~~~
Pulling into lot 98 after dinner, Daniel saw a fire glowing in the lot next to him along with three shadows now familiar. He parked the truck and nodded at the loungers when Mr. Smith raised a hand to say hello and took his food into the canvas cabin. He had been pleased to see there was a small refrigerator included in the cabin when he unpacked the night before and stored his groceries in it for the “special” surprise he was considering tomorrow after the tour. After storing them he exited and went over to the fireside.
The conversation mostly revolved around kids and grandkids and Rachel seemed to have a lot of opinions about the psychology of parenting for someone so young, single and apparently, as Dan gathered during other topics of discussion, an only child in her own family. Daniel amused himself listening to Rachel concur and advise the Smiths on how to handle the feuds boiling up around the divorce back in Texas. But to his surprise they in turn seemingly took her suggestions seriously and responded in a manner that they were considering her words. Whether this was cute or weird, he couldn’t decide. But eventually conversation turned to the tour for the next day. Apparently the Smiths had committed to attending and wanted to know more about the Mesa.
“One of the sites we’ll see has a couple windows painted like it was a face to warn people away.”
“So these cliff dwellings really were forts?” asked Mrs. Smith.
“Well…we can’t be absolutely sure of anything. We just go by the clues and make good guesses. But Cliff Palace and most of the others were actually dwelling places. There were even farms in the valleys below them,” Rachel answered. “It’s just they’re likely more easily defended dwellings than living on the mesa above or down in Cortez Valley below. We know there was a lot of fighting for resources by 1000 or 1100 AD.”
Mr. Smith interjected, “And then they just all disappeared not long after that?”
“Well, they were there for a hundred years or more. …But…ya…they just sort of leave.”
“And not long before European explorers started showing up in the Americas…” Smith pondered. “Interesting. What drove them away, you wonder.”
Rachel took on her Ranger’s tone in answering these questions but was also very clearly excited by them. “You can’t be sure…but I’m thinking it was the lack of resources like trees and maybe some of the fighting we know was going on in this valley. They would have known about it, and that’s why we think they moved down from the mesas in the first place.”
Dan’s interest was piqued by the motives for building the beautiful structures he’d seen on the website and started asking questions as well.
“You’d think that would be very tedious living, going up and down and in and out of those caves to their farms or whatever. …Wasn’t it dangerous too?”
Rachel knew she’d hooked her entire audience at that point and leaned back in her chair to reply. “Yes. We think the mortality rate was well over fifty percent for infants and toddlers.”
“Eeesh!” replied Mrs. Smith. “From falling?”
“Again, we can’t say for sure, because there would probably be a lot more health threats then too. But…ya…we definitely found signs on skeletons of broken bones and such very often. On everyone of every age, really.”
There was a pause while Mr. and Mrs. Smith considered the tragedy of it all. For Dan that wasn’t too surprising or even terribly interesting. He felt a sort of, what would you expect, indifference about it. But Rachel had a different view.
“When you think about the souls that lived there, you have to kind of wonder…and a lot of people say they feel some bad vibes when they’re in the dwellings.”
Dan prompted, “Really?”
“Ya. There’s a painting of another face inside one of the rooms that we’ll see. It isn’t really a pleasant picture. Some think it’s a religious ceremonial drawing but most people get pretty creeped out in there. I don’t know what it is.”
Everyone took a sip of their coffee and Dan crunched a s’more Rachel was able to provide this time around.
“For me, I just feel like there’s a bunch of old souls hanging around there…like they want you to know they were there.”
Mrs. Smith shivered. Mr. Smith took her hands and excused themselves saying they’re sure they’ll learn a lot on the trip tomorrow, but that Mrs. Smith didn’t deal too well with “spooky.” It wasn’t a curt departure because they’d both been yawning and getting drowsy anyway, but it was a fairly quick maneuver to leave. After they’d gone Rachel snickered a little and elbowed Dan who was sitting relatively close next to her.
