The Return

by Bentley Little

  ALSO BY BENTLEY LITTLE

  The Collection

  The Association

  The Walking

  The Town

  The House

  The Store

  The Ignored

  The Revelation

  University

  Dominion

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Return

  A Signet Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright (c) 2002 by Bentley Little

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN-: 978-1-1011-9170-5

  A SIGNET BOOK(r)

  Signet Books first published by The Signet Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  SIGNET and the "S" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: March, 2003

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue

  For Judson and Krista Little,

  who know a lot about the

  weirdness in Arizona

  Prologue

  Zane Grey awoke with a twisted neck and a knotted back. Grunting, he pushed himself out of bed and made his way over to the window. He looked through the trees, past the sloping meadow in which his horses were corralled, to the tan wall of rock that was the base of the Tonto Rim.

  He'd had a difficult time sleeping again. There'd been noises near the cabin: branch snappings and stone rattlings that could not be attributed to animals or to the wind. They seemed especially loud in the darkness of the moonless night. He'd also heard unearthly howling from somewhere up on the Rim; a low, strange wail that sounded like neither man nor beast. It was the howling that had really set his nerves on edge.

  He was not a timid man. He'd hunted bear in Colorado without the benefit of a guide. He'd fished alone in a rowboat in a gale off the coast of Oregon. He'd lived half his life out of doors with nothing but a saddle blanket and a knife between himself and the wild. But the sound of that creature or demon or whatever it was up there on the Rim made him want to pack up his bags and hightail it back to civilization.

  Demon?

  He was not superstitious. But neither was he so closed minded that he refused to deny the possibility that there were things in this world he did not understand. Hell, the Bible talked of demons. And who was he to contradict the Good Book?

  He stood for a moment at the window, leaning on the sill so as not to put pressure on his back. In the meadow, one of the horses whinnied and moved skittishly against the fence.

  Word back in town was that even Indians avoided the top of the Rim, though they usually chose to make their homes atop plateaus for protection against marauding enemies, utilizing the natural fortresslike qualities of the geological formations. That was something to think about. He had no love for the red man, but he had to admit that they knew about the land, knew how and where and why to build their villages, knew what they needed to do in order to survive in this harsh country.

  He straightened, grunting with pain as his back cracked. Part of him was still wary of going outside, even though the sun was up and the darkness gone. But he refused to let himself be frightened like some old lady. Rubbing his aching neck, he walked out to the outhouse to do his business, then brought in some water from the well, and set the kettle on the stove. The embers were still warm from last night, and he placed another log and a patch of kindling in there, using the bellows to resurrect the fire.

  As he always did here at the cabin, he began the day with eggs and a slab of bacon, washing them down with hot black coffee. After breakfast, he walked back outside and looked in the dirt for any footprints, hoofprints, or claw marks. He circled the cabin three times but, as before, he found nothing to indicate that anyone or anything had been there save himself.

  Already the Arizona sun was warm on his scalp, with sweat beginning to bead beneath his hairline. It was going to be a hot day--was there any other kind here in the summer?--and he strode out to the meadow before the temperature rose too high and the horses were put off their feed. Dead beetles, dried pine needles, and crushed sandstone crunched beneath his boots as he walked down the narrow weed-lined pathway. He'd been warned not to buy this land by more than one person in town, but the only advice he had ever listened to was his own, and he wasn't about to take the word of those local bumpkins on matters such as real estate.

  He opened the pasture gate and started toward the barn, where he kept the oats and barley. The dark feelings of the night were already fading, as they did each morning. Daylight seemed to dispel any lingering dread and render ridiculous his nocturnal fears. Still, a vestigial anxiety remained. Last night had been the worst by far, and it was not quite as easy as usual to shake off the conviction that something evil and unnatural lurked in this section of the Tonto.

  The horses came up to him, looking for food, and he patted their flanks, first Virgil's, then Tenny's. He pointed them toward the salt lick and sent them on their way. "Chow's coming," he said, then chuckled. "Just hold your horses." He made his way through the pasture, keeping an eye out for snakes.

  It was in the barn that he saw the colt.

  There should not have been a colt in there. He had only two horses, both stallions. There were no people on the property other than himself, and there should not have been any other animals.

  But that was not what caused him to stop in his tracks. That was not what filled him with the urge to flee.

  It was the animal's face. The bloody flared nostrils, the crazily bulging eyes, the wildly tangled mane, the too-wide mouth with its teeth bared in an impossibly savage grin.

  Horses were not supposed to smile, and the presence of that human attribute on the face of a dumb beast was not only inappropriate but horribly wrong.

