Common sense told him to call out Jay's name, then haul ass and bail if there was no answer, but he continued to creep slowly and silently forward. His shoes squeaked on the varnished wood floor of the entryway. The house grew progressively darker the farther he went in. The door behind him was open, but all of the drapes were closed and none of the lights were on as he passed into the gloomy living room.
Jay's mom was a fanatic housekeeper and, as usual, the room was immaculate. But when he looked toward the kitchen, he saw shadows within shadows, areas that, even with the curtains drawn, should not have been quite so dark. He turned away, not wanting to go in there.
Gathering his courage, he strode quickly across the murky living room to the hallway that led to the bedrooms and bathrooms. He'd speed through here quickly, and if he didn't find anyone, he'd go back to his own house and dial 911.
He poked his head into Jay's room, saw nothing, checked the first bathroom, then stepped into the doorway of Jay's parents' bedroom.
Where he stopped.
It was standing on the bed, hair frizzed out, arms bent at the elbows and stretched forward as though waiting to catch a ball. It was completely still, like a statue, but it was not a statue. While its eyes were deep-set and too dark to see within the shadowed face, Cameron knew it was staring at him.
It was the thing he'd seen in the backyard that day.
The Mogollon Monster.
No. It wasn't the Mogollon Monster. He had the feeling that whatever this thing was, it was far more dangerous, far more evil than the simple Bigfoot clone described in that scout ranch story.
There was no indentation on the mattress where the figure stood, not a wrinkle on the carefully folded bedspread. The creature seemed to weigh nothing at all. Again, the air was heavy, liquid. Only this time it was as if he could see it. He was not incapacitated, though, he could move. He backed up slowly, then ran back down the hallway. Jay's parents had a Polaroid camera. He and Jay had used it once to take a picture of Stu swimming in his underwear, and he knew it was in the closet next to the front door. He dashed over there, praying that it had film, praying that the thing on the bed--
the monster
--hadn't left. He wanted to catch it on film so he could prove later that he wasn't lying or crazy.
If there was a later.
It was still standing on the bed when he returned. Cameron held up the camera and with shaking hands took a photo.
He tore out the Polaroid as he ran, the afterimage of the flash making it hard to see as he dashed down the unlit hallway. He sped out the front door, and in seconds was across the lawn and at the curb. He glanced down at the picture in his hand. It wasn't fully developed yet, but already he could see that frizzy-haired monster coming into focus atop the blurry bed.
He'd gotten it.
Cameron shoved the picture in his pocket and looked over his shoulder. As he'd hoped, he wasn't being followed. The creature remained in the house. Before him, the street was empty. Now that he looked, he saw that all of his neighbors' front doors were open.
This was a nightmare. This couldn't be real.
It was real, though, and he wondered if monsters were standing on the beds in all of those houses.
He had no idea what to do next, so he ran back home across the street. The front door, thank God, was not open but closed, the way he'd left it. At least he knew there were no monsters in his house. He'd dial 911, call the police, tell them what he'd seen, and they'd probably have someone over here in a couple minutes. They already had men stationed at the Indian ruins. All they had to do was send one of them up the street.
He knew he was not alone the second he stepped inside the house, but his first reaction was one of relief because he saw his parents sitting on the couch, watching TV.
Only the TV was turned off.
They were watching a blank screen.
Relief was replaced instantly by fear. He wanted to call out to his parents, wanted to run over to them, make sure they were okay. But he was afraid. They were not okay. Something was dreadfully, horribly wrong, and he couldn't even call the police because the phone was on the other side of the couch.
His mother nodded at the blank TV screen. His father laughed.
Maybe he could run to the police.
Cameron backed out of the house, closed the door behind him, then raced down the empty street, past the other homes with their open doors, toward Camelback Road and the ruins, toward police and people and the real world.
He was allowed to get two blocks down before his way was obstructed. He reached Clark, the second side street, and halted instantly at the edge of the curb. There were twin dust devils dancing on the asphalt. Impossibly tall, impossibly thin cyclones of sand that stretched into the air farther than he could see.
Dust devils.
They moved in tandem across the road from one side to the other, making sure he could not pass.
The dust devils had faces. His parents' faces. It wasn't like that old Tron game they had at the Retro Mall. The faces weren't stretched-out, flattened countenances wrapped around the bottom of the cyclonic dust cloud. They were more fluid than that, and at the same time more real, three-dimensional visages formed of swirling sand and leaves and trash.
Cameron stood there, breathing hard, sweating profusely. Collateral wind, hot and gritty, touched his cheeks, mussed his hair.
His mother's face nodded at him. His father's laughed, the accompanying sound a sibilant hissing of grainy wind. Those were the same reactions they'd had to the blank TV screen at home, and Cameron sat down hard on the curb. He wanted to cry, wanted to give up. The dust devils pressed forward across the asphalt, moving slowly, deliberately, and when he looked up again to see the faces, they were both angry, mouths wide open as if to yell at him or devour him.
