Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

  “Close up and keep moving!” came the harsh, strained command from above. Forcing herself into action, Nora urged the new rearward horse forward—Smithback’s horse, Hurricane Deck. But he wouldn’t move; a clonus of horror trembled along the animal’s flanks. Then, in a galvanic instant, he reared up, whirling around toward her. Nora instinctively grabbed his halter. With a frenzied clawing of steel on rock, Hurricane scrabbled at the edge of the trail, wide eyes staring at her. Realizing her mistake, she released the halter, but her timing was slow and already the falling horse had pulled her off balance. She had a brief glimpse of yawning blue space. Then she landed on her side, her legs rolling over the edge of the cliff, hands scrabbling to grip the smooth sandstone. She heard, as if from a great distance, Swire shouting, and then from below the soggy, bursting sound of a wet bag as Hurricane Deck hit bottom.

  She clawed at the rock, fingernails fighting for purchase as she dangled in the abyss. She could feel the updrafts of wind tickling her legs. In desperation, she clutched the stone tighter, her nails tearing and splitting as she continued to slide backward down the tipped surface of stone. Then her right hand brushed against a projecting rill; no more than a quarter inch high, but enough to get a handhold. She strained, feeling her strength draining away. Now or never, she thought, and she gave a great heave, swinging herself up sideways. It was just enough to get one foot back onto the trail. With a second heave she managed to roll her body up and over. She lay on her back, heart hammering a frantic cadence. Ahead and above came a whinny of fear, and the clatter of hooves on stone.

  “Get the hell up! Keep moving!” she heard faintly from above. She rose shakily to her feet and started forward, as if in a dream, driving the remnant of the remuda up the trail.

  She did not remember the rest of the journey. The next clear memory was of lying facedown, hugging the warm, dusty rock of the ridge summit; then a pair of hands were gently turning her over; and Aragon’s calm, steady face stared down into her own. Beside him were Smithback and Holroyd, gazing at her with intense concern. Holroyd’s face in particular was a mask of agonizing worry.

  Aragon helped Nora to a nearby rock. “The horses—” Nora began.

  “There was no other way,” Aragon interrupted quietly, taking her hands. “You’re hurt.”

  Nora looked down. Her hands were covered with blood from her ruined fingernails. Aragon opened his medical kit. “When you swung out over that cliff,” he said, “I thought you were done for.” He dabbed at the fingertips, removing a few pieces of grit and fingernail with tweezers. He worked swiftly, expertly, smearing on topical antibiotic and placing butterfly bandages over the ends of her fingertips. “Wear your gloves for a few days,” he said. “You’ll be uncomfortable for a while, but the injuries are superficial.”

  Nora glanced at the group. They were looking back at her, motionless, shocked to silence by what had happened. “Where’s Roscoe?” she managed to ask.

  “Back down the trail,” Sloane replied.

  Nora dropped her head into her hands. And then, as if in answer, three well-spaced gunshots sounded below, echoing crazily among the canyons before dying away into distant thunder.

  “God,” Nora groaned. Fiddlehead, her own horse. Beetlebum, Smithback’s nemesis. Hurricane Deck. Gone. She could still see the wide pleading eyes of Hurricane; the teeth, so strangely long and narrow, exposed in a final grin of terror.

  Ten minutes later Swire appeared, breathing heavily. He passed Nora and went toward the horses, redividing and repacking the loads in silence. Holroyd came over to her and gently took her hand. “I got a decent reading,” he whispered.

  Nora glanced up at him, hardly caring.

  “We’re right smack on the trail,” he said, smiling.

  Nora could only shake her head.

