THE BLOOD MESA Page 2

  The ledge was narrow enough that when Matt looked out, he couldn't see anything except empty air on that side of the truck. And on the other side loomed the red cliffs, bulging out in places so they overhung the ledge. It was a little nerve-wracking, all right. As a rule, though, his nerves were pretty steady.

  "What's up there on top?" he asked. It was a natural question for someone in his position, even somebody who couldn't see the festering sores on Hammond's face.

  "There's not much left of the pueblo itself," Dr. Dupre explained, "just a few walls still standing, and the kivas, of course, although some of them have collapsed in on themselves. But there are enough ruins so that when the wind blows through them, it makes a sort of wailing noise, like there's someone up there crying . . . I know, that probably sounds crazy."

  Matt shook his head. "Not at all."

  "Of course I know that no one lives up there and hasn't for hundreds of years, but there are times I catch myself looking over my shoulder, like there's somebody behind me. But nobody's there. You know what I mean?"

  "I do," Matt said. All too well.

  As they approached the top, Dr. Dupre pointed through the dust-covered windshield and said, "There's the Indian's Head. We're not supposed to call it that, even though that's what the few people who live around here have called it for years and years. The university doesn't want anybody to be offended."

  Matt saw right away what she was talking about. A huge chunk of rock poised at the edge of the mesa, above the ledge. Centuries of erosion had carved it into a shape that roughly resembled a stereotypical Native American profile.

  "It's a hard landmark to miss," she went on. "When you see it, you know you're almost at the top."

  Sure enough, a couple of minutes later the trail emerged onto the mesa's top, which was approximately half a mile wide and three quarters of a mile long, Matt judged, and laid out in a roughly rectanglar shape, although there were no sharp corners anywhere.

  After climbing all the way up the trail, it felt good to be back on relatively level ground again. Stretches of grass grew here and there, along with an occasional stunted bush, but mostly the ground was a mixture of sand and rock. Jagged crevices sliced in from the rim and would have to be avoided. A fall into one of them could be fatal.

  As Matt drove across the mesa, he spotted in the distance the ruins Veronica Dupre had mentioned. Some of the eroded walls that were still standing had windows in them, and that probably accounted for the wailing wind she had talked about.

  It struck Matt that those openings also looked a little like eyes, watching them approach.

  "People actually lived up here?" he asked.

  "Oh yeah, several hundred of them. Maybe as many as a thousand."

  "How did they get water? What did they live on?"

  "They dug cisterns underground and rigged sluices to carry the water down to them when it rained. It doesn't rain much here, as you might imagine, but when it does it's usually a downpour. There are also some springs within walking distance, and they could carry water back from them if they had to. They were able to grow some corn, and hunting parties went out and brought in fresh meat. Getting enough to eat had to be a problem, though. That may be one reason why they finally abandoned this city. They made it work in other places, though. Acoma, southeast of here, is the oldest continually occupied settlement in North America. People still live there." Dr. Dupre laughed. "And I'm lecturing again. Occupational hazard."

  Lecture or not, none of what she said explained why the crawling sensation along Matt's spine had gotten even worse since they reached the top of the mesa. He looked around for Mr. Dark but didn't see the scrawny son of a bitch.

  Several pickups and jeeps were parked near the ruins. Matt saw a few people moving around, scattered here and there on the mesa. They all appeared to be young, which was no surprise since graduate students did most of the grunt work on archeological digs like this, while the professors just supervised.

  A pudgy young man with curly brown hair came toward the truck as Matt brought it to a halt near the other vehicles. Matt opened his door and slid down from the high bench seat.

  The young man stopped short and looked at him in surprise.

  "Who're you?" he asked.

  Drs. Dupre and Hammond had gotten out of the truck on the other side. As they came around the front, Dr. Dupre said, "This is Matt Cahill, Jerry. He's taking Alberto's place."

  "What happened to Alberto?"

