A Man Without a Haven

by Beverly Bird

  “Shadow!” he bellowed again.

  He heard her cough and the relief he knew in that moment was like no other emotion he had ever encountered in his life.

  “I guess...I fell again,” she mumbled.

  Mac closed his eyes. For an incredible moment they felt hot, and he had the most bizarre urge to laugh. He looked down into the hole again instead.

  “Are you hurt this time?” he asked roughly.

  There was a long hesitation. “Nothing’s broken.”

  Then Shadow put a tentative hand to the back of her head and it came away sticky. There was a good-size gash there, she realized. She had cracked her head against something when she had fallen through.

  She looked around. Blackness pressed in on her, penetrated only by the shadowy light from the hole up above. But her eyes were beginning to adjust to the filmy darkness. She gasped, recoiling, cold terror sliding through her again.

  Bones. So many bones.

  Mac heard her sharp, indrawn breath. “What is it?”

  “I think I’ve found your midden,” she answered thinly.

  Her voice was too close to breaking, he realized. What had she found down there?

  “I’m coming in.”

  “No!” Her voice was stronger this time. “You can’t. I’m...it’s about a ten-foot drop to the floor in here. If you come down, I don’t see how either of us will be able to get out.” She cleared her throat. “What happened?”

  “The back of the niche was just a thin rock, sort of braced upright. When you leaned against it, it slid backward.”

  “It was covering the hole,” she agreed.

  “Yeah. Covering something I wasn’t supposed to find. What do you see?”

  “Just...bodies.”

  He heard her voice crack again. Given the desperate measure of the snakes, he knew someone had to have hidden a hell of a lot more in there than that.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just hold on. I’m going to get a flashlight and some rope and I’ll be right back. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  She gave a wild, high-pitched laugh. “Fine...under the circumstances.”

  She heard a few scratching, thudding sounds as he left. She was alone.

  Shadow glanced over her shoulder. There was nothing behind her, just the wall of the...cave, or whatever it was. She inched slowly backward, feeling better when her spine touched the cool rock.

  Her back was protected now. She shuddered and looked around again. The cave was about twelve feet deep, maybe sixteen feet across. She kept a tenuous control over her panic as she looked at the skeletons.

  Not Anasazi, she realized suddenly. They were all sitting up, braced against the far wall, five of them. Some of their hands were bound together in their laps; others had their arms tied behind them. Scraps of decayed cloth showed at their wrist bones and the one directly in front of her had a shattered hole at the front of its skull.

  Another scream tried to climb in her throat, but she had no breath to give voice to it. Then it finally escaped, a shriek that tore from her again and again until finally she felt Mac’s strong hands on her, live hands, gathering her close, pressing her face against his chest so she wouldn’t have to look. She clawed her fingers into the shirt he wore, hanging on, gasping.

  “Okay, okay, come on,” Mac said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  He pulled her to her feet, guiding her back to the rope he had left dangling from the hole over their heads. She groped for it blindly and tried to pull herself up.

  It gave in her hands. She fell again and it came with her, puddling in her lap. There was a grating sound from above them as the rock slid back over the hole. Then they were caught in impenetrable darkness.

  Shadow screamed again, a bloodcurdling sound of horror and despair.

  Chapter 13

  For one stunned moment, Mac was frozen. Then he turned on the flash and a thin beam of light stabbed through the pitch. He aimed it to the side of her, spilling just enough of a glow over her face that he could see her.

  She was as white as the skeletons and her eyes were huge and stricken as she stared up at the closed hole. He swore and put the flash down, gathering her close again. Her trembling rocked all the way through him.

  He guessed she was probably beyond speech, but he prayed that she would at least hear him. “Listen to me, sweetheart. It’s not chindis, it’s not evil, it’s not anything supernatural at all. Sure, there are bodies in here, but they’re long past hurting anybody. It’s just the guy who’s been trying to scare us out of here. We found something he didn’t want us to find. That’s all.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “We can fight something human. We can outwit him.”

  Nothing.

  “I’m going to have to turn the light off again, but I’m right here. Okay?”

  He finally felt her nod. He reached down and switched off the flash. “We’re going to have to be able to see if we’re going to find a way out of here,” he went on, “so I don’t want to run the batteries down.”

  He stared at the opposite wall again, though he couldn’t really see it now in the dark. Still, the sight was indelibly imprinted on his mind. Five bodies, he thought. Five relatively new bodies. He doubted if any of them was more than a few years old. So much for the legend, he thought, fighting a laugh that would surely come out crazed. He had been right. The stories had gotten started somewhere along the line, then someone had decided to breathe a little extra life into them. But that someone hadn’t been playing pranks. He had been protecting a secret. Five people had found it, and five people had died for it.

  It wouldn’t be seven.

  He had to get her talking, had to bring her back to him. She was going to have to work with him on this. He knew she would—she always did—if only she would come out of her terror, deeper this time than it had been yet.

  “What did you do up there?” he asked softly.

  She shook her head as if she didn’t understand his question.

  “With the snakes,” he clarified.

