The Return

by Bentley Little

  Vince shrugged. "I have no idea. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I know they weren't from Springerville, but where they were from and why they were there . . ." He shook his head.

  Glen tried not to look at the boy, tried not to think about him. "So how did the people in Springerville act? I mean, after you saw them up there in the ruins the next day?"

  "Not all of them were there, just a couple dozen or so. But everyone in town seemed normal afterward. I didn't see any changes. No hostility. Nothing like what you're talking about."

  "What about that . . . skeleton you said you saw?"

  "The one in the kiva? The headless one?"

  "Yeah. Is it still there, did you just leave it?"

  "What else could I do? It's an archeological find, and I wasn't equipped to dig it out right then, and, well, to be honest, it was creepy. I didn't like being around it by myself. And now, after what you told me about that skull, I'm glad I didn't try to do anything more with it."

  "You didn't happen to take a picture of it, did you?" Melanie asked.

  Vince shook his head. "Do you have a photo of your skull?"

  "Ron took some," Glen said, "but, no, we don't have them, and I don't know where they are."

  "I'd bet they're from the same creature," Melanie said. "Bower and Springerville aren't that far apart, and since it appears that the creature was beheaded as part of some ritual, it makes sense that its body would be in a kiva. The scary thing is that the people who did this weren't content to just separate the head from the body and bury the two separately. They had to bury them a hundred miles apart at different pueblos."

  Vince looked at his nephew, then up at Glen and Melanie. "Cameron got a picture of it," he said, speaking low. "The creature he saw. We didn't tell the police. I thought you should see it first. I don't know if it's the same one we're talking about or . . ." He nodded at Cameron.

  Silently, the boy handed Glen the Polaroid.

  It was one thing to see paintings, drawings, carvings. It was quite another to see a photo of the real thing. Glen stared at the picture, unable to look away, held captive by the sheer incongruity of the scene. There was a bed, a dresser, the nondescript furnishings of a suburban middle-class bedroom. But atop the bed, standing on the covers, was a creature with a dirty orangish afro. It was huge and out of proportion, but the face was what captured Glen's attention. Neither human nor entirely inhuman, with dark angry eyes and a cruel, slightly smiling mouth beneath a blank expanse of skin where a nose should have been, it was terrible, a ghastly visage unlike anything he had ever seen. God or devil, Pace had said of the painting in Chaco Canyon, and Glen was fully ready to believe the latter. There was something evil and unnatural and fundamentally wrong with the figure, and seeing it alive in a photograph brought this home in a way that nothing else could.

  "Oh, my God," Melanie said, putting a hand to her mouth. "I've seen that before."

  Glen nodded. "At Chaco Canyon."

  "No."

  "The church in--?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "No."

  "Where, then?"

  "It was a mummy in this tourist trap. I don't know why I didn't remember it before."

  "A mummy?"

  "Yeah. It was . . ." She shook her head. "I can't remember. It was either in southern Arizona, down past Tucson, or somewhere past Flagstaff on the way to Meteor Crater. One of those little roadside attractions. They had it in a Plexiglas box, and it was supposed to be an ancient Aztec king. I thought it was fake at first, and the friends I went with all laughed about it, but I remember the room it was in was un-air-conditioned and hot as hell and smelled. It was like something had died in there, and after that I couldn't be sure if the mummy was real or not. I mean, I didn't actually think it was an Aztec king, but I thought it might be the remains of a real dead man and not just a papier mache mockup. One of my friends took photos of us next to the mummy case, which is what jogged my memory." She shivered, and her voice grew soft. "But that's what it looked like. I remember the hair."

  Cameron swallowed hard. "Yeah. The hair."

  Glen continued to stare at the Polaroid. Was this the same sort of creature whose skull he had found? The picture was dark, but there seemed to be definite similarities. This one was so much smaller, though. He thought of that unholy cave under Ricky's house, and he could easily see this creature sitting in the darkness, patiently piecing together various skulls and bones into fences and tables and sculptures.

