Tío, a long-haired Mexican with mare’s tail mustaches, gave Prophet and Colter the woolly eyeball through the smoke wafting up from the corn-husk cigarette he was smoking. That seemed to amuse Jack, who chuckled, gave a tolerant sigh, then glanced at Lou and Colter before turning away again, saying, “Right this way, mi amigos. Jack’ll give you the grand tour.”
He hitched his deerskin leggings up his broad hips then ambled off up the canyon between the looming dwellings that ever so vaguely resembled piled human skulls, their open doorways like empty eye sockets looking forbiddingly, maybe a little malevolently, down at the living intruders in their sanctuary.
Chapter 30
Jack inadvertently kicked a stone as, walking in his awkward, bandy-legged fashion, he said, “Pa and I had one helluva time figuring out what that sound was. We didn’t even recognize it until our second visit to the canyon. I guess at first we thought it was the wind blowing over the tops of the canyon walls. But, no, no . . . that wasn’t it.”
A little breathless, kicking another rock and stumbling, Baja Jack continued on up the canyon, along the base of the dwellings on the canyon’s left side. Prophet and Colter were dogging his heels.
Lou looked around, intrigued by the mystery of the place, trying to imagine what it had looked like here maybe a couple thousand years ago when those who had built the mud homes into the cliff walls still lived here in this little Indian town, working together. They likely ran out through the openings at either end to tend whatever beasts they tended, or maybe to hunt and bring back meat and skins they’d probably stretched and dried and turned into clothing right here on the canyon floor or on the ledges separating the various levels.
Both sides of the canyon were peppered with circular stone formations, black from charring, that had most likely been fire pits. In his mind’s eye, Prophet watched the smoke from all those breakfast and supper fires roll up the canyon walls to turn to lazy wisps when they reached the open sky above. Maybe even a faint tang from the food that had once been cooked here, likely by the women to whom young children clung, had permeated the place so deeply that Prophet could still detect it.
Pshaw. That was just his imagination running wild.
All that remained here of the people who’d once lived here, maybe for many generations, were their ghosts. He didn’t have to imagine them. He thought he could see them at the periphery of his vision, copper faces with mud-black eyes watching from the shadows. Lou gave a shudder.
Colter glanced at him skeptically. “You all right?”
Prophet glowered at him. “Hell, yeah.”
“All right.”
“All right, what?”
“Just all right,” Colter said with an ironic snort.
Jack stopped and pointed up to a stretch of crudely chiseled steps that rose toward a dark opening in the cliff wall, maybe fifty feet up from the canyon floor. “Up there,” the little man said, breathless. “You two go up ahead of me and give me a hand. My legs is too short to make fast work of them steps. If I blow out a knee, my goose is cooked.”
Lou and Colter mounted the steps ahead of Jack then reached back, each taking one of the older man’s hands and half leading and half hoisting him up the staircase, the risers of which had been whittled down to near nubs in places by time and—what? By the many feet that had negotiated them over the long years this hidden, cliff-clinging village had been occupied?
Lou suppressed another shudder, this time at the incomprehensibility of so much time past.
They led Jack up the stairs and through the oval portal and into what appeared to be a room of sorts. It was impossible to tell just exactly what it was because it was nearly pitch-black in here. It smelled like rodent dung and cool, ancient stone.
“One of you got a match?” Jack asked. He was so breathless from the climb his chest rasped like sandpaper with each inhalation, and he could barely get the words out.
Prophet reached into his pocket for a lucifer and popped the sulfured tip on his thumbnail. The match flared, spreading a weak, brassy radiance. Baja Jack crouched with a grunt. Straightening, he held up a ten-inch-high lantern with a drop-away bottom.
He handed the lantern to Colter, then crouched again. When he straightened this time, he held a small box of short, wide candles. His face was swollen and red, his eyes dark as coals in their deep sockets.
“Stick a candle in the sumbitch and light the feller,” he instructed Lou.