  “Oh.” It came out as a breathy little sigh. But then she finally spoke, and he closed his eyes in relief. “I believed.”

  “Believed? In what?”

  “In the Holy People. They help anyone who seeks their assistance, if they trust in them enough. I didn’t actually talk to the snakes. They did.”

  It shook him deeply. He had seen it with his own eyes, but he had never believed, had never trusted in anything so profoundly that he would walk into a writhing knot of deadly rattlers. That she could, that she had done so, left him awed. Over and over she showed him things, gave him things, that he would have sworn hadn’t existed in this cruel, uncompromising world.

  Because he couldn’t deal with that right now, he changed the subject. “Can you stand?” he asked quietly.

  He felt her nod again. “Good. I need you to help me. Two heads are better than one.”

  She finally loosened her death grip around his waist. “My head hurts,” she murmured. “I think I knocked it coming down.”

  He ran his hands through her hair, over her scalp, and felt the blood. Too much of it. His heart staggered. They didn’t have a lot of time.

  “There’s got to be another room,” he muttered, helping her to her feet.

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t see the sense in killing people to protect a few skeletons. I can’t see someone wrestling with a bunch of snakes to keep me from stumbling on what we see in this room.”

  “He’s out there,” she breathed suddenly, as if understanding had just dawned on her. He figured it probably had.

  “No,” he answered. “He’s gone by now. He thinks we’re history.”

  “He’s sealed us in, Mac! He untied your rope and trapped us in here! There can’t be another way out. He would know about it if there was. He’s either waiting for us at another entrance or he knows we’re going to die in here!”

  Her voice was escalating. Touch her. Keep touc
hing her, he thought, stroking his hands up and down her arms, her back, holding her close. Maybe he needed the contact—that sense of life—as much as she did, he thought. What she’d just said made a lot of sense.

  But damn it, there had to be more than bones!

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Where?” she demanded wildly.

  “Think, Sergeant. Use that practical brain of yours. If you were a way out of here, where would you be?”

  She clutched him close, shivering, refusing to look at the skeletons. But she thought about it because it beat anything else that came to mind—the terror of being trapped in here with so very many chindis, the horror of knowing that she was going to die. Something reared up in her at that, something furious. She wasn’t ready yet. Oh, God, she wanted babies and Diamond Eddie’s job, she wanted Mac! She wanted to share every lonely sunrise with him for the rest of her life! If only they could get out of here, she knew she could leave the Res for this man because he was enough to sustain her, because he was beauty and fire, because he made her think and made her laugh.

  “Well?” he persisted.

  “I’m working on it.” Then she knew. “The wall!” she gasped.

  “Which one?”

  “Behind us. Where I was sitting when you came down. Why didn’t he put the bodies there?”

  Mac whistled softly. “Because that moves, too.”

  “Maybe.” Or maybe he had just chosen the other one by chance.

  But she didn’t want to consider that until she was faced with irrefutable proof. Mac switched the light on again. She pressed close to his side and they moved to the wall.

  “We could check it a whole lot faster if we separated,” he pointed out.

  “No,” she answered quickly. “No way.”

  He found he was just as glad for her refusal. He slid an arm around her waist, pinning her against his side, smelling that faint lavender scent of her hair again. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start at the top.”

  It quickly became apparent that he could reach a lot higher than she could. He skimmed his hands along the ceiling while she pressed against the lower half of the wall.

  Nothing happened.

  “What are we looking for?” she muttered. “I don’t even know what I expect to find.”

  “Something that gives the way the rock up top did. Push harder.”

  “What if we die in here?” The words scraped from her throat. But for some reason, she had to say them. Maybe it was just to wrangle an assurance from him that it wasn’t going to happen. Or maybe it was because if she spoke the possibility, it was made real. It forced her to face it, to come up with a way to deal with it.

  Mac didn’t give her assurances. He was quiet for a moment, considering it, then he looked for the goodness she had somehow taught him to find.

  “Then I’m going to go out buried inside you,” he answered, and she wanted to cry. “It would almost make it worth it.”

  “Oh, God, Mac, I need that now.”

  “You’ll have it, sweetheart. Just hang in there a little longer and it’ll happen in the sunlight. It’ll be a celebration of life.”

  “But—” She broke off at the scraping sound of more rock. For a wild moment, she thought their tormentor was coming back. The sound came from above her. She threw a terrified glance back in the direction of the hole through which she’d fallen but there was still only blackness there. Then she felt a rush of damp, cool air on her neck and she whipped around the other way again.

  “You found it!”

  “I found something.” Mac pushed with all his weight at the upper half of the wall, leaning his body into it. It groaned and slid back, revealing another room.

  “Good thinking, Sergeant.”

  “Don’t call me—oh!”

  They had climbed over the bottom slab of rock. It took her a moment to realize what she was seeing when he moved the flash around inside. At first she thought it was diamonds...millions upon millions of diamonds glimmering in the sharp beam from the flash. Then disappointment rushed at her so fast she felt faint. She looked at his face. It was grim as the dream of years slid through his fingers like sand.

