Ancient Enemy (8 page)

The board over Grandfather’s window. The bottom corner had been wrenched upward. I could see where the old wood had cracked and the shadows cast by the exposed lengths of the nails.

Something had gotten past me. How could anything have done so without me seeing—?

Yanaba whinnied and struck the stable wall with a resounding crack of snapping wood. Paa slammed against the door with such force that the hinges squealed and bent. I caught a flash of the fear in her eyes through the crack.

I was useless from up here, but if I gave up this vantage point—

Another cracking sound to my left, barely audible over the sudden frenzy of the goats.

Before I could change my mind, I slung the rifle over my shoulder, swung down from the branch, and dropped into the yard. The moment my feet touched the ground I had the stock of the rifle seated against my shoulder. I turned in a full circle, watching the night landscape pass down the barrel. There was nothing but scrub oak and bushes and cacti behind me, clear to the horizon. Other than the dark shapes of the animals in their pens, there was no sign of any movement whatsoever.

I crept toward the trailer first, glancing back over my shoulder every few steps.

Whoomph-whoomph-whoomph
.

There were curls of wood near the edge of the board, where sharp claws had gouged into the siding in an effort to pry it from the window frame. Splinters jutted from the fracture in the aged wood and the nails in the corner now protruded by more than an inch. Something wet and dark dripped from the edge of the board. I leaned closer and watched the droplets run down the siding and drip to the snow near a patch scuffed with footprints.

I turned and surveyed the darkness behind me. No sign of motion. No indication that I wasn’t completely alone, save for the goats and the horses, which stomped and huffed near the center of their enclosures, as far from the walls as they could get.

I returned my attention to the trailer. Dabbed my index finger in the fluid. Rubbed it against my thumb until it became tacky and dry.

Blood. I recognized it immediately. I’d worn more than my share of it over the last few days.

I thought back to the cave where I’d found the bodies encased in flowstone, the grooves where it looked like something had tried to claw its way through the accreted minerals to get to them, and the footprints on the ground near the jagged shards.

Whoomph-whoomph-whoomph
.

I transferred the rifle to my right hand and drew the rattle from beneath my waistband with my left. Braced the stock against my shoulder and rested the barrel on my left forearm, which I tried to hold as still as possible when I shook the rattle.

The blood on the trailer and spattered around my feet phosphoresced with a bluish-purple hue. As did the palm prints on the siding I hadn’t noticed until that moment. I turned and could faintly see the droplets leading from the trailer to the stables. Directly beneath the tree in which I’d been sitting. There were smears on the latches of the enclosures.

I hadn’t heard so much as a single footstep.

I stood beneath the tree and looked up toward where I’d been sitting. There were deep gouges in the soft bark that positively glowed with blood. Mere feet below where I’d been sleeping until I’d abruptly awoken. It looked almost as if something had been climbing up—

A shrill bleating sound.

Far away. Echoing from the distant canyon walls.

Another. And another still.

I could hear their pain, feel their terror.

Tears streamed down my cheeks as I walked a circuit around my trailer and the outbuildings while I listened to the sheep being slaughtered.

Every last one of them.

FOURTEEN

I cried like I hadn’t cried since my father left. It was the same overwhelming feeling of utter and complete helplessness. No matter what I did, someone or something suffered. I had known that by leaving the sheep undefended I had consigned them to their fates. I might as well have put a bullet through each of their skulls and saved them what sounded like an agonizing and torturous death. It would have been far more humane. Whether consciously or not, I had made the decision that they would suffer when they died and I felt horrible about it. Were it within my power to do so, I would have gladly offered my life in exchange for theirs. My penance would be to never forget the awful sounds of their bleating as they were massacred. I didn’t know if I would have the strength to once again drive the truck around the river to collect their bodies and butcher them. Not that I had the time, anyway. It seemed an almost fitting final insult to let their bodies rot in the field where they died.

I watched the sun rise through eyes so tired I could barely keep them open as I shuffled in circles around our property. A part of me understood that whatever was out there had succeeded in getting what it had come for last night and had already returned to the darkness in which it dwelled, but I couldn’t afford to be wrong. So I walked until the sun cleared the mountaintops and the crows starting cawing from the field. I transferred the rattle from one hand to the other when my wrist grew sore and my fingers became numb, despite the fact that I could no longer see its ethereal glow.

I inspected the riot of footprints in the snow. Bare. Question mark-shaped. The impressions of toenails I would have ascribed to animals, were it nor for the almost human shape of the prints. And I saw the droplets of blood that led off in all directions and contemplated the implications.

If they could bleed, then they could be hurt. If they could be hurt, then they could be killed. And if they could be killed, then I had no choice but to do just that.

They were simple if-then statements. The kind we had studied in math. One right answer. Black and white.

I had proof that they could bleed, and by virtue of that proof, that they could be hurt. And anything that could be hurt could be hurt so badly that death was inevitable. Which meant that I could not waste another day waiting for them to come again. I needed to be proactive.

I needed to go on the hunt.

I had spent the better portion of my life in these very hills and knew them as well as anyone could. I knew where to find the biggest tiger salamanders and where to catch the most horny toads. I could recognize which burrows the rattlesnakes had claimed and any of the venomous species of spiders at a glance. I’d spent more hours than I could count with my grandfather, on horseback and on foot, hunting mule deer and elk and bighorn sheep. Following their tracks on the bare earth, across leaves, and through the snow. I’d learned their calls and their migration patterns and could identify their scat by smell, sight, and touch.

Finding my prey wasn’t the problem, though.

