The Return

by Bentley Little

  The keening sound came and went, came and went, came and went, like a siren.

  And then it stopped.

  That should have been an improvement, but somehow the silence seemed just as ominous. Pace imagined the mummy gliding out of the lean-to, across the weedy ground, over to the edge of the well. Involuntarily, he looked up, but the opening was clear, there was nothing there.

  "So now we're all gonna cooperate, huh?" Divine grimaced. "What're we supposed to do to get out of here, Professor?"

  "Knock off that attitude for one thing, asshole." He glared at the old man, who held the stare for a moment before looking away.

  "Fuck you!" the dwarf said again.

  "No. Fuck you, you little freak." He glared at all of them, one at a time. "If you want to get out of here, if you don't want to starve to death or turn into porcelain dolls, you're going to listen to me and do as I say, got it?"

  No response.

  Pace pretended to withdraw, moving away from them, closer to the skull. But not too close. "Eat your soup, then. Lick it up off the dirt."

  Jesse looked at her family, then stepped forward, holding out her one hand for Pace to shake. "I'm in," she said softly. "I'll do whatever you say."

  "We're all in," Divine said gruffly, trying to make it seem as though he hadn't caved, as though there'd only been a misunderstanding on Pace's part. "Whadda we do?"

  "We're going to boost someone up until they can get out. They'll find a rope--there's one in my truck if there's none in your trailer--bring it back, tie one end to a tree or a boulder or something, and then drop the other end down so the rest of us can climb up."

  It was a simple plan, easily understood, and even though he had to run through it a couple of times, they seemed to grasp the concept.

  There were five of them, more than enough to reach the top if they stood on one another's shoulders. He didn't trust Christiansen Divine further than he could throw him, so the old bastard would be at the anchor spot, on the bottom. But he himself was too heavy to be top man, so he would have to take a chance that one of the others wouldn't double-cross him. Absalom, the dwarf, was out. He'd return with a weapon, try to kill him and then rescue the others. The thumb-sucking girl did not seem able to do what needed to be done.

  That left Jesse. She was not a bad choice. Pace trusted her more than the others; she was the only one who seemed genuinely cooperative, and looking at the situation from a purely mercenary standpoint, she would have her hand full carrying the rope. She wouldn't be able to bring along a weapon or do anything else.

  But could she tie a knot with just the one hand?

  He was about to ask when the little girl suddenly stopped sucking her thumb and, for the first time in Pace's presence, spoke. "I'll do it," she said. Her voice was clearer than he'd expected, more mature. "I'm lighter than everyone else. It'll be easier to hold me up."

  Pace stared at her, stunned by the realization that she could speak.

  "There's a rope in the storage shed. I know where it is. I can tie it to this tree where we used to have a swing. It'll hold."

  He recovered quickly. "That'll be perfect," he said. "Let's do it."

  Logically, Pace should have been at the bottom; he was the biggest. But he still thought it best to keep the old man's movements as restricted as possible, so he told Divine to stand next to the wall, then climbed up on the bony shoulders, steadying himself with both hands against the rounded stone. The pressure from the others climbing up and over him caused his shoulder wound to reopen, but he grimaced and held his place as Jesse, then Absalom took up their positions. They were wobbly, and Divine was cursing and whining at the bottom, but the little girl--he didn't know her name, Pace realized--scurried up quickly. She couldn't quite reach the lip of the well, but before he could tell her what to do, she jumped from her brother's shoulders and grabbed the top edge. She could have fallen, could have knocked over their entire ladder, but she was more agile than she looked, and Pace admired not only her abilities, but her ingenuity.

  Had she really been cured of spina bifida?

  By mummy hair?

