“What are you doing out here?” a voice hissed from one side. His nephew, War Chief Browser, rose from behind a sagebrush. He had a round face with thick
black brows and a flat nose. A gray blanket, the color of the soil, draped his shoulders. “Uncle Stone Ghost, didn’t I tell you to stay in the village? Did you forget?”
Stone Ghost smiled. He did seem to be getting terribly forgetful of late, so his nephew’s words didn’t particularly bother him. He answered, “The only thing I forgot is how foolish you are.”
Browser gave him an irritated look and hooked his war club to his belt again. In the twilight the angry red scar on Browser’s forehead looked purple. A bandage swathed his arm.
Browser turned. “It’s my uncle,” he called in a soft voice.
“I know.”
From several paces away, Catkin stood. A beautiful woman, she had cut her hair in mourning, and it hung about her oval face in irregular locks. Her long legs and slim figure made her appear taller than she was. She cast wary glances over the edge of the terrace.
“What are you doing out here, Uncle?” Browser demanded. “You, of all people, should know how dangerous it is. The White Moccasins might be anywhere.”
“You and Catkin are not up here hunting White Moccasins, Nephew.” Stone Ghost looked down the slope to the greasewood flat below. Did he feel
her
eyes on him even now?
Stone Ghost gazed back across the valley. The first fires cast their glow on Dry Creek village. The small rectangle of mud-plastered rooms nestled beneath an eroded sandstone ledge. In the forgotten past a basin had been dug into a seep below a crack in the sandstone. It provided a dribble of water. The supply had been consistent enough that over the years a settlement had sprung up. Room after room had been added to Dry Creek village until a block of twenty-six rooms stood beside the seep. Now, with refugees from Longtail village, every room was crowded. The overflow lived in brush shelters. The Katsinas’ People couldn’t
stay here. Last summer’s rains had been few and far between. The seep provided Dry Creek village with just enough water in times of drought to irrigate their pitiful crops. The process was laborious, plants watered one by one from a ceramic pot. The ditches that normally diverted runoff from Dry Creek had remained parched. Corn had withered, the harvest poor.
“Why did you pick this place to hunt for her?” Stone Ghost looked around at the low sage and the crumbled stone shrine.
“It has the best view of Dry Creek village,” Catkin said, “and it’s far enough away that the dogs wouldn’t smell her and bark.” Worry etched her delicate face. She served as War Chief Browser’s deputy, one of the most blooded and skilled warriors in the world.
Browser nodded. “She’s here, somewhere. Or was. Until you walked out here and announced our positions, Uncle. Now she knows we’re hunting her.”
Stone Ghost exhaled and his breath rose against the darkening lavender sky. “She didn’t need me to know your positions, Nephew. She’s been watching you all day. She is the most dedicated of all hunters, her mind twisted like a yucca rope, bent and kinked until it is no longer human but something animal. She hasn’t taken her eyes from your movements all day, so she already knew you were here, waiting for her.”
Browser did not respond. His gaze darted over every shadow.
Stone Ghost stared back at the lights twinkling in Dry Creek village. “I came to tell you that Matron Cloudblower has decided to take the Katsinas’ People to Straight Path Canyon. She plans to rebuild the great kiva at Streambed Town. She thinks that perhaps that was the First People’s kiva—the one where they climbed into this world.”
“Why would she think that?” Browser’s round face was gilded by the fading light.
“Because it might be,” Stone Ghost said simply.
“And because Dry Creek village, despite Matron Rock Dove’s warm welcome, cannot shelter us through the winter. Matron Cloudblower sent me to summon you that you might help her plan the move.”
Browser nodded. “Very well. Tell her I will be there soon.”
Stone Ghost dropped his voice to a whisper. “No. Now.” He gripped Browser’s sleeve. “You must never hunt her in the darkness, Nephew. She will kill you before you know it.”
Catkin fingered her war club. “It is we who are hunting her, Elder.”
“Is that truly what you think?” Stone Ghost laughed softly and began picking his way down the dark slope toward the flats below. “Do you remember that first night, Catkin, when you came to my house down at Smoking Mirror Butte? Do you remember what I told you?”
“You told me a great many things, Elder. As I recall, you even talked to a skull in a sack.”
“Yes, my old friend, Crooked Nose. I wonder how he’s doing down there. I miss his company.” Stone Ghost took a breath. “Do you recall what I told you about the Blue God?”