  They weren’t diamonds. They were pots, easily a hundred of them, all covered with an ice blue glazing. For the most part, they were precious and whole, neatly situated at one end beside the small, fragile skeleton of what had once been a woman. But someone had stumbled into one end of the pile. A few of the vessels there were cracked and broken—shattered.

  Finally, too late, Shadow realized where the piece on the trail had come from.

  Mac moved to the skeleton and Shadow went with him, close by his side. “She Who Waits,” he said, a strange, dull tone to his voice. “It’s got to be.”

  Shadow’s breath snagged. Nestled at the skeleton’s breast was another tiny bundle of bones. A baby.

  “He...Kokopelli...came back to her. He gave her a child.” She had no way of knowing that. For all she knew, the baby had been another man’s. Perhaps Kokopelli had never really existed at all. But she felt Mac’s arm tighten around her and she knew that he wanted to believe it, too.

  “And then she died,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, Mac, I’m so sorry.” Her pots wouldn’t lead him to the place where the Anasazi had vanished to. They had found the end of her trail.

  He let her go to kneel beside the bones. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured suddenly.

  “What?”

  He motioned her closer. She knelt beside him. There, next to the skeleton’s right shoulder, partially concealed beneath her collarbone, was a flute. Shadow felt a shiver race up her spine.

  “You were right,” she breathed. “Your whole premise was right. She was Kokopelli’s woman.” She knew it wouldn’t be proof enough for the archaeologists, but the flute’s implications satisfied her. Mac, too, she realized. He couldn’t publish his findings here, but after a moment he nodded.

  “There’ll be another way to learn where the Anasazi went to, and someday somebody’ll find it. I think I’d almost rather know that this woman got everything she wanted and died happy.”

  Shadow smiled. It was a tremulous reflex at first, but then it grew because she knew the kind of man he was beneath his hard, rocky surface. And that man really would rather think that She Who Waits had died happy, rather than fleeing from some enemy so much stronger, so much more formidable than her own people.

  “So,” she said on a shaky breath, straightening again. Odd, but she felt no real threat here so close to this particular skeleton. It was almost as if her lingering spirit was pure benevolence, at least as far as Shadow was concerned.

  She looked around, and then she gasped again. On the other side of the room there was another treasure trove.

  “Mac,” she breathed. “Look. Look over there.”

  He stood again and turned about.

  “I don’t think our villain was protecting She Who Waits,” she murmured.

  Mac went to the other pile. His heart jumped. It was, he realized, enough to kill for. It was enough to wrestle a bag of deadly snakes for. It was a lifetime income to be removed from here piece by invaluable piece, judiciously filtered into the general population, slowly enough that no one would be suspicious, steadily enough that a man would be rich for all the rest of his days.

  Anasazi pots. Ancient artifacts, tools and whole scraps of leather, a history of a civilization in one sprawling pile.

  “But why not She Who Waits’s stuff?” he wondered aloud.

  “He must be Navajo,” she said flatly, moving up close to him again. “No way would anyone who believes in chindis touch her or any of her pots, not on purpose. She’s still whole. That’s worse—” She paused to rub her temples, trying to explain. “That’s much worse than isolated bones, a rib here, a skull there. Her whole skeleton is together. A chindi would be more likely to come back to that than to just a piece of itself.”

  “And he doesn’t need her pots,” Mac mused.

&nbs
p; “No.” The thief hadn’t been carting She Who Waits’s pots out of here—he had been removing items from his own stash. The shard on the trail must have gotten lodged in the sole of his shoe when he stumbled into her treasures, working out later as he climbed.

  The fact that she felt no relief told her how long it had been since she had really suspected Mac.

  “This stuff isn’t from this canyon,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t find enough signs of trespass for a dig this big. He must have gathered it from a lot of different illegal sites, then brought it all here to sell as he needed to. The legend would have made Kokopelli’s Canyon a perfect place for his stash. Hardly anyone ever comes in here.”

  “We did,” she said tightly. She started looking around again wildly, her fear coming back.

  “Give him credit. He tried to scare us off first.”

  Mac started looking around, too. There was definitely a damp draft in here, he thought. It had to be coming from somewhere. He started moving, following his nose. The air was coming from behind She Who Waits, yet her head was almost touching the wall.

  “Good news, sweetheart. I don’t think our thief knew there’s another way out of here.”

  Shadow looked at him sharply. “Why? What did you find?”

  “Assuming you’re right about him being Navajo and not wanting anything to do with our girl’s bones, he wouldn’t have come close enough to her to find this.”

  He stepped carefully to the side of her head opposite the pots. Then he pointed up. Shadow followed his gaze and her heart leapt. There was a thin crack at the top of the cave wall.

  Sunlight. Just a glimmer, but it was the sweetest thing she had ever seen in her life.

  “Thank you, Holy Ones,” she whispered.

  He had noticed that she reverted back to her heritage when she was most stressed, so he reached behind him and grabbed her hand to steady her.

  “Don’t thank them quite yet,” he cautioned. “There’s air. We won’t die as long as we stay in here, at least not from suffocation. But it’s going to take a lot of hard work to widen it enough for you to get through.”