  "He quit," Hammond said with scorn in his voice. "Claimed he was too frightened to come back out here. You know how these uneducated Indians are. Afraid of evil spirits and hogwash like that."

  Dr. Dupre frowned at her colleague's comment but didn't say anything.

  "Oh. Okay," the young man said. He extended a hand to Matt and grinned as he introduced himself. "Jerry Schultz. I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Cahill."

  "Call me Matt," he said as he shook hands.

  "Jerry, can you help Matt unload the supplies?" Dr. Dupre asked. "We're going to talk to Dr. Varley."

  "Sure, I'd be glad to."

  "Jerry can fill you in on anything you need to know about what we're doing up here," Dr. Dupre went on.

  "And welcome to Blood Mesa," Hammond added, although the look on his rotting face didn't appear welcoming at all. "I hope you enjoy your stay with us."

  Matt doubted the sincerity of that sentiment.

  And he had a very strong hunch that he wouldn't enjoy his time on Blood Mesa at all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A number of tents were set up near the parked pickups and jeeps. Matt and Jerry began carrying the supplies into a large one that Jerry identified as the mess tent.

  Matt had to move his duffel bag to reach one of the crates, and as he set it down, something in the bag made a slight clunking sound as it landed on the truck bed.

  "What was that?" Jerry asked.

  "Just some of my gear," Matt said.

  He didn't explain that it was the ax he had brought with him from the sawmill when he started on his personal odyssey.

  The ax that he ought to take out of the duffel bag, carry over to the tent where Dr. Andrew Hammond was talking to an older man with white hair, and bury the keen edge of the blade deep in the evil motherfucker's rotting face.

  That would put an end to the trouble before it even began.

  But it would leave unanswered the question of why he felt such a compulsion to journey to the top of that mesa. Was there something even worse waiting for him up there, something only he could stop?

  Matt didn't know, but he had to find out.

  "So you're a graduate student," Matt said to Jerry, just making conversation while they worked.

  "Yeah. I'm doing my doctoral thesis on the linguistics of the Anasazi, so I'm hoping we'll find something that'll tell us more about their language, which seems to have been primarily Uto-Aztecan in nature."

  "Uh-huh," Matt said.

  "Plus it was supposed to be a chance for me and April to spend some, you know, quality time together."

  "April?"

  "My girlfriend. We came out here together, but we . . . uh . . . sort of had a fight."

  "Oh." Matt hoped that Jerry wouldn't feel compelled to share all the details of that disagreement. He didn't really have any interest in grad student soap opera.

  "But then that damned Scott Conroy had to come along, too," Jerry continued. "I hate guys named Scott."

  "Let me guess," Matt said. "He's . . . April's ex?"

  "Yeah. They broke up four months ago. I finally get a chance with her, after all this time, and it looks like things are gonna go my way at last, and then . . . then Scott comes along and starts makin' noises about getting back together with her, you know, and I thought maybe April would tell him to take a hike, but she said she couldn't be rude to him after all they'd been through together, so she had to listen to him, and that just made me, well, you know, that's not something a guy like me wants to hear, since Scott, he's this good-lo
okin' guy and I'm, well, you can see for yourself what I am, and his name is Scott, for God's sake—"

  "So you've known April for a long time?" Matt asked, figuring that if he didn't stop the flood of words somehow, Jerry might pass out from lack of oxygen, especially at this altitude.

  "Since a seminar on ancient civilizations in our sophomore year. I looked at her across the room, and suddenly I didn't give a shit about the Hittites anymore."

  "Yeah, I know what you mean," Matt said. "So are they going to get back together?"

  "April says no . . . but I don't really believe her."

  "And she figured out that you feel that way."

  "Oh yeah. Pissed her off, too. She said if I didn't trust her, then maybe we shouldn't be together after all."

  "Well, there's something to that, I suppose," Matt said.

  "Yeah, probably. Anyway, we're sort of stuck up here now, so I guess we'll have to make the best of it. You'd think we'd be more, you know, mature about everything. I mean, we're graduate students. We should be past all this stuff."