Prophet poked one of the candles into the lantern, attaching it to the spike at the bottom. He lit the candle with the match then tossed the match away.
Baja Jack grabbed the lantern’s bail, swung around, and rasped, “Thisaway, pardners. Thisaway here!” Raising the lamp before him, he chuckled and walked straight out away from Lou and Colter, who stood regarding the little man dubiously.
Where was he going?
“Come on, come on!” Jack grinned tauntingly over his shoulder at Prophet. “Lassen yer yaller!” He winked and wheezed out a mocking laugh.
“I ain’t yeller,” Prophet grumbled, casting the grinning Colter a quick, indignant glare.
They followed the little man—where, God only knew. Maybe God didn’t even know. Baja Jack seemed to be heading straight back into the ridge, beating back the shadows with his candle lamp. The rough stone floor, which appeared to have been chipped away with tools, dropped gradually.
As he followed Baja Jack and the soft yellow sphere of light with which the little English mestizo assaulted the thick velvety darkness before him, Prophet glanced at the stone walls passing on each side of the corridor. The walls had been decorated with crude paintings similar to those he’d seen before all across the West and which he’d attributed to ancient peoples.
Stick figures were walking along the walls—some taller than others, some holding spears. There were wavy blue lines upon which small stick figures reclined, extending their arms and legs, their mouths forming wide dark circles. Absently, Lou reached out and brushed his fingers across them.
The stone floor continued to drop.
The rumbling, which had been growing incrementally louder, was like muffled thunder now. The air had become humid and rife with the smell of mushrooms. It had also grown cooler.
The walls passing to each side were beaded with moisture.
Walking behind the seesawing, hard-breathing Baja Jack, Prophet and Colter exchanged a curious glance.
“Almost there now,” Jack said roughly five minutes after they’d started out through the back of the room in which they’d found the lamp.
Beyond Jack and his sphere of weak light, Prophet thought something was moving. The rumbling grew louder . . .
Finally, as the rumbling became a roar above which Prophet could no longer hear his and the other two men’s footsteps and spur chings, the walls pulled back away from him. Baja Jack stopped.
“This is far enough, gents,” he yelled above the din.
Prophet stepped up to stand on the man’s left side while Colter did the same to Jack’s right. Lou gaped as he stared straight ahead and down at what was obviously an underground river roaring through yet another canyon.
Cavern, rather. It was fully enclosed.
The light from Jack’s candle lamp shone like gold dust on the skin of a blacksnake, which was the river rushing past them from their left to their right. It appeared to curve toward them on their left, following a sharp bend in the cavern about thirty feet away.
It hammered violently past the spectators, thumping and throbbing, drumming against rocks and flailing against the stone banks, including the one on which Lou, Colter, and Baja Jack stood. Lou felt the river’s drumbeat through his boots. It beat like a giant heart in the walls around him, in the stone ceiling arcing over him.
He felt the fine, cold spray of water against his face, dampening his clothes. It smelled vaguely of rotten eggs.
The river dropped sharply before him, on his right, the water foaming as it chugged and sprayed and tumbled away ou
t of sight around yet another bend in its tomblike cavern.
It was a formidable sight, this underground stream. It seemed alive, like some ancient, forever-raging beast confined forever to the earth’s bowels and not liking it one bit, struggling to free itself. Lou licked the moisture from his lips. It was cold and it tasted fresh but also a little sour, with that rotten-egg tang, like water he’d tasted from limestone tinajas.
Colter turned to Baja Jack, who stood staring dreamily out at the tumultuous water thundering through the gorge before him. The little man was thoroughly mesmerized. “Where does it come from?” Colter asked. “Where does it go?”
Baja Jack looked up at him. “I got no idea where it comes from. Probably deep underground. My pa figured it’s part of some aquifer. Same one that carved out all these canyons and mountains in this part of Baja.” He shook his head. “I can’t tell you for sure where it comes from, but me and the old man tracked it to where it flows out of the mountains, about a mile downstream. Comes out nice, purty as you please, in a deep green valley. Flows on east to the Sea of Cortez.”
