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Authors: Michael McBride

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BOOK: Ancient Enemy
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I leaned back onto my haunches and stared down at the unlocked hatch for nearly a full minute, contemplating the significance of what I was about to do. My grandfather hadn’t saved the artifacts on his shelf all these years because they’d been of sentimental value; he’d saved them to pass on to his heir when the time was right. The gravity of the responsibility he bestowed upon me was paralyzing.

It hit me just how much my grandfather knew about what was happening during the night and I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d knelt where I did now a lifetime ago.

I flipped open the latch, drew a deep breath, and raised the hatch.

 

 

 

SIXTEEN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I stared down into darkness that sparkled with motes of dust. The smell that blossomed from it was unlike anything I’d smelled before. It was more than merely the scent of age; it was the scent of another age, of a time when the air was as different from how it was now as the people were. There was the time-old scent of wood smoke and dust and aged timber. Whatever had once been down there of a biological nature had long ago reached its final stage of decomposition and become a part of the communal whole. I imagined bowls full of dried fruits and grains, textiles made from animal hide, and food stores withered to the consistency of jerky. I wondered whose house it had once been and how my grandfather had come to be in possession of the key that unlocked the secrets of a chamber hidden below its earthen floor, from an age when construction had been almost exclusively aboveground.

Cool air blew into my face when I leaned over the edge. I had the distinct sensation of depth below me, but couldn’t tell how far down the bottom was, only that I wasn’t about to drop blindly down into the darkness.

Fortunately, I’d come better prepared today. In addition to the rattle, I’d packed a flashlight, my hunting knife, some hard-boiled eggs, and bottled water into Yanaba’s saddlebag.

She was still grazing where I left her and seemingly oblivious to my presence as I relieved her of the saddlebag and the rope. I ate one of the eggs while I crawled back under the trees, dragging the bag behind me. I already had the flashlight in hand when I reached the hole.

A patina of dust covered what looked like a bare stone floor far below and motes danced in the column of light. It was maybe fifteen feet down to where I saw the broken remains of what must have once been a ladder. I pictured myself contorted and impaled on them and looked around for the sturdiest birch trunk I could find. I tied Yanaba’s rope around it and dropped the loose end into the hole, where it unraveled and swung maybe five feet above the ground. It wasn’t a perfect arrangement by any means, but it would have to do. I just prayed the knot held.

I tucked the rattle under my waistband and dropped the knife down ahead of me so I didn’t end up accidentally stabbing myself with it if I fell, which was the kind of thing I could count on with the way my luck was running.

I crouched over the hole and tugged on the rope as hard as I could. Jerked it and yanked it and watched the knot for any indication it might slip. The reality was simple: If it didn’t hold and I fell, I would die down there, whether from a broken neck or starvation. Only my grandfather knew where I was and he had no way of communicating that information.

My heart pounded as I drew the rope to me, wrapped my ankles around it, and slid gingerly over the edge. Braced my elbows on the wooden cribbing until I found the courage to begin my descent.

The flashlight beam barely penetrated the shadows lining the circular walls. I could just make out the texture of stacked stones fitted together in no apparent pattern. My elongated shadow twirled beneath me in what little light passed through the opening in the ceiling, where I feared the wooden edge would saw through the rope. The sooner I was on the ground the better.

The beam traced the rocky floor. It was covered with dirt, chunks of sandstone, and splintered wood.

And bones.

When I reached the end of the rope, I swung to avoid the ruins of the ladder, and dropped down to the ground. Turned in a complete circle.

The cold, dark space reminded me of a kiva, only those came hundreds of years later for the Anasazi. It appeared to have been built into an existing subterranean formation, which accounted for its unusual size and depth. I wondered if this was part of the original structure or, more likely, something retrofitted under the obsolete pit house long after its abandonment. It reflected the same style of construction as the cliff dwellings of the Late Pueblo III Era, the final days of the Anasazi.

The roof was reinforced with planed pine trunks in a linear pattern and appeared to be the same kind of wood as the broken ladder scattered around my feet. It was so cold that my teeth started to chatter.

The hearth was built directly into the ground. It was roughly four feet in diameter and ten inches deep. There was carbon scoring on both it and the deflector wall standing over it, which was roughly five feet tall and composed of sandstone bricks. The
sipapu
—the symbolic portal through which the Hisatsinom first entered this world—was roughly six inches wide, four deep, and set right in the center of the room.

To my left was a concentration of skeletal remains. The bones were disarticulated, but remained largely in anatomic position, as though the body to which they belonged had been left to decompose where it fell. A long spear rested eternally just outside of its reach. The archaeologists called it “abandonment context,” meaning there had been no attempt to bury the remains. There were no grave goods, nor did there appear to be any form of severe trauma to the bones. At least not that I could tell.

There were more bones in the recess behind the smoke deflector, similarly abandoned, only what was left of the body appeared to be in fetal position, as though the man’s final act in life had been an attempt to hide behind the small wall. There was a spear beneath his body; its spearhead was long gone, leaving behind the notches to which I assume it had been attached. It had less dust on it than the remains, as though at some point someone had picked it up, only to set it back down again. The closest ventilation tunnel had been plugged with stacked stones, the majority of which had toppled inward.

I shined my flashlight at the wall as I approached another set of remains. It was composed of sandstone bricks mortared together with mud that had crumbled to dust over time. Recesses had been built into the wall, maybe five feet from the ground, and looked to be about the right size for someone to sleep in. Or be interred. At the very back of one, bows and arrows and spears were buried beneath countless lifetimes’ worth of spider webs and dust. The skeleton on the ground beneath it was still articulated, but again abandoned. It was sprawled prone in an awkward position, its torso twisted to the left. Near its outstretched hand was what looked almost like a cross with a hole in the center that I imagined must have been used like a boomerang. Again, it had less dust on it than the body.