Fear won out. Despair fled as quickly as it had arrived, and he jumped to his feet and ran back the way he had come, leg muscles straining, hurting as he pushed them to their limit, desperate to escape the dust devils, this neighborhood, everything. Doors slammed sequentially on the houses as he passed them, but when he approached his own house, the door he'd closed opened wide.
He slowed, stopped. It was pretty obvious that whatever was behind all this was bent on keeping him there. It would throw any obstacle it could into his path in order to direct him, like a lab rat in a maze, to the destination it wanted for him.
Besides, where else did he have to go? Wasn't this where he was heading anyway? His house was no longer any of the things homes were supposed to be: it wasn't safe, it wasn't reassuring, but it was what he knew, and the impulse to return was instinctive.
He looked at the open doorway, heard the click-clack maraca sound of front doors slamming up both sides of the street. He thought of his parents and knew that he had to go check on them, see what had become of them.
He entered the house warily, prepared for anything. Nothing jumped him, nothing came at him, he heard no strange sounds, but when he looked across the living room, his parents were gone.
In their place, on the couch, were two brown carrots.
Dazed, numb, overloaded, he stepped heavily across the room.
Maybe those weren't dust devils he'd seen. Maybe they were giant carrots.
The connections here seemed to make sense on some level he could not understand. He reached out to touch the carrot on the left. It broke beneath his finger, cracking like cheap porcelain before crumbling into dust. In the dust was a single white tooth. His mom's tooth. The one on the top in the front that was a little differently shaped than all the others.
He knew he was supposed to touch the other carrot, break it, see something of his dad's inside, but he did not, could not. He stared at the tooth, snow white against the brown dust, realizing for the first time that his mom was dead. He had assumed that already, but it had not hit him until now. Knowing that her tooth had been taken out, though, knowing that wherever her body was, it was missing a front tooth, made him understan
d in a very visceral way that his mother had been killed.
He looked at the other carrot.
His dad, too.
The doorbell rang.
What would it be now? His parents reincarnated as dwarves? Jay dead and still wanting to hang out? That frizzy-haired creature?
It didn't matter. He was beaten. He couldn't take any more. He wasn't going to run, wasn't going to fight. Whatever was going to happen would happen, and he would accept it.
The doorbell rang again.
He opened the door, bracing himself.
"Cameron?"
"Uncle Vince!" he said gratefully.
And he started to cry.
Eleven
1
As quickly as it had come, it was gone.
Except that Glen was not sure it really was gone. He had the feeling it had just moved.
He and Melanie stood in the Pima House parking lot while McCormack, several policemen, and a host of scientists carrying various types of electronic equipment walked up and down the ruins' trails. As always, a huge crowd stood behind the barricade, but this time they looked worried, disappointed. Television news copters hovered above.
No one knew when it had stopped. But early this morning, before dawn, one of the policemen charged with patrolling the perimeter had made a run for it himself. His fellow night-shifters went after him, wanting to grab him before he vanished.
But he didn't vanish.
He passed the spot where everyone else had disappeared, and kept going, over a small rise, around the side of the main house, before coming to a confused stop. His pursuers had halted long before, afraid of vanishing themselves, and they stared with undisguised shock.
An hour later, the state park was crawling with cops, scientists, investigators trying to determine whether the "vortex," as it was being called, had shrunk to a fraction of its former size or had disappeared entirely.
"What do you think it means?" Melanie asked in a hushed, awed voice.
"I don't know," he admitted.
"It seems ominous, the way it just stopped. Like maybe this was the preview, and now the main show's about to start."
She was exactly right. He hadn't known why this latest development was making him feel so uneasy--it was a good thing that the vortex was gone, wasn't it?--but she'd hit the nail on the head. The disappearances in Bower, the vortex here, all the bone sculptures and animate relics had been leading up to something, something bigger. Stage one was ending and stage two was about to start.
Melanie was about to say something else when her cell phone rang. She answered and immediately handed the phone to Glen. Vince was at his sister's house, he said, but things had come up and he wouldn't be able to make it today. He'd call them back tomorrow. What things? Glen asked, but Vince had already hung up.
"What is it?" Melanie asked, seeing his face.
Glen shook his head. "I don't know."
"Is he here in the Valley?"
"Yeah, but he said he can't make it today, that something came up, and he sounded . . ." Glen thought for a moment. "Scared."
Melanie sighed. "What now?" she said wearily, and that expressed his feelings exactly.
Glen looked out across the parking lot. One of the policemen--Captain Ortiz, if Glen remembered correctly--was talking to McCormack in a brisk officious manner. Immediately after the end of the short conversation, the professor hurried over. "An interesting development has happened on one of the streets off Camelback here. It sounds as though it's connected. A whole neighborhood has disappeared, everyone save one kid. I don't know any more than that. Some of our guys are going over to see what's what."
"I'll drive," Glen said.
