Ancient Enemy (12 page)

When I reached the end, I stopped and looked back toward the beginning, at the two figures first emerging from the darkness into the light, now halfway across the chamber at the farthest extent of my beam’s range. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, but felt as though I’d followed the flow of the narrative well enough. I just stared at the sarcophagus-man, whose primitive depiction stared back at me through eyes carved with such care that their ferocity was impossible to mistake.

The next images were in a different style and an undeniably different hand, but were no more recent. There were seven men: one held out a palm from which smoke rose, the second a staff, the third a plus-wheel, and the other four combinations of weapons and shields. I had a pretty good idea who they must have been. This time it was they who were underground and a lone sarcophagus-man standing above them, outside of a house surrounded by trees and beneath a crescent moon. And then there were only four, lying on the floor of a circular room. The fifth stood over them, holding high a horned head.

Then there was the plus-sign stone again, sealing off the hole in the mountain once more.

A part of me rebelled against the idea of a literal interpretation of the storyline. Here I was, trying to make sense of eight-hundred-year-old petroglyphs of monkey-men and horned sarcophagus-guys in an effort to understand what was happening now and find a way to make it stop. The notion was almost laughable. We probably just had some rabid coyotes running wild and I was wasting time I didn’t have poring over legends and superstitions when I should be back home setting up snares around our trailer—

And then my flashlight beam penetrated the recess carved into the rock wall to my right and suddenly all doubt vanished. The ground dropped out from beneath me and I had to remind myself to breathe.

The skull resting on the limestone shelf was unlike anything I had ever seen before. At first I thought it belonged to an animal. The upper half of the cranium was obviously that of a ram. Its thick horns projected outward and curled around the remainder of a skull that could only have been human. Or something close to it. The eyes sockets were wider and narrower, the nub of the nose elongated in the vertical plane, and the large teeth positively bulged from the top jaw. Its canine teeth could only be described as fangs and the remainder were tall and narrow, some of them turned sideways as though they had grown in crooked as a consequence of trying to cram so many into one mouth. The mandible sat askew, and probably would have caused the whole skull to topple sideways, were it not balanced on the horns so that it looked up at me from across the centuries and the other side of the grave.

I thought of the bodies I’d seen through the mineral accretion and shivered.

I took it by the horns and tried to remove the crown of the ram’s cranium from the man’s skull. The entire head rose from the disarticulated lower jaw. I set it back down and turned it sideways so I could see how it was held in place. A layer of porous bone maybe an eighth of an inch thick and the texture of a sponge held the two together. They’d become fused over time, the living bone absorbing the dead bone and adding it to its mass. I could tell the hominin skull was elongated like those I had seen earlier and realized that the disfigurement had been deliberately inflicted so that it would fit the dimensions of the cranium of a much larger animal. The ones I had seen hadn’t been subjected to whatever form of grafting they were forced to endure. They had been the juveniles of the species—their children—the retribution for the slaughter of the Anasazi children in the House of Many Windows.

I righted the skull on the shelf and moved on to my right. There were more petroglyphs, all of which told a similar tale of something hideous and horned escaping from the earth and killing animals and men alike before being separated from its head and the rock seal replaced once more. And after each one was another recess in which the head of the monster rested. There was one with the crown of a stag, the antlers broken and perhaps intentionally sharpened. Another had the cranium of a bison. Its black horns were short and sharp and tufts of wiry brown hair still clung to their bases.

Petroglyphs gave way to tapestries and paintings, and finally to yellowed photographs that hung from the cavern wall in frames made of carved bone. Someone had written on them in indelible ink and in a language I couldn’t read or understand. The skulls gained flesh as I reached the modern era. Their skin appeared mummified, shrunken too tight for their skulls, their eyes sunken beneath their stretched eyelids. I could see where the skin had grown over the skull graft, as though it had been peeled back with a knife and then stretched back over once the animal’s crown was in place. I couldn’t imagine how excruciating the procedure must have been or how long the pain must have lasted while the exposed bone and tissue attempted to heal, and in doing so sealed the heavy cranium to theirs.

I turned off my light and shook the rattle. The eyelashes and the rims of the teeth, the sutures between the two parts of their skulls, and the bases of their craniums where they had once fit onto the neck…all of them glowed faintly with dried blood.

I clicked the light back on a heartbeat later. I’d seen what I needed to see and didn’t want to spend another second in the darkness with that eerily lighted face.

I moved on to pictures from the earliest days of photography, when the subjects had to stand perfectly still for some absurd length of time while their likeness formed on a copper or silver plate. They were the kinds of pictures you’d find in history books. Stone-faced, dark-eyed men with long braided hair from which feathers protruded. Wearing fringed buckskin and the traditional breastplates of warriors. Sitting astride powerful horses.

One picture in particular caught my eye. It had been taken from maybe a hundred feet away to capture what looked like somewhere between twenty and thirty riders. I recognized Point Lookout, with its stratified sandstone and piñon pine-lined slopes, as the backdrop, but none of the men, whose long shadows fell upon bodies lined up side-by-side on the ground in front of them in the weeds and sage. Were it not for the antlers and horns jutting from their heads, I would have assumed they were just ordinary men and women. Inhumanly pale men and women covered with spatters of blood and nearly indistinguishable from each other from the distance. I stared at the picture, at the bodies of the slim, naked people for as long as I could stand it, for I knew when I looked to my right I would see their heads.

