by Brian Hodge
They took a right, heading into the Sandia Game Management Area, far away from the road, back where the campgrounds were located. They drove past scrub oak and sage, tamarisk and chimasa, and stopped at a sign. She glanced at it, then drove onward for a few winding miles. She stopped at the junction of two dirt roads, both of them restricted to vehicles.
Looking around and seeing no one, she proceeded along the dirt road, and the truck jounced with each dip and bump. Finally she came to a flat area, parked, set the handbrake and turned to him.
"This is very close to the spot where we were camping that night," she said. He nodded. "Don't forget this," she said with a faint smile, and handed him the flashlight. "I know it's not traditional, but—"
He accepted it gratefully. "Thanks."
They both got out. He wore jogging shorts, Adidas running shoes, and a knife in a sheath at his side. He'd placed the black fetish in the small pouch and slipped it around his neck. He had braided his hair, not wanting it to get in the way, then had put a sweatband around his forehead. The larger buckskin pouch hung at his side.
Not quite the way his scout forebears had dressed, he thought with sudden humor, but just as effective. Or so he hoped.
He stretched slowly, massaged a bicep, looked around as he did so.
"Over there," she said, pointing to a large group of piñon trees. "I think that's the spot. And Montoya was talking about the hidden place being straight behind where we were.”
He nodded. She laughed a little, sadly, and her eyes were darker than normal. "I'll see you later."
He tried to smile, failed, and kissed her, long, her lips opening under the pressure of his. He breathed deeply of her fragrance, then pulled away.
"Later."
She walked back to the truck—a graceful, swaying walk he'd never noticed before—slid under the wheel, and drove slowly down the road that was more washed-out arroyo than anything else.
He waved, once, but wasn't sure she saw. He watched as she drove away, dust rising behind, and then he could no longer hear the truck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Keenly aware of the silence now, be faced the mountain. No birds sang in the nearby trees, and even the normally whispering wind was silent as it brushed the boughs.
He was alone. And he felt it.
Sweat trickled down his back already, although he hadn't yet moved. A wisp of wind caressed his cheek, and his fingers went to the soft pouch, grasped it. It hung level with his sternum. It would work, would keep him safe. It had to.
Thunder again rumbled, and he smelled the faint odor of ozone.
From where he stood he could look out over the flat reaches of the reservation land of Sandia Pueblo miles away to the west, close to the river, and he could see straight down to the river and to the cluster of houses and trees along it. Distantly on the highway, heading west to Grants and to Arizona beyond, he saw the glint of cars.
Lightning twisted overhead; close by he heard the crack of thunder. The wind shifted, colder now than a moment before, and he wished he'd worn a shirt. Still, activity would keep him warm, and with that he decided he'd stalled long enough.
He breathed deeply once, scanned the oblique face of the mountain and wondered if anything watched him, then began walking toward the area Sunny had indicated. When he reached it, he found a ring of rocks, the inner sides blackened by fire. A broken Jim Beam bottle lay next to it. A compact lay half-buried in the dirt.
Still no sound, no sight of birds in the trees. He walked past the small campground, aware now that he was cut off from the vista to the west.
His running shoes made little noise as he climbed steadily upward, seeking paths in the forest through the trees and shrubs. Here, at the higher elevation, most of the trees had shed their leaves, giving them wintery, skeletal appearances. The leaves formed a grey-brown carpet underfoot and it was hard not to make noise because of the dry leaves.
How had his ancestors slipped through the woods so quietly? It had to take long years of practice. Something a University-trained geologist didn't have. His mother and father had worked at the Inn of the Mountain Gods in Mescalero, where he'd grown up. Before that they'd owned a small store. They'd never worked outdoors. What did they know of tracking, of slipping silently through a forest? He had missed so much, he knew now. So very much. So much … like the old ways.
He didn't know what he was looking for. The entrance to the pueblo—and that had to be where he would find the shadoweyes—might be no more than a slit in the face of the mountain. Easily overlooked.