  The girl hung there for a moment, her fingers scrabbling, repositioning herself, then pulled herself up. She went over the top. "I'll be back in a minute!" she cried. And then the rest of them broke apart, Absalom jumping off his sister's shoulders, Divine yelling, "Get off! You're too heavy!" Pace helped Jesse down, then was thrown off the old man. He landed on his feet near the skull, and he quickly turned to look at the others. It dawned on him that they might try to rush him, take him down, before the girl returned. His eye lit upon one of the rocks that Divine had thrown at him.

  "How long do you think it's going to take her?" Jesse asked.

  As if in answer, they heard the voice of the girl, faintly, from up above. "I'm at the shed!" she called. A moment later: "I got the rope!"

  "What's her name?" Pace asked.

  "None a yer bizness," Divine snarled.

  "Loretta," Jesse said. "Our mother named her." The implication was that Divine had named the other two, and this time Pace really did feel sorry for her.

  "I'm tying it around the tree!" Loretta called.

  Pace moved into position, looking up. He was ready. He grabbed the rope the second it was thrown down, and before anyone could take it from him or push him off, he was clambering up the steep side of the well. He half-expected Divine to call out to Loretta, ordering her to unhook the rope and let him fall, but apparently the old man really was willing to let him escape if it meant that he could get out, too.

  "I'll help pull you up once I get to the top," Pace said. He was thinking of Jesse. "If anybody can't pull themselves, just tie the rope around their midsection and I'll haul them up."

  The old man did not respond, not even to say something nasty, and Pace was immediately suspicious. Were they going to attack him? Pausing in his climb, he turned his head and looked down. The three Divines were frozen, unmoving. He thought for a split second that they were merely remaining still as they watched him climb out of the well, but then he realized that they couldn't move. Like the "others" who had been thrown into the well, they had been turned into porcelain--he could see light glinting off surfaces that shouldn't have been reflective. As he watched, Absalom toppled over, striking the other two. All three shattered on the floor of the well, breaking like safety glass into thousands of tiny almost uniformly shaped pieces.

  Only the skull remained intact, grinning.

  Pace had intended to take the skull with him, to have Divine hand it up, but he immediately changed his mind. The skull was dangerous; he did not want anything more to do with it.

  And there was no way he was going back down.

  He scurried up the wall. From outside came the keening sound again, but at this moment the mummy in the lean-to did not seem half as scary to him as the skull in the well. If he was going to die, he'd rather it be in the open.

  The first thing he did as he pulled himself out of the well was look for the mummy. It was standing by itself in a flat open area away from the lean-to, like a scarecrow from hell. The sun was shining full on its face, but that still did not illuminate the deep-set eyes and only served to emphasize the cruelty in that sneering toothless mouth. With no one to shave it, the orange hair had bushed out wildly, and the incongruity of a living mane on that dried dead form was somehow loathsome and abhorrent.

  His eyes scanned the area around the trailer, around the outhouse. The girl was nowhere in sight. He hoped she'd gotten away, but he had the feeling she hadn't. If he started searching through those high weeds, he suspected, he'd find little pieces of porcelain, some that matched the color of her skin, some that matched the color of her hair, some that matched the color of her clothes. . . .

  Moving slowly, he made his way through the weeds toward the trailer, keeping an eye on that dark wrinkled figure to make sure it didn't try to come after him. It was still wearing bra and panties, and Pace could not help thinking that it was that humilia
tion which had caused it to turn on Divine and his family.

  But why had it spared him? And why, if it really had helped destroy the Anasazi and was part of an effort to purge the contemporary Southwest, was it staying here on the outskirts of Albuquerque and harassing one white-trash family?

  The mummy remained where it was as Pace stepped carefully between the trailer and the outhouse. A lizard scuttled in the dirt before him, scurrying into the weeds. To his left, a crow squawked noisily, flying up from a twisted branch on the dead oak tree.

  His truck was right where he'd left it, but the tires were flat, the windows shattered, and someone had taken a sledgehammer to the body. Divine, he assumed. The motorcycle next to his pickup had also been incapacitated, knocked over, its frame apparently beaten with the same sledgehammer. He glanced around. There were no other vehicles he could take. It was a long walk back to the highway, a long walk back to the next house, but he saw no other choice.

