Ancient Enemy

by Michael McBride

  Smears that looked a whole lot like footprints.

  I followed them deeper into the cavern, retracing the steps of what looked like the partial impressions of bare feet. Question mark-shapes where the ball of the foot and outside edge contacted the stone, the dot of the heel. Faint circles above it from the toes. Leading me inexorably into the darkness. From one mound to the next. Each of them surrounded by spatters of phosphorescence, like drops of paint hurled from a wet brush.

  The flow of air grew stronger, colder. The smell reminded me of the rocky banks of a river after the first frost of the year. Damp. The footprints faded to the mere occasional smudge. My pulse rushed in my ears.

  Whoomph. Whoomph. Whoomph.

  The sound of my breathing grew louder, harsher, as it echoed back at me from the darkness. Despite alternating them, both of my arms were sore from shaking the rattle.

  The rear wall of the cavern materialized from the shadows behind a jagged crest of stalagmites nearly as tall as I was. The stalactites protruding from the roof above them produced the impression of a giant fanged mouth preparing to close. The wall behind them was covered with flowstone, but even through the years of accumulation I could see the petroglyphs that had been carved into it. There were two large spirals, etched in a counterclockwise direction. They didn’t tell a story like those inside the House of Many Windows, but their message was every bit as clear.

  The spiral was a common motif with pretty much every native population in the New World. It had been assigned many meanings, depending on which direction it turned. To some peoples, it was both a literal and metaphorical journey of ascension or descension, of life or death. To others, a sign used to mark trails, either as an indication of safety or as a warning. To the Hopi—whom, along with the Zuni, many believed absorbed the surviving Anasazi into their ranks when they abandoned this area—it marked the gates to the underworld, the portal from which the Hisatsinom emerged into the Fourth World from the Third World, where Masau’u—god of war, death, and fire—reigned.

  Hisatsinom was what the Hopi called the Anasazi.

  Regardless of the actual meaning those who’d carved the symbols had in mind while doing so, I couldn’t imagine they suggested good things would be found through the opening in the rock between them.

  At some point in time, a massive slab of stone had been shoved in front of it and left to accumulate eons of flowstone, which had essentially absorbed it into the wall. I could see where that flowstone had been chiseled away and someone had attempted to reseal it several times with concrete of varying color and consistency. The most recent was reinforced with rebar and chicken wire and appeared to have held quite well, with the exception of a section at its base, near the smooth rock floor, where a small passage had been carved. Barely the size of the entrance to a mountain lion’s den. Maybe I could have found a way to wriggle inside with the right combination of motivation and lubrication, but for the life of me, I couldn’t bring myself to take even a single step closer.

  The ground all around it glowed with phosphorescent spatters and smudges. The opening itself was limned with it. If that was indeed blood, as I suspected, then whatever tunneled through the solid rock had been so desperate to free itself from its confines that it had nearly flayed its skin from its bones in the process.

  I shivered against the gentle breeze seeping from the bowels of the earth and recoiled from the same scent I had experienced so recently while collecting the remains of the sheep.

  The movement of air through the mountain sounded like whispers.

  I’d never felt such an instinctive desire to leave a place in my entire life. It was a compulsion bordering on panic. The kind of innate fear response that defies all reason and logic and one against which I was helpless to resist.

  I didn’t look at the shadows imprisoned in the rocks or dwell on the bloody footprints I used as a guide. All I knew was that I wouldn’t be able to breathe until I reached the surface.

  Something was terribly wrong down there in the darkness. It was a distinct sensation I couldn’t quite define. A feeling, maybe.

  A feeling that I wasn’t alone.

  TWELVE

  The sun was a crimson crescent settling behind the mountains to the west when I finally crawled back out into the fresh air. It bled the mesas red and made the accumulation of snow sparkle as though infused with shards of rubies. At best, I had maybe an hour before the last hint of light faded and even if I pushed Yanaba, we’d be lucky to get home before stars filled the sky. And then I was going to have to make a choice I really wished I didn’t have to make.

  The scratches around my grandfather’s window worried me the most. If whatever was out there wanted to get in badly enough, I had to believe it would find a way to do so. But if I elected to defend our home, I feared it would cost us the rest of our flock, which would damn us for the coming year. We couldn’t afford to replace them or lose the income they generated, let alone the lambs they would produce to keep us going for the foreseeable future. Yet the thought of risking the lives of my mother and grandfather was more than I could bear. Despite the fact that she was rarely sober enough to acknowledge my existence and my grandfather wasn’t expected to recover from the stroke, they were still the only family I had and there were already too few things I could truly call my own.

  By the time we thundered through the dry streambeds and the maze of canyons to reach the trailer, the sun had long since set. I wished I’d allowed myself more time to prepare for the long night ahead, but there was no point in dwelling on what could have been. I just needed to get everything done as quickly as I could and pray I wasn’t too late. Unfortunately, there was one variable I hadn’t taken into account.