Catkin put a hand on his elbow to steady him as they walked, and he patted her fingers in gratitude. “You said she was a bloody-headed woman, that she met the breath-heart soul as it climbed out of the grave. I told you I didn’t believe in her.”
“And I told you that your disbelief made you the rabbit in the brush, and she the cougar lying in wait.” Stone Ghost wobbled when his foot snagged a root. “There is only one way to sneak up on a desperate predator.”
“What is that, Uncle?” Browser asked from behind them. His voice sounded tired.
“You must find her weakness, and then use it against her. Do you know her weakness, Nephew?”
The silence stretched, and Stone Ghost concentrated on his feet.
Finally, Browser said, “No. Do you?”
“I think so.”
Catkin turned to stare at Stone Ghost. “What is it?”
Stone Ghost navigated across a treacherous bed of loose rocks. “It is a place, not a thing. A place I am not even sure exists. A—”
“A place of legends,” Browser whispered.
“Yes, I’m glad you remember, Nephew.” He had told Browser this right after the kiva burned at Longtail village. “We should be going. Soon. It may take us several days to find it, if it can be found.”
Browser came up beside Stone Ghost, and his face gleamed in the firelight cast by the village. “If it exists, we can find it.”
Stone Ghost smiled sadly and looked down at the village. People sat before evening fires, wrapped in blankets. A few children ran across the plaza, strangely quiet.
“This is a witch’s lair, Nephew. It may exist, but it will be surrounded by traps, and cloaked in darkness.”
I SLIP A hand from the darkness beneath the tumbled rocks of the First People’s shrine and grasp the sandstone. One by one, I remove the stones until the gap is wide enough to raise my head and peer out into the night.
Old Stone Ghost is gone … and he has taken my prey with him.
I rise from the hollow like a Spirit from the earth, and turn toward the distant fires of Dry Creek village, watching the wavering shapes of three people move through the greasewood toward the light.
I sniff the air for their lingering scents. The breeze caresses my charcoal-smudged face.
I was so close! If the old man hadn’t come …
I wait until they walk back into the village plaza; then a throaty laugh breaks from my full red lips. Browser will come to me again. It is inevitable.
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
DR. DALE EMERSON Robertson froze in his tracks. He would have sworn he heard laughter, mocking and eerie. The faint sound seemed to dance on the cold desert night. As he cocked his head to listen, the sound faded. Moonlight washed the canyon with its pale brush, beaming whitely on the cracked rimrock, painting the rabbitbrush, chamisa, and sage.
“Must have been the wind,” he whispered. Though no trace of a breeze could be felt in the chill air.
He shook off the dark premonition and resisted the urge to climb back into the warm safety of his pickup. Instead he locked the door and started down the path that led west from the Tseh So interpretive site toward the ruins of Casa Rinconada.
Chaco Canyon: a place of mystery. It spoke to every American archaeologist’s soul. It had always spoken to Dale, but on this night he would have preferred to forget the past and what this half-baked Halloween journey might mean for him. His eyes drifted over the moonlit landscape.
Eons past, tectonic pressure, wind, and water had
carved the canyon through the Cretaceous Cliff House sandstone. People had come here, drawn by the alluvial soils in the canyon bottom where, as the rains came and went, corn, beans, and squash could be grown. Dale thought of the immense draw of Chaco Canyon, and how it had shaped men for thousands of years. It had reached a stunning climax over nine hundred years ago when the Anasazi charted the courses of the sun, moon, and stars. They had used that sophisticated astronomical information to lay out their enormous pueblos, schedule their complex ceremonies, and build hundreds of miles of roads.
He looked up at the star-patched sky. The late October chill ate into his bones, sending a shiver coursing through him. It was Halloween; he should have been home dropping candy into sacks as a means of placating little suburban ghosts and witches.
“This is a fool’s errand,” he murmured to himself in irritation.
He should have been in Santa Fe eating
pollo marengo
at the Pink Adobe with his adopted son, Dusty, and his friend of twenty years, Dr. Maureen Cole. Not out here. Not on a cold night like this.
Moonlight gilded the canyon rim a quarter mile to the south, and the weathered sandstone shone with a knuckle-white luminosity that mimicked freshly stripped bone. Cracks, fissures, and irregularities in the stone cast raven shadows.
Rains had washed little rivulets into the trail. Stones tried to roll under Dale’s feet. He stopped, took a deep breath, and winced against the pain in his knees. His frosty breath rose pale in the cold night air. No wonder his knees hurt. Power and time were carnally entwined like two perverted lovers.