  God, he wished he'd borrowed a cell phone from someone and brought it along.

  By the time Pace reached the head of the drive, he could no longer see the mummy. It was hidden behind the trailer, and for all he knew, it was moving back there. If he poked his head around the trailer's edge, he might see it standing next to the back door, waiting for him.

  He shivered, though the afternoon sun was hot, and he saw himself walking to the next shack down the road to find the place abandoned and another mummy standing in the field next to the house. And one standing behind the next log cabin after that. And on and on.

  Judging by the sun, it was late afternoon. In a few hours it would be evening. The last thing he wanted was to be caught out here when night fell. He went over to the pickup. The doorframe had been smashed in and would not open, but he managed to wiggle halfway through the shattered side window and grab what he needed. He took out a flashlight, a buck knife, and his notebook and pen.

  He started walking.

  Halfway down the drive, he turned to look back, but everything was obscured by the high dry weeds. He thought of Divine and his family lying next to the skull in broken pieces at the bottom of the well, thought of that blackened mummy with its orange afro hair, dressed absurdly in lingerie and standing alone in the middle of the field.

  And he started to run.

  2

  Cameron had never been to a university before, and it was not the same as he'd thought it would be. There were so many people for one thing, and they were all different ages, most in their late teens or early twenties, but some a little older and some genuine geezers. As far as he could tell, classes were starting and ending at all sorts of times, not merely at standard intervals. There were even fast-food restaurants on campus. The college seemed chaotic and crowded, but exciting and alive, unlike any school he'd ever been to.

  He liked it.

  But what he didn't like was standing in the hallway, staring at the same closed elevator doors, while he and his uncle waited for Dr. McCormack to finish talking to that fat smelly student. They'd been waiting for ten minutes already, and this guy was going on and on about some class assignment that he didn't understand. They could hear his whining voice even through the closed door, and Cameron wondered why Dr. McCormack didn't just send him on his way.

  Another girl had been waiting out here with them, "a hunk of babe" as Jay would've said, but she'd gotten tired of waiting after only a few minutes, and she'd scrawled a message on yellow notebook paper and put the note in a manila envelope hanging from a clip attached to the office door. She hadn't said word one to either of them the entire time, not even a hi, and Cameron thought that that was one thing that was the same about college and middle school: stuck-up snots were still stuck-up snots.

  The office door opened, the fat smelly guy walked over to the elevator and pushed the down button, and Cameron and his uncle stepped inside to see Dr. McCormack.

  "Hey," the professor said, surprised. "Have you been waiting long?"

  "About ten minutes," Vince told him.

  Behind them, a bell dinged. The elevator door opened.

  "You should've knocked and let me know you were here," the professor said. "I could've used you as an excuse and gotten that student out of here earlier."

  "I thought you saw us," Vince said. "We came about the same time he did."

  "Sorry. No. But I wish I had." He stood up and started sorting through a pile of books on his desk. "What brings you here?"

  "The Mogollon Monster."

  Dr. McCormack frowned. "What?"

  Vince took a deep breath. "Remember Cameron's story about--?"

  "Yes. A campfire tale. Some type of scouting tradition."

  "Except that this time a scoutmaster was murdered exactly the same way as in that campfire tale. His face was torn off and left hanging on a branch. And Cameron felt the monster pass by his cabin. There's no Anasazi connection," he said quickly, before Dr. McCormack could object. "I'll grant you that. But bear with me." He looked at Cameron, smiled. "Us."

  Cameron smiled back.

