The Return

by Bentley Little

  "Cool, huh?"

  Devon grabbed the flashlight.

  "Hey!" Pete said.

  "Just shut the fuck up for once."

  Devon focused the beam away from the skeleton, on the ground, trying to ignore the goose bumps surfing down his arms and legs.

  "What is it?" he asked, and his voice came out more hushed than intended.

  Pete did not respond.

  "Hey, I'm talking to you."

  There was no answer, no sound.

  Devon shone the beam around, but it lit only the boulder in the center of the room. And the broken pottery surrounding it.

  Pete could not have left. Devon was near the doorway and would have felt or at least heard him pass by. There was no other entrance or exit, so it was impossible for him to have departed through another opening.

  So . . . what?

  He'd just disappeared?

  Devon avoided shining the light on the skeleton until he checked everywhere else in the chamber that Pete could be. Quickly, reluctantly, he pointed the beam at the corner. No Pete. There were only the malformed bones, the wild hair.

  He ran outside. He ducked to get through the door and sped through the other rooms on instinct more than memory, but finally he emerged from the ruins. The sun had sunk lower and had grown a little more orange, but there was still plenty of light. Dusk was at least an hour or so away.

  He stopped crouching, stood at full height. "Pete!" he yelled at the top of his lungs.

  The cry echoed down the canyon, bouncing back at him from the ancient adobe facades, but there was no call in response, no answer.

  "Pete!" he yelled again.

  He looked back at the small door through which he'd exited. The undersize rectangle was now completely black, the rooms inside bathed in the darkness of the coming night.

  He got out of there fast. He hauled ass up the rope ladder, ran up the small section of trail, hopped on his bike, and sped back toward the visitor's center and the YCC cabins. Briefly--very briefly--he considered telling someone, reporting what had happened to Shumway or one of the rangers or someone in the visitor's center, but he knew that was out of the question. Besides, he was determined not to spend one more minute in this godforsaken wilderness. Court order or no court order, there was no way in hell he was going to stay here, not after that.

  He went to his cabin, gathered up his belongings and took off.

  He headed home.

  The thought occurred to him that he might be blamed for Pete's disappearance. Someone may have seen them leave together, or Pete might have told a friend about his plans. He knew that the truth would sound ludicrous, and he began trying to think up a more plausible scenario should someone try to question him. He'd worked out a pretty good explanation by the time he pulled into his parents' driveway. He'd even come up with a legitimate-sounding excuse for his parents, to explain why he'd broken his sentencing agreement and bailed on the YCC.

  The lights in the house were off, and though he didn't have a watch, Devon knew it had to be after midnight. The national park was a good six hours from home even cruising at top speed--which he hadn't been doing because he hadn't wanted to be pulled over by any cops.

  He was glad his parents were in bed. If all went well and he was able to sneak into the house unseen and unheard, he'd at least get a good night's sleep before having to confront them in the morning.

  Although he wasn't really sure how good a night's sleep he'd get.

  He thought of the ruins, the chamber.

  Shivering, he hurried up the walk, found the key under the mat, and quickly opened the door, anxious to get inside.

  He locked the door behind him, acutely conscious of the sound the lock made as it clicked into place. The house was silent; even his parents' television was off, and he was careful to make no noise as he tiptoed down the hall to his bedroom. He slipped off his boots and crawled into bed fully dressed, falling asleep seconds after closing his eyes.

  He awoke once and found that he'd twisted and tossed in his sleep. His blanket was tangled up by his feet and he was lying on his side, facing the window. Outside, backlit by a streetlight, he thought he saw a shadow on the slatted blinds.

  A short squat creature with a wild mane like a 'fro.

  No, he thought, he was imagining it. Or he was dreaming. Whatever it was, it wasn't real, it wasn't happening.

  He quickly straightened the covers and pulled them over his head, making sure his feet and hands were tucked in, the way he had as a child, and he closed his eyes and forced himself to fall asleep.

  He awoke in the chamber.

  The smell woke him up, the odor of dust and dirt and that other thing, that unpleasant thing. The smell was stronger than it had been before, and he opened his eyes to see a piece of broken pottery next to his face, a jagged shard depicting a kid who looked a hell of a lot like Pete being impaled on an oversize stake.

  There was hard ground beneath him, and he sat up instantly, head and heart pounding. His mouth tasted like dirt.

  Pete's flashlight lay on the floor to his left, its dying yellow beam spread out and illuminating the right half of the room, the boulder, and the broken pots. Devon didn't know where the flashlight had come from, but he was pretty sure he'd taken it with him when he fled. In fact, he knew he had. It had been in his hand when he'd climbed up the rope ladder to the motorcycle.

  That didn't matter, though. It was here now and so was he, and he reached for the object and trained its weak beam on the far corner.

  The skeleton was gone.

  A quick sweep around the chamber showed him that it was not anywhere within these four walls. He hoped to Christ that it was not waiting for him in one of the other rooms as he ducked through the small doorway and ran out of the adobe building as fast as he could.

  He was barefoot, and the dirt beneath his feet felt cold and rough. The air was cold, too, but he was sweating, filled with terror.