  My mother was sitting on the stairs of the porch when I came galloping down the drive. My heart nearly stopped when I saw the scarlet glow from her cigarette. It highlighted her face with an ethereal red glow. Part of me just wanted to get the confrontation over and done with. Judging by her expression, though, there was little I could do to make her any madder than she already was. So I pretended not to see her and went around the side of the trailer to lock up the horses and the goats and the chicken coop before making my way back around the house in a darkness that felt positively sentient, as though eyes followed me from behind every trunk of every tree and from every shadow they cast.

  She started in on me the moment I came around the trailer.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “I had to take care of some things.”

  “Couldn’t be bothered to leave a note? Didn’t think I might worry when it got dark and I hadn’t heard from you all day?”

  “I didn’t think about it. Like I said, I had to take care of some things.”

  “Like butchering the ewe we lost last night?” She took a deep drag, blew the smoke straight up into the still night air. “Were you going to tell me or did you figure I wouldn’t notice?”

  “I did what I could, Mom.”

  “All of the others look like they’ve been beaten with a hammer. Call that doing what you could?”

  “I’m not the only one who lives here, you know.”

  The words were out before I even knew they were coming.

  “That right?”

  I was too tired to have this conversation and my mind was still preoccupied with trying to make sense of what I’d seen inside the mountain. A part of me wanted to wash my hands of the whole thing, to just drop it in my mother’s lap and let her deal with it. She was the adult, after all. Why was I the only one who had to act like one?

  “Go back to your couch, Mom.”

  Her hand moved with a speed I never would have ascribed to her. My head snapped to the side. I immediately pressed my palm to my cheek. She caught me so off-guard I could do nothing but stand there staring at her. My cheek stung, but that wasn’t the worst of it. I felt like the impact had caused a part of my world to come unglued, or maybe I’d been somehow dislodged from it. I struggled to make sense of what
had just happened. Never in my life had she struck me. I’d never even dreamed she was capable of doing so.

  I watched the same thoughts play out in the expression on her face. She couldn’t find any words either. She looked at her hand, dumbfounded, as though seeing it for the first time, and then back at me. I caught a shimmer of tears in her eyes before she turned and trundled up the stairs. The loose planks made a squeaking sound and the screen door closed behind her with a resounding clap.

  I stared at the door, then down at the cigarette butt that burned unevenly on the ice at the foot of the porch. Watched the smoke swirl and eddy, following a spiral path of its own creation without any influence from the breeze. I finally ground it beneath my shoe and ascended the steps into the house.

  There was a plate on the counter in the kitchen. I peeled off the plastic wrap and looked down at the cut of meat—rare, just how I liked it—and potatoes for a long moment before closing my eyes. I wished I could kick myself. It was an unprecedented gesture on my mother’s behalf. An effort to reach out to me that I’d thrown back in her face without even knowing it. She’d spent her day cooking in this wooden box and then the evening sitting at the table with two steaming plates of food, waiting for me to come home. And when I finally did, I’d done everything in my power to screw up a night she must have envisioned would go in a dramatically different direction.

  I wanted to cry. Just go into my room, curl up in my bed, and cry like I hadn’t cried since I was little. I was too tired to think straight. I wanted to fix the situation, but I didn’t have the time. Not if I intended to keep my family and our stock safe from something I couldn’t find the words to explain. And even if I could, I was certain she wouldn’t believe me. The only person who might was my grandfather and he wasn’t in any position to offer advice.

  I couldn’t deal with that now. I had to force it out of my mind and get on with what I knew I had to do.

  I shoveled the food into my mouth as I could as fast as I could, then chased it down with a few spoonfuls of instant coffee grounds and a tepid glass of water. My stomach seethed in protest. A couple splashes of water in my face and I was on my way to my room, where I changed into the darkest clothes I could find.

  I was nearly out the door again when I glanced into the living room and saw the flicker of the television’s glow upon an empty couch with blankets bunched at the foot. No smoke swirled lazily from the ashtray on the coffee table and the customary row of empty bottles was conspicuously absent. I quietly entered the room and searched for any sign of my mother. I couldn’t spare the time for another confrontation, especially if she was outside on the porch again. I wouldn’t be able to sneak past her and I doubted after everything that had happened tonight she’d just let me take off, let alone slip the rifle out from under the skirt where I’d stashed it.

  Her voice from my left. Soft. A tone I hadn’t heard since I was much, much younger.

  I followed it to my grandfather’s bedroom. The door wasn’t quite all the way closed, so I peeked through the crack. My mother sat in the chair beside the bed, just as I had last night, holding her father’s hand. She looked down when she spoke, whether because she couldn’t see him as he was now or because she was ashamed, I could only guess.

  “I even screw things up when I’m trying to make them right.”

  She stroked the back of his hand. Wiped the tears from her cheeks with her shoulders. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my mother anything resembling vulnerable and felt like a voyeur for spying on her in her moment of weakness. I saw her for the girl she was inside, the frightened child who needed her father to pull her into his arms and tell her everything was going to be all right. I knew how that felt. Believe me. My heart broke for her.

  “Please…tell me what to do.”