  "What we're thinking is that this creature that Cameron saw and photographed at his friend's house, the one everyone's looking for, was the inspiration for all of these stories. Cam said the feeling he got when he saw that thing on the bed, a strange heaviness in the air, a sense that he was incapacitated, was the same thing he felt at the scout ranch, the same thing he felt when his friend's dog went crazy and killed a neighbor, the same thing he felt at the Pima House Ruins. They're all connected. I concede that Cameron's our only real link between the Anasazi creature and the Mogollon Monster, but I did an Internet search, and the legend of the monster goes way back. At least to the mid-1800s. And while I couldn't find information about any specific Native American monster myths, the settlers, at least according to what I read, were under the belief that the quote, unquote red men considered the portion of the Mogollon Rim, where the monster supposedly roamed, to be cursed. They avoided it, built no pueblos there, though the escarpment would have provided a natural defense against invaders and, according to written records, including the testimony of an Indian agent, they thought some sort of demon lived there.

  "And the fact remains that Anasazi artwork throughout the Southwest depicts the same afro-haired creature that Cameron saw and photographed, and that elicited the same physical reactions as whatever passed by his cabin at the scout ranch and murdered that scoutmaster."

  McCormack nodded. "Yes, but isn't it more likely that our genocidal creature killed that scoutmaster rather than the monster from their campfire tale? I'm not doubting you that the murder is connected, and I'm very excited about that development--it's a leap I don't think anyone else could have made--but I don't see the value of crediting this scout story."

  "Like I said, it's not just a scout story. It's old. And there are obvious parallels between these two creatures. Not only that, but the tales of the Mogollon Monster have been continuous. There've been gaps in the appearance of this thing, but fifty, sixty years is all. Not centuries. It seems to me that this creature or this race of creatures has been hiding out since destroying the Anasazi civilization and has been living up by the Mogollon Rim, resting, recuperating, building up strength, and coming out occasionally to . . . kill people."

  "Interesting," Dr. McCormack said. "So perhaps it hasn't been dormant all these centuries, but has been operating right under our noses, undetected."

  "Now here's the weird part. I think Cameron's immune to it. I might be, too. And Glen and Melanie. Possibly you."

  "Wait a minute--"

  "He's the only person in his neighborhood who survived. I was completely unaffected by the skeleton in the kiva or whatever it was that caused those artifacts to move and compelled those citizens to dress up in their finery and start digging in the dirt. Glen and Melanie survived Bower and that abandoned town and two days with that skull in their trunk. Your wife was attacked but not you."

  "And you think this means . . ."

  "We're immune, we're resistant
. Whatever force or power or energy emanates from that creature or from the bones of its ancestors doesn't affect us. And maybe . . ." He paused. "Maybe there's a reason for that. I'm not religious, and I'm not superstitious. At least I didn't used to be. But maybe we've been chosen."

  "Chosen?"

  "Not necessarily by God or some higher power--although I'm not ruling that out. It could be a natural occurrence; we could be like the antibodies attacking a disease. I don't know. I just think that . . . well, I think we're the ones who can fight it."

  The professor nodded, looking thoughtful.

  "I know you weren't a big fan of Al Wittinghill's work. I'm not sure I completely bought into it, either. But that was before. Now think about what's happened and think about the Mogollon Monster. Tell me you think we're crazy. Tell me there's no way it could possibly be the case."

  Dr. McCormack sighed. "You know I can't do that. It is possible. Anything's possible."

  "So what do you think we should do?"

  "I have no more classes today, only a few scheduled conferences. I'll reschedule them and we'll go up to this scout ranch and see what we can find."

  "I was hoping you'd say that." Vince grinned at Cameron, who found himself feeling suddenly optimistic, excited by the possibility that they might be getting close to solving this thing, to stopping it.

  "We'll call Glen and Melanie," Vince said, taking out his cell phone. "Let them know where we're going."

  "Where are they now? Wickenburg?"

  "Last time they checked in."

  "All right. You call them, I'll call Alyssa. After that. I'll tell the department secretaries I'll be gone for the day and have them reschedule my conferences. Do you want to drive or shall I?"

  "I'm sure your vehicle's better than mine."