The Return

by Bentley Little

  McGuane was a sleepy little desert town stretched over two forking canyons at the edge of a massive open-pit mine. There were two museums: a small, one-room mining museum that, according to the carved stone above the doorway, had once been the assayer's office; and the larger Heritage House, which was run by the county historical society and was located in what appeared to have once been a hotel. Preston Alphonse said he had sold the mummy to a "historical museum," and while technically that described both, they figured the Heritage House was the more likely place to start.

  It was nine-thirty when they arrived in town and the museum did not open until ten, so they walked down the block to a little cafe where they bought coffee and sat at small metal tables listening to the conversations of the local people around them. There was talk of sick dogs and honor roll kids and new cars, and it all seemed so innocent and oblivious that Melanie wanted to cry. There was beauty in the ordinariness of everyday existence, a splendor that she had not noticed until now but that touched her heart. She wondered if Glen felt the same, but she couldn't ask him here, so she just looked at him and tried to read his face.

  How fragile was the world, she thought, how delicate their lives. She had always done her best to live life to the fullest, but more often than not that had meant grand gestures: white water rafting with her friends in college, backpacking alone through the Maze in Canyon-lands, spending her summers working at historical locations throughout the state. Now, she thought, she would take the time to appreciate the smaller things and enjoy the commonplace wonders immediately around her.

  Like being here with Glen, drinking coffee.

  This was nice, and she wished it could go on forever, but the real reason they were here was always at the forefront of her thoughts, and as customers came and customers left, she realized that the time was drawing close.

  "It's ten," Glen said finally, looking up at the clock on the wall. "Let's go check it out."

  A short bald man with a hangdog face was just unlocking the Heritage House door when they walked up. He opened the door, flipped on the lights, and introduced himself as Rod Huffman, president of the historical society.

  "Just the man we're looking for," Melanie said.

  "Well, I guess it's your lucky day. I was going to spend the morning birdwatching in Ramsey Canyon, but our curator cancelled out on us and I'm up. We take turns helping out at the museum. Everything's strictly volunteer here." He spoke fast and without pause, his voice betraying more than a hint of Southern twang.

  They walked past a tall wooden box inside the entryway on which was stenciled: DONATION REQUIRED $2 ADULTS, $1 CHILDREN 12 AND OVER. Glen stopped, took out his wallet and started digging through it looking for ones, while Melanie followed the bald man into the next room, where he stepped behind an old oak desk and turned on a Macintosh computer. "We need to ask you about one of your exhibits," she said. "It's a mummy you bought from an antique dealer named Preston Alphonse in Wickenburg--"

  "The mummy?" Huffman turned pale. "Why are you interested in that? I haven't . . . I don't . . ." He took a deep breath. "It's no longer an exhibit here."

  Melanie suddenly felt tired. Not again.

  "Where is it?" Glen asked, joining them.

  "Why do you want to know?"

  She took the reins, explaining that they had found a skull at an archeological site in Bower that they believed was connected to the mummy, telling him that they had tracked the mummy from a tourist trap on Highway 40 to an antique store in Wickenburg to here.

  "What do you want to do to it? Just look at it? Take pictures?"

  "We'd like to buy it," Glen said.

  "You want it? I'll sell it to you cheap. I'm keeping it in a storage locker right now. Haven't opened the door of that place for two years. Don't intend to."

  Glen glanced at Melanie. "Why?" he asked.

  "I don't like that thing. You want to know the truth? It scares me. I'm only telling you this because if you buy it there's no money-back guarantee. If you take it, it's yours, and I don't ever want to see it or hear about it again."

  "What happened?" Melanie asked.

  "Nothing." Pause. "Or at least nothing specific."

  "But . . . ?" she prompted.

  He chewed on his upper lip for a moment, unsure of whether to answer. "Things were moved," he said carefully. "We put the mummy in our 'The Best Before the West' room, next to some pottery and other artifacts we'd found, bought or were donated. I can show you the room if you want; it's quite an impressive exhibit." He looked at them quizzically, and Glen nodded.

