Hundreds of fleshless hands seemed to twitch in the sweeping beams of light, skeletal fingers extended as though in supplication or clutched as if in rage. Those in the dry space were mostly white and well preserved, but those in the moist area were more yellow than not, mottled brown, sometimes serving as matrixes on which mold grew like rodent hair.
Jane was prepared to find this—and worse—on their journey, because Hendrickson had spoken of it, but the tableau was a grislier spectacle than expected. She didn’t know what to make of it, except that this was no sacred catacomb where peaceful people placed the dead with reverence. To her, trained in homicide investigation, these appeared to be trophies. The wrist bones were crushed and splintered where hands had been hacked from arms, perhaps sometimes from the arms of the living. The cavern told a story of violence and brutality, of ancient war and subjugation. Carved in the walls were strange runes, each sharp character like a cry of hatred.
“See this, you little coward. Look!” Hendrickson whispered. “If a man intends you harm, cut off his hands before he can act.”
Whoever had shaped the steps and adapted the cavern to their purpose must have been those who murdered these hundreds and made the crooked staircase into an ossuary.
Evidence existed of Paleo-Indian tribes living in this area more than fourteen thousand years ago, but little was known of them other than they were hunters of large game, including mastodons. Their tools were thought to have been such as flint or obsidian spearheads and hammerstones, primitive and insufficient for the stone shaping done here. Their cultures were said to be largely peaceable, but in fact so little had they left behind that they were ghosts in the fog of ancient history.
Only carbon dating and other tests would help to determine who created this place and furnished it with bones. Perhaps some paleo culture had possessed more advanced tools than were thought. Or as Hendrickson suggested when she questioned him at Gilberto’s place: It was known that, thousands of years nearer our time, the Northern Paiute had brutally oppressed the Washoe Indians; perhaps an even more militant faction of Paiutes had done part of this.
The Martis Indians had also lived in this general area for 2,500 years before disappearing without a trace around 500 B.C., which happened to be about the same time that other tribes invented the bow and arrow. These caverns might hold the remains of the long-vanished Martis people.
Hendrickson channeled his mother, and his words were like the susurrus of centipedes crawling the walls. “See, boy, see this. Did they eat these people after slaughtering them? We’re not far from Donner Pass, where stranded pioneers ate their dead to survive. Dog eat dog, so they say. More true is man eat man.”
Jane thought of Hendrickson, five years and younger, sleeping in a locked boy-size box, coffined in darkness as punishment, and by the age of six sent into this maze alone, at the top as they had entered this time, told that he would be let out only at the bottom. The first few times, he’d been given a flashlight, but on occasions beyond his counting, he’d been denied a light and had felt his way through damp stone corridors, down disconnected sets of zigzagging stairs, across fissure-bridging planks, through crypts appointed with trophies of genocide, like a lost spirit haunting the haunted dark, hearing noises he didn’t make and wondering at their origin, feeling presences where none should be, with no food, with nothing to drink but the cold water that formed shallow pools in certain chambers and sometimes tasted like iron, sometimes like nothing he wanted to name, on the worst occasions lost for two or three days.
As pitiable as he was, he nevertheless deserved some admiration for having endured without being driven entirely insane. But if he had remained functional, he had nonetheless been mentally deformed, twisted and knotted into a creature that, though pitiable, had no slightest measure of pity for others. During his many ordeals in darkness, he at some point ceased to be just a boy and became a boy who was a monster, the minotaur of this labyrinth. He didn’t eat human flesh as did the Minotaur of Crete, but other people had no value for him except to be used in whatever way the use of them might satisfy him.
For all her pity, Jane kept in mind, cavern by cavern, step by step, that what she had here on a leash was a monster who passed for human. In the long history of monsters, they sooner or later slipped their leashes.
6
Some of the sheriff’s deputies have returned to their regular patrols. Foursquare and two of his men are standing together in the produce department, admiring the fruit, waiting to see if they might be needed—which they won’t be—when the additional NSA contingent arrives.
Upon his return from the manager’s office, Dubose draws Jergen aside to the relative privacy of pallets stacked with large bags of charcoal being offered at a special price now that the barbecuing season is about to start in earnest. “This damn well better not be another freakin’ banana peel we have to take a fall on before we can get our hands on that little bastard. The plates on that Honda expired four years ago, and the registration was never renewed. It shouldn’t be on the road.”
“You’ve got the name and address of who last registered it?”
“Some guy named Fennel Martin.”
“What kind of name is Fennel?”
“Hell if I know. But he’s still in the local phonebook at the same address that’s on the registration.”
The rhythmic sound of a rotary wing draws their attention to the window. As the glass begins to hum with vibrations, they step outside into the parking lot and use their hands as visors and look to the west, where the helicopter angles down out of the sun.
7
Jane used the spray paint so often that she worried the can might be empty before they reached the house at the bottom of the serried caverns, leaving critical final turns unmarked. She formed smaller arrows on the walls.
Most of the chambers through which they passed were marked with runes, but only a few of the larger ones contained bones. The least disturbing was nevertheless a dramatic display in a space decorated instead with pictographs that were perhaps far older than the runes. The contents also might have been older, suggesting that more than one ancient culture had used this place to memorialize their skill as hunters of both animals and humans. The skulls of three mastodons were elevated above Jane on pedestals of stacked stone, immense and chalk-white in the probing lights, shadows shifting in the sockets as if eyes of some immaterial nature still looked out from the empty craniums and across thousands of years of time. The enormous tusks, clearly having been broken out of the skulls in order to get them through the narrower passages, had somehow been reattached, curving in majestic threat.
In two successive chambers, hundreds of human skulls were arranged on ledges, like some collection of grotesque beer steins, most bearing evidence of ritualistic murder in the form of pikes made of chert or obsidian, one in each forehead, bristling like a horn, perhaps pounded into the skull with a crude hammerstone. Those not featuring pikes had been accessorized with the open-jawed sharp-fanged skulls of rattlesnakes inserted in the place of human eyes, demonic visages configured thus bizarrely with what meaning it was impossible to say.
Hendrickson was transfixed by the sight of those evil-eyed totems, the papery bone of long-ago severed serpent heads issuing with silent hisses from skulls unmasked of faces.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Jane urged, chilled and weary of both body and spirit. “Let’s get to the bottom of this place.”
He didn’t respond, but addressed himself as Anabel had lectured him forty years earlier, his quiet voice reverberant in the cavernous sarcophagus. “Here’s the truth, boy, the one truth. Take or be taken from, use or be used, rule or be ruled, kill or be killed.”
“Booth, do you hear me?”
He said nothing.
“Play Manchurian with me.”