Ancient Enemy

by Michael McBride

  And then my flashlight beam penetrated the recess carved into the rock wall to my right and suddenly all doubt vanished. The ground dropped out from beneath me and I had to remind myself to breathe.

  The skull resting on the limestone shelf was unlike anything I had ever seen before. At first I thought it belonged to an animal. The upper half of the cranium was obviously that of a ram. Its thick horns projected outward and curled around the remainder of a skull that could only have been human. Or something close to it. The eyes sockets were wider and narrower, the nub of the nose elongated in the vertical plane, and the large teeth positively bulged from the top jaw. Its canine teeth could only be described as fangs and the remainder were tall and narrow, some of them turned sideways as though they had grown in crooked as a consequence of trying to cram so many into one mouth. The mandible sat askew, and probably would have caused the whole skull to topple sideways, were it not balanced on the horns so that it looked up at me from across the centuries and the other side of the grave.

  I thought of the bodies I’d seen through the mineral accretion and shivered.

  I took it by the horns and tried to remove the crown of the ram’s cranium from the man’s skull. The entire head rose from the disarticulated lower jaw. I set it back down and turned it sideways so I could see how it was held in place. A layer of porous bone maybe an eighth of an inch thick and the texture of a sponge held the two together. They’d become fused over time, the living bone absorbing the dead bone and adding it to its mass. I could tell the hominin skull was elongated like those I had seen earlier and realized that the disfigurement had been deliberately inflicted so that it would fit the dimensions of the cranium of a much larger animal. The ones I had seen hadn’t been subjected to whatever form of grafting they were forced to endure. They had been the juveniles of the species—their children—the retribution for the slaughter of the Anasazi children in the House of Many Windows.

  I righted the skull on the shelf and moved on to my right. There were more petroglyphs, all of which told a similar tale of something hideous and horned escaping from the earth and killing animals and men alike before being separated from its head and the rock seal replaced once more. And after each one was another recess in which the head of the monster rested. There was one with the crown of a stag, the antlers broken and perhaps intentionally sharpened. Another had the cranium of a bison. Its black horns were short and sharp and tufts of wiry brown hair still clung to their bases.

  Petroglyphs gave way to tapestries and paintings, and finally to yellowed photographs that hung from the cavern wall in frames made of carved bone. Someone had written on them in indelible ink and in a language I couldn’t read or understand. The skulls gained flesh as I reached the modern era. Their skin appeared mummified, shrunken too tight for their skulls, their eyes sunken beneath their stretched eyelids. I could see where the skin had grown over the skull graft, as though it had been peeled back with a knife and then stretched back over once the animal’s crown was in place. I couldn’t imagine how excruciating the procedure must have been or how long the pain must have lasted while the exposed bone and tissue attempted to heal, and in doing so sealed the heavy cranium to theirs.

  I turned off my light and shook the rattle. The eyelashes and the rims of the teeth, the sutures between the two parts of their skulls, and the bases of their craniums where they had once fit onto the neck…all of them glowed faintly with dried blood.

  I clicked the light back on a heartbeat later. I’d seen what I needed to see and didn’t want to spend another second in the darkness with that eerily lighted face.

  I moved on to pictures from the earliest days of photography, when the subjects had to stand perfectly still for some absurd length of time while their likeness formed on a copper or silver plate. They were the kinds of pictures you’d find in history books. Stone-faced, dark-eyed men with long braided hair from which feathers protruded. Wearing fringed buckskin and the traditional breastplates of warriors. Sitting astride powerful horses.

  One picture in particular caught my eye. It had been taken from maybe a hundred feet away to capture what looked like somewhere between twenty and thirty riders. I recognized Point Lookout, with its stratified sandstone and piñon pine-lined slopes, as the backdrop, but none of the men, whose long shadows fell upon bodies lined up side-by-side on the ground in front of them in the weeds and sage. Were it not for the antlers and horns jutting from their heads, I would have assumed they were just ordinary men and women. Inhumanly pale men and women covered with spatters of blood and nearly indistinguishable from each other from the distance. I stared at the picture, at the bodies of the slim, naked people for as long as I could stand it, for I knew when I looked to my right I would see their heads.

  It was one thing to look upon the skulls of monsters seemingly plucked from myth, but another entirely to see the remains of a horned man who, moments prior to having his picture taken, had been a living, breathing entity. There were four points on his antlers, all of them sharpened to such an extent that I had no doubt they could be driven through the side of a car with a running start. And the teeth…the shriveled lips peeled back in such a way as to make him appear to be snarling.

  I had to consciously think of him as an “it” for fear my mind would start ascribing human traits. Feelings. And if I thought of whatever these things were as human, then this chamber of trophies suddenly became much more sick and twisted. As it was, I had to keep reminding myself that these things had slaughtered our livestock and attempted to get at my grandfather through his window. Whatever they might have looked like, they were still feral. And they were still my enemy.

  This one must have been the alpha male, or perhaps the most ferocious fighter, for his was the only head the men in the picture had chosen to keep. I thought of my grandfather savoring the soup made from the sheep’s head and chose not to ponder what they had done with the others.

