Canyon Shadows

by C R Langille

  They led us away at the end of the game. I don’t know why, but we could hear screams echoing off the stone walls as we left. I dread to learn what happened in that court.

  We showed the chieftain and his elders the book, which caused them a great amount of distress. They immediately associated Sir Geoffrey’s malady with the book. Through much insinuation and guesswork, we believed they were trying to say they could help us, but they wanted something first.

  They led us away from the city to a cave. The primitives were afraid to enter, yet it was obvious that they wanted me, and only me, to go inside.

  Lighting a torch and drawing my weapon, I said a quick prayer to the Lord and Savior and ventured into the depths of evil. The smells which assaulted my senses were horrid—rotting flesh, dank wet earth, and something else I cannot, even now, put words to, filled the air.

  As I descended further into the cavern, all became quiet. The only sounds I could hear were my own footsteps and the small drops of water further in; however, as I continued, my ears picked up on a terrible sound—the sound of quiet, mournful, weeping. Yet it was unlike any weeping I had heard before. It sounded female in origin but had a twisted quality. It was hard to tell if it was crying or laughing. As I moved quietly forward, another sound entered my head—a faint whispering. I could not discern the words, but somehow, I knew the voice in my head belonged to Sir Geoffrey.

  I turned a corner, and my torchlight fell upon the source of the hideous lamentation. Its back was to me, but I could tell it was a woman of the same race as the native peoples. Her skin had a rotten quality to it, unnaturally bloated. It was stooped low to the ground, rocking back and forth.

  The creature must have noticed I was near, for the cries turned into definite laughter. The maniacal cacophony of sound attacked my ears from all angles. Just as I thought my head would burst from the unholy noise, it stopped, and the creature rose to full height.

  Seeing it standing tall furthered my belief that it was no longer human. Its limbs were abnormally gangly, brushing the ground. As it turned toward me, I prayed with fervor to the Lord in the Heavens to grant me strength. Sir Geoffrey’s indiscernible, disembodied whispers grew in volume as I tried to block them mentally from my mind.

  I fought for my sanity as the torchlight fell upon the creature’s visage. The woman’s face distorted into a wicked smile that held no warmth, unnatural in all ways.

  That which happened next transpired very quickly. The creature spoke and then attacked. It came forward as fast as a viper. I was barely able to put my sword between myself and the creature. It hit harder than a horse’s kick, knocking my sword from my hand. My blade flew into the wall with enough force that it broke the cross-guard.

  The creature was on top of me before I knew it, pinning me to the ground. With the grace of God above, I was able to gain hold of the fallen torch and blind the foul creature by thrusting the cleansing fire into its eyes. As it screamed in pain, I grabbed my dagger and took its tainted life.

  I reclaimed my weapon and cut off the creature’s head to show the city elders. As I walked from the cave, I could only think of what the creature had said, in perfect English no less.

  “He waits for you, Poor Knight of Christ. He waits for you deep in the mountain.”

  -Sir William Brock

  Twin Falls, Idaho

  Confusion spread across Troy’s face when he delved into the package. The most curious article was the book. It was thick and heavy, obviously very old, and smelled like tilled earth. The only distinguishing mark was a small symbol shaped like a mountain on the cover.

  Putting the book aside, Troy investigated the rest of the contents. There was a printout from TravelNowTravelCheap.com indicating that his father had bought plane tickets and had booked a hotel room for St. George, Utah. The date of the itinerary was roughly two weeks ago.

  Troy also saw a road map of Utah with a town called Canyon Shadows circled. There were advertisements for a local cliff dwelling with attraction hours and local dining coupons.

  Finally, Troy came upon a handwritten note from his father. He could recognize his father’s handwriting but also noticed that it had a messy, almost worried quality to it. Rolling the windows down to let the cool breeze in, Troy read the note.

  He waits, deep in the mountain. In the beginning, that’s all that I could translate from the damned book. Somehow, once I translated that much, the rest came to me. In nightmares, in the dark, when I closed my eyes, I could hear them, I could see them. They told me things, horrible things from the book. No one must find it.

  I should have never opened it.

  They won’t stop talking to me. Sleep offers no solace. The things I’ve been shown, no human should see. Now the book is alive too; I find it open sometimes. It opens to pages I don’t remember seeing, images and words I should never understand. I have to stop it… I have to destroy it. He waits, deep in the mountain.

  He put the note down. Troy stared out the car window for several minutes as he tried to come to grips with the fact that his father had lost his mind. Why didn’t his father seek help? His father always complained that the military had too much training on suicide prevention. It was almost ironic. Almost. Damn it to hell.

  Millions of questions ran through his head. Troy fished into his glove compartment for his smokes. Troy had been trying to quit, but in his weakness, and as a comfort, he always kept an emergency stash.

  As he let the nicotine enter his lungs, he tried to make sense of everything that happened. None of it made sense, and every possible answer he could come up with generated two more questions. He gave up. It didn’t help anything, and his father was already dead.

