The Return

by Bentley Little

  "He told me there were hundreds of interred bodies, and that they looked . . . dumped, as though this were a mass grave and there'd been no time to go through the usual ceremonial procedures, as though a lot of people died at once, and they'd simply needed to get the bodies in the ground quickly."

  "And you think this thing caused it?"

  Pace didn't answer, but turned the skull back over. It seemed to be frowning at them, Melanie thought. Had it changed expression? No, that wasn't possible. She had simply not noticed before. Or was now ascribing to the shape of its bone structure an emotional component that wasn't there. But it seemed to her that its facial cast looked different than it had before, angry and more unpleasant.

  "What do you think it is?" Glen asked, staring at the skull. His voice was low. Awed or frightened or both. "Al told us his theory--your theory--that there was some sort of catalyst, a creature maybe, that led to the disappearance of those Indian tribes. Do you think this is it?"

  "If you want my professional opinion, as an anthropoligist, I have to say that I have nowhere near enough data to make that determination, and that in all likelihood I won't be able to conclusively answer that question, no matter how many tests I run." He paused, and ran a hand through his hair. "But if you're asking my gut reaction, my feeling . . . Yeah. I think this is it."

  Pace thought for a moment, then covered the skull with a blue tarp. "Let me show you something," he said.

  They left the workroom. Pace carefully locked the door behind them, then returned to the visitor's center to tell Ranger Steve not to let anyone in until he returned. He led them behind the building, down a rock-lined path cordoned off from the public with a length of rusted chain and a cheap aluminum sign that read: EMPLOYEES ONLY. The path passed over a small rise, then wound around a pair of open pits that were unmanned at the moment but obviously excavations in progress. Ahead, at the edge of a low, heavily eroded mesa, Melanie could see a smallish ruin with an open roof.

  It was hot, and she wiped the sweat from her face with a finger. She was struck by how divorced she felt from the vanished world around her, how alien it all seemed. This was the history of the United States, yet she felt apart from it, a third party with no connection to these ruins, these people, and she was reminded of how Wallace Stegner had once called this nation's past "other people's archeology." It was true. In Africa, in Scandinavia, in Asia, people could dig down into the earth and find the bones and artifacts of their ancestors. And their ancestors before that. And their ancestors before that. All the way back to the beginning of time. But the Americas were not like that. Even before the British, this had been a continent of serial conquerors, and digging into the earth brought up only the remnants of defeated cultures and dead civilizations.

  They reached the site, a nondescript rock structure that appeared to be a single-family dwelling. That was odd. As far as she knew, the Anasazi had lived in pueblos, the equivalent of apartment houses, great interconnected structures where an entire village would reside. She had never seen a small house, set apart like this, with no adjacent structures.

  She wanted to ask Pace about it, but he was already walking through a small, almost completely square doorway, ducking under the tree-branch lintel and entering the roofless room beyond. She and Glen followed.

  Inside, the walls were smooth adobe, well preserved after all this time by the aridity of the desert. On them were painted arrows and spears, sharply angled birds and simplistic, rectangular people. There was color--white and brown and black--but only the smaller figures had been painted in. The larger birds and people were sketchlike, line drawings with only the heads and feet in color.

  "As near as we can figure, this was a storehouse of some kind. Although, why it was located so far away from the other structures of the community is not clear. It is also quite small for a storehouse, and the murals suggest some sort of ceremonial usage." He smiled sheepishly. "The truth is, we don't really know what this building was. We're guessing."

  Pace moved forward, gesturing at the paintings on the walls. "I want you to look at this artwork so you can compare it to something I'm going to show you in a minute."

  "What are we supposed to be looking for?" Glen asked.

  "Nothing in particular. I just want you to note the style and technique, the primitive characteristics of the painting."

  "Okay," Glen said.

  Melanie stepped up to the wall on the right, looked at the pictures, committed them to memory, and nodded. "All right."

