The Haunted Mesa (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  Slowly they adjusted, although no doubt hope remained. Some would have loved ones awaiting their arrival in St. Louis or whatever river port might have been their destination. Some were on business, some going to stations upriver, others just adventuring.

  Hope must have lasted long, while they clung to the one thing familiar: the steamboat.

  The main cabin had obviously become a community hall where all gathered. There were tables there, and in one corner the few books aboard had been gathered and a sort of library organized. In another corner a store had been set up for the purpose of passing out what clothing was available as what they possessed wore out. There had been cases of clothing, boots, shoes, and other articles destined for some place upstream. From a tablet on a table, Raglan could see an effort had been made to keep a list from which to compensate the owner if they ever returned.

  There was no evidence of turmoil or confusion. All seemed to have proceeded in an orderly fashion and with decorum.

  Yet there had been trouble, but not from among themselves. Obviously, they needed one another and reacted accordingly. The trouble had come from something outside.

  Bales of cotton had been arranged around the rails, and behind one he found a dozen brass cartridge shells and a Henry rifle. Kneeling down where the marksman must have knelt, he sighted toward shore. Up there in those rocks…

  There were dishes on the tables in the main cabin, and there was still chopped wood alongside the fireplace.

  In the pilot house he found the one skeleton, still wearing dried-out leather boots, clothing in rags.

  The skeleton bore no evidence of violent death. He must have been one of the last to die, as his body remained unburied.

  Johnny came up from the Texas, the officers’ quarters. “Found some powder,” he said. “I don’t know about it.”

  “Probably no good any longer,” Raglan waved a hand. “Pilot, I expect.”

  He looked around again. How must the man have felt? Yet he had stayed with his steamboat. Obviously, he or someone had maintained discipline. Some of the people had gone off exploring, trying to find where they were or some way to return.

  Did they know what had happened?

  “We’d better get going.” Raglan gathered up a small stack of account books and one that might have been a log. “Put these in my pack. I’d like to go over them when there’s time.”

  Erik got to his feet as they came down from the boiler deck. “Sorry. I’m played out. They didn’t pay much attention to feeding me.”

  Mike Raglan studied the distant hills. He knew only approximately where they must go. He started off, crossing the dry riverbed on a diagonal, heading for what seemed to be a dim path as observed from the upper deck of the steamboat. Paths usually led somewhere and were always a time-saver if the direction was right. In cutting across country, a man never knew what he might encounter.

  From time to time he stopped to study their back trail. There would be pursuit, of that he was sure. How soon it would begin and what form it would take he had no idea. There were Varanel ahead of them—at least the patrol he had seen near the Anasazi pueblos. Had they some means of communication? If they knew he was coming, they could set up an ambush.

  Where was Kawasi? And what had happened at the pueblos?

  Several times he sighted vestiges of ruins not unlike the ruins found in Arizona and New Mexico, but there was no time to stop or to collect even the simplest of artifacts for future study.

  The air was very still. Uneasily, Raglan looked around. Nothing, so far as he could see, moved upon the landscape, yet he had a haunted feeling, a sense of imminent disaster. There were no clouds, only that veiled yellow sky from which he could read nothing.

  Mike glanced at Johnny. “Do you feel it, too? What is it?”

  Johnny shrugged. “No idea, but we better get where we’re goin’.”

  Raglan started off again, walking swiftly. He was scared and he did not know why. There was a chill along his spine that worried him. What did his body know that he did not?

  Before they reached the cliffs there was a vast city of tumbled rocks. Huge boulders and slabs that had evidently fallen here in the past, unlike anything he had seen.

  He led the way, following the dim, long-unused path that wound among the rocks, climbing higher and higher. Somewhere up here was where they had come through. He thought he could find the place. He hoped he could.

  The trail went up steeply into the rocks and he hesitated, glancing back down the trail just covered. Somehow the air was no longer clear, and he could make out objects only as far as a few hundred yards away. From here he should have been able to see clear to the dry riverbed, but it was lost in distance. He climbed on, moving faster as he climbed farther, driven by an urgency he did not recognize. When he topped out on the ridge he waited for Erik, who was making slow time of it.

  Johnny walked over to Raglan. The shrewd old eyes studied him warily. “Are we goin’ to make it? I’d surely like to be among my own kind one more time. I’d like to get me a little cabin somewhere, just live out my days.”

  Raglan looked off to his left. She was over there somewhere, among her own people. If he took her away from all that, would she be happy? Was he vain enough to believe he could make it up to her? What right did he have to assume he could?

  Erik’s face was strained and pale when he came off the climb. He looked at Raglan with haunted eyes. “I’d no business getting you into this. I’d no claim on you.”

  “You spoke as if there was somebody with you,” Raglan said.

  Erik shrugged. “It was a dream. She got away, or they let her go.” He sat down on a flat rock. “It was she who left me the sunflowers.”

  Raglan started to speak, then hesitated. Could it be that Kawasi was the one? It was Kawasi who had brought the daybook to him.

  He turned abruptly. “We’ll be getting on.”

