The Return

by Bentley Little

  "When the sun came up, she finally went outside." The scoutmaster's voice lowered. "The monster had gotten him. Torn his face clean off. She found it hanging from that dead tree by the side of the cabin, draped over a branch.

  "That was seventy-five years ago . . . today."

  The scoutmaster flipped on his powerful flashlight and pointed the strong beam across the camp to the abandoned cabin outside the ranch gates. The light played across the overgrown vines, the blackened openings that had once been a door and some windows, the rocking chair on the porch, the dead tree on the north side of the dilapidated structure.

  The flashlight switched off, and Scoutmaster Anderson said in a low tone, "Sleep well, boys. Sweet dreams."

  They switched on their own flashlights and walked back to the cabins in silent groups. Even the toughest among them had been quieted by the offhand horror and formless narrative of the story. Campfire yarns usually had some sort of big finish, and when the scoutmaster came to the end of his tale, Cameron had tensed up, waiting for someone dressed in a Bigfoot suit to jump out and scare the crap out of them.

  But it hadn't happened. The story simply ended, and something about that was unnerving. It made everything seem a lot more real, a lot more serious.

  The ranch seemed darker than usual, and Cameron told Darren, who was walking with him, that the counselors and scoutmasters had probably left a few of the lights off or had somehow turned down the intensity in order to scare them.

  "It's working," Darren admitted.

  "Maybe they're going to throw a dummy out from behind one of the buildings, or maybe they rigged up some sort of fake corpse that they put in the path so we would see it." Cameron kept talking, trying to convince himself more than his friend, because deep down he thought that the adults weren't doing anything different or special, weren't trying to trick them, and that things were spooky and scary because it was all real.

  At least, he consoled himself, their cabin was at the end of the row farthest away from Jim Slade's creepy little shack. Of course, it was also the cabin closest to the foot of the Rim. So if the monster came down the side of the cliff in the middle of the night . . .

  No. He didn't want to start thinking about that.

  They made it to their cabin safely, saw nothing weird on the way, and once they were safely inside, all was normal, all was right, and they had no problem forgetting about the Mogollon Monster.

  Well, not forgetting about it.

  Ignoring it.

  But it was a different story after lights out. They all tossed and turned, anxious and ill at ease, but gradually the noises silenced as, one by one, the scouts in the cabin fell asleep: Jimmy, Art, Julio, Darren. Pretty soon Cameron was the only one awake. And he remained awake, listening, as the rest of the camp shut down. He heard two scoutmasters talking over by the chuck house, heard the clatter and rattle of equipment being put away in the barn, heard the adults say good night, and walk off to their respective cabins. There was a pause before the sounds of people gave way completely to the sounds of nocturnal nature, a brief interlude when all was quiet, and then the crickets started chirping, the frogs started croaking, the owls started hooting.

  Everyone was asleep.

  And still Cameron remained awake. Seconds passed, minutes, a half hour. He imagined the hands on a clock moving slowly, slowly, and found himself wondering what time it was. He tried to count sheep, tried to think of nothing but blackness, but none of it did any good. He simply couldn't fall asleep. He desperately had to take a leak, but there was no way he was going to leave the cabin. If he couldn't hold it the rest of the night, he'd just get out of bed and piss in the corner of the room and then try to blame it on someone else in the morning. He gritted his teeth, tried not to think of water.

  And something changed.

  He didn't know what at first, but he figured out almost instantly that the crickets and nighttime creatures had suddenly gone silent.

  A shiver passed through him. His mouth was suddenly dry and he no longer had to pee. He wanted to reach over to the next bed and shake Darren awake, but he couldn't seem to make his muscles move. His arms remained stiffly at his sides underneath the sheet.

  Gravel crunched outside, a slow heavy sound, as though something big were moving through the camp. A strange wind blew through the screen, a movement of air that felt oddly fluid, as though it had the density of water. Cameron breathed in quickly, a deep breath that he intended to hold until whatever this was--

  The Mogollon Monster

  --passed by, but the air he inhaled was thick with the stink of something rancid, and he gagged, coughing. He immediately clapped a hand over his mouth, praying that he hadn't been heard, that no green muscular talons would slice through the screen and slash his stomach open. He closed his eyes, shutting them tightly enough to cause tears, and waited for the blow that would end his life. Yet it did not come and did not come and did not come, and he fell asleep in that position--hand over his mouth, eyes squeezed shut--though he had no idea how long it took or when it occurred.

  He was awakened by shouting.

  "OhmyGod! OhmyGod! JesusChrist! HolyJesus!"

  It was Scoutmaster Rogers' voice, and it was joined a moment later by the shouts of other scoutmasters and counselors, all of them shocked and horrified.

  Cameron felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he quickly pulled on his pants like the rest of the boys and hurried out of the cabin. He knew where the startled voices were coming from even before stepping out the door, knew where the scouts would be running to, knew exactly where they would find whatever this horror turned out to be.

  Jim Slade's cabin.

  He was right. A crowd of men and boys had gathered around the rundown shack. The boys, who were talking excitedly on the way over, were all silenced the second they dashed out the ranch gates and reached the shack.

