by Gwen Moffat
‘Why shouldn’t – oh, rattlers.’
‘That, and where they’re built: in the weirdest places.’
Miss Pink looked down the slope below the Pale Hunter and into the stony wilderness they called the Maze.
‘I was thinking more of cliffs,’ Dolly said. ‘They wouldn’t build houses here; they had to be close to water. No one would ever live in the Maze.’
Miss Pink wiped her greasy fingers on a napkin and stood up. She took a few steps to the edge. ‘You line the Stone Hawk with the Blanket Man?’
Dolly came and stood beside her. ‘That’s right; Blanket Man is almost hidden by the Hawk, but look at what’s this side of them!’
The ground fell gradually towards the hunched stone bird, more distinctive from here than it had been from below. It must have been a mile away but in the translucent air it looked only a third of the distance. Immediately below them there was an earthy gully, and the towers started at the foot of it: squarish formations, perhaps eighty feet in height, each crowned by its thick white cap. ‘So close,’ Miss Pink murmured, ‘it looks as if you might jump from one to the other.’
‘I’m sure you can: downwards.’
‘Let’s go a little way: just a few yards. We’ll build cairns.’
‘You’re a spunky lady.’ Dolly was amused. ‘O.K., but I’m not going more than a hundred yards. After that you’re on your own.’
They gathered the remains of the picnic and stowed them in the saddle bags. They moved the horses until they were in deeper shade. Dolly picked up a dead branch and they started down, Miss Pink leading. ‘Here,’ Dolly said at the foot of the slope, ‘take this.’
Miss Pink took the branch and hit the rock experimentally. ‘They ought to hear us coming anyway,’ she said loudly. ‘Trouble is, down here, it’s rather difficult for them to get out of our way. They might feel cornered.’
‘We’re going to go slow, building cairns.’
‘There is a cairn.’
They stood and stared at a neat pyramid at the mouth of the slit between the first towers. It had not been visible from above. ‘That’s wild,’ Dolly breathed.
They moved forward, forgetting the noise they should be making to drive the rattlesnakes away. They looked down at the cairn, they peered into the dark joint; their gaze travelled sideways. ‘No!’ Dolly gasped. A few yards away, at right angles, was a diminutive duck.
They walked to it, found it stood outside another joint at the end of which was a cairn in a ray of sunshine. They moved down the joint carefully, their eyes scarcely having time to adjust to the gloom before they came to the cairn and saw that it was at the intersection of three ways. The wall of the tower on the right overlapped. They looked, and saw the next cairn along the joint on the left.
‘They’re built where you turn,’ Miss Pink said.
‘Yes, but who built them? I never dreamed there was a trail here.’
‘You didn’t look.’
‘I never came down the first slope. I’ve passed the Pale Hunter dozens of times but there’s no way I’d come down into the Maze on foot – until today. I’d sooner have swum the Colorado.’
‘But this trail is well marked.’
‘There are no tracks. Didn’t you notice? There’s not one footprint ahead of us.’
‘You’re right. And the sand is wavy. No one’s been here since the last rain. When was that?’
‘The rain took the last of the snow. That would be in February. You’re not going on … ’ Miss Pink made to move forward.
‘Why not? We’ve got the cairns to guide us back.’
‘As long as – ’ Dolly looked round and shivered, ‘ – as long as they’re the only cairns.’
‘You think there’s more than one trail?’
‘We don’t know there is a trail. All we know is there are cairns. They don’t have to be the only ones; we could follow the wrong line back.’
Miss Pink studied the other’s face. ‘We’ll put a duck beside each cairn.’
They penetrated deeper into the Maze, placing ducks beside the cairns as they went. Above them the needles that surrounded the park sank below the level of the towers until they were lost from view. Now, but for the sun, they would not have known in which direction they were going. They worked their way along the bottom of the joints, occasionally sliding down a slope, sometimes forced to sidle between constricting walls. Despite the slit of sky overhead it was like being in the bowels of a stone earth. Sometimes the walls almost met above them. It was a relief to emerge in a kind of well, shadowed at the bottom but with lank grass at the foot of an ash sapling, its crown a sunlit diadem of spring foliage.