  The path led into the rocks, up a steep trail through a narrow crack wide enough for them to move in single file. He looked back. Erik was behind him, Johnny following. He turned back, using his hands to help pull himself up. Here and there a projecting root offered a handhold, yet a subtle change had taken place.

  The rocks now were weirdly shaped, looking like thick molasses frozen in movement. Once they had been molten lava. The climbers emerged suddenly on a small plateau covered with ruins, incredibly ancient. Fallen arches, tumbled columns, and long, unroofed halls, the walls covered with paintings.

  The painted figures resembled some of the kachinas he had seen, but with a difference. The kachinas he had seen in the Hopi and Zuni villages, no matter how grotesque, had always seemed beneficent, but these conveyed a subtle feeling of horror, of fear. These were malevolent beings. “I’ll be glad when I’m out of here,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Know what you mean. I lived with it for years.” Johnny paused, looking around. “Never seen anything like this. Not in all my born days. Figured I’d seen everything over here, but this here’s different. This is all wrong.”

  Mike’s eyes sought the rocks, the alleyways between the ruins. How did one get out of here? Where were they exactly? They were, he was sure, close to the point at which he had come through from the other side, but where was it? Had it been among these ruins? He remembered nothing of the kind.

  “Raglan? Better decide what’s next. They’re comin’.” Johnny pointed back down the trail. Not a half mile away the Varanel, a dozen of them, were coming out of the rocks.

  Slowly Raglan looked around, trying to clear his mind of all but the immediate necessity. It was so much easier to be a follower than a leader. The responsibility could be left to another, and one had only to go along. Yet he was the leader and they trusted in him. He was the one who thought he knew the way back, but now he was near and he had no idea which way to turn. His eyes searched the rocks, trying to
find some vestige of a way. The ruins invited them with numerous openings that might have been streets or passages, yet where did they lead? Were they traps? Were they to end in blind alleys? There was no time to try each one. His first decision had to be the right one.

  “Johnny? Can you slow them up for me? I need some time.”

  Johnny walked to the rocks, looking back down the trail. “This light’s deceivin’, but I’ll try.”

  He paused then and said, “Raglan? There’s some of the Lords of Shibalba among them. They don’t mean for us to get away.”

  Somewhere ahead of them, unless they had been destroyed by the people of the pueblo, was that other patrol of the Varanel. The worst of it was, he had lost track of time. There seemed nothing on which he could depend to count the hours or the days. The light varied so little. Raglan walked away among the ruins, trying to think, to find a way out. It had to be quick.

  Kawasi—what of her? Could he find her again? He paused on the edge of a kiva. Here, too, the roof had fallen in like so many of those he had seen in his own world. He stared into it. No sipapu, of course, but the ventilation was the same, the construction the same. Around the inside were moving figures, or figures that seemed to move, for there was a series of them in different positions.

  His thoughts were suddenly cut sharply by the boom of Johnny’s Sharps Fifty. Standing on tiptoe he looked over a wall and could see a blue-clad figure lying in a deserted path. The man was obviously dead.

  He looked into the kiva again. There was a window there, like the one on the Haunted Mesa, but not a window, exactly. More like one of the T-shaped doors so familiar from the ruins at Mesa Verde. Only this door seemed to open on nothing. Or was it open? He walked closer.

  This was not the way he had come. This certainly could not be the way the Poison Woman or others, including Tazzoc, had crossed to his world.

  Where was Tazzoc?

  He prowled among the ruins. There had to be a way, but how? Where?

  If he could find the way he could send Johnny over with Erik and then he could go for Kawasi.

  The Sharps boomed again.

  He glanced over at Johnny. The old man looked at him, their eyes meeting. “Raglan? I can’t hold ’em long. They’re creepin’ up on us, gettin’ closer. We don’t have much time.”

  Raglan dropped into the kiva, approaching the window. He could not see through it. Open it undoubtedly was, but here, too, what lay beyond was masked by that weird curtain of what appeared to be a thick smoke, or something akin to it.

  Did he dare take a chance? He moved closer, and then, within, he saw the edge of the door slope steeply down, a smooth rock surface.

  Another trap?

  “Mike?” Johnny’s voice was pleading. “For God’s sake!”

  He turned quickly. The old man was struggling to reload, and Raglan could see spots of blue darting among the rocks. He reached for his own gun, and then from behind him a voice spoke. An amused, contemptuous voice.

  “I would not do that if I were you. It is too late, Mr. Raglan, much too late.”

  Mike turned slowly, his hair crawling at the base of his skull.

  It was Zipacna.

  Behind him were a half-dozen Varanel, and among them, Kawasi, obviously a prisoner.

  CHAPTER 41

  Too late?

  Kawasi was a captive. If Johnny was taken he would be immediately killed, and as for Erik and himself, they would either be starving in cells or dead.

  Even as Zipacna spoke, Mike Raglan knew it was too late only if he did nothing. If he was to resist, the time was now, not when he was a prisoner. He drew his pistol and fired.

  Again their confidence worked for him. The great Zipacna was speaking, he who was never disobeyed. For men unaccustomed to resistance, believing themselves invulnerable, Mike’s reaction was too swift. Before their minds could adjust and react, a man was down and dead, another dying, the rest scattering like sheep.