  "This way." Pace led them through another small door into a long narrow room where the mid-morning sun shone at a slanted angle, illuminating an elaborate mural on the facing wall. "We don't show this to the public," he said. "For obvious reasons."

  Indeed, the mural portrayed the most graphically depicted sex acts Melanie had ever seen. These were not the simple featureless figures with engorged, overemphasized pudenda or gigantic, crudely rendered phalluses that were so common among primitive fertility-based cultures. Instead, exquisitely detailed and remarkably colorful scenes of debauchery were painted on the smooth adobe, with individual focal points bordered in black as though the viewer was supposed to be looking through a window. In one, an older man was standing atop a tree stump holding his penis, and either ejaculating or urinating into the willing mouths of a trio of young women spread-eagled on the ground before him. In another, an overweight woman was on her hands and knees while another thinner woman sat behind her, the second woman's face buried in the buttocks of the first. Two women licked the opposite sides of a prone man's erection. A man was copulating with a female bear. At least a dozen other figures were engaged in various types of unnatural sex acts.

  "It's Sodom and Gomorrah," Melanie said.

  "Remarkably similar," Pace admitted. "Even more so when combined with the narrative provided by the accompanying pictographs." He pointed toward the narrow side wall. "According to that, the community depicted here was prophesied to end cataclysmically due to its decadent ways, its destruction brought about by an unspecified supernatural being. Less than fifty years after these paintings were made, Chaco Canyon was abandoned, its windows and doors sealed."

  Melanie was still staring at the explicit painting before her. Not only did the mural look as though it had not been created by the same artist as the artwork in the previous room, it did not look like it came from the same culture. There seemed something more modern about the graphic detail here, an individuality in the presentation that had not been seen even in European art until half a millennium later.

  Glen must have been thinking the same thing. "Were these--" he began.

  "They were done at the same time as the others," Pace said.

  Melanie felt chilled, though she was sweating and the sun felt hot against her head.

  "Now let me show you what's on the other side of this wall." Pace ducked under an arched entryway to the center room of the ruin.

  Though there was no ceiling here, either, the chamber seemed darker, and was measurably cooler than the rest of the structure. She also noticed a strange smell--not the sour, musty deadness found in most ruins, the scent of sand and rock and long-departed life, but a fresher, harsher odor, subtle yet tangible, that bizarrely struck her as gasoline mixed with rotted vegetables.

  Pace was facing the wall next to the entryway, and Melanie and Glen both turned to look in that direction.

  At the painting.

  This one was done in a more traditionally primitive style. It resembled the artwork back in the first room--or perhaps its sister mural on the other side of the wall, only drained of life and individuality. It depicted a solidly built, squarish creature with wild bushy hair. The creature was humanoid--that is, it had two arms and two legs--but it was not human. Even this crude representation imparted the feeling of something profoundly alien. Not "alien" in the sense of outer space, but "alien" as in utterly unknowable. It was the same creature they'd seen in the tryptich of the abandoned church, and that connection made
it seem much more ominous.

  They stared at the figure.

  "It is a god," Pace said softly. "Or a devil."

  Melanie felt uncomfortable looking at the painting. Her brain suddenly made the association. "Why did you take us out here?" she asked Pace.

  "Because I think you have the skull of this being, a supernatural entity predicted to destroy the Anasazi society, the entity that did destroy that society."

  Melanie could believe it. The bushy-haired figure was, hands down, the most evil-looking creature she had ever seen. It cast a shadow over the entire room, a pall that encompassed the walls, the floor, even the narrow strip of sky above. The air itself here seemed wrong, affected by the unnatural creature depicted on the wall. She found it hard to breathe, her throat and lungs filled with a parched harshness.

  Glen was asking Pace a question, but even though she was only a foot away, she couldn't seem to hear their words. The sound was muffled, indistinguishable. She squinted at them, trying to read their lips, then turned back to the painting on the wall.

