Ancient Enemy (6 page)

The sun was already well into its descent by the time I picked my way up the talus slopes and navigated the seemingly insurmountable cliffs to reach the orifice I’d seen from below. It was a narrow crevice in the limestone, a point where the warring currents of ancient rivers had met and created curious eddies and unique erosion patterns. It was nearly sealed by the loose rock that had accumulated over it with the passage of time. The stones made clacking and clattering sounds when I shoved them out of the way and sent them tumbling out over the nothingness.

The rocks inside were dramatically cooler and their smooth surfaces felt almost polished. It was hard to believe they were composed of the same type of stone as the dry limestone riddled with superficial cracks all around me. I had to lower myself to my belly to see inside. As I stared into the darkness, its cool breath upon my face, I had to wonder what I was doing here. Granted, we’d lost a good number of animals and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what kind of predator had attacked them, but the notion of hunting it by following the clues I gleaned from petroglyphs that were only visible when I shook my grandfather’s rattle filled with quartz shards seemed positively ludicrous.

I glanced back down below me to the bottom of the ravine, where Yanaba grazed amid the trees. It was going to take hours to get back down there. As it was, there was no way I’d be home in time for dinner and I’d be lucky if I made it before nightfall. What the hell was I doing up here anyway, chasing mythical horned creatures with an old rattle? I hadn’t slept in days and every inch of my body had begun to ache. What I really needed was sleep. Everything would make more sense without the fog of exhaustion making it so hard to think clearly. All of the killing was probably the result of some coyote contracting rabies from a ground squirrel. Yet here I was, halfway up the mountainside, peering into a cave that had been pretty much exactly where the petroglyphs said it would be. I’d be a fool to leave without seeing what was inside.

The opening was maybe a foot tall, if that, and the edges were lined with rocks that nearly sealed it in spots. I had to stick my entire left arm through first, turn my head sideways, and push off with my feet to force myself through. By the time my chest cleared the rocks, I could feel where the uneven ground slanted downhill away from me. I used my elbow for leverage and pulled until my entire body was inside.

The sound of my harsh exhalations echoed, giving me some indication of the size of the space around me. It had to be a good twenty degrees cooler and the light from the glaring sun seemed to simply die at the slender entrance, little more than diffusing into the blackness. I pried the rattle from beneath my waistband and shook it. I would have gladly traded it for a Maglite, but the last thing I’d expected when I left the house this morning was to find myself spelunking in a cave where once upon a time horned monsters had dwelled.

The mechanoluminsecence of the crystals inside the rattle limned the cavern walls with a bluish aura amplified by the crystals and phosphors embedded in the stone itself. I was in a small cavern roughly the size of my bedroom. The slant of the floor was severe and rocky and tapered to another orifice lined with stalactites, near the ground at the bottom. The surfaces were slick with the accretion of minerals left behind by the prehistoric ocean.

It wasn’t quite as hard to slither through the second opening as the first, but the stalactites were a lot more delicate than I initially suspected. I broke one off with a bump of my shoulder and it nearly impaled me when it fell. I felt more broken formations grinding together under my belly and thighs, which made me wonder what had crawled through here before me and how long ago it had done so.

I emerged into a cavern easily five times the size of the last. The low ceiling made it impossible to stand upright. I walked in a crouch, shaking the rattle as I went. There were stalactites and stalagmites everywhere and thick columns where they joined. The shadows they cast moved as I moved, reminding me of the way the moonlight filtered through aspen branches in a windstorm. I followed something of a wending path through the maze, guided by phosphorescing smears on the ground, until the stone above me abruptly lifted and I found myself in a much larger cavern where the dim light from the rattle couldn’t even reach the far wall or the ceiling. All I could see were the sharp tips of the stalactites suspended in darkness as thick as tar.

Condensation dripped with plinking sounds that echoed around me.

Larger formations dominated the room. Massive creations that appeared to have the consistency of wax, but were every bit as hard as the ground upon which I walked. There were broad-based columns that looked like frozen waterfalls. Sheets covering the walls that resembled folded taffy. Giant rounded pyramids reminiscent of enormous termite mounds. The mineral content in their clear outer layers made them appear to glow in the flickering blue glow of the rattle.

There was something else. Deeper inside.

I approached one of the mounds, shaking the rattle as I advanced. There was a dark shape at its core. An ill-defined silhouette, trapped inside a flowstone-draped stalagmite that was even taller than I was. The air inside the cavern grew colder as I neared. My skin prickled with goosebumps and I shivered despite my heavy coat.

There was something about the silhouette. Something both foreign and strangely familiar.

The quartz luminescence defined the hazy shape inside the rock. It was a statue. Presumably sculpted in here so long ago that the leached minerals had accumulated on top of it to such a degree that they ultimately entombed it. Detail was lost to the attenuation of the outer layers, but it was obviously the representation of a man. Standing upright, knees bent, his arms drawn behind him and his chin resting against his chest.

You couldn’t live in these canyons for any length of time without getting something of a feel for the artistic style of the Anasazi, and the Navajo and Ute who followed. There were petroglyphs everywhere you looked in Southwestern Colorado. Potsherds and arrowheads. Traditional textiles and jars. Maybe even a few small totems and carvings, but nothing like this. Nothing nearly as large or as anatomically proportionate.

I walked in a circle around it. From behind, it almost looked as though its wrists were bound and tethered to the ground. A stalagmite ran straight up its spine, between its biceps. I couldn’t tell for sure, but there appeared to be ropes around its chest, lashing it to the stalagmite.