It was one thing to look upon the skulls of monsters seemingly plucked from myth, but another entirely to see the remains of a horned man who, moments prior to having his picture taken, had been a living, breathing entity. There were four points on his antlers, all of them sharpened to such an extent that I had no doubt they could be driven through the side of a car with a running start. And the teeth…the shriveled lips peeled back in such a way as to make him appear to be snarling.

I had to consciously think of him as an “it” for fear my mind would start ascribing human traits. Feelings. And if I thought of whatever these things were as human, then this chamber of trophies suddenly became much more sick and twisted. As it was, I had to keep reminding myself that these things had slaughtered our livestock and attempted to get at my grandfather through his window. Whatever they might have looked like, they were still feral. And they were still my enemy.

This one must have been the alpha male, or perhaps the most ferocious fighter, for his was the only head the men in the picture had chosen to keep. I thought of my grandfather savoring the soup made from the sheep’s head and chose not to ponder what they had done with the others.

The subjects in the next picture showed more of the white man’s influence. They’d traded the traditional buckskin leggings for heavy wool trousers, the breastplates for double-breasted jackets, and the feathers for wide-brimmed hats. The faces changed, but looked no different, especially their eyes. A dozen dour men either stood by or sat on a rock formation, staring past the camera as though captivated by something other than the photographer. Propped against the granite were nine naked men and women with the horns of bison, deer, and elk. They were so emaciated that I could see every bone in their bodies through their nearly transparent skin. The man in the center, the largest one with the bison horns, looked so peaceful that he could have passed for sleeping, unlike his decapitated head in the recess beside it, which appeared to scream into whatever abyss had opened before it.

I followed the progression of pictures through the years, past the dawn of the twentieth century and into the modern era of short hair, clothing from general stores, and hunting rifles.

One photograph featured men wearing wool caps and scarves. The camera had captured their breath hanging in the frigid air. I recognized my great grandfather and his brothers from the pictures in the photo albums in the bookcase, and my grandfather’s four brothers—my great uncles—from the portrait hanging in his bedroom, only they were much younger here. Men in their early twenties sitting with their backs against a sandstone escarpment with the bushes in the foreground buried under snow. My grandfather’s brothers tried to look serious, but their eyes betrayed their mischief. They’d leaned one of the naked men with deer antlers against the rock between them and slung his lifeless arms over the shoulders of the two in the middle—Charlie and Roy, I think—as though he were just one of the guys, not their trophy buck.

My grandfather had distanced himself from them, and stood off to the side near where his father and uncle sat, staring somewhere off-camera with a pensive expression on his face, one I immediately recognized. It was the look that generally preceded the kind of conversation that led to endless hours of stories from which I was supposed to glean some major life lesson, when he could have just condensed it into a couple of sentences that actually made sense like a normal human being.

That was my grandfather, though. Always the serious one, always the teacher. I wondered if there had been a time when he allowed himself to let loose and goof off with his brothers, none of whom I could remember meeting. They all died around the same time my father left, which was obviously the more traumatic and memorable event in my life.

I looked at the man with the deer antlers, sharpened so that they looked like two great tusks, and realized that my grandfather—a man I had known and loved all of my life—had locked eyes with this creature at some point before its death. And suddenly it was real in a way that until that moment it hadn’t been. This was once a living being that had occupied the same plane of existence as a younger version of the man who had been mother and father to me for the majority of my life, that had been immortalized with its arms over the shoulders of his brothers as though the culmination of its life had been the butt of a joke. There was nothing abstract about this situation. Out there, right now, was something just like this, a creature that I was somehow meant to not only confront, but to kill, and unlike all of these people in the pictures, I was completely and utterly alone.

My heart stopped when I moved on to the next set of pictures and finally understood just how much trouble I was actually in.

NINETEEN

The first photograph was nothing like the others. It showed a cluster of houses I didn’t recognize, old and small, single-level ranches in the middle of a wide field surrounded by ponderosa pines. I could tell they had been built by the occupants, not for them. The windows were broken and jagged shards glittered in the frames. The front doors either stood wide open or were absent altogether. They’d been abandoned for some length of time, judging by the leaves blown into the entryways, although how long was a matter of speculation. It looked like they had come under siege.

There were additional pictures—for the first time in color—presumably taken inside these houses, where broken glass was scattered all over the floors and tables and chairs lie in broken ruins amid spatters of blood that crossed the wood flooring and ascended the walls. There was more blood on the sheets of unmade beds and the furniture, while great care had been taken not to include the identities of the bodies, which had been covered with blankets where they fell.

My grandfather had never told me how his brothers died and I had never asked. He was old and they were dead; those were just the facts of life as I knew them. I never questioned the things that happened before my earliest memories because in my mind I’d just come to believe they had always been that way.

I thought about my grandfather, who’d lived his entire life in these hills and who’d never shown me the house where he’d spent his childhood or the one in which he’d raised my mother during her formative years. I’d always seen his trailer as an extension of him, like the shell of a turtle. I’d never stopped to think that he’d ever lived anywhere else. Turns out I’d never stopped to think about much of anything.

There were close-up pictures of the faces of men and women of all ages, only some of whom I recognized, with the blankets I had seen covering their bodies bunched over their upper chests and necks. My great aunts and their children, I guessed, some of whom were obviously still in their teens. I recognized the photographs of each of Grandfather’s brothers, their faces cleaned of the blood I could still faintly see clotted into their hairlines. Otherwise, he’d done a remarkable job of making them look peaceful, of both memorializing them for all time and using their deaths to serve as a warning to those who would follow in their footsteps. This was no ordinary hunt, nor was it a laughing matter. This was life or death, as evidenced by the expression on Grandfather’s face in the next picture.