Something blurred in the corner of his eye, and as he whirled, he reached for the pouch. But when he looked, he saw nothing. Whatever it was had gone—or was hiding from him. He started walking again. He walked for what he thought was miles, and knew that it was heading toward late afternoon as the light was growing dimmer.
It was still silent, the air motionless. As if everything waited.
He licked his lips and looked around slowly. A soft whisper touched his mind, then was gone. Sweat sprang out on his forehead. His heartbeat accelerated, and he could barely breathe.
Fear. It was going to kill him unless he got under control.
The pouch radiated warmth on his skin, as if the black stone inside glowed red-hot. For a moment he almost took the pouch off to check, then stopped, the thong halfway over his head. It was a trick. With the pouch no longer around his neck, he could be tricked somehow—made to drop it, lose it so it could no longer protect him. And then they would come. No. He slipped the pouch back against his chest. Instantly it seemed cooler.
A few minutes later the whispers returned, the coaxing voices calling to him. He had trouble keeping his eyes open, and he yawned. He wanted to sleep, wanted to curl up at the foot of one of these big trees, pull a pile of warm leaves over him and just doze. Doze for as long as he wanted. Doze and not worry about a thing. Doze…
His head jerked up. He had almost fallen face first to the ground. He stopped, wiped the sweat from the back of his neck, drank from the canteen he was carrying. The water was tepid, but at least it was wet and helped his dry lips.
Another trick.
He sat on a flat rock then. The trees crowded together here; he felt far more closed in than where he'd entered the forest. He was above the piñon-juniper line now, up into the Ponderosa pines, almost at eight thousand feet above sea level. The bark blurred into a brown-grey, some with streaks of black as though they'd been charred by flames, and again he heard the deep-voiced thunder, only it was closer 'than it had been before.
He would never find them. He would look for hours … days … go right by them, and they would laugh in their whispery ways, and the only way he'd find them was if they wanted him to … when they called him to them … when they called …
Something rustled in the bushes, and he squinted into the gloom.
A flash of darkness. That was all. But it was enough. Instantly he was on his feet. He ran after the shadow, oblivious to the noise made in his pursuit, and felt the slap of leather against his side, against his chest. He could still see the shadow, could see it race away from him, drop back to become tantalizingly close, then draw farther and farther away.
He had to keep track of it, had to find where it would go.
The sky changed, fading to a yellow-white color as lightning charge followed lightning charge, ripping through the atmosphere. A tree to his right exploded as it was struck. Wood hurled outward, pieces of bark striking him, stinging his skin.
He had lost track of the creature. Damnit. He brought his fist down on his thigh in frustration, ground his teeth. He was close, very close now, to the face of the mountain. Piles of boulders, fallen long ago from higher slopes, lay heaped at the bottom. The vegetation was sparser, more stunted than in the actual forest.
He still did not hear any birds singing. Had the shadows driven them all away? And where the hell was the pueblo? He would be running out of light in a few hours, and then he would have to work
by moonlight. He didn't want that, not when the night gave them powers, gave them more strength.
He fingered the pouch again, unable to keep his hands away for very long, and wondered if the stone could help him find the pueblo. The bag was cooler than before. He started up again, winding his way along the base of the mountain slope. He passed giant boulder after giant boulder, paused at times to push at them to see if they would move. They wouldn't. Again he touched the pouch. The cold shocked his fingers. He frowned. It was downright icy now. He climbed up past outcroppings of rock, slipped once and scraped his hand along a rock, left a smear of blood on the gritty surface.
He licked the blood off and stared up and saw it. A slight cleft against the face of the cliff. He peered at it, wondering if it were a shadow, some trick of the shifting clouds. From this distance he couldn't tell. It was too far above him. He would have, to climb up there. What appeared to be handholds formed a rough path up the sheer cliff.