  He ran through the last doorway into the open and kept running. There was no moon, and his eyes were not able to adjust to the lightless dark that enveloped the canyon. The flashlight was useless, and he dropped it in frustration, thinking only after he heard it hit the ground that he should have saved it. He could have used it as a weapon.

  Against what?

  He ran faster.

  He had no idea where the rope ladder was, and he was thinking that he should stop and try to get his bearings when he ran into a tree. Hard. He hit his head and fell backward onto the ground, landing flat on his ass.

  He thought he was there for only a second, thought he'd simply closed his eyes and shook his head to clear it.

  But he was back in the chamber, Pete's dying flashlight on the littered floor next to him.

  This time he was not alone. His parents were standing on the left side of the boulder, staring unblinkingly at the opposite wall. Both were holding broken jars of clay on which were depicted scenes he did not want to see.

  Were his mom and dad dead? He didn't know, but despite the wrenching in his gut he was afraid to check, afraid to find out.

  He grabbed the flashlight, swung it around. The far corner was empty, but there were bones piled in the doorway, oddly shaped bones that looked neither human nor animal.

  It came to him then. He finally recognized the smell, that other smell, the horrible smell. It was the odor of fresh blood. He recalled how the trunk of the stolen car had smelled like this after they'd killed the retarded kid's dog, after Kirk had cut the animal in front of the boy and they'd stuffed its body in the trunk.

  That was the smell.

  Blood.

  He didn't know why he hadn't recognized it before.

  There was a percussive clattering as the bones in the doorway shifted, moved of their own accord.

  Elsewhere in the room the sound was echoed as shards of pottery stirred, slipping against each other.

  He looked wildly about, trying to figure out a way to escape. There was only the one door, but even in the
dying light he could tell that more bones were in the entryway than there had been before. There was no way he'd be able to make it through.

  He was going to die in here, he realized.

  Why was this happening? Had he and that dweeb Pete disturbed what was supposed to remain untouched and were they being punished for it? Or was he being punished for his part in harassing the retarded kid and killing his dog? He'd never been religious, never been a believer, but maybe there was a God, some sort of cosmic judge who had decided to mete out divine retribution.

  No, he thought. Even if God existed, He wasn't working out of the back room of an old Indian ruin.

  This was something else. Something he did not--could not--understand.

  The bones in the doorway shifted again, rearranging themselves into a shape he recognized, but did not want to acknowledge. He thought he heard a sigh, a word, whispered.

  His name.

  Instinctively, he ran to the center of the room where his parents stood next to the boulder.

  "Mom!" he cried. "Dad!"

  He reached for his father, who fell over backward, shattering on the ground as though he were made out of clay. The pieces of his body landed indistinguishably among the other shards on the floor.

  Devon grabbed his mother's hand, but felt only a strange dry coolness, like leather that had just been taken out of a refrigerator. He was sobbing, and he whirled around, screaming to the room and anything in it: "I'm sorry!" He didn't know what he was apologizing for, but he was sorry, sorry for everything he'd ever done, ever said, ever thought, even though he knew that made no difference here, had nothing to do with this.

  The weak yellow beam of the flashlight flickered once, then started fading.

  "Help!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "Help!"

  He looked wildly around the chamber, and the last thing he saw before the flashlight died completely was that his mom had a 'fro.

  Nine

  1

  Glen awoke before Melanie, and he rolled carefully onto his side to watch her while she slept. She dozed soundly, none of the chaos and horror of the past few days visible in the smooth lines of her face. Her brow remained unfurrowed, her eyes gently closed, her full lips parted as she snored lightly. The sun had not yet risen, but it was growing light outside, and he could clearly see the details of her soft attractive features, features that he had come to know intimately over the past few days.

  Amidst all the things that were happening, he thought, one of the oddest was this. Them. This island of calm in the storm. Their budding relationship.

  Budding relationship.

  It sounded so corny, He'd never been one to think of life in Hallmark terms, and he felt embarrassed now to be so overly focused on and enthusiastic about his first real relationship in . . . what? Ten years? Fifteen?

  He thought of Kim Mangram, his girlfriend in college, and he remembered the first time they'd had sex in his dorm room rather than in the car. She'd peed in the shower in front of him, and afterward they'd performed sixty-nine, using their mouths on each other, tasting each other's juices. "There are people who've been married for fifty years who aren't as close as we are," she'd said. It was a naive and embarrassing overstatement, a cliche no doubt repeated and believed by every lover on the planet, and though he'd bought it at the time, he'd figured out over the years that such self-important declarations were generic and typical, the type of pronouncements ordinary people used to make them feel unique and special.

  But he felt that way again with Melanie. The sexual acts they'd performed were no different than those performed by every other couple, the confidences they'd shared no more intimate or revealing, but it felt like they were. The two of them seemed closer than any other couple on earth at this moment, and it was a glorious feeling to have, an endorphin rush that made him feel awake, alive, and irrationally happy.