They looked round for the next cairn but there was none. There were four joints leading from the well: that by which they had come and three others. They scouted separately but neither went beyond a corner from which they could look back to the clearing. They found no more cairns. They returned to the ash tree.
‘I can only think,’ Dolly said, ‘that someone started to explore and this is as far as he got.’
‘Yes.’ Miss Pink didn’t sound convinced.
Dolly glanced at her and went on, with a touch of defiance: ‘Well, that’s that. We’d better get back. Can’t leave the horses long in the sun.’
Miss Pink refrained from pointing out that the horses were in the shade. She looked thoughtfully at the entrance to a joint that Dolly was supposed to have explored. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, moving away.
‘You’re on your own,’ Dolly called, trying to sound amused but with a shrillness behind the words. Miss Pink smiled and nodded reassurance. Dolly’s eyes were wide. ‘Only a moment,’ Miss Pink pleaded, and walked into the joint.
Halfway along, a passage went off to the left, the main joint continuing. She stooped, placed two stones with a slab on top and she had a Welsh cromlech: something that could not be confused with a marker placed by someone else. She walked up the side passage to discover, on the right, a sloping gully leading to a heap of jammed boulders. Behind the boulders there was a hole with the light showing through.
It was quite a large hole, big enough to allow the passage of an adult. She emerged on top of the boulders – which shifted a little under her weight but not alarmingly – and she saw that a few yards away the left wall leaned back, and there were pockets – natural holds – in the rock.
The angle was easy and the holds were nicely placed. She climbed about twenty feet to a crack which ran up to a pale band of rock. She had found a break in one of those dough-like caps that crowned the towers.
She stepped out on the summit and looked around, and was overwhelmed by panic. She did not know how long she was confused, probably only for a few moments. When she did manage to get a grip on herself she realised that the basic cause of this disorientation was the light, which was different: emanating from the wrong place; the sun was behind her when she had expected it to be on her right. Worse, she had thought to step out on the summit of the tower to find the Stone Hawk close at hand and the Crimson Cliffs visible on the other side of the valley. What she did see was a great wall looming above the tops of trees and no Stone Hawk, no Blanket Man, not one feature that she could recognise.
There were the towers, certainly: rising behind her and level on both sides. But in front, this side of the trees, there were only one or two towers, somewhat lower than the one on which she stood. She had come to the outer edge of the Maze and the reason why everything seemed to be askew, even the sun, was that she was facing not south-east but north-east. During their progress inside the labyrinth their general direction had changed by ninety degrees. If they had been observing the sun more carefully they would have realised it. Now she was not looking across the valley but down it, towards the Colorado, although that vista was obstructed by the looming wall. She was above the great cove, that wooded depression set high in the stone barrier that was supposed to be inaccessible except to the Anasazi.
The Anasazi. At one point, near the foo
t of the wall, she could see the start of an overhang, a soft bulge, shadowed but softly gleaming with reflected light. There seemed to be marks on the rock below the bulge but the edge of the next tower cut the view, even through binoculars.
She moved forward and looked down on the next summit which was only marginally lower and so close that a jump would be no more than two or three feet, but downwards. The move could not be reversed. Even if one could spring upwards, there was nothing on the smooth and convex cap to grab hold of, and below – she felt sick – below, the joint could be eighty feet deep. The top of the next tower was remarkably tempting but it was as bare as the one on which she stood. There was not even a scatter of stones to indicate that a cairn had once stood here.
‘Melinda! For God’s sake! Melinda! Miss Pink!’ The shout climbed to a despairing shriek.
‘I’m coming back. Right now!’
She knocked down her cromlech-cairn and met Dolly in the joint before the clearing, the woman’s face pale in the gloom.
‘I was terrified! Where were you?’
‘Just looking. I’m ready to go back now.’