If I was right, they made their home deep within the mountain, through the hole at the back of the cavern where it looked as though they had clawed their way out. And I knew well enough that nothing that lived in the sunlight was capable of phosphorescing. I’d learned in biology class that it was an evolutionary adaptation developed by organisms that dwelled in complete darkness. And, by extension, the creatures that fed upon them.

My main concern was that going on the offensive could easily cost me my life and leave those who could not protect themselves vulnerable when night invariably fell again.

Worse, I had no idea where to begin and I was too tired to think straight. The thought of going to sleep at a time like this seemed absurd, but I could barely function now as it was. Ten hours from now I’d be completely useless.

I tucked the rifle back under the skirt and crept up the stairs, carefully placing each footfall near the sides to minimize the creaking and then avoiding the loose plank in front of the door. I opened the broken screen just far enough to slide through and ducked inside the front door into the kitchen, shedding layers as I went.

My mother was asleep on the couch, with an empty bottle of Old Forester tucked under her arm like a stuffed animal and an infomercial on the tube. Some skin care product or other with a celebrity I’d never seen before. A part of me wished she’d been awake and waiting to yell at me; the better part was grateful to have dodged yet another in a seemingly endless series of confrontations.

I was halfway to my bedroom when I stopped and turned toward Grandfather’s door. It stood partially open and I could hear his labored breathing. Not the soft rhythm of sleep, but rather the almost rasping noises that came with consciousness.

I debated continuing on my current course and pulling the covers up over my head so I couldn’t see or hear a thing, but abruptly changed my mind and entered his bedroom in a T-shirt and boxers that had definitely ripened overnight. Not as much as his urine bag, though, which took just a few minutes to change.

He followed me across the room with his eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to meet his stare. I felt like a failure, like I’d let him down. He’d undoubtedly heard the sheep being slaughtered and knew I hadn’t done a blasted thing to stop it. And if that hadn’t awakened him, then surely the sound of something attempting to pry the board from his window had.

I didn’t bother with the chair this time. I just crawled up onto the bed beside him and wrapped my arms around a once-strong frame that had wasted away to mere skin and bones. Lowered my head to his chest and listened to his heartbeat, to the crackle of fluid in his lungs. And for the first time truly understood that he was going to die.

His hand brushed the back of mine and I nearly jumped. I looked down at his gnarled fingers, at the veins protruding from skin so thin it was nearly transparent. He hadn’t moved on his own since the stroke. I watched it just lying there like a dead spider, but it didn’t so much as twitch. When I looked up into his wide, horrified eyes, I saw something deep inside of them, the determination of a man who refused to be conquered, who would find a way to reach me if he had to move heaven and earth to do so.

I saw my grandfather in there.

I sat up and wiped the tears from my eyes, tried my best to be brave. He was the one who taught me that if you didn’t have confidence, you had to fake it. And if you faked something well enough, then it was only a matter of time before the illusion became reality. That advice served me well through my early years as a half-breed Navajo at a Ute school and, later, during an online distance-learning pilot program for select high school students as part of an outreach program through the University of Colorado, for which I was the only one from my reservation chosen. Maybe that concept translated to other states of being.

I stared into his eyes for several moments, attempting to decipher his thoughts, but it was like trying to see the trout in a placid lake through your own reflection.

“You know what’s happening out there, don’t you?” I whispered.

His eyes locked onto mine, then—very deliberately—looked toward his shelf and back again.

“You heard them last night. I mean, how could you not? They were right outside your window. Before they slaughtered what was left of our herd.” I cocked my head and studied his expression. “You know what they are, don’t you?”

He glanced at his shelf, then back again.

“I’ve seen what the rattle can do. I’ve been inside the House of Many Windows. I’ve seen the blood. How it phosphoresces. I know what happened to those people. Those children. I’ve seen the…bodies…entombed in the flowstone inside the cavern in Fewkes Canyon. I’ve seen what they did to our livestock and worry that it’s only a matter of time before they kill the rest. And mostly I’m afraid. Afraid they’ll find a way in here and…and…”

His eyes hardened, if such a thing was physically possible. It was how they looked when we were forced to put a wounded animal out of its misery or when he had to deal with the representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs when they showed up on our land, one of a man doing what he knew needed to be done, no matter how little he wanted to do so. When his eyes guided mine toward the shelf again, I got up and walked across the room.

I stood beneath a shelf now held together by silver duct tape and looked back at him. I could barely see his eyes across the dark room. I pointed at the water jar, now spider-webbed with cracks. His eyes darted to the right in response. I moved on to the rawhide parfleche with its juvenile painting. He stared directly at it.

I brought it down from the shelf and returned to the side of the bed, where I sat in the chair with it flat on my lap. A line of light from the seam around the boarded window bisected the design. It looked like something a child might have painted, certainly not something you would save unless it had been your child who painted it. The mountains were uneven and the sun about as round as a football. The paint was cracked from the fall and crumbling off in large flakes, beneath which I could see the smooth, tanned leather and…

I looked up at my grandfather, whose eyes recognized the expression on my face. Whatever hardness had been there was now gone, leaving in its place what looked like sympathy.

The dried paint chipped off with my thumbnail and covered my bare legs. The more I chiseled away, the more the design beneath was revealed. The leather had been intricately carved using an implement with such a small, sharp tip that every fine detail remained perfectly clear, despite its obvious age. It was smudged and discolored by the oils from the many hands that had held it and run their fingers over the design. At first I wondered why someone would allow a child to paint over something that must have taken an incredibly long time to create. And then the realization struck me.