I had to kneel against the base and strain my neck to even partially see the indistinct lines of its face. The layers of waxy rock grew thinner near the top, affording a better view of the oblong shape of its bald head. No, its bare skull.

I leaned closer and shook the rattle right up against the stone in an effort to better see. The detail on the skeletal face was amaazingly realistic, rivaling the skill of the Renaissance sculptors half a millennium later. It was so lifelike and detailed. The canine teeth were disproportionately long, those in front slightly crooked. The triangular peak of the nasal bones was sharp, the ridge of the brow severely angled back toward the sloped forehead. The eyes were deep pits of darkness.

It wasn’t a statue. It was too perfect, right down to the imperfections that gave it just the right amount of realism. Whatever it was had once been a living, breathing being before it was bound to the stalagmite.

And left to die.

ELEVEN

I stepped backward. Caught my heels on the uneven floor. Landed on my rear end. Dropped the rattle.

The darkness swarmed from where the bluish glow had held it at bay. I ran my palms across the ground until I found it once more and shook it for everything I was worth. The resultant light was little more than a single candle could generate, but I was fortunate to have it.

I again approached what I was suddenly certain was anything other than a sculpture. Its exposed bones glowed faintly, as though painted with the same phosphors as the slab of rock in my grandfather’s room and on the rear wall of the House of Many Windows. The remainder of the body was covered with a taut, desiccated layer of leathery skin that appeared almost mummified.

I risked a tap on the rock formation. It was crystalline and solid. There were deep gouges in it where it almost appeared as though someone had attacked it with sharp implements in an effort to free the remains trapped inside. I held my hand up to the marks. Aligned my fingers with them. Quickly withdrew my hand.

The fit was nearly perfect.

I stared again at the face of the being inside. At eye sockets that looked like they’d been stretched too wide. At teeth so large they must have made the absent lips bulge.

Suddenly, I felt as though the temperature had fallen another ten degrees. I wanted nothing more than to feel the warmth of the sunlight on my face and the fresh air against my skin.

I turned around and, for the first time, truly appraised my surroundings. I was positively surrounded by the large mounds, the dark shadows at the hearts of which I could see even from a distance.

And worse.

Fragments and shards encircled the bases where it looked as though something had attempted to free the creatures trapped inside, leaving behind the phosphorescent droplets and smears on the ground I had followed through the maze of columns.

Smears that looked a whole lot like footprints.

I followed them deeper into the cavern, retracing the steps of what looked like the partial impressions of bare feet. Question mark-shapes where the ball of the foot and outside edge contacted the stone, the dot of the heel. Faint circles above it from the toes. Leading me inexorably into the darkness. From one mound to the next. Each of them surrounded by spatters of phosphorescence, like drops of paint hurled from a wet brush.

The flow of air grew stronger, colder. The smell reminded me of the rocky banks of a river after the first frost of the year. Damp. The footprints faded to the mere occasional smudge. My pulse rushed in my ears.

Whoomph. Whoomph. Whoomph.

The sound of my breathing grew louder, harsher, as it echoed back at me from the darkness. Despite alternating them, both of my arms were sore from shaking the rattle.

The rear wall of the cavern materialized from the shadows behind a jagged crest of stalagmites nearly as tall as I was. The stalactites protruding from the roof above them produced the impression of a giant fanged mouth preparing to close. The wall behind them was covered with flowstone, but even through the years of accumulation I could see the petroglyphs that had been carved into it. There were two large spirals, etched in a counterclockwise direction. They didn’t tell a story like those inside the House of Many Windows, but their message was every bit as clear.

The spiral was a common motif with pretty much every native population in the New World. It had been assigned many meanings, depending on which direction it turned. To some peoples, it was both a literal and metaphorical journey of ascension or descension, of life or death. To others, a sign used to mark trails, either as an indication of safety or as a warning. To the Hopi—whom, along with the Zuni, many believed absorbed the surviving Anasazi into their ranks when they abandoned this area—it marked the gates to the underworld, the portal from which the Hisatsinom emerged into the Fourth World from the Third World, where Masau’u—god of war, death, and fire—reigned.

Hisatsinom was what the Hopi called the Anasazi.

Regardless of the actual meaning those who’d carved the symbols had in mind while doing so, I couldn’t imagine they suggested good things would be found through the opening in the rock between them.

At some point in time, a massive slab of stone had been shoved in front of it and left to accumulate eons of flowstone, which had essentially absorbed it into the wall. I could see where that flowstone had been chiseled away and someone had attempted to reseal it several times with concrete of varying color and consistency. The most recent was reinforced with rebar and chicken wire and appeared to have held quite well, with the exception of a section at its base, near the smooth rock floor, where a small passage had been carved. Barely the size of the entrance to a mountain lion’s den. Maybe I could have found a way to wriggle inside with the right combination of motivation and lubrication, but for the life of me, I couldn’t bring myself to take even a single step closer.

The ground all around it glowed with phosphorescent spatters and smudges. The opening itself was limned with it. If that was indeed blood, as I suspected, then whatever tunneled through the solid rock had been so desperate to free itself from its confines that it had nearly flayed its skin from its bones in the process.

I shivered against the gentle breeze seeping from the bowels of the earth and recoiled from the same scent I had experienced so recently while collecting the remains of the sheep.

The movement of air through the mountain sounded like whispers.

I’d never felt such an instinctive desire to leave a place in my entire life. It was a compulsion bordering on panic. The kind of innate fear response that defies all reason and logic and one against which I was helpless to resist.

I didn’t look at the shadows imprisoned in the rocks or dwell on the bloody footprints I used as a guide. All I knew was that I wouldn’t be able to breathe until I reached the surface.