At the pueblo, the mood was upbeat. Everyone was exhilarated by the possibility that their work here was not merely interesting but important, and Al had to caution them to focus on the small stuff, on the here and now. Archeology was in the details, and oftentimes the less showy work yielded the most significant results.
For Glen, the excitement of yesterday had worn off a little. Yes, he was glad to be present at such a significant place and time, but he felt slightly detached from it all. Maybe if he'd been here from the beginning, he'd feel more a part of it, but as it was, he was happier for his coworkers than he was for himself.
After work, Melanie dropped him off at the motor court. She had to attend a summer session school board meeting in order to find out her schedule for the next school year, so he was on his own tonight. Judi, Randy, and Buck were going out for Mexican food and invited him to join them, but he begged off and instead walked down the highway to the grocery store, where he bought cheese and bread and luncheon meat for sandwiches.
He stepped up to the checkout counter.
"How do you expect to pay for this?"
Glen frowned. Was it his imagination or was the clerk at the register being deliberately rude? The man was frowning at him as though he were a habitual shoplifter. Glen was reminded of an incident the day before yesterday, when a teller at the bank had given him a dirty look as he'd cashed his paycheck, acting like he was trying to rob the place. Was it because he was an outsider? Or because he was digging at the pueblo? He'd told Melanie about it, and she said that she, too, had noticed a change in people's behavior, that ever since individuals had started discovering Indian artifacts in their yards, they'd seemed suspicious of the university team.
There's something weird about that pueblo.
Melanie's words had never been very far from his mind, and while nothing unusual had been unearthed during his time at the site, save that shard with Melanie's picture on his first day, the possibility had always been there. Maybe that was why he hadn't been as gung-ho as everyone else about all these new discoveries popping up around town. He had turned down Al when the professor had invited him to see the burial chamber, and he realized that the reason he had done so was because he was afraid.
There was something weird about that pueblo.
Glen handed the disapproving clerk a twenty, took his change, and left the store. Was the old woman walking through the doorway glaring at him? Was the young man pushing his infant son in a shopping cart eyeing him suspiciously? Maybe he was just being paranoid, but he felt as though he was the center of attention, the recipient of hostile glances from everyone he met, and as he walked back down the highway, he looked down at the gravel shoulder before him, not wanting to see the faces of people in the passing vehicles.
The police arrived at the motor court shortly before midnight. Glen was awakened by shouting and doors slamming and the flashing of red and blue lights that easily penetrated the sheer fabric of his drapes. He watched for a while out the window, but there were too many people, too many lights, too many shadows. His sleep-addled mind could not seem to make sense of the chaos, and he finally lay back down in the bed, covers over his head, facing away from the window.
In the morning, he discovered that Ron had been arrested for taking obscene photos of underage girls and posting them on his web page. A high school girl from Bower had filed a complaint with the police.
After being drugged and tricked into taking toilet shots, she said.
After he wouldn't give in to her demands and pay more money than they'd originally agreed upon, he said.
The word was that he'd made all of his "models" sign release forms and that the folder containing those release forms was one of the things the police had confiscated. Al had been to the police station and was pretty sure that Ron would be released quickly, but he was still worried about the university's liability in this, as well as the public relations damage. Like Glen, he had noticed that the residents of Bower were not exactly enamored of them or their project, and the professor was concerned that this incident would hinder the prospects of getting the site the protection it deserved.
"I always thought there was something weird about that guy," Judi admitted.
Randy grinned. "Want to check out his website?"
She punched his shoulder.
"You're not on there, are you?"
She punched him again, harder.
Al was gone for most of the afternoon, and the rest of them worked alone and unsupervised. They were subdued. Even Randy and Judi's comfortable banter took on a forced, brittle quality before subsiding into silence. Glen was glad that he and Melanie were working apart today. He didn't feel much like talking to anyone. The professor returned sometime after three, making a short general statement to them all that echoed his cautious optimism of the morning, then settling down at his customary chair and table under the central canopy.
Glen returned to his work. He was digging and scraping the hardpacked ground in the northwest quadrant, having already unearthed a cache of small shells and a scrap of a yucca fiber pouch. Then he came across an object much larger than any of the other artifacts he'd found today, an incongruous expanse of rounded bone. He picked at the hardened soil, chiseling out the shape.
Frowning, he brushed dust off the object. It was a skull, he could see now, but he couldn't quite place it. It wasn't wolf or bear, wasn't horse or deer or mountain lion. In fact, it looked . . . vaguely human.
But not quite.
He was no expert. What little he knew about nature came almost entirely from the Discovery Channel. Once he'd completely freed the skull from the surrounding dirt, he called Al over to look at his find. As he waited for the professor to make his way to this section of the pueblo, he recalled what Melanie had said about the other things that they'd found here, the unexplainable things, and a chill passed through him as he looked at the yellowed skull.
"Where is it?" Al asked, stepping over the low adobe wall.
Glen motioned toward the ground at his feet.
He knew instantly from the change of expression on the professor's face, the quick shift from professional obligation to unqualified excitement, that this was big, this was significant.
"What is it?" he asked.