  He did not even stop to think, his reaction was so instinctive. Reaching for the loaded rifle he kept on the wall, he whipped it off its hook and shot the colt in the head. The animal collapsed. Yet even in death that disturbing wildness remained, every single element of the colt's appearance abnormal.

  And there was an air of . . . something else in the barn. He could not explain it, could not describe it, but it lingered nonetheless.

  Still carrying the rifle, he hurried back outside, to the safety of sunlight. He wanted to get away from that dark clapboard structure with its dead crazy colt.

  Perhaps the rumors were true. Perhaps Indians had always avoided this area, thinking it evil or cursed. But it did not seem to him that this was something old reasserting itself. No, this evil was something new, something emerging, something being born. He did not know how he knew this, but he felt it to be true.
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br />   He took a deep breath and looked back toward the barn, hefting the rifle in his hands. He needed to dispose of the horse's body. He didn't want to see it again and definitely didn't want to touch it, but the thought of the dead colt lying next to the stalls all night with that wild look on its face while he heard noises outside his window and howling up on the Rim . . . well, the prospect of that seemed much, much worse.

  Virgil and Tenny wandered over, nuzzling his side, thinking he'd brought out their feed. The horses' presence bolstered his flagging courage, and he was grateful for their company. "Come on, boys," he said, slapping their flanks. "Let's see if we can't get you something to eat." He led the animals to the open barn door. He half thought that all would be normal upon his return, that he would discover he had imagined it all or, at the very least, that some of the craziness would have eroded from the colt's face. But the animal looked as bizarre as ever, and when both Virgil and Tenny balked at moving past the threshold, Zane decided that he, too, would be better off staying out of the barn. At least for the time being.

  "I guess you'll have to make do with hay this morning," he told them.

  The pasture was full of grass and he'd dumped two half-bales of hay by the far fence, so the stallions weren't about to starve. He led them over to the hay, made sure they started eating, then headed back to the cabin. Maybe later, after he drank a little courage and the sun rose higher in the sky, putting some more distance between himself and the night, he'd come back and figure out what to do with the colt's body. But until then he was going to stay as far away from that hideous abomination as possible.

  He walked up the cabin steps and, once inside, closed and bolted the door. He was behaving like a woman and was ashamed of his foolishness, but no one else was around and he had to admit that he felt safer inside, behind locked doors.

  On the table was the unfinished manuscript for his new book, "Under the Tonto Rim," and he riffled through the pages, looking down at the words with disdain. It was romanticized hogwash, a portrayal of the West that existed only in his mind. He thought of the noises last night, thought of the colt in the barn. He should write a book about what life was really like under the Tonto Rim.

  But no reader would believe that, he knew.

  Not even in a work of fiction.

  One

  1

  His first memory was of Delaware Punch.

  The memory was pure and undiluted: a tactile sensation of cold and a taste of sweetness. He recalled a shack out in the middle of nowhere on a dusty road where his mother bought him the bottled drink. He hadn't known back then what his father did for a living, had not found out until years later, but his mother had a paper route, and with no one to baby-sit, she'd take him along each day, bouncing along the washboard roads with him in the backseat while she drove the old Rambler barefoot, folded papers in the front next to her. In his mind, the shack, a general store, was at the exact middle of his mother's route, and every afternoon they drove out into the desert, tossing out papers at the heads of ranch driveways, before turning around at the store, stopping for drinks, and delivering the remaining papers to other ranches on their way back to town.

  Only he wasn't sure how much of his memory he could trust, because he saw the store as having a bare-board porch with a raggedy overhang and one of those metal soft drink iceboxes next to the door--an image he recalled seeing in a recent commercial. Did he remember what he'd seen or just what he wanted to have seen? It was impossible to tell where his memory was true and where imagination or cross-referenced images filled in gaps and blanks.

  He could still remember the taste of the Delaware Punch, though. That part was for real, and it was for that reason that he chose to believe the rest of it as well.

  2

  When he thought about it objectively, Glen realized that he must be going through some sort of midlife crisis. But it did not feel that way to him, and he was not at all sure if his behavior could be so conveniently categorized.

  He left work on Friday fully intending to make a quick trip out to Arizona, put the land up for sale, and be back in time to participate in the conference call with programmers from the San Francisco office on Sunday afternoon. He shut off his computer, locked his desk drawer, said good-bye to Gillian, Quong, and Bill, and headed home to pack. His plan was to bring along the deed and all of his mother's papers, find some local real estate agent in Kingman to handle the sale, and return to Southern California immediately.