  Her heart skipped.

  Had it changed positions?

  She suddenly wanted to--had to--get out of this room, this building. No, the figure hadn't moved, but there was definitely something different about it, and the fact that its appearance could change terrified her. She thought of the shard of pottery she'd left back at the empty church yesterday, with its disappearing face in her parents' window. Reality, she understood now, was not solid and dependable, as most people thought, as she'd always thought. It was ever fluid, shifting.

  Gasping, panting, trying desperately to catch her breath, she fled the chamber, fled the ruin, and waited outside in the hot unfiltered sun until Glen and Pace emerged. They'd obviously come out to check on her, concerned, wondering why she'd bolted. She expected questions, expected them to ask her what was wrong, but neither of them said a word.

  They felt it, too, she thought.

  They returned to the visitor's center in silence, walking slowly back over the dusty path until they reached the cement sidewalk and the workroom.

  The skull was gone.

  It was impossible but true. They searched the room, and Pace questioned the staff, but no one knew anything about it. No one had gone back there, and while ordinarily such a locked-room mystery would have thrown suspicion on everyone within shouting distance, all three of them instantly believed the denials. This was not a normal theft.

  Melanie asked Ranger Steve if there had been any calls for her in their absence. When he said there'd been none, she tried to call Al again, but the land line seemed to be down and the cell phone didn't work out here.

  "Kind of convenient," Glen said.

  She didn't respond, but she'd been thinking the same thing.

  The three of them stood in the middle of the visitor's center, between the museum and the gift shop, while around them tourists walked in and out of the building. Melanie glanced over at the museum, her attention drawn by the skull of a sloth encased in glass. "Where do you think it is?" she asked Pace.

  He shook his head helplessly. "Haven't a clue. Any ideas?"

  Melanie had plenty, but she didn't want to speak them aloud. She wouldn't be surprised to see the skull suddenly appear in one of the museum's exhibits, or back in the trunk of Glen's car, ready to return to Bower. She could even imagine it back in Bower, returning on its own in some mysterious, unspeakable way, positioned once again in the hole Glen had dug.

  But her gut told her something different. She really thought it was in the ruin they'd just visited, that spooky little building out there on its own, with its open roof and unholy murals, and in her mind's eye, she saw it on the ground before that bushy-haired figure in that dark cold chamber.

  Pace led them once more on an obligatory search of the workroom and the park service's storehouse, even on an inspection of the picnic grounds adjacent to the visitor's center, but they found nothing.

  "Where are you two planning to spend the night?" he asked as they walked past the public restrooms.

  Melanie looked at Glen.

  "We didn't really have any plans," Glen admitted. "We thought maybe we'd find a motel in Gallup or something."

  "It's getting late. Gallup's far, and we have an empty cabin you can use. Why don't you stay here? We can talk some more over dinner. I haven't had an opportunity to speak with Al, so I'd like to sound out the both of you about some of my thoughts here, what I think we might do and what we should concentrate on. Since we can't get ahold of him, you can be my messengers and tell him what we've discussed."

  "Well . . ." Glen said hesitantly.

  Pace ran a hand through his thick hair. "As Al probably told you, we've pretty much kept this under wraps. And we'd like to keep it that way until we publish." He gestured back toward the visitor's center. "So I can't tell them in there, can't talk about this with any of my friends or coworkers. But you two know. Hell, you were there, you found it." He took a deep breath. "And I think I want to talk about it tonight."

  Glen was nodding, and Melanie, too, understood. "All right," she said, catching Glen's eye. "We'll stay."

  "Great." Pace smiled. "That's great."

  2

  They left early, before dawn, and arrived in Bower just after noon.