Al shook his head, knelt down, and examined the object, his fingers running over the smooth curved bone, touching the small slanted eye sockets, the snoutlike nasal cavity, the sharp and overlarge teeth. Whatever it was, the thing had had a big head, and Glen thought of a phrase he'd heard somewhere or read: There were giants in those days. What was that from? The Bible?
Al stood, took off his hat, and gazed down in wonder. "What a day," he said. "First Ron, now this. I guess everything does even out."
"Is it . . . human?" Glen asked.
"That's the question, isn't it?"
"You mean, you don't know?"
"I can guess, I can speculate, but do I know for sure? No. I can tell you this much: I've never seen anything like it, never even heard of anything like it, and if I'm right, if it is what I think it is," he said, a note of triumph in his voice, "it confirms a theory that I've long held to be true, but that has pretty much been the laughingstock of academia for the past decade. I'll be honest with you. This"--he pointed at the skull--"is why I'm here. It's what I've been hoping to find every summer since I started these excavations. Not this specifically, not this skull, but some indication that we are on the right track, proof that our theories were not just idle speculation." He looked around. "Damn, I wish Ron was here to take a picture. Do you know where his cameras are? Are they back in his room?"
Glen shrugged. "I guess so. I don't know."
"I need to tell the others about this. We need to talk about it." Al held up a hand. "Listen up!" he announced, speaking loud enough for everyone to hear. "I want you all to come here! I have something to show you!"
Melanie and the students put down their tools and instruments, stopped what they were doing and made their way th
rough the maze of pueblo half-walls to the room in which Glen had been working.
"What the hell's that?" Buck asked, pointing at the skull.
A smile spread across Al's face. "That is what I want to talk with you about."
"Is it from a caveman?"
Al's smile, if possible, grew even wider. "I'd be willing to bet that its age is concurrent with that of the Anasazi bones in that burial chamber--although there's no way we can prove it right now." He crouched down and carefully picked up the skull, turning it over in his hands. It was nearly twice the size of the professor's head. "Glen is the one who discovered this. It's a skull, obviously, but it's not from any animal I've ever seen, and despite some surface similarities, I don't believe that it is human."
Glen shifted uneasily on his feet.
"Then what is it?" Melanie asked. He thought he heard in her voice what he was feeling.
"The Anasazi ruled this realm for nearly a thousand years. In the latter half of the thirteenth century, a severe drought lasting several decades hit the Southwest. Virtually no rain fell, rivers ran dry, and the Anasazi disappeared, their major settlements left deserted.
"They devolved into cannibalism at the height of the drought. At least, that's the most recent theory. Anasazi coprolites with proteins that would only be present if the defecator had ingested human flesh were found several years ago at Ute Mountain in Colorado, confirming what had been merely a widely disputed hypothesis." He paused dramatically. "But maybe it wasn't the drought. Maybe something else made them turn to cannibalism.
"I know this sounds unbelievable, but bear with me. There is a pattern of civilization abandonment, for want of a better term, throughout the Americas. The Mayans, in fact, disappeared at almost the same time, in nearly the same way, as did the Anasazi. The assumption has always been that wars and environmental factors fragmented these civilizations, that the people scattered and the smaller tribes which came afterward were all descended from these great cultures. But the thing is, none of these tribes exhibited the same mastery of art, science, and mathematics as did their supposed forebears. There were similarities, sure, but more the copycat attempts of a less talented people than the legitimate inheritance of true descendants."
"So where did they go?" Melanie asked.
"It is my contention that, in the case of the Anasazi, an outside force is at the root of this disintegration, behind the cannibalism and the abandonment of cities. This could mean some sort of invisible force like radiation." He paused. "Or it could be a specific being, a monster if you will, that somehow influenced or corrupted or even coerced the Anasazi into modes of behavior that were not native to them and that eventually destroyed their civilization."
Glen looked down skeptically at the skull. "And that's what you think this is?"
"I don't know. Physical anthropology is not my area of expertise. But Pace Henry, a friend of mine from NMU who's over at Chaco Canyon, is an expert in that field. We've been working together on this theory for the past ten years without any evidence to support us, relying solely on reading between the lines of existing facts. This is the first concrete confirmation that the accepted conventional interpretation of events does not tell the whole story, that perhaps our ideas have some validity.
"That's what Pace has been hoping to unearth at Chaco Canyon. Again, you students already know this, and Melanie probably does, too, but for the benefit of Glen, Chaco Canyon is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Southwest. A Southwest Stonehenge, if you will. It was supposedly a place of great power, and there were massive edifices constructed at various points of the compass, aligned with celestial phenomena. Like other Anasazi settlements, it was abandoned abruptly, but unlike other cities, the doorways to the buildings were sealed up before the people left. No one knows why, but Pace and I believe that they discovered something at that location that caused them to rethink their entire worldview, that . . . well, scared the hell out of them.
"So they left. But before they did, they took the time to meticulously close up every entrance to every building, using rocks and mortar to block all doors, all windows, every way in or out of their structures.