McCormack was right: it was close. They could've walked. As they drove down the wide suburban street, following a police car, Glen didn't see anything out of the ordinary. These sorts of neighborhoods never appeared to have any people in them anyway, because the residents were always either at work or inside their homes. But halfway down the third block two patrol cars and one unmarked vehicle were parked at angles in front of a nondescript house.
Standing in front, talking to a team of detectives, was Vince.
The police car they'd been following parked next to the others, and Glen pulled into the adjacent driveway. The three of them quickly got out. While McCormack hurried over to talk to the officer in charge, he and Melanie made a beeline for Vince. The other man was obviously surprised to see him, but just as obviously grateful. Glen silently indicated that he and Melanie would wait around until he finished talking to the cops.
That proved to be sooner than expected. Looking exhausted, Vince walked over and suggested that they move farther away from the police so they could speak in private.
"What happened?" Glen asked.
Vince shook his head, not ready to talk yet, and Glen saw how young he was, how overwhelmed and out of his depth. The last time they'd met, Vince had seemed like a knowledgeable archeology professional and he himself had felt like an unemployed dimwit. Now he felt older and more experienced--and he realized with a start that he was not the same person he had been at the beginning of the summer, the person who had left Automated Interface to travel the country and find himself.
Vince cleared his throat. "I didn't tell them what happened back in Springerville. Maybe it was a mistake, but I don't think it's what they're looking for. I don't think they'll understand . . . and I don't think there's anything they can do about it." He paused. "I'm not sure what Cameron's saying."
"Cameron?"
A group of additional detectives had been interviewing a kid on the front porch of the house. They finished their questioning, and the boy quickly came over.
Glen sucked in his breath.
"This is my nephew, Cameron."
The boy.
Glen blinked, not quite believing what he was seeing. He felt an uncomfortable sense of deja vu as he looked at Vince's nephew. Cameron looked uncannily like the boy in those paintings in the abandoned church. Same round face, same dark hair, same red shirt.
Glen didn't like this, didn't like it at all. Everything was coming to pass just as some unknown priest had imagined three or four centuries ago, and while he still held out hope that he had the capacity for free will, he was beginning to think that it was all predestined, that he was merely fulfilling some role that had been assigned to him long before he'd been born.
Glen watched the boy talking to his uncle. Maybe it wasn't true. Maybe he was seeing things that weren't there. He thought of the store that sold Delaware Punch on his mom's old paper route. Memories were faulty under the best of circumstances. Perhaps he was imagining similarities between Cameron and the boy in the paintings where there were none.
He wished they had the New Mexico photos so he could compare and make sure. Why the hell hadn't they picked up the developed pictures before coming down to the Valley?
"So what happened?" Melanie asked.
"According to Cameron, it started here before it started there," Vince said, motioning toward Camelback Road and the ruins beyond. "The pets on this street were affected over a week ago. One of them even killed a man."
"It started before that," the boy said in a quiet, hesitant voice. "It killed one of the scout masters at my boy scout ranch. Tore his face clean off. It followed me down here."
"It?" Melanie said gently.
Cameron nodded. "Whatever it is."
Vince told the rest of the story. He explained how his nephew had seen something outside the window of his bedroom after returning from the scout ranch and had drawn a picture of it; how one friend's cat turned strange and spooky; how another friend's dog had killed a neighbor; how people and animals had started disappearing into the ruins . . . and then what had happened today: missing people, the monster in the bedroom, dust devils with his own parents' faces, ceramic carrots that looked like the dust devils. Cameron chimed in periodically to clarify or correct, but for the most part kept silent.
"It's the
scope of this I don't like," Melanie was saying. "Bower, Springerville, Chaco Canyon, Phoenix, almost every major site or museum throughout the Southwest. This isn't like a haunted house. It's big. Not that I believe in haunted houses, but that was the only analogy I could think of." She sighed. "Although, there's no reason for me not to believe in haunted houses. They're certainly no stranger than what we're talking about here."
Vince nodded. "I hear you."
"What really worries me is that in Bower the problem wasn't just the site or the bones or the Anasazi relics. The people in town were affected, too--and not in the way you'd think they would be. Even my father seemed weird. He was angry with us, with Al and the entire team."
"Hell," Glen said, "the whole town seemed pissed. It's like they blamed us, like they knew what was going on and thought we were the cause of it."
"Maybe they did know what was going on," Vince said softly.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Just a theory. But after I ran into that old Navajo man, while I was following those artifacts across the desert, it occurred to me that societies are unique entities not totally related to the people who make them up, and that they have memories, ways of retaining and passing on knowledge that individuals may not specifically know but, when confronted with, know to be true."
"A collective unconscious?" Melanie said.
"Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But there are myths and stories indigenous to specific cultures at specific times. That old man knew enough to call those tribal people 'The Others,' but he said he didn't know anything about them: who they were, where they came from, anything. It was as though his knowledge was instinctive rather than rational, like a baby who's afraid of a black widow spider, but can't possibly know that the spider is poisonous or even understand the concept of 'poisonous.' It's just an automatic reaction. Knowledge that's hardwired in."
"Who do you think those people were?" asked Melanie.
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