  Talking all the way, he led them down the hallway to a surprisingly large space with professional-looking museum cases arranged around a central tableau that included a mock-up of a hogan and a fire pit. "The mummy was going to be our star exhibit, our signature piece. No other historical society in this part of the state has one, and it was in such good shape that our board thought it well worth the expenditure. We'd been saving that money for a new air conditioner, but this seemed so much more worthwhile and--" He stopped just inside the doorway of room. "But you don't want to hear this." He pointed at the tableau. "We were going to redo that installation and build it around the mummy. We even had it temporarily set up."

  Huffman took a deep breath. "Then things started to move. Small items at first, things you wouldn't notice unless you were extremely familiar with the Heritage House. We'd just taken on a new part-time janitor, he was still on his probation period, and although he denied rearranging anything, it kept happening, and we let him go because we all thought he was responsible.

  "But it didn't stop. In fact, larger items began to be moved. One of us would arrive to open up in the morning and discover that, say, that case"--he pointed--"had been relocated to the Copper Days room or the Pioneer Era room. It was not only frustrating, it was starting to get spooky. Then one night the mummy moved.

  "I was the one working that day. I'd worked the night before, too, back in the office, on plans for our monthly meeting, which was going to be a big one. Wyatt Earp's nephew's grandson was going to be our guest of honor. When I left that night, everything was where it was supposed to be. But when I opened the door the next morning . . ." He paused, remembering. "It was standing right there." Huffman held up his hand, flat palm an inch from his nose. "Right in front of my face. It scared me to death, and it looked . . . it looked like it had a different expression, like it was smiling. Maybe it had always looked that way and I just hadn't noticed. I don't know. But I'd been working with that thing for several weeks, seeing it every day, and that day it looked different. It never changed again, mind you--I kept tabs on it, kept watching--but I think on that morning it did. And it seemed to me that it had been trying to escape.

  "Now I know how crazy that sounds, and it sounded crazy to me, too. But when I called in the other board members and the curator and the rest of the volunteers and told them what had happened--this was after I'd put it back in the installation--none of them seemed that surprised. It came out that quite a few of them were spooked by the mummy. We didn't know what to do, so we decided to do nothing. We couldn't very well remove what was our greatest asset based on one odd occurrence and some nebulous feelings.

  "But it started happening every night. Each morning, one of us would arrive to find the mummy moved out of its display and standing next to another door or window. It got to be so volunteers were afraid to open. We couldn't afford to install security cameras, and no one wanted to stay in the house overnight, myself included, so we hired someone for twenty bucks to stake the place out one night and see what happened, an unemployed construction worker who wasn't afraid of anything."

  "What happened?" Melanie asked. "What did he see?"

  "We don't know. He died that night of a heart attack, and when we found him in the morning--or when I found him, since I was the one to open that day--he was kneeling down before the mummy as though he was praying to it."

  Melanie thought of where the mummy had been discovered,
in a shrine built into a cowboy's house in a long-abandoned ghost town, and when she glanced over at Glen, she could tell that he was thinking of the same thing.

  "It was the eeriest sight I've ever seen in my life, and I got out of there as quickly as I could and went to the police, and after they were through in here, me and Ham Hamson and Eric Amos went and put it in a storage locker, and you know what? We haven't had a problem here since. So we pay the rent on that place by the year, and it stays in there and no one's seen it since."

  Glen cleared his throat. "I thought you said there was nothing specific that happened."

  "I lied," Huffman snapped. "All right? I lied. Now, do you want to see the mummy or not?"

  "Of course," Melanie said. "That's why we're here."

  "It's on the other side of town. We'll take my car. Just let me lock up."

  Melanie had assumed the historical society rented one of those storage lockers with wide metal roll-down doors that were housed in parallel rows of long buildings behind metal security gates. But the mummy was tucked away in a dilapidated wooden shed in back of a shabby warehouse known as the McGuane Ice Works. There were four such sheds abutting the bare canyon wall, and Huffman gave Glen a tarnished key, said, "The one on the left," and walked back to his car to wait.