“What about you? Does the idea of spirits send you packin’ too?”
Dan smiled back. “No. I can get spooked…and I think there are definitely souls around. But it won’t scare me off. As a matter of fact, I suppose you could say it was a spirit that sent me down your way in the first place.”
During the course of the next three-and-a-half hours huddled around the fire, Dan tried to explain a lot of what he’d been experiencing the last several weeks in cautiously chosen words. He even ended up detailing the dream about the Indian who’d sent him on the trip to the south. Rachel interpreted it as a ‘vision’ just as he had initially, but it seemed clear she was not entirely comfortable with the description. Dan thought perhaps she wasn’t quite ready to believe him and backed off at that point talking about spirits.
There was also a lot of discussion about the rain, and again Rachel put on her old-wizened-woman look and expounded on the effects of global warming. But more importantly, the two of them got to know each other pretty quickly, and Daniel learned he really like Rachel. He wasn’t sure what that meant to him, because he still felt she was too much his younger to ask her out for drinks. But he was glad for her company and didn’t particularly want it to end when he went home. He began to devise what he’d write on the greeting card he’d give her tomorrow after the tour that could interest her in perhaps maintaining a pen pal…or email pal…if rangers even had access. Feeling ignorant, that was a question he thought he might have to pose in the next day or two as well.
When he left the camp, Rachel stood and gave him a hug and thanked him for listening to her. It lasted longer than he might have expected and he grew a little uncomfortable. Her smell was that of pine, oak and clean forest soil, and he found himself dreaming of a forest again the night of the fifth, but with no darkness or blocked paths to follow, and therefore had a good night’s rest.
December 6
Dwellings and a Soul
Rachel apparently wanted to keep their date for the tour fairly business-like as she was gone by the time both the Smiths and Dan were up and moving about the camp. Dan thought he’d heard that small car rumble to life and leave again earlier and decided it must be Rachel’s ride. He thought it was probably an appropriate thing: small and vocal like her.
Breakfast was the Denny’s in town, but after returning to the camp he decided to shave in the bathroom and shower area on the backside of the camp office. All cleaned up, he then prepared a couple sandwiches for the day. The tour appointment was at 1:00PM, but he intended to go up a little early and visit the museum near the Spruce Tree House before meeting Rachel and her audience there. The visitor’s center itself on the mesa near their other tour location, Cliff Palace, was closed from November through March, so there was no sense trying to hunt down a souvenir, at least not from within the park itself.
Parking in the museum lot next to the four other cars there, the area seemed to Daniel to be a grounds of several small out-buildings connected by a tarmac path and had a cute, touristy look to it. Hand-carved signs directed visitors to the ranger’s office, a facilities building or the museum among scrub oaks and various low desert bushes. The museum building itself appeared to be older than the others around it and it had various levels and nooks and crannies, almost as if an old house had been converted many decades ago, or perhaps added on to. Dan
couldn’t decide on his own how that might have come to be up on the top of this mesa with little appeal to anyone but perhaps cattle ranchers, but he felt very at home while looking through the dioramas and displays of artifacts. A small wood fire burned in the entrance lobby, keeping the one remaining ranger staff there moderately warm, while the rest of the building was still shaking off the near-freezing temperatures the mesa top must have dropped to during the night.
The officer at the counter was dressed in full ranger’s regalia but by Dan’s estimate had to be about one-hundred and two years old. He asked if he could assist and Daniel politely explained that he was there for the scheduled tours at one and that he just wanted to look around the museum for a while. In the immediate room behind the ranger’s desk was the hallway lined with glassed-in dioramas of the construction of various living quarters the Native Americans had built through the centuries.