Prophet turned to the stone wall to his left and yelled above the river’s thunder. “Swing the light over this way, Jack.”
Jack swung the light around, turning, revealing some of the paintings Prophet was staring at, absently tracing one in particular with his fingers. It was another small stick figure riding the tops of wavy lines. The figure’s mouth was open, as though it were screaming.
“Bloody savages!” Jack cried, shaking his head and turning his mouth corners down.
“What?” Colter yelled, frowning down at the little man.
Baja Jack nodded at the figure beneath Lou’s right index finger. “Poor little baby,” he said, again shaking his head. “They musta took certain ones down here and threw ’em in. Some sort of sacrifice to the river gods rumbling beneath their town.”
“You really think so?” Colter asked, incredulous.
“That’s what the old man thought, and he was learned in the ways of the ancient folks. He figured the ancient ones who lived here was worried the water would rise and flood their town. Maybe it had in the past. To make sure it didn’t do it again, they’d offer up the wee little ones—maybe the sick little ones and the old ones.”
Jack paused to indicate a stick figure with long, white hair riding the wavy lines that were the river flowing through the gorge. “They’d throw ’em to the river gods to keep ’em happy and to keep themselves high and dry. Savages!” Jack shouted, shaking his head in anger. “Imagine all the poor little screaming wee ones and the old ones that got thrown into that river. You can see their bones—little white pieces here and there—sticking out of the riverbank where the stream flows out of the mountains.”
Again, Jack shook his head and yelled, “Savages!”
Prophet stared at the figures blazed on the wall. They shone behind a layer of moisture on which Jack’s lamp glistened like gold dust. He gave a little start when the light moved and a shadow passed through it, entering his field of vision on his right.
Baja Jack stared gravely up at him, his eyes wide and round, even the crossed one, which looked especially loony all of a sudden. “You can bet the seed bull this place is haunted. By the ghosts of the wee little screamin’ ones and the poor defenseless old-timers who were thrown into that river to drown and get their bones spit out in that valley yonder!”
“I don’t doubt it a bit,” Prophet vaguely heard himself mutter. He hadn’t meant to say it. He didn’t think he’d said it loudly enough for Jack to hear. Maybe Jack only read his lips. Whatever the case, Baja Jack had understood. He gave Lou a crisp nod of agreement, winking his uncrossed eye.
Lou felt his ears warm a little with embarrassment. Sometimes he surprised even himself with his superstitions, his otherworldly hauntings that were part and parcel to his Old Southern heritage.
He turned his gaze back to the roaring river. For just an instant, he saw a child riding those black, foam-frothed waves. For just that one second, he could hear the poor babe’s wailing cries. Chicken flesh rose all over his body, and his intestines writhed.
He turned to Baja Jack, no longer caring one whit about showing his fear. He’d rather face twenty blood-hungry Apaches than ghosts any day of the week. “Let’s get the hell outta here, Jack. I for one done seen enough of this place!”
Baja Jack smiled up at him in frank understanding.
“Come on, fellers,” he bellowed, ambling back into the dark corridor, the weak lamplight waging a halfhearted war with the far more powerful darkness. “Come on, fellers—let’s done get us a drink. My throat’s drier’n the last button on a rattlesnake’s tail!”
Chapter 31
Lou woke with a start.
He sat up, staring into the darkness of the canyon beyond the cold ashes of his and Colter’s fire.
“What is it?” He’d awakened the redhead, who’d lifted his head from his own saddle on the other side of the fire. Colter already had his Remington in his hand; he’d already cocked the hammer.
Beyond him, Baja Jack and the little man’s men snored around their own dead fire maybe fifteen to thirty feet away. Lou could barely see them in the canyon’s penetrating darkness. He could, however, see the ridge looming on the canyon’s north side. The stacked mud houses seemed to radiate a very soft, gray-blue glow. The light was probably a reflection of the starlight, for the sky between the ridge walls was peppered with those flickering lights, like snow smeared across black velvet.
