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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

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BOOK: The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries
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Santa Fe, New Mexico, October
“M
Y GOD, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.”
William “Dusty” Stewart lifted his magnifying lens and studied the intricacies of the artifact. A master stoneworker had carved the image of a serpent coiled inside a broken eggshell into this flawless piece of anthracite, or jet. It stared up at Dusty with one glistening red coral eye.
Dusty backed the lens away and caught his own reflection in the glass. His freshly washed blond hair and beard shone, but his blue eyes had a worried gleam. A woman he’d rather forget had once told him he’d be drop-dead good-looking if it weren’t for the weathered look of his tanned skin. At the age of thirty-seven, lines already etched his forehead and cut crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. He brushed at the dirt that had fallen from the artifact onto his holey gray T-shirt and faded blue jeans, but it didn’t improve his appearance any.
Dusty turned the artifact in his left hand. He had to draw it perfectly for the museum records. As he dipped his crow quill into the ink bottle, a gust of wind rattled the cottonwoods and whistled up the canyon from Santa Fe. The tin walls of his trailer shivered.
That old Keres medicine woman, Hail Walking Hawk, wanted this artifact buried forever. She said it was a witch’s amulet.
The thought stuck in Dusty’s mind as he crosshatched the serpent’s outline on the paper, then carefully sketched it to represent the original. He remembered the day he’d unearthed
el basilisco
, also called a “basilisk.” It had been resting on a dead woman’s sternum. Elder Hail Walking Hawk, and her young niece, Magpie, had been horrified and ordered it reburied immediately. Dusty, naturally, had collected it, as he would have any other artifact from the 10K3 site in Chaco Canyon.
In the end, scientific responsibility had won out over his respect
for Native religious traditions, and he’d bagged the artifact, catalogued it, and now recorded it for the final report that would be turned in to the Park Service, the NOAA, and the University of New Mexico, where the artifacts and skeletal material would be curated.
Dusty turned the
basilisco
in his hand and watched the polished black artifact flash in the light. His greatest fear was that all such priceless bits of the past would be lost to human greed and ignorance, and with them any chance he had of understanding who the prehistoric peoples were and what had happened to them. He truly believed that modern people had a great deal to learn from the past. Especially from the Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloans.
During the thirteenth century, the Four Corners region had seen a mass exodus. The Anasazi had abandoned their magnificent multistoried towns and fled to other larger pueblos. No one knew why exactly, but Dusty had excavated enough burned pueblos and skulls with club wounds to put warfare at the top of his list. While he didn’t have any solid proof, he suspected it was the nastiest kind of war: holy war. The earliest images of the katchinas dated to the 1200s. The word was spelled many different ways: kachina, thlatsina, ka’atsina. They were often called “ancestor spirits,” but the katchinas were a great deal more than that. The invisible forces of the universe manifested themselves in the spirits of the clouds, lightning, animals, trees, the Hero Twins, and the dead. The essence of the universe, the breath of life—that was katchina.
Dusty set the
basilisco
on the table. He had finished everything else, even the bibliography, which he really hated, before turning to documenting the
basilisco.
“A serpent born of a cock’s egg.” Incarnate evil, according to the Native peoples of the Southwest.
The 10K3 site had been steeped in witchery, murder, and evil. At least eleven women had been killed and had rocks dropped over their heads to trap their souls in the earth for eternity. Despite the seven hundred and fifty years that had separated Dusty from the murderer, he’d felt the evil, too. It had stalked their camp every night. He still felt it when he held the
basilisco.
Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which had wanted to place a microwave tower there, had given up on the project and relocated to the rim rock above the canyon, outside the national monument boundaries.
Dusty studied his drawing and made one final inspection of the
basilisco
to make sure he’d gotten it right. Its baleful red eye gleamed.
“Yeah, I see you glaring at me.”
Dusty set his quill into the ink bottle, unscrewed the top on a bottle of liquid paper, and smeared a white streak down the smooth curve of the
basilisco.
He held it above the heat of the lamp for a few seconds to dry it, then retrieved his quill and inscribed the catalogue number that would allow other researchers to find it in the museum collections. In a final act of superiority, he unscrewed the cap on a bottle of clear nail polish and sealed the number.
“Science triumphs over evil again.” Dusty dropped the polished stone into its Ziploc bag, filled out a catalogue card, and tucked it into the sack with the other 10K3 artifacts. He’d deliver them to UNM tomorrow.
The wind rocked his trailer, and the windows trembled on the worn-out screws that opened and closed them. A car whooshed by on the road outside.
The night had suddenly turned darker, more lonely.
Dusty slipped the drawing into the draft report manuscript, closed the ink bottle, and rose from the threadbare brown couch. As he stepped into the kitchen, the linoleum floor sagged under his weight. He turned on the tap and cleaned the crow quill before dropping it in his drawer. For years he had illustrated archaeological reports, doing pen-and-ink drawings of the artifacts that he and Dr. Dale Emerson Robertson, his father for all practical purposes, recovered from the field.
A crawling sensation ran up the nape of his neck. He glanced at the brown paper sack bulging with potsherds, stone tools, and bone artifacts. He could feel the
basilisco
watching him, as if the layers of plastic and brown paper weren’t there.
“I’m losing my mind,” Dusty whispered to himself. He grabbed the sack and stepped out into the cool night.
The pinyons and junipers around the trailer roared as another gust of wind came up the canyon. The fragrant scent of pine needles filled the air.
Dusty felt his way along the railing, wishing he’d replaced the burned-out sixty-watt bulb that lit the small plywood deck. When he reached the rickety two-by-four steps, he trotted down them and opened the passenger door on his Bronco. He set the artifact bag on
the passenger seat floor amidst the empty soda, juice, and beer bottles. Then he slammed the door hard and looked around at the night.