  Looking back to the passenger seat, he saw the book staring back at him. Deciding to take a closer look, he opened it. After thumbing through the first few pages, it was painfully obvious he wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of the language. In fact, Troy wasn’t too sure if he even knew which language it was. The script looked eastern, maybe Arabic or Sanskrit. He looked for the phrase that his father had found, but he couldn’t find anything even closely resembling the words.

  Trying to make sense of it would have to wait. It had been a long, exhausting day, and a monster headache was forming deep in his skull. He needed to get in contact with Captain Hernandez and get to the bottom of all this mess. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the captain’s number.

  Letting out an angry growl, Troy started his car and pulled into the street. Turning the radio on as loud as his ears would permit, Troy tried to put the questions out of his mind; it was an exercise in futility.

  ***

  Dan sat in his Bronco, watching and waiting to see if the duct tape bandit would make an appearance. He had cased all the streets and public areas in the town with no luck. His deputy hadn’t reported anything out of the ordinary during any of his patrols either. Dan didn’t think that the suspect would show up anywhere, but it didn’t mean he wouldn’t look—he had a job to do regardless of the outcome.

  There was one place he hadn’t looked yet, and he was trying to avoid the area. It was the Last Stop gas station right outside of town. The place gave him the creeps, which was saying something. Dan usually found ways to send Brent that way or make his visits as quick as possible. The gas station was one of the reasons lower management originally stationed him in Canyon Shadows, and he ensured things didn’t get out of hand at the site, but it didn’t mean he had to camp out at the place.

  Before it was a gas station, it had been a small café. A husband and wife combo, the Fellermans, owned it. Xavier and Janice Fellerman had come from out of town, their exact country of origin unknown, although Dan could detect a trace of German in their accents. He doubted that Fellerman was their real surname, but he never felt the need to investigate them further. As long as they kept things civil, he allowed them to operate the café. Dan had avoided the area bac
k then as well, even though the locals said the Fellerman’s rib eye steak was to die for.

  Dan’s orders were simple; observe and report. He was only to interfere in the most extreme of circumstances. So, when people started to disappear, he had messaged his superiors, asking for the authority to put a stop to what the Fellermans were up to. Lower management denied his request.

  More people started to disappear, and Dan once again requested to intervene. Once again, his orders were to observe and make reports.

  When a young child was reported missing, enough was enough. Orders could go to hell and have a nice, toasty seat right next to him. When he stepped on site to put an end to it all, he found the Fellermans’ depravity to be much more atrocious than what he originally anticipated.

  They were warlocks from the Old Country, offering sacrifices to older things than mere demons. It wasn’t anything a little hellfire and brimstone justice couldn’t stop, though. The darkness had dwelled on that patch of land for much longer than the Fellermans’ short residence.

  Before the café, it had been a small Japanese Internment camp. Over twenty local Japanese families had been tortured and killed at the site. The U.S. Government had covered it up, dismantling the camp and wiping its existence from the records.

  Before that, something murdered and mutilated a group of pioneers moving through Utah, eating their bodies; their story was lost in the annals of history. Killings, sacrifices, and dark rituals had cursed that particular plot of land for hundreds of years, going back as far as history would remember, but all the events disappeared, covered up and forgotten.

  Like the events before, the specifics of this incident disappeared, forever known as the Fellerman Fire. A few years later, someone bought the land and constructed the Last Stop and had remained in business since. Dan’s job returned to observation.

  He’d taken a lot of crap from lower management regarding his actions. Before the incident, lower management talked about promoting him and moving him to an active assignment, but that little stunt cost him. Breaking his cover shot down all chances of promotion, and they almost terminated him. In an unusual move, they decided to be lenient and let him off with a warning: stay in line or else. He’d toed the line ever since.

  It didn’t matter too much to him, though. He could only stand by and watch for so long. He only felt remorse for one decision in particular—the decision which had cost him everything. Dan constantly searched for ways to make amends and find forgiveness, yet so far, he’d come up with next to nothing in that department.

  Dan drove to the Last Stop but pulled short along the road. The gas station was small and homely, looking very much like it was a small mom and pop joint. But there was something missing from the down-home quality of the place, as if an unseen force sucked all the joy, love, and kindness from the site.

  There was little in the world that scared Dan, and he wouldn’t ever admit to it, but the site of the gas station scared him. There was too much dark energy surrounding the place. It wasn’t so much what could happen to him, but what he was capable of under the influence of so much darkness.

  Memories flooded his thoughts, and he remembered the feeling of domination he had when he towered over the broken bodies of the Fellermans, how easy it had been to strike them down, ending their dark deeds. It had been hard to walk away from it, and at times Dan thought that if he had embraced the feeling, lower management would have a different reaction to his disobeying of the rules. Perhaps that had been the test all along.

  Dan was about to get out of the vehicle when a call came over his radio.

  “Sheriff, I think we may have found your suspect. A man checked into the Buena Vista Motel matching the description.”

  “Thanks,” Dan said.

  He flipped on his police lights and pulled away, relieved to be driving from the gas station.