‘You were up somewhere. I heard you.’ Miss Pink raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, that’s how it sounded,’ Dolly said sulkily. ‘It must have been the echo. You shouldn’t go off on your own. You don’t know what could happen: sprain your ankle, anything. It’s dangerous.’
‘Who would be likely to come here?’
Dolly chose to misunderstand this. ‘I don’t mean people. I mean getting lost – or bitten. There are scorpions besides rattlers. What are you doing? Why are you knocking down the cairns?’
Miss Pink was not knocking them down but carefully dismantling the ducks which they had placed themselves. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘if the Cave of Hands is in the Maze and someone is looking for it, but is keeping quiet, it’s good manners not to advertise that we’ve been here.’
Dolly was astonished. ‘You’re thinking of Birdie?’
‘No, she wouldn’t build cairns. This is an adult, but secretive. It would be – neighbourly – to keep quiet, don’t you think? We haven’t been here; we just had a picnic in Rustler and rode out again.’
‘You’re suggesting someone thinks he’ll make money out of it if he finds the cave, that there’ll be a ruin or a tomb and artefacts: pots, weapons, that kind of stuff? Turquoise?’
Miss Pink had not been thinking along those lines. She would be hard put to it to say how her mind had been working. In eliminating the evidence of their presence she could be demonstrating a tidy nature rather than prudence. ‘Our tracks are here all the same,’ she pointed out.
‘They’ll be washed out in the first storm, and who cares anyway?’ The earth slope appeared ahead, and tall flowers below the Pale Hunter. Dolly was suddenly cheerful now that they were back on familiar ground. ‘He doesn’t have to worry about anyone discovering his secret; there were no cairns after the little ash tree, unless you saw any when you wandered off on your own. Did you?’
Miss Pink stumbled and paused to catch her breath. She looked back into the Maze, blandly innocent under the sun, the Stone Hawk once again in line with Blanket Man. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see anything familiar at all.’
Chapter 3
‘What’s this mark?’ Dolly asked suspiciously, staring at a painting of Rainbow Bridge. ‘It looks like soot.’
Myrtle Holman peered through her ornate spectacles. ‘That’s shadow, deep shade. I love this picture; it has an aura of magic about it.’ Her tone changed. ‘You should put a higher price on it. A hundred dollars would make it more valuable.’
Dolly licked a finger and touched the black smudge. ‘It is soot.’ She showed her dirty finger to Miss Pink who nodded agreement and turned away to encounter the stare of a small boy standing in the doorway of the room, watching them.
The Holman store (Junque and What-ever) was an extension of the main cabin. Light entered by way of one small window and the open door. It revealed shelves crammed with rusty gin traps and unidentifiable bits of cracked harness, broken pots, smeary glass bottles, and a rank of books with tired jackets. There were two chairs, their backs carved so elaborately that it was a safe bet raw edges would be revealed if the pieces were up-ended.
The largest piece of ‘junque’ was a glass display cabinet which served as a counter. Its shelves were cluttered with cheap silver and blue plastic jewellery simulating turquoise: belt buckles, bangles, rings and pendants, with polished pebbles and broken crystals and a few badly made kachina dolls. The legend on a belt buckle read: ‘I will give up my gun when they pry my cold dead fingers from it’ above a moulding of a smoking gun. ‘That was my late husband’s,’ Myrtle had informed Miss Pink proudly, seeing the other’s interest.
One side of the display cabinet had lost its glass which had been replaced by a sheet of plywood. A square of dusty black velvet lay on the flat surface.
Myrtle stepped back from the painting of Rainbow Bridge and tripped over to the counter on her spiked heels. She touched her lacquered blue rinse and said brightly: ‘I forgot. I cleaned and everything had to be re-hung. Maybe I touched it then. Shawn will get a clean cloth, won’t you, sweetie?’
The boy’s eyes moved slowly from her to Dolly. Miss Pink’s lips compressed. He was perhaps ten years old: a country boy, and yet that lack of expression was streetwise. ‘Do you have television here?’ she asked curiously. His gaze was transferred to her and now it was calculating; he was taking her measure. Without a word he turned and disappeared.