  Melanie touched his arm, and he jumped. Broad daylight, a completely appropriately touch, and he jumped. No one laughed, though.

  "I think we should track that mummy down," she said.

  "And do what?"

  "Buy it, steal it, bring it back to study. Give it to Professor McCormack. Or Pace if we can find him. These creatures, these things, whatever they are, are at the heart of what's going on. We found a bodiless skull, Vince found a headless skeleton, the boy took a picture of one, we've seen cave drawings. This is our opportunity to examine one and . . . see what we can learn."

  Glen nodded reluctantly. She was right.

  "Can we keep the picture for a while?" Melanie asked Cameron. "I promise we'll take good care of it."

  "You think I want that thing?" The boy gave her a disgusted look. "It's yours. I only took it so people would know I wasn't crazy."

  "Maybe we should let the police see it," Glen suggested.

  "You think they'd be able to do more with it than we can?" She shook her head. "We'll give it to them afterward if they want it."

  Melanie's confidence gave him confidence. He looked at the Polaroid in his hand. What were they up against? What were these things?

  McCormack walked up, confirming that policemen had gone into open houses and found half-eaten food and partially completed chores, but not a single person alive or dead. "They've vanished," he said. "And since they didn't go down to Pima House, I think there's a good possibility that our vortex has relocated somewhere very close by."

  Cameron looked from his uncle to McCormack. "What do the Indians say is happening?"

  Vince looked surprised. "What?"

  "What do the Indians think is behind all this?"

  The professor blinked, started to say something, then shut his mouth. Glen felt his own face redden with embarrassment. He glanced at Melanie. How ethnocentric could they be? All of the bizarre events that had occurred throughout the Southwest over the past few weeks had happened in or around Indian ruins and museums. Yet none of them had even thought to discuss what was going on with a single member of any tribe. Why had it taken a boy to figure out what should have been obvious to them from the beginning?

  The police had failed, too, he realized. And all of the other scientists and experts with their metal detectors and laser scanners and Palm Pilots.

  The past doesn't die. It's with us all the time. Melanie had said that when she'd told him about her great-grandfather the serial killer, and it was true. Attitudes and outlooks from previous centuries, politically incorrect positions denied and thought long discarded were still there in modes of thinking, systematic approaches. It had never occurred to any of them to consult someone who might have some cultural connection with what was happening. Even Vince, who had met and talked with an old Navajo man in the desert in the middle of the night, had not thought to seek out any other tribe member the day after he watched his fellow citizens loot the ruins.

  "I don't think they know either," Melanie said. "But we need to ask them."

  The detectives were returning, armed with more questions, no doubt, and Vince told them to go ahead and leave. This was going to take awhile. Implicit in his request was an admonition to get started on their unofficial investigation because the official one wasn't about to look in the places that it should. "We'll be staying at a motel tonight," he said. "I don't know where yet, but I'll call you."

  Glen nodded.

  Vince smiled wryly. "Bet you're glad you stopped off at Springe
rville for that tour, aren't you?"

  "Don't think I haven't thought about that," Glen said.

  He, Melanie, and McCormack headed back to the car. The crowd from the ruins seemed to have discovered that something equally interesting was going on here, for they were massing at the end of the block, which policemen were beginning to cordon off. News choppers were flying high above, circling both locations, waiting to see which turned out to be the bigger story.

  McCormack wanted to return to Pima House, where his colleagues were still poking around with their high-tech instruments, but Glen said that priorities had changed. They had a possible lead and that he and Melanie needed to go back to the professor's home.

  "Why? What is it? What happened?"

  They filled him in on the details, the dust devils and ceramic carrots, explaining what Cameron had seen and how he had thought to take a Polaroid of the monster. Glen withdrew the Polaroid from his shirt pocket and let the professor see it.

  "Did he tell the police?"

  "He told us," Melanie said.

  "We have to tell them. Let's go back to the ruins. We can give Captain Ortiz the photo and they can use it in their investigation."