He was too old to be out here chasing a wild goose, but he had to find out if what he knew in his heart was the same truth his head had denied all these years.
What happened to you that night, you old fool?
The question rolled around in his mind like a polished stone. It had been a fool’s errand—even back then. A dare that his “Western” mind had taken, and for which he now had no explanation except bad knees and an illusive but mocking memory. The problem was, he’d slipped that night, twenty-five years ago, fallen … and when he’d awakened the picture lodged in his mind had been so clear that he couldn’t tell if it had been an artifact of the midnight fall, or a sight he’d seen with his eyes. He’d never known for sure.
The vision was of a sand painting on a cave floor. In the carefully poured grains of colored sand, he’d seen his image: a white man wearing a brown hat, with a trimmed beard, blue jeans, and western-style shirt. His hair had only been threaded with gray then. But it had been him. He’d known it.
Then he’d seen the three naked witches in the back of the cave, illuminated by firelight. One, a tall, pirouetting form, wore only a wolf katchina mask. Smooth muscles had rolled under sweat-shiny skin as the katchina dancer lifted his bow and shot a yucca-leaf arrow into the sand painting’s knee. Dale had felt a terrible pain, like glassed fire, under his right kneecap. As the macabre dancer shot a second arrow, Dale’s left knee exploded in agony. He remembered crying out, falling into a gray abyss. Falling …
Hours later he’d come to, dazed, almost unable to walk, and practically had to crawl back to where he had left Dusty and the horses in a nearby arroyo.
For more than twenty-five years he had wondered what had happened to him that night. And then this morning, she had called. Was that why he’d come here, to this place? To the spot where he’d last seen her, where they had finally terminated what should never have been.
Power and time. Cycles of the sun and moon. They all came together in Chaco Canyon. After thirty-seven years, almost to the night, he was back. At this place.
It had been years since he had last heard from her. Her voice had been so clear over the phone line that morning that the intervening decades might not have been:
“You’re not being funny, Dale.”
“Funny?” he had asked, confused not only by her call after so many years of mutual silence, but by the subject of the conversation.
“The note says, ‘We will meet at the center place where the ancestors climbed from the Shipapu into this world. In the corner house on the night when the dead live. Two cycles of the moon have come full. It is time to end what the four of us began. On the night of masks, at midnight, you shall make the journey. The wolf returns to its lair.’”
“I didn’t send you any note.”
“If you didn’t, who did? Who else knows about this?”
“I intend to find out. Can you fax it to me?”
“Dale … you know what this means?”
His knees hurt worse, as if someone had injected habanero pepper juice into the joints. A form of rheumatoid arthritis the doctors said, though they were a little hazy on the exact diagnosis.
He looked up at the gap where water had eaten into the sandstone rim to form Rinconada Canyon. To the east, in the gap just below the night-blackened horizon, was the stairway, a series of steps carved into the caprock where the ancient road led south to Tsin Kletsin. Here on the meridian line between Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, the high priests of Chaco had passed on the greatest of their ritual journeys. Now, he, too, followed it, seeking the end of a thirty-seven-year-old mystery.
“Is the note signed?” he had asked.
“There is only one word: ‘Kwewur.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yes,” he’d whispered.
It was old—a name from a long dead village called
Awatovi. Few whites outside of a handful of southwestern archaeologists and a few folklorists had ever heard the name.
In the moon’s glow he studied the bit of paper and crumbled it in his palm. His feet crunched loudly in the still darkness. To either side of the trail archaeological sites—the so-called small houses—lay under low mounds of rubble. This part of the canyon was packed with archaeology. The irregular ground surface consisted of mounds—ruined pueblos—and depressions caused by collapsed pit houses. Speckled bits of pottery and flaked stone artifacts glinted in the moonlight.
Some investigators believed that while the Great Houses filled the north side of Chaco Wash, the south side had been reserved for the lower classes and itinerant pilgrims who came to Chaco Canyon. It was here, some hypothesized, that the Chaco elite had provided a sort of “ceremonial circus” for the masses.
He strode past the interpretive marker that explained that fact to tourists, and made his way up the slight incline. Atop the knoll, he stopped. The desert was quiet, though in the distance the faint hooting of an owl could be heard. He exhaled again, his frosty breath rising toward the stars.
“Are you here?” he called out. “Kwewur? Is that what you call yourself?”
He looked up when dark wings moved through the moonlight above him. The owl hooted right over his head.