  Matt just grunted and didn't say anything. He didn't know much about grad school or the whole world of academia, but he had knocked around enough in his life to know that anytime you put a bunch of males and females together, it was junior high all over again.

  To distract Jerry from the subject of romance, he said, "This Dr. Varley . . . I take it he's some sort of hotshot in the archeology field?"

  "You've never heard of him?"

  Matt shook his head. "I don't travel much in academic circles."

  "Yeah, he's one of the top men," Jerry said. "He's written a bunch of books and been running the department for years and years. This is gonna be his last dig, though. He's retiring pretty soon."

  "Dr. Hammond's going to replace him?"

  Jerry laughed, then shook his head. "Don't tell anybody I said this, but Dr. Hammond just wishes he was going to replace him. Dr. Varley's picked Dr. Dupre to take over."

  "Does Hammond know that?"

  "Yeah, and he's not happy about it, either. This is between you and me, right?"

  Matt nodded. "Sure. My word on it."

  "Hammond figured when he was running things, he'd be able to hook up with Dr. Dupre. He's been tryin' to get in her pants for a long time, and let's face it, who can blame him? But now she's gonna be the boss, not him, so he's not gonna have any leverage, you know what I mean?"

  "Yeah. Tough break for him."

  And maybe the anger and resentment that had grown in Hammond's heart because of it was what had drawn Mr. Dark to him.

  At first Matt had wondered if the evil he saw on Hammond's face was caused by that skeletal, lollipop-sucking bastard, or if the man had started to rot, inside and out, without being touched by Mr. Dark.

  The momentary glimpse Matt had gotten of Mr. Dark as they left the state highway, though, convinced him that something on this mesa had drawn the creature here, just as Matt himself had been drawn. There had to be a reason they kept winding up in the same places. Mr. Dark had a history of manipulating humans to get what he wanted, and Matt had a hunch that Hammond was one of those tools.

  The more information he had, the better he might be able to fight whatever was lurking up here. He said, "Tell me about the other members of the expedition. Is that the right word for it, expedition?"

  "Sure, whatever. We're all graduate students in archeology . . ."

  For the next few minutes, Jerry rattled off names and random facts about his fellow would-be archeologists, mostly concerned with the relative hotness of the female members of the group. All of them met with Jerry's approval to some degree. Matt knew he wouldn't be able to remember all the names, at least not until he got to know them better, so he didn't really try.

  By the time he and Jerry finished unloading the supplies, Matt was tired. The heat made a man sweat, and the dry air sucked up all the moisture almost immediately. It would be easy to get dehydrated out here.

  He turned to look around. The mesa had a stark beauty, and from this height he could see for twenty miles or more in every direction. Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles, as the old saying went. But the red and brown and tan landscape was dotted with other mesas, too, as well as slender, towering rock spires and other formations in odd, twisted shapes.

  "What do you think of it, Mr. Cahill?"

  The voice belonged to Dr. Veronica Dupre. She had come up behind him without him hearing her.

  "It's something," Matt said noncommittally as he turned to look at her. "And you might as well call me Matt, too. Mr. Cahill still makes me look around for my dad."

  She laughed. "All right, Matt. And you can call me Ronnie. I know I should stand on ceremony, like Dr. Varley and Dr. Hammond, but I've never quite been able to do that. I suppose that comes from years of working to put myself through school."

  "What did you do?" Matt asked, curious about this woman. She was attractive, but that wasn't it. There wasn't really anything flirtatious about her attitude.

  "Waitressed, bartended, you name it. I even worked in a lumberyard for a while."

  That was it, Matt thought. She might have transformed herself over the years, but she had started out in the same blue-collar world he came from. In fact, some of the boards in that lumberyard where she worked could have come from the sawmill where he had worked for so many years.

  "That's why I was interested when you said you'd worked in a sawmill," she went on. "We're a lot alike in some ways."

  "I suppose so," he said.