  * * *

  Compared to the nightmarish ascent, the trail down into the valley beyond the hogback ridge offered few difficulties. The horses, smelling water, charged ahead. Tired as they were, the group began to jog, and Nora found the events of the last hours temporarily receding in her devouring thirst. They splashed into the water upstream from the horses and Nora fell to her stomach, burying her face in the water. It was the most exquisite sensation she had ever felt, and she drank deeply, pausing only to gasp for air, until a sudden spasm of nausea contracted her stomach. She backed away, retiring to a spot beneath the rustling cottonwoods, breathing hard and feeling the sting of evaporation on her wet clothes. Gradually the waves of nausea passed. She saw Black bent double in the trees, vomiting up water, joined shortly by Holroyd. Smithback was kneeling in the stream, oblivious, bathing his head with cupped hands. Sloane staggered over, sopping wet, and knelt beside Nora.

  “Swire needs our help with the horses,” she said.

  They went downstream and helped Swire drag the horses out of the water, to prevent any possibility of fatal overdrinking. As they worked, Swire refused to meet Nora’s eyes.

  After a rest, the group remounted and continued downstream into the new world of the valley. The water ran over a cobbled bed, filling the air with tranquil noise. The sounds of life rose about them: trilling cicadas, humming dragonflies, even the occasional eructation of a frog. As Nora’s thirst abated, the sickening horror of the accident returned with fresh force. She was riding a new horse now, Arbuckles, and every jarring movement seemed a reproachful memory of Fiddlehead. She thought of Swire’s poem to Hurricane Deck, almost a love ballad to the horse. She wondered how she was ever going to work things out with him.

  They traveled down the valley, which narrowed as it approached the broad sandstone plateau, rising in front of them now less than a mile away. Nora glanced up at the cliffs as they passed, noting again the odd lack of ruins. This was an ideal valley for prehistoric settlement, and yet there was nothing. If, after all that had happened, this turned to be the wrong canyon system—she shut the thought from her mind.

  The stream made another bend. The naked plateau loomed ever closer, the stream at last disappearing into the narrow slot canyon carved into its side. According to the radar map, the canyon should open, about a mile farther along, into the small valley that—she hoped—contained Quivira. But the slot canyon itself that lay between them and the inner valley was clearly too narrow for horses.

  As they rode up to the massive sandstone wall, Nora noticed a large rock beside the stream with some markings on its flanks. As she dismounted and came nearer, she could see a small panel of petroglyphs, similar to those they had found at the base of the ridge: a series of dots and a small foot, along with another star and a sun. She couldn’t help but notice that there was a large reversed spiral carved on top of the other images.

  The rest came up beside her. She noticed Aragon gazing at the glyphs, an intent expression on his face.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen other examples of dot patterns like these along the ancient approaches to Hopi,” he said at last. “I believe they give distance and direction information.”

  “Sure,” Black scoffed. “And the freeway interchanges and the location of the nearest Howard Johnson’s, I’ll bet. Everyone knows Anasazi petroglyphs are indecipherable.”

  Aragon ignored this. “The footlike glyph indicates walking, and the dots indicate distance. Based on other sites I’ve seen, each dot represents a walking distance of about sixteen minutes, or three quarters of a mile.”

  “And the antelope?” Nora asked. “What does that symbolize?”

  Aragon glanced at her. “An antelope,” he said.

  “So this isn’t a kind of writing?”

  Aragon looked back at the rock. “Not in the sense we’re used to. It’s not phonetic, syllabic, or ideographic. My own view is that it’s an entirely different way of using symbols. But that doesn’t mean it’s not writing.”

  “On the other side of the ridge,” Nora said, “I saw a star inside the moon, inside the sun. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

  �
�Yes. The sun is the symbol for the supreme deity, the moon the symbol for the future, and the star a symbol of truth. I took the whole thing to be an indicator that an oracle, a kind of Anasazi Delphi, lay ahead.”

  “You mean Quivira?” Nora asked.

  Aragon nodded.

  “And what does this spiral mean?” asked Holroyd.

  Aragon hesitated a moment. “That spiral was added later. It’s reversed, of course.” His voice trailed off. “In the context of the other things we’ve seen, I’d call it a warning, or omen, laid on top of these earlier symbols. A notice to travelers not to proceed, an indication of evil.”

  There was a sudden silence.

  “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my,” murmured Smithback.