His hand went to the pouch, but stopped inches before it reached the leather. A pulsating coldness radiated from the pouch, spread across his fingers, frosting them with white ice crystals. He tried to move them, forced them to bend, felt the crystals breaking, shattering like fragile icicles. He cried out with pain as hot pokers jabbed up into his arm, as fire spread through his veins. With his other hand he grabbed his right one, jerked it away. A faint blue tinged his fingers, darkened his fingernails, but otherwise the hand was all right. Against his chest the bag was warm, not cold. He frowned, took a drink from his canteen, wiped and flexed his hands.
He reached up, grabbed the first hollow, slowly eased himself up. It was time-consuming, inching his way up the vertical face of the rock. He would place his foot carefully in a hollow, extend an arm to the next notch and pull up, one hollow at a time. Slow and tiring, and he wanted nothing more than to rest and take a long, slow drink of water. His hands grew slick with sweat, and from time to time he had to pause to wipe them, one at a time, on his shorts.
He looked down, then wished he hadn't. He had come well over a hundred feet up from the base. One slip of his hand, one fumble with a foot, and he would crash within seconds to the ground, smashing his body on the sharp rocks below.
He closed his eyes, feeling the vertigo sweep through him, nauseating him. His body swayed, bulged away from the rock, and the toe of one shoe found only loose gravel in the handhold. The foot slipped, missed the hollow, and his body slammed against the rock. He opened his eyes, stared into the grainy surface of the cliff, sought desperately to heave himself upward. Finally his foot found the hollow again, and he kicked away the gravel. Bouncing wildly, it clattered like hail down the cliff. Secure once more, he rested for a moment, waiting for his heart to stop its erratic pounding, for his breath, so harsh in his ears, to quiet. Sweat poured down his body, mingled with the dust that coated his skin. When he had calmed down, he once more began his ascent.
The crack widened as he climbed upward, and now he could see it was a true break in the cliff face and not a mere fracture in the granite. He reached it, then heaved himself upward, his back foot dislodging a cluster of rocks that threatened to throw him off balance. The fissure extended only a few feet above his head, and he had to turn sideways to slip into it. Overhead the rock met to form a solid chunk once more, and he could feel the solid weight of the mountain pressing downward toward him. The avenue inside stretched into blackness; the two sides of the rock pushed inward, coming toward him, grinding together, crushing him, pounding his body into a bloody pulp of sinews and bone.
He took a deep breath, shut his eyes momentarily. It was all an illusion. Nothing more. The rock wouldn't crush him; it had stood stationary for countless centuries, and it wasn't about to shift now.
He opened his eyes, stepped forward. As he walked slowly, one hand trailing against a wall, he found the roof of the fissure dropping, forcing him to move on his hands and knees. Underneath, sand scraped, stinging his palms and knees.
He lost track of all time in the blackness. Thought once that he saw twin yellow lights ahead, and stopped, squinting into the darkness until his eyes watered. He listened for noise, but all he heard was the harsh rise and fall of his breath echoing in his ears. He knew his breath pounded into the rock, cracking it, splitting the granite into minute lines. He caught his breath, held it for a moment, then slowly expelled it. The act served to calm him.
He knew now why men and women panicked underground. Why they lost all sense of time and direction. He didn't know how long he'd been there, didn't know how far he'd come. It might have been a few feet; it might have been a mile or more.
He squatted on his haunches, his head brushing the roof, uncapped his canteen and drank deeply. Then rubbed the bag on his chest. It was warm, and the touch somehow reassured him. He could go on now.
He crawled on through the tunnel, farther and farther away from the outside. Farther and farther away from safety. Finally a soft tendril of air brushed against his face. Ahead light glimmered, and he could once more walk upright. The light increased, forcing him to squint until his eyes adjusted. Finally he was out of the fissure, standing on a ledge jutting out of the rock.
He looked around. Stared at what he saw.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It was the pueblo.