  The subjects in the next picture showed more of the white man’s influence. They’d traded the traditional buckskin leggings for heavy wool trousers, the breastplates for double-breasted jackets, and the feathers for wide-brimmed hats. The faces changed, but looked no different, especially their eyes. A dozen dour men either stood by or sat on a rock formation, staring past the camera as though captivated by something other than the photographer. Propped against the granite were nine naked men and women with the horns of bison, deer, and elk. They were so emaciated that I could see every bone in their bodies through their nearly transparent skin. The man in the center, the largest one with the bison horns, looked so peaceful that he could have passed for sleeping, unlike his decapitated head in the recess beside it, which appeared to scream into whatever abyss had opened before it.

  I followed the progression of pictures through the years, past the dawn of the twentieth century and into the modern era of short hair, clothing from general stores, and hunting rifles.

  One photograph featured men wearing wool caps and scarves. The camera had captured their breath hanging in the frigid air. I recognized my great grandfather and his brothers from the pictures in the photo albums in the bookcase, and my grandfather’s four brothers—my great uncles—from the portrait hanging in his bedroom, only they were much younger here. Men in their early twenties sitting with their backs against a sandstone escarpment with the bushes in the foreground buried under snow. My grandfather’s brothers tried to look serious, but their eyes betrayed their mischief. They’d leaned one of the naked men with deer antlers against the rock between them and slung his lifeless arms over the shoulders of the two in the middle—Charlie and Roy, I think—as though he were just one of the guys, not their trophy buck.

  My grandfather had distanced himself from them, and stood off to the side near where his father and uncle sat, staring somewhere off-camera with a pensive expression on his face, one I immediately recognized. It was the look that generally preceded the kind of conversation that led to endless hours of stories from which I was supposed
to glean some major life lesson, when he could have just condensed it into a couple of sentences that actually made sense like a normal human being.

  That was my grandfather, though. Always the serious one, always the teacher. I wondered if there had been a time when he allowed himself to let loose and goof off with his brothers, none of whom I could remember meeting. They all died around the same time my father left, which was obviously the more traumatic and memorable event in my life.

  I looked at the man with the deer antlers, sharpened so that they looked like two great tusks, and realized that my grandfather—a man I had known and loved all of my life—had locked eyes with this creature at some point before its death. And suddenly it was real in a way that until that moment it hadn’t been. This was once a living being that had occupied the same plane of existence as a younger version of the man who had been mother and father to me for the majority of my life, that had been immortalized with its arms over the shoulders of his brothers as though the culmination of its life had been the butt of a joke. There was nothing abstract about this situation. Out there, right now, was something just like this, a creature that I was somehow meant to not only confront, but to kill, and unlike all of these people in the pictures, I was completely and utterly alone.

  My heart stopped when I moved on to the next set of pictures and finally understood just how much trouble I was actually in.

  NINETEEN

  The first photograph was nothing like the others. It showed a cluster of houses I didn’t recognize, old and small, single-level ranches in the middle of a wide field surrounded by ponderosa pines. I could tell they had been built by the occupants, not for them. The windows were broken and jagged shards glittered in the frames. The front doors either stood wide open or were absent altogether. They’d been abandoned for some length of time, judging by the leaves blown into the entryways, although how long was a matter of speculation. It looked like they had come under siege.

  There were additional pictures—for the first time in color—presumably taken inside these houses, where broken glass was scattered all over the floors and tables and chairs lie in broken ruins amid spatters of blood that crossed the wood flooring and ascended the walls. There was more blood on the sheets of unmade beds and the furniture, while great care had been taken not to include the identities of the bodies, which had been covered with blankets where they fell.

  My grandfather had never told me how his brothers died and I had never asked. He was old and they were dead; those were just the facts of life as I knew them. I never questioned the things that happened before my earliest memories because in my mind I’d just come to believe they had always been that way.

  I thought about my grandfather, who’d lived his entire life in these hills and who’d never shown me the house where he’d spent his childhood or the one in which he’d raised my mother during her formative years. I’d always seen his trailer as an extension of him, like the shell of a turtle. I’d never stopped to think that he’d ever lived anywhere else. Turns out I’d never stopped to think about much of anything.

  There were close-up pictures of the faces of men and women of all ages, only some of whom I recognized, with the blankets I had seen covering their bodies bunched over their upper chests and necks. My great aunts and their children, I guessed, some of whom were obviously still in their teens. I recognized the photographs of each of Grandfather’s brothers, their faces cleaned of the blood I could still faintly see clotted into their hairlines. Otherwise, he’d done a remarkable job of making them look peaceful, of both memorializing them for all time and using their deaths to serve as a warning to those who would follow in their footsteps. This was no ordinary hunt, nor was it a laughing matter. This was life or death, as evidenced by the expression on Grandfather’s face in the next picture.

  He looked like a different man. More than could be justified by his younger age. There was something alien on his face, in his eyes. Something I had never seen there before, at least not before his stroke, but something I now saw every day thanks to his paralyzed facial muscles.

  Fear.