  “Obviously, there’s still a lot we don’t know,” Aragon said, the slightest trace of defensiveness in his voice. “Perhaps you, Mr. Smithback, with your no doubt profound knowledge of Anasazi witches and their modern-day descendants, the skinwalkers, can enlighten us further.”

  The writer rolled his tongue around his cheek and raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

  As they moved away, Holroyd gave a shout. He had walked around to the side of the rock nearest the entrance to the slot canyon. Now he pointed to a much fresher inscription, scraped into the rock with a penknife. As Nora stared at it, she felt her cheeks begin to burn. Still staring, she knelt beside the stone, fingers slowly tracing the narrow grooves that spelled out P.K. 1983.

  23

  * * *

  AS NORA TOUCHED HER FATHER’S INITIALS on the rock, something inside her seemed to give way. A knot of tension, tightened over the harrowing days, loosened abruptly, and she leaned against the smooth surface of the rock, feeling an intense, overwhelming flood of relief. Her father had been here. They had been following his trail all along. She realized dimly that the group was crowding around, congratulating her.

  Slowly she rose to her feet. She gathered the expedition under a small grove of gambel oaks, near the point where the stream plunged into the slot canyon. Everyone seemed to be in high spirits except Swire, who silently moved off with the horses to a nearby patch of grass. Bonarotti was busy cleaning the dirty cookware in the stream

  “We’re almost there,” she said. “According to our maps, this is the slot canyon we’ve been searching for. We should find the hidden canyon of Quivira at the far end.”

  “Is it safe?” Black asked. “Looks pretty narrow to me.”

  “I’ve kept my eyes on the canyon walls,” Sloane said. “There haven’t been any obvious trails that would lead up and over to the next valley. If we’re going on, this is the only way through.”

  “It’s getting late,” Nora said. “The real question is, shall we unpack the horses and carry everything in now? Or shall we camp now and go in tomorrow?”

  Black answered first. “I’d prefer not to carry any more equipment today, thank you, especially through that.” He gestured past the canebrake toward the narrow slot, which looked more like a fissure in the rock than a canyon.

  Smithback sat back, fanning himself with a branch of oak leaves. “As long as you’re asking, I’d just as soon sit here with my feet in the stream and see what victuals Signore Bonarotti brings out of his magic box.”

  The rest seemed to agree. Then Nora turned toward Sloane. In the woman’s eyes, she immediately saw the same eagerness that was kindling within her.

  Sloane grinned her slow grin and nodded. “Feel up to it?” she asked.

  Nora looked at the entrance to the slot canyon—barely more than a dark seam in the rock—and nodded. Then she turned once again toward the group.

  “Sloane and I are going to reconnoiter,” she said, glancing at her watch. “We might not be able to get in and back before darkness, so it may turn out to be an overnight trip. Any objections?”

  There were none. While the camp settled down to its routine, Nora loaded a sleeping bag and water pump into a backpack. Sloane did the same, adding a length of rope and some climbing equipment to hers. Bonarotti wordlessly pressed small, heavy packets of food into each of their hands.

  Shouldering their packs, they waved goodbye and hiked down the stream. Past the grove of oaks, the rivulet burbled across a pebbled bed and entered the canebrake outside the mouth of the slot canyon. Much of the cane had been torn and shredded into a dense tangle, and there were several battered tree trunks and boulders lying about.

  They pushed ahead into the cane, which rustled and crackled at their passage. Deerflies and no-see-ums danced and droned in the thick air. Nora led, waving them away with an impatient hand.

  “Nora,” she heard Sloane say softly behind her, “look carefully to your right. Look, but don’t move.”

  Nora followed Sloane’s glance toward a piece of cane perhaps eighteen inches away. A small gray rattlesnake was coiled tightly around it at about shoulder height.

  “I hate to tell you, Nora, but you just elbowed this poor snake aside.” It was meant to sound lighthearted, but Sloane’s voice carried a small tremor.

  Nora stared in horrified fascination. She could see the cane still swaying slightly from her passage. “Christ,” she whispered, her throat dry and constricted.