  "It is a little creepy," Melanie admitted.

  Glen smiled. "Big buildup."

  They walked up to the shed. From inside she could smell the faint scent of something dead, a familiar sickening odor that brought back memories of that un-air-conditioned room with the so-called "Aztec mummy." She was not sure she wanted to see what was inside. In her mind, she saw the mummy standing right against the door, waiting for them to open it, grinning.

  The hanging clasp lock was encased in cobwebs that stretched to the door handle and held trapped the dead brown leaves of more than one autumn. Glen brushed the webbing aside, put the key in the lock, turned it, and opened the door, a tangled train of additional spiderlines pulling with it. To her relief, the mummy was lying flat on a board between two sawhorses at the rear of the shed. Huffman had told them the mummy was wrapped in plastic, but she was not surprised to see that the plastic was gone. A pile of black tarps lay tangled beneath the sawhorses.

  What did surprise her were the rats and snakes. She had no idea how they'd gotten into the closed shed, but dozens of them, all dead, many in stages of advanced decomposition, stretched out between the door and the blackened preserved form. They were all facing the mummy, as though they'd died bowing down to it, praying to it.

  A god or a demon, Pace had said. Was he right? Was this a dead god's body? Or a demon's?

  Next to her, Glen recoiled, gasping audibly and taking an involuntary step back.

  "What is it?" Melanie asked. "What's wrong?"

  He shook his head as if to indicate it was nothing, but the frightened expression on his face and the sudden stiffness of his spine said otherwise. He didn't even trust himself to speak, so shaken was he, and she peered into the small dark room to see if there was anything she'd missed. The mummy was scary looking, yes, especially with that huge orange afro, and the scores of dead vermin were disconcerting as well, but she saw nothing that would engender that sort of reaction in him, not after all they'd seen, not with all they knew.

  "What is it?" she asked. "The rats? The snakes?"

  "Nothing," he said, but his "nothing" was about as believable as Huffman's had been, and though she didn't press him on it, she couldn't help feeling hurt that he wouldn't come clean.

  They walked in, using their shoes to push aside the stiff and rotting bodies of rats and snakes so they could pass. Melanie tried to breathe through her mouth as they approached the mummy, but even holding her nose was not enough to keep out that godawful stench. They walked up to the dried blackened form and looked down on it. She expected to feel . . . something. An indication of residual power or untapped energy. Gloom, doom, and dread. The heavy air that Cameron had talked about. But there was nothing.

  They stood there for a few moments, not speaking.

  "Let's do it," Glen said.

  They turned and left. He closed and locked the door, and they walked back to the car, where Huffman sat in the driver's seat, staring resolutely ahead at the road. Glen tapped on the window, and the historical society president reluctantly rolled it down.

  "How much do you want for it?" Glen asked.

  "How much are you willing to pay?"

  "A hundred bucks."

  "It's yours."

  "Thank you."

  "I'm not exaggerating when I say that nothing will make me happier than to get that thing out of town once and for all." He looked up at them. "And no money back. You buy it, it's yours. Like I said, there are no guarantees."

  "Understood."

  Huffman seemed to relax. "Do you want to drive your car up here and pick it up? We can conduct the transaction back at the Heritage House. We're a nonprofit organization, so there are a bunch of forms I need to fill out."

  "That'll be fine. But can you wait a minute? There's something I need to do first."

  Huffman nodded. "Sure."

  Glen took the cell phone from Melanie and called Vince. "We found it," he said. "We bought it. We're coming home."

  4

  Ron was tired of sitting in this damn teepee motel in this damn town waiting for his damn trial. The cops and the DA had that bitch's signed release. Why weren't they dropping the charges? They had no case here. Jesus Christ on the cross.