  But they really weren't, not anymore. She had become a professor, and he had become . . . something. He wasn't sure what. But he wasn't an average joe anymore, no matter how he might wish that were the case.

  Ronnie laughed. "Come on. If you're through unloading, I'll show you around. There's a little daylight left, but when night falls out here, it falls hard and fast."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The supply tent and mess tent were full of bottled water, crates of food, cases of toilet paper, tents, and supplies that would be used in the dig, such as stakes and rolls of twine for marking off grids, mallets for hammering the stakes into the hard ground, framed screens for sifting dirt, boxes and bags for storing artifacts, and portable lights that ran off the generator that also was in the back of the truck. Matt had already seen all of that, but Ronnie Dupre pointed it out to him anyway.

  Then they roamed around the ruins and Ronnie showed him the three dig sites, which were separated from one another by several hundred yards. To Matt they just looked like holes in the ground, but as he stood looking down into one of them, he suddenly tensed.

  The surrounding area was just a stretch of hard-packed ground with a few rocks littered around it.

  But as Matt looked down into the excavation, he seemed to feel a pulsing under the soles of his boots, almost like the ground was alive, with a heart buried somewhere down there underneath its surface.

  Whatever was down there didn't need to be dug up.

  He couldn't explain that to these rational scientists, though, not in any terms they would understand or accept.

  "Is Dr. Hammond in charge of this part of the dig?" he asked. Surely there was a connection between what he felt here and the sores he saw on Hammond's face.

  "No, Dr. Varley is supervising this excavation," Ronnie replied.

  "Oh." Matt was surprised by that answer.

  "I'm sure he'd be glad to tell you more about it, if you're interested. I'll introduce you to him at supper, along with the others."

  "Thanks," Matt said. He cast an uneasy glance over his shoulder at the excavation as they walked away.

  Ronnie was right about night falling quickly. The members of the expedition gathered in the mess tent, which was lit by oil lamps, and she introduced him to everyone as she had promised.

  The grad students all seemed like good kids, and even though he wasn't really that much older than them, Matt couldn't help but think of them that way. April Milligan, Jerry's former
girlfriend, was the sort of sweet, wholesomely pretty young woman who reminded people of somebody's little sister. Scott Conroy was the handsome, athletic guy who had been the quarterback in high school and on the honor roll. Ginger Li was the smart, pretty Asian woman. Brad Kern was another former high school athlete, although with his lanky height he'd probably been a forward on the basketball team. With one exception, the rest still blended together in Matt's mind.

  That exception was Chuck Pham, who looked Vietnamese. But when he opened his mouth, what came out was the good-ol'-boy drawl of a West Texas redneck. Matt figured that Chuck had been born and raised a long way from his parents' homeland.

  Dr. Howard Varley was a soft-spoken man in his seventies, lacking in the arrogance that made Andrew Hammond such a prick, but he had an air of casual superiority about him. He gave Matt a limp handshake and said, "Glad to have you with us, Mr. Cahill. Andrew has told me how you helped out with that mechanical crisis this afternoon. You seem to be something of a godsend."

  "I'm always happy to lend a hand," Matt said. He didn't bother telling Dr. Varley to call him Matt. He knew the man would never be that informal.

  Supper was simple fare: biscuits and spam cooked on a propane grill, along with canned vegetables heated in a microwave powered by the generator. The members of the expedition ate by the light of the oil lamps, which gave the meal an old-fashioned feel.

  Ronnie came over and sat down beside Matt, who was using a large flat rock as a seat. "You've worked really hard since we got here, Matt," she said. "Maybe Alberto's attack of nerves was actually a stroke of luck for us."

  Matt shrugged. "The way I was brought up, when I see something that needs doing, I usually try to do it."

  He was aware that Andrew Hammond was watching the two of them from the other side of the circle formed by the expedition members. Hammond didn't look happy that Ronnie was talking to Matt. Of course, to Matt's eyes it would have been difficult for Hammond to look happy with all that rotting flesh and those oozing sores.