by Mark Lukens
Palmer parked in front of the trailer and shut the engine off. It was deathly quiet now. He sat there like he was reluctant to get out, looking around.
“It’s not here,” David told Palmer. He would be able to tell if the Ancient Enemy was here, he would feel that prickling on his skin, the goosebumps raising, that electric feeling in the air around him like the air was suddenly ionized, that sense that someone—or something—was right behind him, sneaking up on him, about to touch him.
“Nobody lives here now?” Palmer asked.
David shook his head no. “An old lady owns all of this property around here. She let Joe Blackhorn live here. When he died, she just left his trailer and buildings here. She gave a lot of his stuff to his distant relatives and friends, and donated the rest of it.”
“She doesn’t want to rent this place to somebody?”
“Nobody wants to live here. A lot of people were scared of Joe Blackhorn. Some believe his ghost is here now.”
Palmer didn’t look like he believed that, but he looked worried that a demon might be here. He got out of the truck with Begay’s gun in his hand.
David got out and walked to the front door of the trailer, climbing the three steps up to the door.
“Is the door locked?” Palmer asked from the sandy and weedy area that served as the front yard.
David didn’t answer. He knew the door would probably be unlocked—many older Navajo didn’t believe in locking their doors. He twisted the doorknob and opened the door.
It was a little stuffy inside the trailer. The air was musty but not too bad. The trailer was mostly empty; all of the furniture and Joe Blackhorn’s possessions were gone. The handmade wooden bookshelves were still there, still attached to the living room walls. David swore he could still smell the old books in this room.
Memories came flooding back as David walked deeper into the living room. He had prayed in here and learned in here, studied in here. And outside by the fire pit he had listened to Joe Blackhorn tell stories of his ancestors, stories that had never been written down, some stories never uttered between two people who weren’t Navajo; they were secret stories and powerful songs.
“The power is already in you,” Joe Blackhorn had said while sitting across from him at the fire pit, the firelight dancing and reflected in his dark eyes, the creases and wrinkles in his face seemingly deeper and darker. “Energy is all around you, every atom vibrating at its own frequency. Use that frequency. Use that energy. Nothing in this world is still, that is an illusion. Reality is only an illusion.”
Joe Blackhorn used a mixture of science and ancient teachings in his lessons, and when he explained things scientifically it had all seemed plausible to David. But his teachings had also been frustrating because so much of it relied on David’s own instinct, and David didn’t even know how to control any of it yet.
“You will learn,” Joe Blackhorn had said so many times. “It will come to you. You have years to learn this. Let it come to you naturally.”
But right now David didn’t have years to learn how to summon his powers. Maybe it was too late for him, and maybe it was too late for everyone else.
Palmer entered the living room from outside. He still had Begay’s gun in his hand. He looked around at the empty living room and kitchen, then at David. “This place is empty. You sure there’s something here for you?”
“Billy Nez said there was. I believe him.”
“Do you know what you’re looking for?”
“No.”
“If this thing he left for you was so important, why didn’t he just give it to you when he was still alive?”
David shrugged. Trying to explain how Joe Blackhorn’s mind worked would be a waste of time; David didn’t understand it and he definitely wouldn’t be able to make Agent Palmer understand it. “I think he left something to me like someone leaves something in a will.”
Palmer just sighed, but he seemed to accept and understand that answer. He walked into the empty kitchen, looking around like he might spot an object sitting on a counter or inside a cupboard.
I stopped coming to see him. That was the real reason Joe Blackhorn hadn’t given him the item before now. But David didn’t want to explain that to Agent Palmer either; he didn’t want to tell him how he had turned his back on Joe Blackhorn.
David walked over to the empty bookshelves. He could almost still see all of the old books, the titles and author names on the spines, hardback books shoved in with paperback books, no real order to the collection. He remembered the small objects on the shelves in front of the books: a small animal skull, the sextant, a small figure carved from wood. He had never been contacted by the old woman about Joe Blackhorn’s things. Maybe Joe Blackhorn had been angry at him the last few years for not continuing with the training, or maybe the old woman was angry. David had a few things Joe Blackhorn had given him over the years, a stack of books, carvings from pieces of wood and stone. That was enough for him.
He walked down the hallway into the bedroom. The furnishings and décor in here had been simple: a bed, a table next to it with a lamp, a dresser, and a wooden chair. But the room was empty now. There was a bathroom off of the bedroom with a small shower in it. The bathroom was bare and clean, nothing left behind.
Billy Nez had said that Joe Blackhorn had hidden something here, something that could help with a spirit walk. David tried to guess what it might be. In all the years of teaching that Joe Blackhorn had done with David, he had never taught him about spirit walks, and he had never used objects or talismans. David had never even been on a spirit walk before.
But then again maybe he had been on a spirit walk already; maybe his dreams were unconscious spirit walks. He’d seen the killer in his dreams; maybe he had been journeying through other dimensions to get to the killer in those dreams.