Dan looked through the dioramas for nearly twenty minutes even though there were only five of them, progressing from the early first few centuries AD through about 1200 AD. The first few stages up until the 600’s or so held his curiosity due to the nature of the homes’ construction. They were called “pit houses” and they appeared to be sunken nearly head-height into the earth. Later stages seemed to have stones and such to line the perimeter dirt walls, but all of the evolutions of pit houses had wood and thatch roofs. There was an explanation that roofs frequently caught fire and were often rebuilt, but the people had devised a very ingenious way of building a fire in the middle of the pit, evacuating the smoke through a central hole in the roof, which was apparently also the entrance, and a fresh air intake drawn from one side of the pit through tunnels up to the surface. The fresh air was directed by stones, apparently to reduce the draft and prevent it from blowing out the fire, or spreading the smoke throughout the room.
As he continued to look through the dioramas until the era of the second millennium he learned that the pits had progressed to become the “kivas” of the cliff dwellings. Those were the gathering places and family rooms of the dwellings and were apparently sometimes used for religious purposes. While everything about the constructions and their development over about 1000 years was amazing, Dan still wondered how the stackings of rocks had managed to survive another eight or nine hundred years afterwards until the present. He stood marveling at the last diorama of the cliff palace and little figures tilling the earth in the valley below when the atmosphere in the museum seemed to change suddenly.
Daniel felt as though someone was standing just behind and to the right of him, looking over his shoulder. The feeling was so strong and his heart was racing so that he was stalled, stuck in the position seemingly unable to move his body. He began to wonder if this is what a possession might feel like, remembering various horror films he’d seen from time to time. What is going on?! he thought. Dan had never been out of control of his old body to the best of his memory and the overwhelming feeling began to sink his spirits deeply. The room seemed to be darker than it had been when he entered, as if a cloud had shadowed the sun suddenly.
Slowly moving his eyes to the left to peak up the hallway, he could just see a corner of the ranger’s desk jutting out from the opening. It was a mere twenty-five feet away, yet it seemed so far. He realized intuitively that the old man had left without catching Dan’s attention. Perhaps he was somewhere else in the museum straightening up or something, but Daniel felt very, very alone at that moment…and yet not at all alone.
Once he had the strength to return his view to the cliff dwelling diorama he noticed a pair of red glints in the glass and stared. Allowing his eyes to focus back to the glass rather than the diorama inside he could see a ghosted and opaque image of himself, looking terrible, and the vague outline of a shadow standing behind his right shoulder. The glints seemed to be the creature’s eyes. With noticeable intent, the eyes lowered as if they were then looking at the diorama and the figures in and about the dwelling.
Daniel looked to the display as well and found a new fear welling up. The figures were moving! More accurately, it was as if a film was being projected in slow motion, ghosted over the diorama by way of the window reflection. It seemed to depict the figurines in the valley and at the opening of the cave dropping their various objects in fear and rush to collect children and belongings in and around the dwelling. Something horrible was happening and it was happening quickly to these people, even though Dan was being shown each nuance of panic at a painstaking and heart-breaking pace.
Able to lift his eyes back to the shadow, Dan was finally able to whisper after three false starts, “What is it?”
The shadow’s eyes had met his for the question and then lowered again. Daniel returned his gaze to the dwelling in the cliff again. Most of the stick figures had climbed back down to the valley floor and were rushing altogether out of scene. There seemed to be a pause, yet he still was unable to move, frozen by his own fear. Finally, out of one of the structures in about the center of cliff buildings and just above the largest of the Kiva’s he saw a face and perhaps a shadow of a body peer from an opening. Then a waterfall gushed from the cliff faces above. It filled the valley, washing away the plantings and natural trees alike. It seemed to catch enough of the cave lip that the dwellings were filling with water. All remembrances of the figures who had just fled were being washed out and into the valley below.
Ghost images of water stopped flowing and the real figurines still stood. Daniel looked to the glass again and the shadow behind him was gone. He was also able to make his body kinetic again, turning quickly to see if the being who stood with him and showed him the vision could be detected anywhere else about him.
“You okay, young man?” said a spindly figure with an aged and cracking voice down the hallway in the opening. It was the ranger.
“Did you see anyone else come in here after me?”