  Melanie opened her eyes, surprised to find him watching her, but not made uncomfortable by it. She smiled sleepily and moved her head up to kiss him. They both had bad breath--"morning breath" the commercials called it--but neither of them cared or felt self-conscious, and again he wondered at the magic that had brought them together.

  Magic?

  Jesus, he was a walking Hallmark card.

  Melanie stretched, sat up. "Busy day," she said.

  Glen nodded. Ron would be out today, according to Zack Een, the lawyer they'd found to represent him. Glen thought "Zack Een" sounded like the moniker of a Martian, and the man himself seemed to fit his name perfectly, but Melanie had asked around and according to the teachers at her school who'd had previous need of legal assistance, Een was the best in town. Ron was paying the lawyer with credit cards, although Glen had had to pay the bail bondsman.

  The police were looking into the disappearance of Ricky's parents (Jerod's had shown up and were fine) as well as the disappearance of Al and Buck and Randy and Judi. The cops were treating them like ordinary missing persons, going through the traditional investigational steps. But Glen had the feeling that they suspected something, that though they refused to admit it and were unwilling to act on it, they knew these were not run-of-the-mill cases with ultimately human explanations. It was a vibe he got from them, his reading of the covert glances the cops shared, the odd silences with which they greeted certain inquiries.

  And it was not just the police. Everyone in town seemed weird and secretive, tuned into a hidden agenda that seemed to involve him and Melanie, but about which they were being purposefully kept in the dark. The hostility he'd felt before, which had been simmering beneath the surface, was now out in the open. In their absence, something had hardened the town's attitude against the excavation and everyone associated with it. When he'd gotten gas yesterday at the Circle K, an old woman on the opposite side of the pump had frowned at him. "Why don't you go back where you came from?" she said. Inside the convenience store, the clerk, a middle-aged man wearing a too-hip hat, had practically thrown his change at him, scowling. Later, at the drugstore, dropping off their film for developing, a group of young toughs had followed them up and down the aisles, pointing and laughing and making rude comments. When they walked back outside, they discovered that someone had thrown eggs at the windshield of his car.

  Glen pushed away the covers and rolled out of bed, picking his underwear off the floor. "I'm going to take a shower," he said. "Want to join me?"

  Melanie had showered last night, and she shook her head, sitting up in bed. "I'll make breakfast. Is French toast okay?"

  "Fine," he said. He had only asked out of obligation and was actually relieved they wouldn't be showering together. He wasn't in a sexy mood and was glad he wouldn't have to pretend.

  Ah, middle age.

  He padded off to the bathroom.

  By the time he finished showering, shaving, combing his hair, and dressing, Melanie had coffee and French toast ready, and they ate together at a table on her back porch, looking out at her well-tended yard. Several small brownish birds flitted from tree to tree, occasionally dipping into the birdbath on the lawn and shaking their wings in the water.

  "Robins?" he asked.

  Melanie smiled. "Sparrows."

  "Oh," he said, embarrassed.

  She laughed.

  "I'm a city boy," he said in his own defense.

  "I noticed."

  The two of them sat in the sunlight, enjoying their breakfast, pretending for a brief while that all was right with the world.

  The truth was that he didn't know what came next. Melanie had left a message with the office of the anthropology department at ASU, explaining about the dig, the disappearances, and Ron, but no one had yet called back. The two of them certainly weren't going to continue with the excavation alone, and he was not sure what Ron planned to do once released. Everything was on hold for the moment, and that was frustrating.

  "I think we should call Pace," Glen said. "Let him know what's happening."

  "You're right." Melanie nodded. "Why don't you do it?"


  After breakfast, he did try to call Pace, but a female ranger who identified herself as Matea said that Pace had taken a four-day leave of absence and would not be back for three more days. He hadn't left a forwarding number and she had no idea how to get ahold of him. "He's probably out in the field somewhere," she suggested. "That's what he usually does when he takes time off."

  "What do you think he's doing?" Melanie asked when Glen told her. "Looking for the skull?"

  "I don't know," he said, but the image in his mind was of the bearded professor sitting alone in that adobe ruin, in the narrow dark room with the painting of that horrible creature, performing some type of ancient rite, while outside the weather shifted from rain to sun to wind to hail.

  "I don't like it," Melanie said.

  He looked at her. "I don't either."

  He thought again of the painting of that creature. God or devil, Pace had said. Whatever it was, it had been nearly identical to the figure in those church paintings. He recalled the final panel in the second triptych, where he and a boy had been holding lengths of rope, facing the hairy-maned figure, while on the wall behind the creature was a stone wheel covered with carved symbols. The figure was obviously at the center of all that was happening. But what was his connection to it? Was it because he had found the skull? And was that even an accident? Was it random chance . . . or had he been meant to dig it up? Had the whole thing been preordained?

  The paintings in the church would indicate so.

  Melanie walked back to the bedroom. "I want to stop by my parents' before we go to the police station," she called out.

  "No problem," Glen said. He followed her down the hall, stood awkwardly in the doorway while she made the bed.

  "Just a quick stop by. My father says everything's okay, but I want to see them, make sure nothing's wrong. Just in case."