“Lou?” Colter said.
“What is it?”
“You hear somethin’?”
“Yeah.” Prophet shook his head. “I mean, no. Go back to sleep. Everything’s all right.”
“Good.” Colter depressed his Remy’s hammer and returned the pistol to its holster. “I was havin’ a nice dream about one very talented young lady.”
He lay back against his saddle, curled onto his side, and in seconds he was breathing deeply again.
Prophet stared up the ridge at those ghostly hovels fairly radiating with unearthly power. A malignant presence, like one of the demons his widowed great-granny used to mutter about and pray against, especially in her later years, when she’d ring her cabin in Dogwood Holler completely with salt, hang goat heads over her door, and lay strings of dried snake skins on her windowsills.
Prophet had heard something. But what he’d heard had been in his head. He’d known it even as he’d heard it, but it had awakened him, anyway.
It was the scream of one of those small children being carried down that stony corridor to the river snaking through the earth’s bowels—a diabolical giant that eats children and old people. He’d heard it, all right, and it had sounded real. So real that he couldn’t help wondering, a little sheepishly, if he hadn’t so much heard it as remembered it . . .
Wait. Remembered it?
“Jesus, you’re gettin’ all woolly-headed, old son.” Lou tossed his bedroll aside and rose. Colter muttered something in his half sleep, and Lou reassured him with a whispered: “Just gonna take a stroll. Go back to that sweet-smellin’ señorita, Red.”
Colter groaned as though in the affirmative, and his breathing was once more slow and regular.
Lou pulled his denims and boots on quietly, buckled his Colt and shell belt around his waist, donned his hat, and trod off down the canyon, toward the mysterious doorway through which he’d been introduced to this mysterious place. He wasn’t sure he was glad to have been introduced. The chasm pestered him something awful. He’d felt a dark force at work here even before Jack had shown him that river, far less peaceful than the one in the Bible he’d heard about, and told him about the little tykes and the old people.
Sacrificial lambs.
“Oh, stop your fool-headed thinkin’,” Lou scolded himself as he walked out through the canyon’s front door, so to speak. He climbed the rise and walked into the main canyon. A cool night breeze blew against him. He turned to face it, removed his hat, and tippe
d his head back, fully accepting the cool, refreshing air against his cheeks and forehead.
“There, now . . . that’s better.”
He chuckled at his superstitious nature, leaned back against a high rock, and dug his makings out of his pocket. “Much better,” he said. “I’m all through with that crazy thinkin’ now. I’m ole Granny Brindle’s wild child, I am at that, but I gotta resist them crazy thoughts, I purely do, or I’ll go as crazy as she was, and that was as crazy as a tree full of owls!”
He chuckled as he troughed a wheat paper between the index finger and forefinger of his left hand. He’d just started to sprinkle chopped tobacco onto the paper, when a hushed female voice said, “Lou!”
Prophet jerked with a violent start. He dropped the paper and the tobacco he’d sprinkled onto it and looked up, stifling a terrified yell. He looked around wildly, pushing away from the rock and sliding the Peacemaker from its holster, clicking the hammer back.
“Holster the hogleg,” the woman’s voice said as footsteps sounded to his left, accompanied by the soft ring of spur rowels. “I’m not going to kill you. At least, not now.”
“Louisa?” he said, squinting doubtfully into the darkness.
She moved out of the rocks, a slender figure topped with gold-blond hair that glowed softly in the starlight. It hung down from beneath her tan Stetson, the chin thong dangling against her chest clad in a striped wool serape.
Lou could see the pearl grips of her fancy silver Colts holstered on both her narrow but womanly rounded hips, the serape tucked behind the pistols, making them available at a moment’s notice. Her sun-faded denims were tucked into the tops of her brown riding boots.
Louisa Bonaventure stopped before him. She was a head shorter, so she tipped her head back to gaze up at him, lifting the corners of her beautiful, tender mouth with a wry smile. “Surprise, surprise.”
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