  He stared straight at me from maybe ten to fifteen years ago, from the time before the wrinkles had truly staked their claim to his face and his ears and nose were still proportionate to his other features, from before the flesh started to sag from his jaws and his hair thinned to the point that his scalp showed through. I could almost hear his words, meant for whoever stood where I did right now, some unknown number of years later, words that had failed him when he needed to speak them, forcing him to communicate with his frightened eyes. Words that couldn’t possibly have been meant for me specifically, at least not at that point, because I couldn’t have been more than a toddler back then. Words presumably meant for a son, but since he didn’t have one…

  I lost my train of thought when I recognized the face of the man sitting next to him on the tailgate of the same truck that would undoubtedly outlast us all. The man wore a down jacket with feathers protruding from tears in the fabric and a pair of jeans with holes in the knees, through which his dirty long johns showed. His face was so pale he almost looked white, with the exception of the smear of blood on his cheek. His eyes were glassy and had a faraway look I attributed to veterans returning from war, which, perhaps, was exactly what he’d done. My father, not much older than I was now, sitting as far away from his father-in-law as he could get without physically getting out of the truck. He looked so small and scared. It wouldn’t be much longer before that same man abandoned his wife and young son.

  I studied him…shorter and thinner than I remembered, with long hair and sideburns, little more than a kid himself. I couldn’t see any of myself in him. He looked so much different than he did in my memory, which grew less distinct with each passing year. There wasn’t a single picture left of the two of us together, if there had ever been any at all. Only him with my mother in the early days, looking happy and carefree, and then nothing, as though when he split my mother had decided she no longer wanted to commemorate a single second of our lives as a family. I looked in his eyes for the evil that had caused him to leave us, but saw only the terror of a child, one who’d drawn his knees up to his chest so they couldn’t possibly touch the bodies lined up with their horns and antlers hooked over the edge of the tailgate so they’d remain sitting up. There were six of them. Four males and two females. All slender and naked. All covered with blood from what looked like the close-range blast from a shotgun.

  I glanced back at the other pictures, from the earliest copperplate images of hunting parties of dozens of braves on horseback to the more recent images of men clad in suits ripped out of the Wild West to the pictures of Grandfather’s family, and finally to the fate that had befallen them in the attack on the cabins. For as many of our enemies as we had killed, they had claimed even more of us. All of these heads…they were nothing. For all I knew, there was a cavern just like this one hidden in the mountains, positively overflowing with the trophies of my ancestors.

  I studied the most recent collection of heads. My grandfather had brought all of them, not just the most formidable, for these had been the creatures responsible for the slaughter of his entire family. One had the antlers of an antelope projecting like twin scimitars from its forehead, another two the horns of dairy cattle, one the massive horns of a bighorn sheep, and two more the long spikes of juvenile bucks. They’d been cured in salt, but I could still smell the rot. Their eyelashes were knotted and scabrous, the edges of the lids raw, as though they’d been closed so long they’d grown together and then been torn apart in order to see again. Beneath them I could see the bulge of where their desiccated eyeballs had shrunken. They weren’t quite blind, but appeared to be well on their way, arrested during some evolutionary adaptation that would one day make their eyes obsolete like the blind fish and salamanders that lived in caves. Their ears had shriveled to crisp cartilaginous nubs and their lips had receded from their sharp teeth.

  And that was it. Th
e end of a story spanning however many thousands of years. Or more. Lord only knew.

  I stared at the blank stone wall leading back toward the hole through which I’d crawled and realized that a part of it was reserved for me, that my chapter was the next to be written. And if I were fortunate enough to survive, I would only curse a son who wasn’t even an abstraction in my mind yet to the next section down the line. What kind of monster would I be to willingly do such a thing to an innocent child?

  Again, I looked at my father, so young and frightened. I understood now why he left. It wasn’t like that revelation made it any easier, but at least now I knew it wasn’t my fault. It was one thing hunting these creatures the first time, when you didn’t really know what you were up against, but another entirely knowing you would have to do so again at some unforeseen time in the future when these monsters found their way out of the darkness again.

  And they always did.

  A part of me wanted nothing more than to run away, as well. The difference between him and me, though, is that I wouldn’t. I could not leave my mother and grandfather to their fates to save my own skin. It had nothing to do with bravery or cowardice; it was a decision made out of love for the woman who had given me life and the man who had raised me like his own son. Flawed though they were, they were the only family I had and I wasn’t about to let anything happen to them, despite the fact that I’d never been so scared in my life.

  Worse, I was alone.

  I crawled back into the kiva and climbed out of the darkness in something of a daze. My mind was a train wreck of thousands of colliding thoughts, all of which ultimately led back to the same question…why didn’t my grandfather tell me? About this. About my father. About everything. I wondered if my mother even knew why my father left her. Like me, she’d undoubtedly combed through every minute detail of every memory in hopes of figuring out what she had done to drive him away. If she could find it, she could fix it, and if she could fix it, we could be a family again. That was why she drank, why she retreated from the rest of us and why she inflicted what could only be a form of penance upon herself. I was furious with my grandfather for not telling me, but I was even angrier with him for what he had done to his own daughter. Maybe bringing us to live with him had been his form of penance. I could think of no worse punishment than watching your own child slowly killing herself right before your very eyes.