Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries Read Online Free Page B

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.
    His feet tangled as he turned to run, and the sudden intense pain in his right knee made him cry out. His leg collapsed under him. He hit the ground, hard, falling into the middle of the sand painting. Scrambling, he tried to get up, his knee burning in agony. His fingers clawed frantically through the sand, ruining the exquisitely detailed image.
    A shadow blocked the moon. Dale looked up and could see the colors of the sacred mask: red, blue, and yellow. They encircled the gaping black pits of the eyeholes.
    “Come,” the hollow voice hissed, “let us go talk to the dead.”
     
     
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