“Physicists know there are other dimensions than ours,” Joe Blackhorn had said. “They can’t prove it yet, but they know those other dimensions are real. Are they alternate realities or just different planes of existence? They can’t say for sure. But they know they exist—it isn’t science fiction.”
David thought about the spirit walk again, a different dimension. He had summoned a doorway to the Ancient Enemy’s world before inside the church in the ghost town. Could he summon that doorway again? And if he could, then could he enter that world?
But he had already been in the Ancient Enemy’s world. In Hope’s End he had entered that doorway and taken the Ancient Enemy with him. He couldn’t remember anything now about that world, but he had survived it before because he was standing here now.
David felt a little better as he walked back out to the living room. Palmer was back by the front door, waiting impatiently. David went into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator; it was empty and clean.
“Still didn’t find anything?” Palmer asked.
“No.” David closed the door, thinking again about all the training he had done with Joe Blackhorn here. Some of it inside this trailer, some of it out by the fire pit, much of it in . . .
“. . . the hogan,” David whispered.
He shot past Palmer and went outside, almost running to the hogan in the distance at the foot of the hill. He opened the wood door that faced east and entered the hogan. It was empty inside, all of Joe Blackhorn’s possessions gone. The only thing left was the old fire pit in the middle of the hogan, the pit surrounded by rocks, a hole in the center of the ceiling for the smoke to escape.
David sighed. There was nothing in here. He walked over to the fire pit, but it was empty. He even sifted through old ashes, but he didn’t find anything. He stood back up and walked over to the wall, walking around the large circular room, running his fingers along the wood posts that made up the walls. More wood posts crisscrossed each other to make up the ceiling. As he walked he swore he could still smell the faint odor of wood smoke inside. He swore he could still hear Joe Blackhorn’s chanting.
Whatever Joe Blackhorn had left for him
, it was in this hogan—David was sure of that. But where? He had to slow down and concentrate, feel where Joe Blackhorn would have hidden it.
He kept walking next to the walls of the circular hogan. He kept running his hand along the wooden beams that stood up next to each other, lashed together and packed with mud years ago. And then he stopped. A part of one of the thick wooden posts felt loose. He dug his fingers in around the edge of the loose area and pulled off a piece of wood revealing a rectangular hole cut into the wood. A small wooden box was stuffed into the hole with a white envelope on top of it. He pulled the box out and opened it, sifting through the few contents inside: a small jar of what looked like red paint (but David knew it was owl’s blood), a small paintbrush, a few smooth round black rocks, a small stick with beads and feathers attached to it, and one lone eagle feather.
After setting the box on the floor for a moment, David opened the envelope.
“Is that it?” Palmer asked from the doorway.
David didn’t respond. He unfolded the two pieces of paper he had pulled out of the envelope. One was a letter from Joe Blackhorn, both a goodbye letter and a set of instructions. The other paper was a hand drawn map.
“It’s a map,” David told Palmer as he folded up the papers and stuffed them back into the envelope. He folded the envelope in half and shoved it down into his pants pocket.
“To the ghost town?”
“No. I already know how to get there.”
“A map to where?”
“A map to Bone Canyon.”
“Bone Canyon? What’s that?”
“It’s a place where mass burial sites of the Anasazi were found a few years ago along with some kivas.” He thought of Stella just then and how she would love to see those ancient burial sites. But these sites had been kept secret from outsiders. Many of the Navajo were tired of scientists coming in and unearthing the dead, taking the bones away to be studied and kept in some drawer at a university, or worse, displayed in a museum. This burial ground had been left just the way it had been found, and no one ever went out there. But Joe Blackhorn had gone there over two years ago, and now he wanted David to go to a certain spot in Bone Canyon for some reason. And at the spot he wanted David to go to, he had drawn a medicine wheel there on the map.
Palmer stepped outside the hogan.
David took one last long look around inside the hogan. He picked up the wooden box and followed Palmer outside.
Palmer looked up at the early afternoon sky. He seemed to be calculating the hours until sundown. And then he looked at David. “What now?”
“We go to the Bone Canyon. We go to the place on the map that Joe Blackhorn drew.”
Palmer didn’t say anything for a long moment; he just stared out at the never-ending hills.
David thought Palmer was going to refuse to take him to Bone Canyon, but Palmer took a deep breath and then exhaled just as slowly, like he had finally made up his mind about something. “You ready to go now?”
David nodded.
“Then let’s get going.”
David’s cell phone dinged, it was the sound of a text message. He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, his heart leaping with hope.
“You’ve got cell service way out here?” Palmer asked, looking at his own phone and frowning. “I can’t get anything out here.”
“No service,” David said, reading the text message. “It’s from Stella.”
“What did she say?”
David handed his phone to Palmer.
“Help me,” he said, reading the text. “Where is she?”
“That’s not her,” David told Palmer. “The Ancient Enemy’s got them now.”