A white Range Rover slipped past the gaps in the trees. He could see the yellow gleam of lights on the million-dollar houses that hulked on either side of his three point two-five acres.
They hated him and his 1956 turquoise-and-white aluminum trailer. But this was the one thing his father, Samuel Stewart, had left him. Back in 1957, when Sam had bought the place, Canyon Road was just that, a winding road climbing out of the city of Santa Fe. That was before the boom, before the godzillionaires came to buy Navajo rugs, Maria-style pottery from San Idelfonso, and to build palatial adobes with sparkling Saltillo tile floors, thick viga pine logs, and latilla pine pole ceilings.
Stars twinkled in the ebony sky high above him. His father had been a great archaeologist, but he’d committed suicide when Dusty was twelve. Dusty had had over twenty-five years to get over it—and hadn’t. Strange, that. You’d think the pain and shock would dim, but somewhere deep inside him, he still felt half-dead and half-alive, like a lonely ghost condemned to walk the earth forever. Dusty had immersed himself in archaeology for a number of reasons, but the most important one was that his boyhood mind had truly believed if he could understand why his father had been so obsessed with studying the dead, maybe he could understand why his father had wanted to join them. It hadn’t worked out that way, though. Dusty still did not understand what had driven his father to that final act of desperation.
He rubbed his arms. He swore he could hear the
basilisco
laughing in a hoarse inhuman voice.
“It’s the goddamned wind rattling the trees, you idiot.”
Dusty glowered at the passenger side of the Bronco, then walked back up the stairs and into his trailer.
He looked askance at his refrigerator for several seconds before saying, “What the hell.”
He crossed to the refrigerator, pulled out an egg, and rubbed it over his hands, his arms, around his chest, over his genitals, and down the insides of his thighs. In little more than a minute, he had stroked it along every part of his body.
It was an old ritual, still used in the Southwest. Hail Walking Hawk had cleansed him like this over a year and a half ago. She’d said
that the egg absorbed the evil that lived inside a human body. Once the egg was destroyed, the evil was gone.
He opened his squeaky trailer door and used his best pitcher’s windup to splatter the egg in his rusty barbecue pit.
“I don’t believe any of this shit, of course,” he said aloud as he grabbed the Coleman can and dumped white gas over the barbecue pit. He tossed a lit match on top and leaped backward as flames roared to the night sky.
Dusty fumbled around the step for his hatchet, then walked to the gnarled pinyon across the drive. He whacked off one of the lower branches, and the pungent odor of the sap filled the night.
“Forgive me, grandfather,” he said as he gently petted the bark, “but I need this branch.”
He carried it back, dropped it onto the flames, and watched the white smoke billow up. The Puebloan tribes believed that smoke was the cousin of the Cloud People. Not only would it drive out any evil that might have secreted itself in his flesh, it would carry his prayers to the gods.
“Ah, if the guys at the university could only see me now.”
He pulled off his gray T-shirt and blue jeans and tossed them into a pile, then he cupped the smoke with his hands and pulled it over his naked body. As he rubbed it into his goosepimpled flesh, Maureen Cole’s image formed in his mind, her perfect oval face framed by long black hair, her black eyes glinting. Over the years, he’d developed a love-hate relationship with the world-renowned Canadian physical anthropologist. Being male, he couldn’t help but respond to a beautiful woman, and they shared a great deal: they’d both been raised with the Native peoples, she with the Seneca, and Dusty with the Hopi, Zuni, and Arapaho. They’d both been steeped in the ancient traditions. The difference was, he believed the teachings; she didn’t. Maureen Cole had gone into the “hard” science of physical anthropology. Where Dusty would bend over backward to accommodate someone else’s beliefs, Maureen discarded them out of hand as groundless superstitions. They’d frequently stood toe-to-toe shouting at each other over how to deal with Native religious fundamentalism.
He hadn’t seen her since the 10K3 project, but she stared at him from his memory this instant, silently chastising him for behaving like a fool.
He rubbed the smoke over his entire body, ruffled his blond hair in it, and picked up his clothes. As he tossed them onto the barbecue, he glanced at the passenger side of his Bronco where the
basilisco
rested and called, “Thought you could get me, eh? Take that, you little bastard!”
It took another cup of Coleman fuel to completely incinerate his clothing, then he ran for the trailer.
Maybe Hail Walking Hawk had been right. He should have left the
basilisco
buried in the desert.
Closing the flimsy door behind him, he shivered and found clean clothes.
He felt better. But not much.
He pulled a cold bottle of Guinness from the fridge to help finish the healing process. Popping the top, he flopped onto his battered old couch and stared at the peeling wooden walls. They didn’t make wood like that anymore. Some people would say “hallelujah,” but he thought it gave the trailer character.
He had just reached for the TV remote when the phone rang. He picked it up. “Hello, but I’m not buying anything tonight, got it?”
“I take it you’ve had too many telemarketers lately,”
the gruff old voice said.
“Well, good, William. How’s the 10K3 report coming along?”
“Hi, Dale. As of fifteen minutes ago, it’s finished. At least my draft is. You want me to drop it by tomorrow after I leave the artifacts at the university?”
“Yes, that will be fine.”
Dale Emerson Robertson cleared his throat. Dale was the grand old man of southwestern archaeology. He’d dug some of the most important sites in the world. He was also Dusty’s best friend and adopted father.
“Your timing couldn’t be better.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“I just got off the phone with some real estate developers.”
Dusty winced. “Let me guess. The developers bulldozed a site to avoid the ‘archaeology problems’ and want to know if the state can still come after them?”
“Actually, no. It seems they bought land specifically because of the archaeology. They want us to come and see if they have anything ‘really spiffy.’ I believe that was the term they used.”
BOOK: The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries
2.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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