  They'd been gone only two-and-a-half days, but it seemed like a month. The roads, the buildings, the cars on the street, everything had the slightly distanced unfamiliarity that came with an extended break in the routine intimacies of daily life. Before heading out to the site, they stopped first at Melanie's house to go to the bathroom, and while she went first, he quickly unloaded their suitcases from the car. On the long trip back, Glen had agreed to give up his primitive lodgings in the motor court and move in with her. The invitation was open-ended, and while he knew he'd be there until the end of summer and the end of the dig, what was going to happen beyond that neither of them knew.

  While he went to the bathroom, Melanie phoned her parents. She'd tried to call from the road several times, but the line was always busy. When he emerged, she was just hanging up, and he could tell from the relieved expression on her face that her parents were all right.

  After grabbing two bottles of Snapple from the fridge, they headed out to the excavation in Melanie's truck. Glen sped off the highway and down the dirt road, filled with an unfamiliar sense of urgency. He pulled next to Al's Jeep in the crowded makeshift parking lot and they quickly got out and hurried up the mound of dirt, not speaking, not needing to. They ducked under the rope.

  The site was abandoned.

  Glen stood staring, his eyes searching the various pits, trenches, and half-excavated walls for any sign of movement. It was the town all over again. He didn't know how he knew, but he did. What's more, he'd been expecting it. He glanced over at Melanie, and she, too, seemed unsurprised. After what they'd seen in that church and what had happened at Chaco Canyon, nothing was shocking anymore.

  They stood for a beat longer, then walked slowly through the partially unearthed ruins, looking for . . . what? Charred bones? Piles of ashes? Empty clothes?

  There was nothing, only the sun, only the wind, and they made their way over to the canopy in the center of the excavation, where an extra-large Jack in the Box cup filled with water sat atop the table, having remained there so long that there was not even any condensation on the outside of the cup.

  When did this happen?

  Glen looked out over the empty excavation. He saw Al's Panama hat on the ice chest next to Buck's Walk-man, saw Judi's purse lying next to a pick and pail. They were gone. All of them. They'd disappeared, and he had no illusions that they were just missing and would eventually return. Whatever happened to them, they were never coming back.

  He picked up a spiral notebook filled with Al's small cramped writing, looked down at a sift box filled with pieces of pottery. What if he had been here at the time? What if he were one of the missing? He could not muster much emotion over the prospect, and it occurred to
him that it was because he knew he would not really be missed. He had no family left, no close friends. There was no one to care. Oh, Melanie might feel bad for a while, but then she'd get on with her life and it would be as though he had never existed.

  Life was so transitory and ephemeral, an individual's existence so small and ultimately pointless.

  He thought of his mother. He had avoided thinking about her as much as possible these past several weeks, and he understood now that he'd been afraid to let himself dwell on her passing, afraid that if he did so, he would succumb to despair. He'd done the same thing after his father's death--although he hadn't been aware of it until this moment. He'd thrown himself into his work, had purposely not thought about either his dad's death or life, had carefully partitioned off those thoughts and memories. With his mother, he'd cried, he'd grieved, and he thought he'd gotten it out of his system. But then he'd given up his job and his former life for a taste of freedom and the open road, and he realized now that one of the reasons he'd run away was because he didn't want to deal with the loss, didn't want to face those feelings.

  He stared down at the sift box, then up at the blue, blue sky.

  Why was he thinking of all this shit now?

  Melanie found his hand, squeezed it, not looking at him, but glancing around the excavation as if expecting a monster to pop out at any second. "What do you think happened?" She seemed more shaken than he did. Or rather shaken in the right way. She had not been surprised by what they'd found, but she was horrified, and obviously frightened. "Did they just disappear in a flash? Did creatures come and take them, physically carry them away? Did they put up a fight? What the hell happened here?"

  Glen didn't know and he was glad he didn't know. It was cleaner this way, easier to take. If he were aware of the messy details, if he started imagining the specifics of what they'd gone through, what they'd felt, he might not be able to continue.

  "It's like the town," Melanie said softly. "Like the church."

  "Yeah."

  "Do you think we should . . . look?"