CHAPTER 43
Begay
Hospital – New Mexico
Begay woke up in bed. For just a few seconds he didn’t know where he was. He knew he wasn’t in his own bed or at his own house. No, he wasn’t at his house because there were dead people at his house. The Ancient Enemy had been there.
“You’re awake.”
Begay turned to his left and saw Angie sitting in a chair near the window. The blinds were drawn but the late afternoon light was still shining through them. She smiled at him as she got up and walked over to his bedside.
“I guess I dozed off a little,” Begay said. Now he remembered coming here to the hospital this morning. From the look of the golden light coming through the blinds he guessed it was close to sundown. “What time is it?”
“You can go back to sleep if you want to,” Angie told him. “The doctors told me you don’t have a concussion. They were amazed about that.”
“I’ve got a hard head.”
“I told them that. You’ve got some bruising and they stitched up the cut on your head. And your right knee is sprained.”
Begay moved his leg and felt a sharp pain shooting through his knee. He winced, closing his eyes for a moment. “Have you been back to the house?”
“No. I called Sarah next door a few hours ago. She said the police and FBI were still there then.”
Begay nodded. He figured an investigation like that would take a while. “The bodies,” he said.
“I talked to a nurse. They took the bodies here for the night until they can arrange to transport them to a lab in Albuquerque.”
“Awenita,” Begay whispered. He hadn’t seen her dead body, but Angie had told him about her earlier, before the ambulance had taken him away. “You hear from David?”
Angie shook her head no.
Palmer’s with David. He’ll protect David. And David will protect him.
It’s going to come back. That’s what David had said.
Begay struggled to sit up.
“Hold on,” Angie said like she was suddenly annoyed, but he knew she loved to help him. She pushed a button on a remote control attached to a wire, inclining the bed, the electric motor humming from underneath the bed. When he was sitting up, she laid the remote control down on the bed beside him.
“I need to get out of here,” Begay said.
“They want to keep you overnight.”
“For what? You just said I don’t have a concussion.”
“They just want to keep you for observation.”
“To pad the bill.”
Angie frowned, her eyes smoldering; it was the look she got right before they argued and she erupted in anger. “I know what you want to do. Where you want to go.”
“He needs my help.”
“What can you do for him?” she asked. “Only David can fight that thing.” She touched his hand, laying her hand over his. “You got lucky. We both did. Why can’t we have that?”
“We got lucky because Agent Palmer showed up when he did. He saved your life. If he hadn’t been there . . .” Begay didn’t want to think about that. Angie had told him that the killer had been about to cut her throat. She still had a faint red line across her neck, and there would be bruising there later. A few more seconds and she would have been dead.
“Yes, and I’m thankful he was there.”
“And now I need to help him.”
Angie was quiet for a few seconds. “You don’t have to,” she whispered. “When that man had the knife up to my throat I thought you were dead. I didn’t even fight it anymore; I just wanted the man to get it over with. I didn’t want to go on without you.” She still had her hand over his, squeezing.
“Don’t say that,” he said.
She didn’t reply; she just squeezed his hand a little harder.
“You know this isn’t over, don’t you?” he told her. “That thing isn’t going to stop coming after us. It will find another serial killer or try to scare someone else so badly that they will try to kill us. Try to kill David.”
Angie sighed. “All those years you were a policeman I worried something would happen to you. I know you never worried about it, but I did. Every night, night after night, year after year, I worried that you would get shot or get in an accident trying to chase down a drunk driver. And now here w
e are. You’re finally retired. I finally have you home and out of danger, and now you want to go find danger again.”
“The Ancient Enemy wants David, but I think it also wants us. I think it wants revenge.”
“Maybe David can send it away. He did before. That’s what you said.”
Begay had told Angie about what had happened in the ghost town. On the way home that day he had stopped and bought a six-pack of Coca-Cola. He brought the cans of soda right into the house, not even trying to hide them from her. He sat down and opened up a can and chugged half of it down like it was a beer. Begay would never drink alcohol, he’d told Palmer the truth about that, but he needed something that day, even if it was bad for him; he needed something to celebrate the fact that he had survived the demon he had seen in the church, survived an evil unimaginable to him only a day before. And Angie never scolded him about the cans of soda that day.
He had told her everything that day, from the bodies in the cave at the dig site, to meeting Agent Palmer, to tracking down Billy Nez, and eventually going out to Joe Blackhorn’s place to track down Cole, Stella, and David. He told her about the ghost town and everything that had happened there.
Angie had sat there in her chair, quiet the whole time, letting him get everything out. When he was done there were four empty cans of soda in front of him, and he could tell by the look in his wife’s eyes that she had believed every word he had told her.
Now she had that same look in her eyes. He knew she wanted to keep him safe, but she knew she couldn’t really do that. But she also didn’t want to break his spirit—that would be worse than keeping him safe. He was the man she had married, a man who helped people, a man who put other people’s safety and lives before his, a man who ran towards danger and not away from it.
Angie got up and went over to the closet near the door that led out to the hall. She got his coat and shoes out and brought them back to the bed.