  Served him right, though, for getting involved with these local yokels in the first place. He should've just put his website on hold for the summer, worked at the excavation and taken photos for the school, collected his money and his extra credit, and then resumed normal life once the fall semester started.

  Ron got off the bed, pulled aside the curtains, and looked out. The highway was virtually deserted. It had been strangely quiet the past three days. He hadn't been out much, had only gone to Een's office, Jack in the Box, and Taco Bell, but he didn't like what he'd seen. People were mean, animals unfriendly, and even the buildings themselves seemed darker and more rundown than they had a few days ago.

  He was not a superstitious guy and, despite his web addiction, wasn't prone to believing conspiracy theories. He also wasn't a sensitive guy; he usually didn't notice things unless they came up and bit him on the ass. Nevertheless, even he could tell that something strange was going on in this town. The fact that Al and Judi and Randy and Buck had vanished into thin air was only the beginning. All of Bower semed to be undergoing a weird type of transformation. Even Een had seemed odd the last time he'd gone to his office. Or odder than usual. He had dressed not in his customary black pants and white shirt, but in dirty faded jeans that seemed too baggy to be his and a gaudy animal-print shirt that looked like a woman's. He'd seemed distracted the entire hour, and Ron had the distinct impression that the lawyer did not expect this case to reach completion.

  Why?

  His thought at the time was that Een had been thinking of skipping town. Or even killing himself. But now Ron thought it more likely that the lawyer did not expect him to survive to the end of the process.

  A single pickup drove by. Slowly. He could not see the driver, but sitting in the bed were four men wearing what looked like fur coats and a naked woman with her face painted in camouflage colors.

  He didn't like this. He didn't like it at all.

  Ron let the curtain fall and went back to the bed. I Love Lucy was over, and now the execrable Facts of Life was starting. Shit, small towns didn't even have decent cable. He couldn't wait to get back to the real world and put this whole horrible summer behind him. He picked up the remote, started flipping through channels. Cartoons, auto racing, soap opera, talk show . . .

  Suddenly the screen turned to static and snow. He thought he'd come to the end of the channels, and he pressed the down arrow to back up. When it became clear that the television was out, he got out of bed and went to check the cable c
onnection.

  He felt a gentle swaying motion beneath his feet, a rattle of windows, and from somewhere far away a rumbling sound like thunder. He had never been through an earthquake before, but he knew that most loss of life in such a disaster was a result of collapsing buildings rather than huge cracks opening up in the ground and swallowing people whole. So he obeyed his instinct and dashed out the door as fast as his feet would carry him.

  Into a raging nightmare.

  Crows were falling from out of the sky, landing on top of the teepee cabins and sliding down the sloping sides, leaving ragged red trails of blood. A gas main appeared to have ruptured; flames were shooting out of rubble-strewn sections of ground in the middle of the motor court, across the street, and at several spots on the highway. In front of the tallest tower of flame, silhouetted perfectly in a shot so beautifully composed that he wished he had one of his cameras, two men dressed in animal skins with crowns of horns were using long sharpened sticks to spear a crawling woman. A small scrubby tree in front of the motel winked out of existence as though it was a light that had been shut off.

  This is what happened to Al and the others, he thought.

  A gang of children rode by on their bikes, brandishing bones, their faces distorted with rage. They hit an unseen shimmering wall . . . and disappeared. And then the wall moved forward, down the street, erasing the town as it passed. Gas station? Gone. Bus bench? Gone. Sidewalk? Gone.

  A dead crow slid down the side of his cabin, bumped off the window and hit him in the back of the head. He felt rough feathers and small sharp bones and warm slimy innards smack against his shaved pate. Blood trickled down his neck below the collar of his shirt. Repulsed, he swatted at the back of his head, knocking the dead bird away.

  In the town, in the homes, in the streets, people were starting to scream. Not cries of pain or cries for help or any yell, shout, screech, or shriek he had ever heard before. These were raw, throat-damaging, piss-in-your-pants screams of sheer terror, sounds worse than any in his most vivid nightmares.