  “Probably the only reason he didn’t strike was because it would have caused him to fall,” added Sloane. “Sistrurus toxidius, the pigmy gray rattler. Second most poisonous rattlesnake in North America.”

  Nora continued to stare at the snake, almost perfectly camouflaged by its surroundings. “I feel a little sick,” she said.

  “Let me walk first.”

  In no mood to argue, Nora stood by while Sloane went on ahead, gingerly picking her way through the broken cane, pausing every few steps to scrutinize her path.

  She stopped suddenly. “There’s another one,” she pointed. The snake, disturbed, was swiftly gliding down a stalk ahead of them. It gave a sudden, chilling buzz before it disappeared into a tangle of brush.

  “Too bad Bonarotti isn’t here,” said Sloane, moving ahead carefully. “He’d probably make a cassoulet out of them.” As she spoke, there was another buzz directly beneath her feet. She leapt backward with a shout, then gave the snake a wide berth.

  A few more harrowing moments brought them to the far side of the canebrake. Here the mouth of the canyon opened before them, two scooped and polished stone walls about ten feet apart, with a bottom of smooth sand barely covered by slowly moving water.

  “Jesus,” Nora said. “I’ve never seen so many rattlers in one place in my life.”

  “Probably washed down by a flood,” said Sloane. “Now they’re wet, cold, and pissed.”

  They continued down the creek into the slot canyon, splashing in the shallow water. The narrow walls quickly pressed in around them, leaving Nora with the uncomfortable feeling that she was along the bottom of a long, slender container. Eons of floods had sculpted the walls of the canyon into glossy hollows, ribs, pockets, and tubes. There were only occasional glimpses of sky, and they proceeded in a reddish half-light that filtered down from far above. With the high narrow walls of the slot canyon crowding out the sun, the air at its base felt surprisingly chilly. In places where water had scooped out a larger hollow, they encountered pools of loose quicksand. The best way to get past them, Nora found, was to start crawling through on her hands and knees and, when the quicksand at last gave way, to lie on her stomach and breaststroke, keeping her legs rigid and unmoving behind her. The pack, oddly enough, buoyed her, acting as a kind of float on her back.

  “It’s going to be a wet night,” Sloane said, emerging from one of the pools.

  As the canyon descended, the light grew dimmer. At one point, a huge cottonwood trunk, horribly scarred and mauled, had somehow become jammed in the canyon walls about twenty feet above their heads. Nearby, there was a narrow hollow in the rockface, above a small, stepped ledge.

  “Must’ve been some storm that put that tree up there,” Sloane murmured, glancing upward at the trunk. “I’d sure hate to be caught
in a flash flood in one of these canyons.”

  “I’ve heard the first thing you feel is a rising wind,” Nora replied. “Then you hear a sound, echoing and distorted. Someone once told me it sounded almost like distant voices or applause. At that point, you get your butt out as fast as possible. If you’re still in the canyon by the time you hear the roar of water, it’s too late. You’re dead meat.”

  Sloane broke out into her low, sultry laugh. “Thanks a lot,” she said. “Now you’ll have me climbing the walls every time I feel a breeze.”

  As they walked on, the canyon narrowed still further and sloped downward in a series of pools, each filled with chocolate-colored water. Sometimes the water was only an inch deep, covering shivery quicksand; other times, it was over their heads. Each pool was connected to the next by a pitched slot so narrow they had to squeeze through it sideways, holding their packs. Above their heads, large boulders had jammed between the canyon walls, creating an eerie brown twilight.

  After half an hour’s struggle, they came to a pourover above an especially long, narrow pool. Beyond, Nora could make out a faint glow. Taking the lead, she eased down into the pool and swam across toward a small boulder, wedged between the walls about six feet above the ground. A thick curtain of weeds and roots trailed from it, through which came a sheen of sunlight.

  Nora crawled under the boulder and paused at the shaggy curtain, wringing the water from her wet hair. “It’s like the entrance to something magical,” Sloane said as she approached. “But what?”

  Nora glanced at her for a moment. Then, placing her arms together, she pushed through the dense tangle.