Beside it was another, this one disarticulated and on its right side. Based on the positioning of the bones, it looked to me like he had died covering his head with his arms.

There was a midden heap nearby, petrified and chock-full of remains. I guessed there had to be enough bones there to form at least two additional people, maybe more. I couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around the fact that some of these people had been left to rot where they died, while others had been picked apart and their bones thrown in with the rest of the refuse. Not until I saw the distinct teeth marks on the long bones where I could tell they’d been gnawed, anyway.

And slowly the picture started to come together.

The fact that the other two ventilation ducts had been barricaded from the inside all but confirmed it.

This was some sort of underground safe house. These people had sealed themselves down here in the hopes of riding out a prolonged siege. They’d blocked every conceivable point of entry as best they could and hidden in the darkness for so long that they exhausted their supplies and were forced to resort to eating each other in order to survive, and even that had been for naught as whatever was hunting them ultimately found its way down through one of the ventilation shafts and broke through their barricade. The last days of these people had been filled with unimaginable terror, right up until the moment they were infiltrated and slaughtered.

Legend spoke of the Anasazi as being the fiercest of warriors, yet these people had entombed themselves down here, either out of sheer cowardice or the grim understanding that they faced a foe they could not defeat.

I turned and looked back at the bodies. Two of them had tried to hide and the other two had tried to run. Neither of them had made it very far at all. I wondered if it was the smell of them cooking their companions that had summoned the predators. Not that it really mattered.

I pondered how different this was from the House of Many Windows, where the children had been hidden while their families went to war against an ancient enemy, where they had huddled in the pitch black and waited for their killers to come for them after massacring the forces of their tribe. This must have come later, after the battles had ended and the survivors had taken to the ground, after the enemy had driven them from the dwellings high in the cliffs they had originally built with the intention of withstanding an attack. I thought of the Sun Temple with its fifteen-foot double-walls and fortified construction, perched in the most defensible position in this entire area, a last bastion of hope that was abandoned before it was completed. Or maybe because it simply hadn’t been completed in time.

I imagined an enemy against which there was no prayer of victory coming out of the rock beneath their very feet, scurrying up the canyon walls, and over their pathetic fortifications. And I wondered why, if such an enemy actually existed, they weren’t still around now. How had something that eradicated an entire warrior tribe been driven back into the darkness?

That was why my ancestors had left these bodies in this condition, why no one had gathered and buried the bones or shared the discovery with one of the universities. It was for this very reason…so someone like me could climb down here and make the connections on his own, so he could truly understand the kind of enemy against which he found himself pitted, an enemy that, until now, had been every bit as unreal as the myths that had been passed down through the generations, an enemy that had attacked his livestock with such speed and stealth that he hadn’t even seen it, let alone been able to raise a weapon in their defense.

I pictured my grandfather down here, much as I was now, running through the same thought processes and reaching the same conclusion. I wondered if he had stalled like I was doing now, for I knew exactly what I needed to do next and could think of nothing on the planet I wanted to do less.

I switched off the flashlight, drew the rattle, and started to shake it.

 

 

 

SEVENTEEN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I immediately saw the bluish-purple smudges on the floor near the remains. I walked closer and knelt over them. They were little more than collections of crusted flakes and powder, but they still held their original shape. Maybe not perfectly, but unless I was just seeing what I wanted to see, they looked a whole lot like palm prints. Identical smears surrounded the ventilation duct where the enemy had shoved the rocks inward when it breached their defenses. There were other spatters and drops in no apparent pattern on the ground and across the walls, as though flung from a swinging arm. I had expected to find the walls positively covered with petroglyphs as they had been in the House of Many Windows, but didn’t see a single one.

There had to be something I was missing. I mean, why bring me all the way down here just to show me a bunch of dead bodies?

I walked a circuit around the chamber, shaking the rattle as I went. I stared at the floor and at the walls. Stood on my tiptoes and tried to see up into the crevices between the trunks that formed the ceiling. I leaned over the rubble and peered up into the ventilation duct through which the enemy had attacked and saw only more upside-down handprints on the stone walls.

I tried to picture how the massacre had unfolded. The men had been barricaded down here for some significant length of time before they had been discovered, long enough for the firepit to have seen more than a single use. They must have only burned it during the day, when their adversaries were holed up in the darkness, until at some point the passage of the sun lost meaning and they in turn lost track of it, allowing their blaze to burn just a little too long.

I envisioned smoke rising into the twilight as the red sun slid behind the mountains and shadows emerged from a hole high up on the sheer face of a cliff and inhaled the scent of roasting flesh through flared nostrils. A pause of recognition as they turned toward the source of the smoke and scurried down to the canyon floor. Sprinted like ghosts through the trees, until they converged upon an old, abandoned pit house fallen to ruin, one they had seen many times before. Only this time, fingers of smoke twirled skyward from a ventilation hole its prey had concealed by filling it with stones. Blood flying from their hands as they shredded the skin on their fingers clawing at the stones, hurling them back over their shoulders and casting them aside until the hole was wide enough for them to slither down the ventilation duct, their hands slick with their own blood. Shoving through the final barrier toward where they could hear the panicked breathing of their prey, who, for whatever reason, had chosen to hide rather than fleeing…

BOOK: Ancient Enemy
10.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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