  Zipacna’s reaction had been swift and immediate. Even as he spoke he must have realized Raglan would resist, and his move was to save himself. Poised for instinctive reaction, Zipacna threw himself to the side and leaped for cover.

  Almost as quick was Kawasi’s reaction. She stepped aside and swung a hard fist to the throat of her guard. As she ducked away, Johnny was among them, swinging his clubbed rifle.

  “Run!” Johnny yelled. “There’s others a-comin’!”

  There was an opening among the twisted, malformed lava rocks before them and Mike led the way. Down a steep chute over broken rock, and then a green terrace and a ruin, a few stunted trees. Beyond them a huge mass of rock, weirdly shaped.

  The ruin offered shelter, cover of a sort. A few ruined walls, a kiva, and a roofless corridor ending in a T-shaped doorway.

  It was a semicircular ruin with all the houses facing broken canyon country, somewhat like that between Navajo Mountain and the Colorado.

  “Can we stop?” Erik asked. “I’d like to rest.”

  Once inside the ruin, Raglan paused to listen. “Take it easy,” he suggested. “Johnny? Would you keep a lookout?”

  Somewhere near he could hear the sound of running water. It proved to be a small stream running from under the slide-rock, a stream that had been guided away from its old bed and into a ditch. The water looked clear and fresh.

  “Kawasi? Was it near here?”

  She came to him. “You will go back now?”

  “I must get Erik back, and Johnny.” He turned to look at her. “And you, if you will come with me.”

  Her eyes searched his face. “You are sure? I do not know your world.”

  “You did not like what you saw?”

  “Oh, yes! I like very much some things. Others I not—do not—understand.”

  He looked around. “Kawasi? We’re near, aren’t we? How do we get back?”

  “It is a sometime place,” she said. “I do not know all. He Who Had Magic was the one who knew, and he marked the ways he knew. I think only the door from the kiva is an always place.”

  “We haven’t much time, Kawasi.”

  She led the way through the fallen walls, skirting a kiva and a round tower. She paused some distance from a T-shaped door. “It is there. Or it has been. I do not know.” She looked up at him. “All this is uncertain. We are different from you, for we know our world is a sometime place, and all this where our two worlds come together and cross—all this changes. Now only the Saqua know. The People of the Fire. They come and go as they will, and sometimes people on your side believe them ghosts, or the walking dead. But they will not bother where fire is.”

  “I saw them once, down on Copper Canyon road. There was a bright fire on No Man’s Mesa and they went toward it.”

  “I have seen this, too. The fire calls them back. I do not know why.”

  Raglan glanced toward the door. “That is where we came through? It does not seem the same.”

  “You will see. It is the same. You fell through the door, and got up. You came down here.”

  Turning, he called out. “Erik! Johnny! Come on!”

  He saw them rise, saw them start toward him. Uneasily, he glanced around. The yellow sky remained the same, the green grass, the old, moss-grown stones of the ruined walls, yet something was wrong, very wrong.

  Following Kawasi, he started up the narrow, grassy lane toward the T-shaped door. Behind him were Johnny and Erik.

  Glancing back he saw Zipacna come from the ruins, the other Varanel coming one by one from hiding. He ran, in a stumbling run, following Kawasi. She came to the door and stopped, abruptly.

  “Mike! Mike, it is not here! The opening is gone!”

  He stopped beside her. If ever there had been an opening here it was gone now. Desperately, he glanced around. “Kawasi! Kawasi, there’s got to be a way!”

 
; “It is gone! We are caught!”

  Johnny was loading his rifle. “If we could get to one of my places—”

  “There’s no chance now.” He indicated more of the Varanel coming up from the trees.

  “Be dark soon,” Johnny said.

  The Varanel were down there now, not three hundred yards away, and from where they stood there was no escape. Their little patch of ruins was all there was for them. Through a rift in the rocks he could see the valley of the Forbidden, not so far off as he had imagined. Or was it this deceiving light?

  Vast, black, and ominous. At this distance it seemed much larger than he had believed. It no longer seemed so black. Was that the strange light that preceded darkness? What passed here for a setting sun? Only, no sun was visible.

  “Ain’t like them to attack at night,” Johnny said. “We got until daybreak, if we’re lucky.”

  “There’s not that much time,” Raglan said, “not if what Kawasi said was true.”

  “I don’t know,” Kawasi protested. “Only He Who Had Magic knew. Somehow he worked out the rhythm of the changes. He left writings that explained it, but I have not seen them. He said it was natural law, and only seemed unnatural because we did not understand. He said there were other such places, but they were few, and far apart. This one was all in an area of scarcely more than five of your miles. He said there were occasional openings, and they might happen just anywhere. He said our ideas of dimension and space would have to change before we understood. He said our three-dimensional world was fantasy, something we had become accustomed to and accepted as the all.”

  “We don’t have to understand it,” Erik commented. “We just have to make it work. I’ve an apartment in New York and that’s where I’d like to be.”

  “We followed you, Raglan,” Johnny said. “Up to you, ain’t it?”

  The light had grown dim. “Better gather any wood you see,” Mike suggested. “We’ll want a fire.”