“Bah! No, of course not. We don’t get anyone in December really. … Well, except for this year of course because it’s been warmer than usual.”
“So no one?!” Dan pleaded. He found his feet would take direction again and he hesitantly headed back to the front counter while asking.
“No! No one!” The ranger moved back behind the counter as Dan approached and rested his tired frame on his right arm perched atop the counter.
“Ok,” Dan nervously searched his pockets and appeared as if he were looking for something to the ranger, but even Dan didn’t know what. “So…where did you go then?”
“I haven’t gone anywhere,” he replied. “I’ve been right here the whole time. …Didn’t you hear me on the phone?”
Daniel glanced furtively at the ranger and back to his pocket searching.
“No. No, I guess I didn’t.”
“Well, son, you probably need to hurry if you want to see any of the other exhibits before your tour. You only have another half an hour.”
“Okay…thank you.” And Daniel shuffled out the museum door quickly. A half an hour? I had almost two hours when I arrived I thought. Checking his watch, sure enough it was nearing 12:30 already.
He went back to the pickup in the lot through the winding paths and sat at the wheel. He stared dumbfoundedly out the window for a few minutes puzzling over what had happened to him. It was something that happened to him. The whole experience was not his, and not in his control. Something put him into the situation of unease and weird visions and that neutered not just his ego, but to some extent he was beginning to question his sanity.
After a few minutes of self-contemplation, Daniel opened his sack and had one of his two sandwiches and downed a can of soda he’d bought as well. The meal did not sit well so he put his head back against the back glass of the truck cab resting and thinking at the same time. There is something after me, he consciously acknowledged for the first time. With that a world of opportunities opened before him, but not of the possible outcomes seemed pleasant. What if he was in real dange
r? What did this person or thing want from him? Time slipped quickly towards 1:00 while he stared straight into the scrub in front of his parked truck until Rachel and the Smiths happened to toddle by his front bumper on the way in from the parking lot.
The Smiths were holding hands and Rachel walked behind conversing from there. But as she approached the first corner of Dan’s truck she waggled her fingers and smiled unreservedly.
“Going to come in?” she yelled.
Unrolling the manual-cranked window on his side, Dan replied, “Oh, of course. …Just have a little indigestion.”
“Okay. Just come to that Ranger’s office next to the museum in the next two minutes or you miss your tour, sir!”
Dan mustered a grin and nodded.
He thought for a few minutes more about the events of the last few days. Of course, that expanded to the last two months or more to a time shrouded, for the most part, by heavy clouds and a rain. A lot of rain. Why were things so down back home? And why were they so nice here in near the four corners? And most of all, why is this thing attacking him down here? The only thing he could think of was…He wants me to go back home! Yes, that must be it.
Generally, even in this supernatural line of thinking, Daniel always applied logic. His mind simply worked in an analytical way, and he was proud of that. In this case, it didn’t make any sense for some ghost or something to be haunting him because he hadn’t ever known anyone that would be angry after they died. There must, therefore, be an agenda. And in Dan’s mind, the present agenda was to get him back home to Woodland Hills.
Taking out a piece of paper and an old pencil from a mileage record book he used to keep, he wrote down several words that came to him immediately as he thought about the thing which gripped him inside the Museum. He was sure it was the same as the one at the gas station, outside in his backyard, and who else knew where. In quick printed text he formed a short working list.
Ghost
Wraith?
Demon
Spirit
Poltergeist?
Soul
Checking his watch it was 1:01PM and he knew he was going to be in trouble with Rachel. But he sniggered for just a second as he realized two out of the three names were models Dodge had produced in the past. Soul was another car, and wraith?...he realized that was a movie that featured a Chrysler prototype car as the McGuffin for a good wraith. Charlie Sheen, he thought. Yeah. That was a cool movie when I was a kid. Perhaps he was over-reacting to an over-active imagination. He slipped the paper under the flip down console in the middle seat and hopped out to run to the Ranger’s station.