  Chapter Five

  June 15, 1180

  The elders were pleased with us once Sir William dispatched the demon in the cave; they all but worshiped him after he returned from the cavern’s darkness, bringing with him the creature’s head. They gave us supplies and a map of the region. With Sir Geoffrey feeling better, he used the knowledge he had gleaned from that blasphemous book, showing us on the map where we needed to go. The tribesmen also gave us a small stone carving depicting what could only be called a feathered serpent on one side, along with other strange icons carved into the other. Although there was a language barrier between us, we figured the carving was important.

  Sir William has said little since the incident at the cave. I don’t blame him and offer him counsel when I’m able. It seems we are pitted against evil manifested. I can only hope our combined purity can cleanse it from this world. I pray all goes as planned from here on out.

  It becomes more and more difficult to keep my spirits high. I didn’t ask to come on this quest, and I feel that our services would be better appreciated in the Holy Land. However, I am here now and can only move forward.

  As we venture into the wilderness toward the unknown, I can’t help but think we may never return to Europe or the Holy Land.

  -Sir Ralph Mounford

  Outside of Panguitch, Utah

  “My people have a tale. It has been passed down for generations. Are you ready?”

  “Go ahead, Rusty,” Garrett said, watching the scenery fly by as he drove on.

  Rusty cleared his throat with a slight cough and started, “When the earth was young, things were unfinished. The Great Spirit was out one night placing stars in the sky. The Great Spirit took much care and deliberation in the duty and mused for long periods of time before placing them.”

  “While the Great Spirit was deep in thought, the Coyote spirit, curious as ever, came and investigated the bag of stars. When the Coyote spirit opened the bag, all the stars flew out and into the night every which way.

  “The Great Spirit was angry with Coyote and cast him from the Spirit World, forever to dwell on the earth. This is why you can hear them howl during the night, sorrowful for what the Coyote Spirit did.”

  Rusty paused and took a moment to look out the window. Garrett remembered a similar version of the story from a collection of Native American folklore he read in college.

  “It sounds familiar. I like it,” Garrett said.

  “I’m not finished; here comes the real interesting part. The story I just told you is common and has been told since my people were young. This next part was told to me by my Grandfather and is seldom heard.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “My grandfather said that when the Coyote spilled the stars from the bag, lighting the night up, one star came back. It did not shine like the others, and it was colder than the northern ice. Breaking into many pieces, it fell to the earth. He said that the Great Spirit did not recognize this star and urged the earth to destroy it.

  “He said that when the star touched the earth, the world shook with fear and lashed out with anger. The earth tried to cleanse itself of the dead star using fire, water, and rock; however, the star was clever and hid from sight, fooling the earth and the Great Spirit.”

  Rusty was quiet then. Only the sound of the road filled the small rental car. They both sat in silence. Finally, Rusty turned toward Garrett and took the “Chick Magnet” trucker cap off his head. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he asked, “What do you think?”

  Garrett looked over. “About what?”

  “About Jimi Hendrix and Tom Petty singing Kumbaya to a busload of deaf nuns! What do you think I mean? The story!”

  Garrett raised an eyebrow and wondered if giving this guy a ride to Panguitch was the smartest thing.

  “What does it mean? Don’t most of your peoples’ stories have some deeper meaning or something? This sounds like a story to scare kids or something.”

  It was Rusty’s turn to give a perplexed look. “What do you mean,
‘your people’?”

  Garrett stammered and tried to respond.

  Rusty let out a deep laugh. He put his hat back on and slapped Garrett on the shoulder.

  “Don’t worry about it; I’m messing with you. No offense taken. Anyway, my grandfather only told me that story a couple of times. There’s more to it, but it’s just as weird. Plus, it doesn’t really have a point; it is what it is.”

  Garrett sighed and looked out his window. In the distance, the town of Panguitch shimmered into view through the summer heat.

  “Is there anywhere specific you want me to drop you off?” Garrett asked.

  “The gas station coming up will work. Thank you for the ride.”

  “Not a problem,” Garrett said.

  “You’re a good man, Garrett, don’t forget that. There’s something about you that draws the earth’s energies. You are unique, and sometimes that’s all you need to get by.”

  Garrett let out a small chuckle and smiled.

  “Thanks.”

  He pulled the car into the small parking lot and got out. Garrett stretched and took in a deep breath of fresh air. Rusty followed shortly and walked over.

  “Thanks again, take care,” Rusty said, hefting his backpack onto his shoulder.

  “You too.”

  Garrett walked into the gas station and found the restroom. When he came back out, Rusty was nowhere to be found. After checking his directions once more, he got in his car and hit the road again.

  ***

  Rusty watched him leave from the shadow of a large tree. He couldn’t place it for sure, but something in his gut told him that he would meet Garrett again. The man’s energy was strange, unlike anything he had encountered in a long time. People like that attracted attention, from all manner of things both light and dark.

  ***

  Garrett made one more pit stop before arriving in Canyon Shadows. He found a small, family owned gas station outside of the town. He pulled up just as a sheriff’s Bronco turned its lights on and raced away. Garrett watched the lawman speed off and wondered what was up. Even out here in the middle of nowhere, the law has places to be.