‘We can’t get T.V.,’ Dolly said, ‘but Maxine’s got one of those sets that will take videos and she belongs to a library. Shawn is an addict, but I doubt he could be corrupted by anything he’s likely to see, and that includes hard porn.’ Her tone was casual, conversational. Miss Pink was astonished but Myrtle listened politely as if Dolly were discussing her painting. ‘So what did your little grandson do?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Put his hand up the stove pipe and wipe it on my picture?’
Myrtle fingered the gold chains at her throat with scarlet talons. ‘He’s a child, Dolly— ’
‘Why do you let him in here?’ Dolly started to lose control. ‘Can’t you keep the place locked? You wouldn’t let a dog in, shit all over the floor, but that little bugger can— ’
Shawn slipped in and placed a rag on the counter. He did not look at Dolly.
‘You smeared my picture!’ she said furiously.
‘Now you don’t know that,’ Myrtle protested. ‘He’s only a little boy and you got no proof— ’
‘That’s no little boy,’ Dolly said with withering contempt.
‘Is there anything else I can do for you right now?’ Shawn asked his grandmother in a child’s voice.
Myrtle looked flustered. ‘Go ask Mommy if she needs any help with the supper.’
‘I’ll chop some sticks.’ The tone was ingratiating but the expression remained blank.
‘Such a helpful kid,’ Dolly threw at his back as he left the room. ‘I don’t owe you anything, Myrtle.’ The tone was loaded.
The old woman looked suddenly defeated. She must have been in her late seventies and was so thin as to appear anorexic. The sharp features and the big glasses with their ridiculous ‘jewelled’ chains, her fierce make-up and outrageous eyelashes made her look like some exotic bird in a fashionable fairy tale. She wore a peach-pink dress with coloured chiffon scarves, the waist cinched by a wide gold belt. Half a century ago she might have been in the chorus of a third-rate musical and she had never lost the art of presenting herself. Before the interested regard of Miss Pink she fidgeted self-consciously. Picking up the rag she made to approach the picture.
‘No!’ Dolly cried. ‘Don’t touch it! I’ll clean it myself. I’d take it now but I’m riding. I’m going home and get my car and come straight back. I’ll take all my stuff. We’re square, you and me; well, not exactly,’ she amended viciously.
Miss Pink looked away from Myrtle’s stricken face and saw, through the doorw
ay, the back view of Yaller and Mouse standing patiently at a rail. At that moment something occurred which for an instant she could not identify. There was a movement in the air, a quick sharp flash that seemed to terminate on Yaller’s big rump, and she heard something fall to the ground. All hell broke loose. The horse squealed and kicked, Mouse lashed out in retaliation, Miss Pink plunged through the doorway and saw a screen door closing further along the porch. She strode down the boards and yanked the screen open. Behind her Dolly ran to the horses.
In the middle of the cabin a woman had caught the boy and held him, his head pressed against her stomach. She was a startlingly beautiful woman, not thin like her mother, but fragile all the same. Her hair was piled carelessly on top of her head, lifted and caught there with Spanish combs. Flaxen tendrils had escaped to curl against the slender neck. She stared at the visitor with eyes the colour of violets, then smiled like an angel.
‘You have to be Miss Pink. Hi!’
‘He kicked me!’ Shawn gasped. ‘I only petted him and he kicked me!’ He tried to rub his leg but his mother held him too tightly.
‘I’ve told you,’ she said patiently. ‘You don’t go near the big horses. They can be vicious. And you’re too small for them to see you anyway; you could be a fly touching them. Poor little boy. But nothing’s broken; you can stand properly. Show Mommy.’
‘He can move fast too,’ Miss Pink said grimly. ‘He threw a stone at the horse and was in here like greased lightning.’
The lovely eyes narrowed. Maxine Brenner released her grip on her son and he moved carefully to one side, out of reach. His mother said gently: ‘I don’t think you see too well.’