Dale looked down into the great kiva. Yes, he knew this place. Nearly nine hundred years ago the Chacoans had cut this huge hole through the sandstone cap of the knoll, down into the shale. The diameter measured sixty-three feet and five inches, an almost perfect circle. The sheer walls rose ten feet above the concentric stone bench. Thirty-four crypts pockmarked the curving wall.
Dale walked around the western side, looking down at the stone bench.
Had he been wrong? Was it all some elaborate hoax? Some irritating Halloween trick? He could feel the old Power rising in the air around him. Casa Rinconada’s presence touched the soul. The Anasazi believed that kivas were doorways to the underworlds. Chacoans had used this place to impress the bucolic pilgrims who bore tribute from the far corners of the Southwest. Looking down, shadows seemed to move in the depths of the old Chacoan tunnel.
He walked around to the southern anteroom that led down into the interior. Park Service rules prohibited after-hours visits to the ruins. His mouth had gone dry as he stepped into the shadowed stairway. Stone grated underfoot; he lowered himself step by step into the gloom. At the bottom, cold stone rose around him, timeworn, silent, and ominous. He called out: “Hello?”
The faint scurrying of rodent feet on rock met his ears.
The pain in Dale’s knees became excruciating. White moonlight sliced across the round room.
With growing unease, he looked around the huge kiva. The stone squares of the foot drums cast black shadows, and the central hearth, so many centuries dark, looked like an inky abyss. The square wall niches seemed to pulse, as though from vibrations coming from another realm. The eerie sensation of hidden eyes ate into him.
Dale nerved himself, and called out to the darkness. “If you’re here, I’ve come to talk to you, to find out what this is all about.”
This was madness. As he turned to leave he thought he heard … what? Fabric brushing stone?
Moonlight blazed on the northern wall, and a black slash, the old subterranean passageway, seemed to become a rip across the floor. There, 850 years ago,
masked dancers would have magically appeared, rising, as if out of the very ground.
One hundred years after the fall of Chaco, the Anasazi returned to Casa Rinconada, filled in the tunnel, and refurbished this entire place. They had plastered over the old gods, and resanctified Casa Rinconada in the name of the katchinas.
Fear knotted his stomach. He felt sick.
Why had he been called here? Because of her? That had been thirty-seven years ago. He had found her here alone, on a moonlit night like this one. No one could have known what they had done here. And, after all these years, who would care?
The distant hoot of an owl carried on the still night. The death bird’s lonely voice echoed off the stone walls.
“What do you want? Why bring
her
into this? She hasn’t been part of my life for years. If this is a joke …”
Laughter seemed to come from everywhere; it reverberated off the ancient fitted stones.
Dale lifted a finger. “I warn you, if this is some student prank, you’re going to regret ever—”
“Student?” a voice hissed.
A stone clattered behind Dale, and he spun, his heart stuttering in his chest. “Where are you? Come out and show yourself.”
“Spider Woman awaits you, white man,” the voice whispered. An acoustical trick, it seemed to issue from the stygian crypts on all sides.
“Who are you? Why did you want me to come here? What’s this all about?” Dale swallowed hard.
“It’s about you … me … and the past.” The hollow voice sounded pained. “It’s about love, Dale. Love is pain. And you hurt me so. You have hurt so many … and they don’t even know how badly you wounded them.” The echoing voice paused, as if listening. “Do you hear them crying?”
“What?”
“Forward … step forward.”
Dale hesitantly walked out around the crumbled deflector wall and past the dark hearth. He squinted, seeing the design on the kiva floor. Moonlight washed out the colors, but he knew what he saw: a sand painting, carefully done—an effigy of an old man with bad knees, it wore a fedora hat. The expression on the drawing’s face was one of terror.
Dale fought a sudden wave of nausea. Pressure, like constricting bands, tightened in his chest until he couldn’t breathe.
“Are you afraid, Dr. Robertson?” the voice asked. “You, who terrorized so many? The ghosts of the ancestors are gathering around. Can you hear them? Sense them?”
Dale’s mouth worked as he tried to form words.
An apparition rose from the gaping blackness of the subfloor tunnel. The creature wore a mask, a terrible mask in the shape of a wolf’s head. Even in the moonlight, it looked ancient, battered and cracked with age.
“We have old business, you and I. It goes back … far back.” He spread his black-painted arms like a bird preparing to soar, and in a voice as dry as sand, sang, “In Beauty it is begun. In Beauty it is begun.” From his raised hands, a white moonlit haze fell.
“Sacred cornmeal,” Dale whispered, and panicked.