  But even before he pulled into his driveway, he knew that was not going to happen. He had decided on the spur of the moment, while sitting at a stoplight and watching a blonde in a red Mustang pull into the 76 station on the opposite corner, that he was never going back to his job at Automated Interface again and, as he clicked the garage door opener and drove into the garage, he was filled with an almost euphoric sense of freedom.

  He could do anything he wanted. Nothing was keeping him here; there was no reason for him to continue with this deadening, unfulfilling existence. He had no wife, no family, no girlfriend, and with his mother gone, there were no more appearances to keep up, no one to whom he had to justify his lifestyle. He'd read somewhere that the death of the last parent enabled one to finally become an adult, freeing a person from the role of child and allowing him to do what he wanted to do without any outside constraints. That was how he felt. He was devastated by his mother's passing, of course, and this week he had shed more tears than in the previous twenty years put together. But he had to admit that he also felt an underlying sense of liberation, as though he were finally free to start living after years of remaining in a holding pattern.

  He had no specific dreams, no concrete plans--only a vague desire to travel, to see things, to go places. He was acutely aware of the fact that he had only one life and it was already half over. It seemed like only yesterday that he had graduated from high school, and yet here he was, thirty-five, his twenty-year reunion already on the horizon. And what had he done with his life, where had he gone?

  Nothing.

  Nowhere.

  His mother's death had brought home to him the fact that time was passing quickly. He intended to make up for wasted opportunities by doing what he wanted to do rather than what he should do. He was going to indulge in all those things he had avoided out of fear or a misguided sense of responsibility.

  He left everything behind. His job. His home. His friends. His entire life. He packed some clothes and toiletries, locked up the condo, dropped by AAA to pick up maps and tour books for every state, and hit the road.

  He'd been born and raised in Phoenix, but he hadn't been back to Arizona in over five years--since his father died. His mother had sold the house and moved out to California to be closer to him, and while she'd talked about going back and seeing her friends, trying to get him to commit to a trip before his each and every vacation, somehow he'd avoided it. He'd been selfish. He hadn't wanted to spend his limited time off chauffering her around old haunts, and he regretted it now. It would have been easy to accede to her wishes, and it would have made her happy.

  He spent the night in Vegas. Because of a Friday night traffic jam of fleeing Southern Californians on Interstate 15, he didn't get there until after eleven, but the city was still wide awake, sidewalks crowded, streets ablaze with multicolored lights and signs.

  Amazingly enough, he had never been to Las Vegas before, and he found the city to be a big disappointment. The lavish hotels and resorts that looked so spectacular and enticing on television turned out to be cheap and tacky and crammed right up next to each other. He ended up staying on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise hotel in a room that smelled of stale cigarette smoke, and though he dropped twenty dollars at the hotel casino before retiring, he didn't enjoy it.

  He drove to Kingman in the morning and spent nearly an hour driving unnamed dirt roads outside the city, looking for his parents' property. He wanted to see the lot first before talking with anyone, so that he could take some measure of the l
and, but his father's map was hopelessly out of date. Finally he broke down and went to a real estate agency. The overly solicitous realtor manning the otherwise empty office was busy, waiting for a couple with whom he was closing what appeared to be a pretty big deal. He gave Glen a map of the city's outlying areas, traced a route to the property in red ink, and told him that he'd have another agent meet him there in an hour.

  He drove north out of town down a wide dirt lane that he was pretty sure he'd taken earlier, then turned onto a poorly graded road running over a flat, ugly section of desert. A bleached and weathered sign announced the name of the would-be development: SUNSHINE ESTATES. His parents had bought the property here after his father had retired, long after he was out of the house. As far as Glen knew, it was for investment, and he doubted that either of his parents had set foot on this land since they'd been suckered into buying it. A lot of people fell for such scams, but he was surprised that his father had been taken. Naturally suspicious and cynical, the old man had railed about the stupidity of people who bought items sight unseen through catalogues or television offers, and had constantly warned him about the duplicity and untrustworthiness of salespeople.

  Yet he'd come out here and bought this worthless desert land.

  Not a single home had been built on any of the properties in the intervening years. The parcels were well marked, though, and Glen had no trouble finding his parents' lot.

  Their property was bigger than he would have thought. The barbed-wire fence paralleling the road ran nearly the length of a city block, from the small numbered sign that marked the parcel's eastern boundary to the dented cattleguard that granted access to the land at its western edge. He pulled onto the lot and stopped, getting out of the car. He didn't know what he thought he'd learn by coming out here on his own or what he thought he'd do. Pace off square footage? Run the soil through his fingers? Catalogue the plants? He ended up briefly looking around at the flat, barren land, then sitting in his car with the tape player on, waiting for the real estate agent.