God," he intoned. "Hear these words of thy humble servant. I beseech thee, smite Christensen Divine and his entire family, these heathens that have made a mockery of your gift. Make the youngest child a whore. Instead of sucking her thumb, let her suck cocks, a hundred of them, before you tear her limb from limb in the most painful manner imaginable--"

  "Shut up!" Divine screamed from above. "Don't say that! Don't you dare say that, you son of a bitch!"

  "The other one, I pray, have her brother the dwarf rip off her other arm and use it to fuck her ass in front of her daddy--"

  "Stop that!" Divine shrieked.

  But Pace did not stop. That psychotic prick was going to imprison him down here, torture him, try to kill him? Well, then Pace was going to do whatever he could to get back at the old bastard. He felt a deep satisfaction as Divine hurriedly moved his family away from the well.

  When he was sure that they were gone, Pace moved off his knees and slumped against the cold stone wall. His shoulder hurt like hell, and he was sticky with slop. He could not tell what time it was--the small opening above did not show him a sufficient slice of sky for him to determine the location of the sun--but it felt like mid-morning. Judging by the heat and humidity down here already, this was going to be one hellacious day.

  He stared at the skull. He'd been chasing all over creation looking for the damn thing, intending to study it, but now that he had both the time and opportunity to examine the skull, he didn't want anything to do with it.

  He was afraid of it.

  Not a very professional attitude, he had to admit. But being alone with it in the well for--what, twelve hours now?--he had gained a different perspective. He would still be taking it with him, though. Away from this craziness, back in a lab where he could shield himself from any possible emanations, he and a handpicked team of other scientists and technicians would scrutinize the specimen down to the molecular level.

  The skull grinned at him. Its deep-shadowed eyes looked strangely alive, small curved sections of each socket capturing the light from above, and he had the unsettling impression that it was watching him. He remembered that from his brief exposure at Chaco, when Glen and Melanie had first brought the skull to him--the air of sentient malevolence it possessed.

  Possessed.

  Like Al, he'd originally thought that the skull would provide them with answers. Close inspection would reveal objective, quantifiable information. Now he was not so sure. There'd always been a supernatural aspect to their theory, but he had not realized just how far beyond pure science the reality was.

  He also realized that Al had been wrong about one thing. He had always believed that a single being was responsible for the disappearance of the ancient tribes, that it had traversed the desert from pueblo to pueblo like some itinerant angel of death. But there was a skull here in the well with him and a mummy up top, and it seemed clear now that there had been more than one of these beings. Plus, it appeared that at least one, the one whose skull had been found in Bower, had been successfully killed by its intended victims.

  That gave him hope.

  Of course, he had to get out of here first before he could do anything.

  Not for the first time, he felt around the edges of the well, searching for a handhold, a toehold, some way he could climb up the walls. But as before, he found nothing, only straight hard stone that rose up and up and up. He thought of his outburst, his spina bifida song, his cruel words to Divine's deformed children. He was now convinced that his behavior had been . . . influenced. What would happen after he spent another six hours down here? Another twelve? What would he be like then?

  With nothing to do, he used his feet to clear a larger area, to push the broken pieces of statuary into a single pile. There were quite a few fragments, large and small, many of them covered with the slop that Divine had poured out here, and he herded them over to the skull, using the side of his shoe to shove the heap of rotted vegetables and porcelain against the bone face, covering the mouth, nearly hiding the eye sockets. That gave him room to stretch out, and he sat down, leaning against the stone, looking up at the sky. His mouth was parched, his stomach cramping with hunger, and he wondered if the next time the old man dropped decaying moldy food on him he would be desperate enough to eat it.

  If there was a next time.

  The pain in his shoulder was barely noticeable, and already the bleeding had stopped. Like his legs, his shoulder appeared to be healing fast. He kicked at the floor of the well with the heel of his shoe. Not only was he angry and bored, he was frustrated, knowing that he should be taking the skull back with him to Chaco. He wondered what else was going on out there, what other escalation of this horror was taking place while he rotted down here underground.

  The morning passed slowly. He alternated between sitting, standing, and leaning on the wall, but he had nothing to do. At one point, he grew so desperate that he took out his wallet and sorted through the contents, counting his money, reading the backs of his credit cards, examining the business cards people had given him that he had never looked at once. Waves of emotion passed through him periodically, and he could never be sure if they were legitimate feelings or the influence of the skull.

  Sometime after what felt like noon, when the temperature was hotter, the sunlight brighter, the heavy air more tangible, he started to become drowsy. He had always disapproved of naps and siestas, had considered all sleep a waste of time. Everyone would be dead soon enough as it was, so why spend a significant portion of the allotted time alive unconscious? But these were extraordinary circumstances, and since he had nothing to do, it was probably in his best interest to rest up and conserve his strength.

  Besides, he was having a very difficult time keeping his eyes open.

  But what if Divine and his family threw more slop on him while he slept? What if they decided to empty bedpans on his head?

  He'd ignore them, pretend to
still be sleeping.

  That would work.

  Closing his eyes, giving in, he drifted off.

  He awoke some time later--

  --and they were in the well with him.

  They seemed just as shocked as he was. And just as frightened. They were flattened against the rounded wall, staying as far away from the skull as possible. Across the well, the skull's face was no longer covered by the porcelain fragments, but was sitting atop the pile, facing them.

  Pace stood quickly.

  Divine and his children looked at him, saying nothing.

  "What are you doing here?" Pace asked.

  "It's your fault," the old man said. His voice was cowed, little more than a whisper. "You prayed for it."

  "I prayed for you to die. You're still alive."

  "Fuck you!" the dwarf said.

  Pace turned on him. "Shut the hell up. You're not up there. You're not calling the shots anymore. You're down here with me." He looked from the dwarf to Divine. "If we're ever going to get out of here, we're going to have to cooperate."

  The old man scratched his head as though he had lice.

  "You hear me?"

  Divine nodded reluctantly.

  "So now that we're all together, maybe you can answer a few questions for me."

  "Like what?"

  "What are those?" Pace pointed at the pile of porcelain pieces.

  No one answered.

  "I'm talking to you."

  "The others," Divine said.

  "Others?"

  "We threw them down here, and they all . . . broke," said the one-armed woman. Jesse? "But you didn't break. And now we're down here, too. And now I don't know what's going on." She started to cry. He almost felt sorry for her, would have felt sorry for her had he not remembered her cruel laughter after they'd doused him with rotted vegetable soup.

  "What's going on," he said, "is that you're being punished. And you deserve it. And maybe you will die."

  From somewhere above came a high-pitched keening, an eerie inhuman noise. It was dim inside the well, but the sky above showed blue afternoon daylight, and somehow that seemed worse. Wasn't scary stuff supposed to happen at night, in the dark? The idea that the mummy, after transporting the Divine family into the well, was standing in its lingerie in the hot sun and making weird sounds filled him with a creeping dread.