  I looked away from my mother and caught my grandfather’s wide, frightened eyes. He didn’t have to say a word to me. I recognized the sadness and felt a crippling sorrow for having let him down, when all along we’d both known that what I’d wanted more than anything was for my mother to try. And when she finally did, I treated her like a drunk, with the same level of contempt that everyone else around here did.

  Tonight she’d needed me as much as I needed her.

  I turned away and tried to refocus on the task at hand. I felt so small and alone and helpless.

  And scared.

  I exited through the front door as silently as I could and descended the stairs on the feet of a cat. The rifle was still under the trailer where I left it. I slung it over my shoulder and climbed up into the branches of the cottonwood that shaded the trailer in the late afternoon. Found a thick bough that would bear my weight and settled in for what promised to be one of the longest nights of my life.

  From this vantage point, I could see straight down onto the roof and the into the back yard, if I leaned to my left and looked straight down. To my right, the stables and just a hint of the goat pen. In the distance I could see the trees lining the river and, beyond them, the pasture full of sheep I feared I’d chosen to sacrifice.

  NOVEMBER 10TH

  THIRTEEN

  I awoke in a panic. I don’t know when I dozed off, only that I had. It was a miracle I hadn’t fallen from the tree and broken my neck. Or worse, allowed whatever was out there to get past me.

  I blinked and shook my head to dispel the remnants of a dream I could already no longer remember. I was too tired to be doing this now. The cold didn’t help matters, either. My legs ached and my body seemed slow to respond as I tried to find something resembling a comfortable position. I would have given anything to rise to my full height and stretch, but I could barely shift my butt on the branch as it was.

  Tonight was even darker than last night had been. If there was a moon, I couldn’t see it. The starlight highlighted my surroundings with a pale amber glow. The frozen branches of the distant trees shivered on a breeze that didn’t reach me. The butte beyond them was nearly indistinguishable from the sky.

  The trailer was dark and quiet, save for the flicker of the television through the blinds and the indecipherable hum of voices, perhaps a laugh track. If my mother had gone back to sleep on the couch, she had obviously done so without checking on me in my room, where she would have found an empty, unmade bed and the reason she’d been waiting for to vent her anger at me. Whatever sympathy I might have felt for her earlier dissipated like smoke. For the most fleeting of moments, I thought about what would happen if I closed my eyes again and let the night run its course. With no one to bind me to this depressing existence, I would be free to search for the life I truly wanted, a life of my own, one in which I could be free of the shackles of my responsibilities and find the future about which I could now only dream. But I would have to live with myself, and I was already having a hard enough time doing that.

  Soon, though, my grandfather would pass and my mother would drink herself into the grave and neither would be my fault. I would not pay for my freedom with their lives, at least not while I still drew breath. It might not have been much of a family, but it was the only one I had.

  A snuffling sound to my right.

  I turned to see the dark shape of one of the horses through the gaps between boards, pacing inside the stables. Yanaba, judging by her bearing. She huffed and shook her mane. Headed back in the opposite direction.

  The hairs rose on the backs of my arms. I stifled a shiver.

  I heard the drowsy baaing of sheep and then it was gone. It didn’t sound as though they had left the nook on the far side of the pasture where I had last seen them. Not that I blamed them. Maybe they’d be safe out there after all and I’d be able to focus my attention on—

  A rattling sound.

  Metal on metal.

  Soft. Tentative.

  The sound of something testing the latch on the goat pen.

  I shifted my hips to try to get a better view of the pen. I could barely see the door, but well enough to tell that nothing was there. It was possibl
e one of the animals had brushed against it from the inside. I took a peek through the rifle scope, but even then couldn’t see through the cracks between the planks.

  A nervous whinnying from the stable.

  I swung the barrel and saw Yanaba’s silhouette inside. She reared up. Stomped her hooves. Shook her mane. Stomped again. The hint of movement behind her and then Paa was by her side, nuzzled against her flank.

  The creaking of boards to my right.

  I whirled so fast I nearly fell from the tree. The goats started to bleat. Again, I sighted down the area in front of the pen. A faint haze of dust hovered in the wan light. I zeroed in on the ground to find it scuffed and disturbed.

  A cracking sound.

  This time from my left.

  I swung the rifle toward the trailer. My pulse thundered in my ears.

  Whoomph-whoomph-whoomph.

  The board over Grandfather’s window. The bottom corner had been wrenched upward. I could see where the old wood had cracked and the shadows cast by the exposed lengths of the nails.

  Something had gotten past me. How could anything have done so without me seeing—?

  Yanaba whinnied and struck the stable wall with a resounding crack of snapping wood. Paa slammed against the door with such force that the hinges squealed and bent. I caught a flash of the fear in her eyes through the crack.

  I was useless from up here, but if I gave up this vantage point—

  Another cracking sound to my left, barely audible over the sudden frenzy of the goats.

  Before I could change my mind, I slung the rifle over my shoulder, swung down from the branch, and dropped into the yard. The moment my feet touched the ground I had the stock of the rifle seated against my shoulder. I turned in a full circle, watching the night landscape pass down the barrel. There was nothing but scrub oak and bushes and cacti behind me, clear to the horizon. Other than the dark shapes of the animals in their pens, there was no sign of any movement whatsoever.