  Cameron arrived just before Darren. His eyes went first to the rocker on the porch, but there was nothing unusual about it. He saw that the other boys and men were all turned toward the side of the cabin, and he followed their lead. They were pointing at something high up, something small and shapeless and disgustingly slimy.

  He drew closer and felt suddenly sick as he realized what it was they were looking at.

  Scoutmaster Anderson's face, hanging from a branch of the tree.

  2

  Bonnie Brown didn't like the Anasazi Room.

  None of the female employees liked being alone in the museum at night. Most of them felt uneasy in the Colonization Room, with its metal conquistador uniforms and life-size mannequins depicting diorama scenes of Spain's seventeenth-century forays into the New World. A few of them didn't like the Natural History Room and the stuffed animals with their glowing glass eyes. But when she told them she felt uncomfortable in the Anasazi Room, they all laughed at her. It was in the new wing, for one thing. The lighting here was brighter than in the museum's original section, and the exhibits were all behind glass and spaced far apart. The Anasazi Room was particularly benign. They had no bones or mummies as in the Garfield Museum, not even any statues, figurines, or costumed dummies. There were only artifacts: spears and arrowheads, jewelry and beads, jars and vases, baskets and metates.

  But she still didn't like it.

  Bonnie looked up at the clock. The museum closed at nine on Fridays, but by the time the stragglers left, it was usually closer to nine-thirty. Then she had to count up receipts, tally the guests and reconcile the number with that on the turnstile counter, back up the day's computer work on diskette, and set all the building alarms before she could finally leave.

  She was halfway through the receipts when the phone rang. It was Richard. He was home and bored and waiting for her, and he wanted to talk dirty. "Phone sex," he called it. She'd never understood his desire to describe sexual acts to her over the phone, but she tolerated it. Right now, though, she wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible, and she told him that she didn't have time for
this right now.

  "Come on," he begged. "You know what I'll do to you when you get home, right?" He started describing something he knew she didn't like, and she firmly told him good-bye and said she'd be home within an hour.

  She hung up the phone.

  And heard a noise from the Anasazi Room.

  She looked left, into the new wing. All of the patrons were gone, the doors to the building were locked, and she was the last employee left. No one was in the museum except her. The lights were still bright, she had not yet turned them to half-power, but that didn't make up for the emptiness or the knowledge that she was here all alone.

  The noise came again.

  It was a rattling. No, not exactly a rattling--more like a clicking, a clattering, a chattering made by the rapid tapping of stone against stone.

  She stood, grabbed her key ring, walked slowly down the wide empty corridor toward the Anasazi Room.

  Again she heard the sound.

  It wasn't stone against stone, she told herself. It was the rattling of the air-conditioning unit, some sort of perfectly explainable mechanical problem that seemed spooky only because it was night and she was all by herself with an overactive imagination in this big empty building.

  The noise did not stop this time. It continued, competing with the clicking of her heels on the hard polished floor. She stopped outside the wide entryway to the Anasazi Room, listening to the rhythmic tapping, aware that it was in time with the over-rapid beating of her heart.

  Without going in there, she knew what was causing the sound.

  The metate.

  A whisper of cold passed over her skin, leaving goose bumps in its wake.

  She'd had a nightmare about the grinding stone the first night after the object had been installed in its case. It was a fairly recent acquisition, and a seemingly innocuous one. Aside from pottery shards and arrowheads, metates and their manos, or pestles, were just about the most common Native American artifacts found in the Southwest. Every museum in the Four Corners states had a storeroom full of extras, and every trading post, tourist trap, and gas station had one or two for sale to unsuspecting customers at outrageously inflated prices.

  But she'd dreamed about it anyway, and in her dream the object had been carved not out of basalt but out of bone, the petrified bone of a dinosaur or some other prehistoric monster. It was oddly shaped, and, viewed from a certain angle, its irregular chips and shadowed bumps gave the impression of a scowling, malevolent face.

  Bonnie thought of that now and steeled herself. She should not have come down this way. She should have stayed at the desk, finished her work quickly, and fled the premises.

  She peered into the room. It was far darker than it should have been. The overhead lights were out, though she had not turned them off, and the lights in the display cases were off as well.

  All except for one.

  A lone spot shone on the metate, on the curved basalt grinding stone and its worn, vaguely phallic mano.

  She had to fight the instinctive urge to flee. She still had no idea what it was about that particular object, out of all the hundreds of artifacts in the museum, that had given her the heebie-jeebies, but she knew now that her feelings had been right on the money. The thing might look like an innocent piece of carved rock, but it was haunted or cursed, and now its true nature had been made manifest.

  It was after her.

  No, she told herself. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was impersonal, entirely unrelated to her. It could have happened to anyone. Wilton or Robert or Patrice or Jorge.

  But it hadn't.

  Slowly, the mano began to move, at first turning like a compass, then rocking back and forth before finally flipping up and down lengthwise in a manner that was not only unnatural but obscene, the staccato chattering of its repeated impact on the grinding stone impossibly loud in the stillness.

  Bonnie ran.