  "What are the police going to do with it?" she asked. "Put it in their file? Put it on a wanted poster?" She met his eyes. "If there was ever a time for out-of-the-box thinking," she said, "this is it. Police and law enforcement are trained to fight crime and find criminals. They aren't trained to deal with the supernatural. And whether you want to use the word or not, that's exactly what we have here."

  The professor backed down. "So what's your plan?" he asked.

  "Find the mummy. Buy it, steal it, do whatever we have to to get it back here so you, and Pace, if we can ever find him, can study it, examine it, and . . . figure out what we need to do," she finished lamely.

  McCormack nodded.

  They were woefully unprepared for this, Glen realized. How were they supposed to fight an enemy that was thousands of years old? That made people disappear? That had wiped out entire civilizations? They were completely out of their depth, but the awful truth was that they were the only ones who could fight . . . whatever this was.

  Ten minutes later, he was pulling into McCormack's driveway.

  Something was wrong.

  He sensed it immediately. They all did. The air seemed too still, the world too quiet. Without a word, they got out of the car and hurried up to the front door.

  The inside of the house was a shambles. Two of the tall windows looking out over the desert landscape were cracked, and the middle one had a huge hole at the bottom, as though a large rock had rolled through it. Food was smeared on the hardwood floor, dumped on the native rugs. Juice and milk and cola and wine dripped from the walls and ceiling, their discarded containers littered about the rooms. Everywhere were Indian artifacts: sitting in corners, perched upon couches and overturned tables, waiting in doorways. They were unmoving, but Glen had the feeling that that had not been the case earlier.

  "Alyssa!" McCormack cried out. He ran frantically from room to room, searching desperately for his wife.

  They found her in the closet of the guest room, huddled in a corner, whimpering with fear, her eyes wide with terror. She screamed when she saw them, and tried to bat her husband away as he bent down to embrace her. But then he took her in his arms and she began sobbing. She had scratches on her face and arms, dark purple bruises on her legs. Her top was torn, her skirt hiked up, and they both contained splotches of blood.

  "Oh, my God," McCormack kept saying. "Oh, my God."

  His wife said nothing, just cried uncontrollably.

  Glen took Melanie's hand, stayed back.

  "What happened?" McCormack demanded. "What the hell happened here?"

  It was not a question any of them could answer. They knew that it was connected to everything else that was going on, and obviously Alyssa could fill them in on how she had been attacked, whether by some sort of creature--

  the monster with the afro

  --or by McCormack's artifacts, which had suddenly sprung to life, but as to why it had happened, they were clueless.

  "Let's get you something to drink," McCormack told his wife. He led her through the debris of the discarded containers on the floor, the juice and milk and wine splattered over the walls and ceiling, to the kitchen, where he found an unbroken plastic cup on the counter and filled it with water from the tap.

  "It knows we're on to it," Melanie said to Glen quietly. "It's coming after us."

  Glen shivered. He'd had the same thought exactly. Whatever power was behind all this, it had sensed them. It knew they were rooting around, and it was sending out feelers, trying to stop them.

  Alyssa had ceased sobbing, was thirstily drinking the water, and now it was McCormack who seemed lost and rattled. Melanie approached to see if she could be of help.

  Glen reached down, picked up a broken piece of pottery off the floor.

  On it was a picture of Alyssa McCormack with her legs spread wide, a carved wooden spear--like one that was lying at his feet--shoved deep inside her.

  Embarrassed and chilled at the same time, he covered the picture with his hand, not wanting anyone else to see. But the lines seemed to shift as his fingers closed over the shard, some lengthening, some straightening, and he peeked surreptitiously at the face of the pottery to see that it was now Melanie with her legs spread, being violated by a small doll with a very long penis.

  He started to shove the shard into his pocket, then changed his mind and angrily threw it as hard as he could through the hole in the middle window out into the desert, feeling a sense of grim satisfaction as it skipped off a boulder and shattered into pieces.

  2

  It was happening again. History was repeating itself.

  That's what history did, though. Right?