"Why? To protect whatever was inside from some sort of outside invader? To lock something in that they didn't want to get out? I suggest to you that it was the latter, although if they did manage to capture this creature, it escaped, as no trace of any such thing was found at the site. In fact, no trace of any such thing has ever been found anywhere." He paused. "Until now."
Judi squinted at the skull, moved around to examine it. "This creature certainly wasn't trapped or sealed in any sort of prison or tomb."
"No," Al admitted.
"So you think that in the middle of its wholesale slaughtering of pueblo dwellers it just . . . had a heart attack and died?"
"I don't know. I don't even know if this is it, if it's one of a series of such creatures, or if this is something entirely unconnected." He chuckled. "And for the record, I don't think it slaughtered the Anasazi. I think it made them disappear."
Looks and glances were exchanged, but no one said a thing.
"I'm aware of how all this sounds," the professor assured them. "Don't think I'm not. I expect my credibility in your eyes is hovering somewhere around the Grover Krantz level. But, as I've said, ours is only a theory, and if the facts take us elsewhere, we are prepared to follow their lead. But at the moment, our interpretation appears to be as valid as any other, and it also explains some of the discrepancies that plague the conventional wisdom."
There was silence for a moment. No one spoke.
Randy cleared his throat. "There's no skeleton," he said. "The head was obviously separated from the body."
Al smiled. "Yes."
"That suggests some sort of ritualistic killing," Randy mused. "It indicates that our pueblo dwellers ascribed importance to this death. They either wanted to ensure that this guy remained dead and could not be resurrected, or else he was used as part of some standardized rite or ceremony."
"Exactly."
"Perhaps it was a figure of worship," Judi said, warming to the subject. Glen heard the intrigued tone of her voice. "A dark diety. In that case, this beheading might have served to ward off evil repercussions."
"You think this was a god?" Buck asked.
"Maybe they thought it was a god. Maybe it was some sort of . . . freak, and they ascribed magic powers to it." She shrugged. "Or maybe Al's right. Maybe it was responsible for the disappearance of the Anasazi."
Buck looked unconvinced.
"I'm going to call Pace right now," Al said, "and see if he can come out. I doubt it, and if that's the case, what I want to do is send you, Melanie and Glen, over to Chaco Canyon tomorrow with the skull. I'd go myself, but I have Ron's incarceration to deal with. I'm expecting word from the university about our liability and responsibilities at any time--and . . . well, to be honest, I want to do some excavating of my own and see if I can find . . . who knows?" He grinned happily. "I have no idea what to expect, and I can tell you I'm pretty damn excited."
"Couldn't you just take some pictures, scan them, and e-mail them to your buddy?" Buck asked.
Al shook his head firmly. "Pace needs to see the real thing. He'll probably want to do some tests as well. Besides, he'll have a place to put it and much better security. I couldn't leave it out here with the rest of our artifacts, and the idea of keeping it in my motel room . . ." He trailed off. "No. It'll be much safer with Pace. This piece is far too valuable to be treated so casually. We can't afford to lose it."
The professor looked at his watch. "It's getting late. I want to get some photos of the site as is before we proceed any further. So I need a backup cameraman. Any of you know where Ron keeps his equipment? Anyone know how to use it?"
They broke up soon after. Al assigned them new duties, and everyone remained at the excavation until the summer sun was nearly down.
Glen dreamed that night of the skull. In his dream, it was screaming at him f
rom the inside of a glass museum case and its voice was that of his mother.
2
They set off shortly after dawn, with the sun still low behind the eastern hills and the sky to the west not entirely divested of night color. Melanie brought coffee and donuts, and after an initial round of obligatory conversation, the two of them settled into a sleepy early morning silence. The only sounds in the car as they headed north toward the interstate were the chewing of maple bars, the slurping of hot java, and the quiet drone of Bower's rapidly fading radio station.
The skull was packed tightly in a sealed box and locked in the trunk, but Glen still felt ill at ease. He didn't want the thing in his car at all. It seemed even creepier now, on the second day, the unnaturalness of its size and animalistic-yet-human shape serving to remind him of Al's speculations as to its origins. Plus, that voice from the dream was still echoing in his head.
The radio station finally disappeared completely as they approached the junction of I-40, and Glen motioned toward the box of cassettes on the floor near Melanie's feet. "You can check through there, see if there's anything you want to listen to."
She sorted through the box and picked out a Pat Metheny compilation, which he took as a good sign. It was one of his favorities.
He stared out the window at the flat, nearly featureless landscape, then looked over at her. "Why did Al pick us?" he asked. "And why did he want both of us to go? Shouldn't one of us have stayed? I mean, with Ron gone, he's really shorthanded. One of us could have taken that thing. It's not like it weighs a ton."
She wrinkled her nose mischievously. "Maybe he's playing matchmaker." Glen looked over at her again, and she shrugged. "Actually," she admitted, "Al told me why he sent us. Because we're not students. We're not affiliated with the university, so we're less likely to try to capitalize on this or use it as a stepping-stone for our own careers. Besides, he's pretty confident that the site will be here next summer. This is a significant find, and with practically everyone in town digging up artifacts, he's fairly sure that protected status is a given."
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