  She didn't know she was going to do it until she did it. She'd intended to wait and see what happened next, perhaps to try to turn on the lights before calling someone to take a look. But the obscenely animate mano atop that stolid heavy metate seemed directed specifically at her. Before she had time to make a logical decision, her body was obeying a more primal impulse, and she was racing away from the Anasazi Room, trying desperately to keep herself from screaming.

  She ran back down the wide corridor, key ring jingling in her hand, until she reached the front desk. She threw the receipts in the drawer, locked it, then got the hell out of the building as fast as her feet would carry her, quickly locking the front doors, but not taking the time to set the alarms. Her hands were shaking as she fumbled in her purse for the keys to the car, and even as she sped out of the parking lot and bounced onto the street, the Jetta's radio cranked, she could hear in her mind that horrid clattering of stone on stone.

  If she'd had a cell phone in her car, she would have called Stephen, her supervisor, or maybe even the police, and told them exactly what had happened. But she didn't, and by the time she pulled into her driveway, the desire to save face and avoid embarrassment had reasserted itself. She did call Stephen from the hall phone, but told him only that she'd heard a suspicious noise in the Anasazi Room. When she'd gone to investigate, all the lights had been out, so she'd locked up the untallied receipts, locked the front doors, and left.

  "You should have called me from the museum," Stephen said. "You should have dialed 911. You know a patrol car would have been there in five minutes."

  "I know," she said. "But I thought I might be in danger. There weren't even any custodians left. I was alone in the building, and I thought the best thing to do was get out."

  Stephen sighed. "Well, it can't be helped. I'll call the police and meet them down there myself. If they find anyone, I'll give you a call. Otherwise, I'll see you in the morning. I want to go over this with you."

  She was sure he did. Stephen was not one to let protocol lapses pass without extensive lectures and disciplinary action.

  Richard was already in bed waiting for her, waiting for sex, and she decided not to tell him anything. She took off her clothes, climbed onto the mattress, and they made love--first in her favorite position, then in his. Afterward, she took a quick shower, and they fell asleep next to each other, cuddling.

  She was awakened after midnight by a noise downstairs.

  A thump.

  It was her imagination, she told herself, a sound left over from a dream. But when the thump came again, she quickly reached over and shook Richard awake. "I heard something downstairs," she whispered.

  He was instantly alert, scrambling out from under the covers and grabbing his bathrobe from the back of the chair. Neither of them believed in owning guns, but Richard slept with a baseball bat under his side of the bed, just in case. He scooped it up, hefting it over his shoulder as he treaded carefully across the hardwood floor toward the door, careful not to step on any of the creaky boards.

  "Be careful!" Bonnie whispered.

  He held a finger to his lips, shushing her.

  The sound came again.

  Thump.

  He stepped out of the bedroom into the hall, quietly closing the door behind him, and she suddenly wanted to call him back. She didn't--he needed the element of surprise, and yelling would only alert the intruder--but at that moment she was filled with a frantic desire to get him back into the bedroom, to lock the door, and call the police, let them handle it.

  And she knew exactly why.

  From somewhere near the stairwell came a short sharp cry. And a loud crash.

  Then silence.

  And a thump.

  Thump.

  She tried to tell herself it was a home-invasion robber, a rapist, a murderer.

  A person.

  But she knew that wasn't the case. She knew what was making that noise. She'd known from the beginning.

  The metate.

  The thumping sounded closer, and with it came a familiar chatter
ing, the unmistakable clattering of stone against stone.

  It was outside the bedroom door.

  She screamed. A loud piercing cry with no end, a shriek that required no breathing, no intake of air, and continued endlessly, issuing from her open mouth without any conscious effort.

  She was still screaming when the door was bumped open and the grinding stone lurched across the threshold into the bedroom, its mano chattering crazily.

  And she had not stopped by the time it reached the bed.

  Three

  1

  Glen sat on a plastic booth bench in the Bower Jack in the Box, nursing his coffee and staring out the window at the chaparral-covered hills west of town. Vince had called his friend Al, the ASU professor, who had agreed to meet Glen here at eleven this morning and then drive him out to the site.

  He was excited at first, meeting the archeologist friend of a guy he'd run into at the small town where he'd stopped for lunch. Sort of cinematic, something that would lead to a series of adventures for the ultra-cool hero.

  Something Bronson would do.

  But a night in an un-air-conditioned hotel room, a four-hour drive through some of the most godforsaken territory known to man, and forty-five minutes in this fast-food joint had given him time to think.

  What was he doing here?

  Maybe his mother's death had triggered this irrational behavior. Maybe he was suffering some sort of delayed reaction, some post-traumatic stress disorder that was manifesting itself in the form of a second adolescence. Maybe--

  He was saved from any more self-analysis by the arrival of Al Wittinghill. The archeology professor looked just the way an archeology professor was supposed to look. Dusty clothes, khaki vest, tan skin, bald head, graying beard. Glen was the only customer in the place, so the other man recognized him right away, and he walked over, hand extended.

  "Mr. Ridgeway?"

  Glen stood. "Dr. Wittinghill, I presume?"