The sun had already set behind the steep walls, surrendering the canyon to shadow. Cliff faces, devoid of handholds, thrust upward on either side of him for hundreds of feet. It was like being in the bottom of a stone well. Far up in the grey sky a solitary star gleamed.
He stepped forward on the ledge, looked around. To one side broken rubble trailed downward. He half-walked, half-slid until he stood on the bottom of the canyon and the pueblo was right above him.
There the cliff face yawned,, like the great mouth of some granite monster. There, in the low-ceilinged cave, the nameless Indians of thousands of years ago had built their home. He thought with admiration of the back-breaking labor that had gone into the construction of the pueblo. Each adobe brick had been mixed and individually formed on the floor of the canyon; there it had dried, over a long period of time, for there weren't many hours of sunlight here; and when there were sufficient numbers, the bricks had been set carefully into baskets woven of yucca fiber and hauled up to the workers laboring in the cave. The rooms were all small, about eight by ten feet, with ceilings from four to eight feet high; there were no windows, only narrow, low doors with high sills. Long, heavy poles laid over the walls made the roof, and that was thatched with sticks and twigs, then covered with a thick mud plaster. Inside he knew he'd find a smooth floor of hard clay washed with animal blood. Burnt gypsum was used to polish the walls.
In the vanishing light the mud of the adobe had darkened, turned almost black. Even blacker were the openings of the doorways to the adobe rooms that stared at him like mournful eyes.
Nothing stirred along the bottom of the canyon; no birds sang; nothing grew. The ground was bleak, barren, almost as if it had once been scorched and had never recovered.
He scanned the cliff, searching for a pathway leading to the pueblo, wondering when he found none of the yucca fiber ladders used by the early Indians.
Rubble was strewn at the base of the cliff. Apparently the pueblo dwellers had thrown down their broken crockery, and he walked through pottery shards ankle-deep. There were also the crumbling remains of sandals made of yucca fiber and some scraps of dried leather that once must have been rawhide.
He proceeded with care, from time to time scuffing some of the shards aside with the toe of his shoe. Finally, behind an angular boulder stained with grey lichen, he found a rough ladder of piñon branches strapped together with leather thongs. It was long; but he thought it would reach. He set it against the rock, began to climb.
The rough bark scratched at his palms, and from time to time he had to stop and rub his hands, again one at a time, on his shorts.
The wind whistled through the cleft in the cliff where he'd entered the canyon, but t
hat was the only sound. He did not even hear the distant hum of insects.
He stopped, looked up and cursed. He'd misjudged. And it was a hell of a distance, too—the ladder ended a full seven feet below the lip of the cave.
Damn. He stared up. What next? He had come too far to turn back. And he couldn't. He had to find the creatures, had to so that he could be free.
He reached up with one hand, groped along the rock until he found a handhold just inches above the top rung of the ladder. He eased up, reached for another depression.
Found it. He carefully searched for hand- and footholds, and finding them, he began inching himself upward until his feet no longer touched the ladder. When he had almost reached the top of the cliff, there was a scraping noise below him. He looked down, saw the ladder fall sideways, hit the ground with a resounding thud.
He licked his dry lips. There would be no turning back for him now. He was trapped.
He looked back up the cliff, groped for the next handhold and hauled himself up level with the floor of the cave. He managed to crawl into the cave, then sat, trying to catch his breath.
He found he couldn't straighten completely. He had to hunch his shoulders and bend forward slightly, for otherwise his head would scrape along the top of the cave. As his eyes adjusted to the further darkness, he looked around. All he saw were the walls of the adobe houses.
His breathing grew sharper as he looked around. The shadoweyes were here. He knew they had to be. He caressed the pouch at his chest, fingered the outline of the black stone. What did it look like now? Did it glow with a dark light? Or did it look the same as when he'd first taken it from the protective paper at the park?
The park, and Sunny. How long ago that had been; yet it had only been earlier in the day. No, had been a lifetime ago. Centuries before. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, sucked in a deep breath.