  No. Not now. Not these days. Not with all they knew. Hell, what was the point of studying the past if you couldn't avoid its pitfalls?

  Pace was getting frustrated, not only by his inability to find the skull, but by the fact that every other occurrence he'd heard about and tried to track down turned out to be over and for the most part unverifiable. He'd searched for the missing skull throughout Chaco Canyon, concentrating on a remote, inaccessible area of the park where he had been conducting his own semiauthorized excavation--"The Forbidden Zone," he liked to call it, in homage to the original Planet of the Apes--but without luck. After putting that on hold, he'd driven up to Hovenweep and Mesa Verde, down to Navajo and Wupatki, even stopped off at Walnut Canyon, following the trail of unexplained supernatural events that seemed to have broken out not just at Anasazi ruins, but at Sinagua sites as well. Everything was always over by the time he arrived, though. Sentient artifacts were no longer mobile but placed back in their cases. Noises were silent. Figures and apparitions had stopped appearing. There were attempts at documentation--photographs, video-tapes--but they were always inconclusive, shot on the run, in the dark, and hard to make out.

  There were plenty of eyewitness accounts, however, and the picture they painted was chilling. Everything he and Al had theorized was turning out to be not only true but still valid, applicable to the modern world.

  After a thousand years, people were vanishing again.

  He wondered how far it would go this time.

  He'd been scanning the newspapers at each stop, looking for signs of natural disasters or looming catastrophes. One of the things he'd discovered from his work at Chaco, one of the things he'd wanted to go over with Al but had not, was the fact that previous cultural annihilations, from the Anasazi to the Aztecs, had been accompanied by cataclysms of biblical proportions. The Southwest had suffered not only from the decades-long drought and plagues of locusts, but a period of dramatic geological upheaval, with major earthquakes and uncharacteristically violent volcanic activity. There'd been no such news of late, but he was keeping his eyes open just the same.

  Pace drove toward Albuquerque on Interstate 40
through the radioactive town of Grants. He grimaced as he looked out the windshield. Uranium mining, atomic testing, gas and oil drilling. Unbridled geological exploitation. The reward for being a cash-poor state with beautiful and abundant land. An eighteen-wheeler sped past him on the right, gravel bouncing off the highway and hitting his hood. It depressed him to leave Chaco these days, to go out into the real world, and he did it as seldom as possible.

  He thought of Al, the skull. Maybe the earth was fighting back. Maybe that's what was going on. Or maybe some of its former stewards were.

  He'd heard of crazier theories.

  Hell, he'd thought of crazier theories.

  The countryside passed by. Red rocks to the north, mesas to the east and south. He was getting tired of driving so much, and his old pickup was pushing the 200,000 mark, but some things could not be done over the phone or via e-mail. Some things had to be done in person.

  He drove through the high desert with the pickup's windows open and Copland's Billy the Kid cranked up on the under-dash tape player. Aaron Copland was America's greatest composer. People always said it was Charles Ives because they liked his Yankee life story and they didn't want to admit that the essence of the West was captured best by a Jewish homosexual from Brooklyn. But Ives' music always seemed fussy to him: cloistered, cluttered, claustrophobic, all marching band in the grandstand and piano in the parlor. It didn't capture the majestic grandeur of wide open spaces and big sky the way Copland's ballets did; it didn't speak to the Western spirit.

  Pace smiled. What the fuck did he know? He was just an anthropologist.

  An anthropologist chasing ghosts.

  The office buildings of Albuquerque arose from the rolling plain like missiles pointed skyward, and not until the highway sloped down to the bottom lands of the Rio Grande did the rest of the city come into view. He pulled off at the first exit past the river, stopped at a Fina for gas, and then broke out his street map and found Del Este Way. It was located on the outskirts of town, near the foot of the Sandia Mountains. When he finally drove up the long gravel road that led to the smattering of shacks and cabins and trailer homes, it was late afternoon and the sun was reflecting off the metal mailboxes, making it difficult to see address numbers.