Aaron Elkins - The Dark Place

His throat tightened and hot tears sprang unexpectedly to his eyes. He took his hand from her breast to enwrap her more fully in his arms and bent his head forward so his lips were against the downy, sleep-fragrant nape of her neck. "I love you," he whispered tentatively to the soft flesh.

That wasn’t bad at all. No queasy fluttering in his chest, no deeper, twisting knot of guilt. It felt good, in fact, to say it after all this time. Premature, of course-he’d just met her-but good.

He tried it out again. "I love you," he murmured, his mouth still against her. "I think," he added sensibly, then snuggled closer to her warmth and fell asleep.

With a twig, Gideon prodded at the powdery gray charcoal in the circular fire pit and watched it emit a few dusty wisps.

"Well, something was certainly here not too long ago." He bit his lip. "Someone. Not for at least a day or two, but since the last rain. Otherwise the charcoal would be matted down."

"A very woodsmanlike observation," Julie said.

Gideon gestured at the two-foot slabs of bark that stood on end around the pit, forming a three-quarter circle. "What do you make of these?"

"Heat reflectors?"

"Could be. Could also be a screen to hide the glow. Notice how the opening faces the back of the ledge, away from the valley. From below, you’d never know there was a fire going up here."

"From below, you’d never know there was anything up here."

She was right. From their camp they had raked this mountainside with binoculars but had been unable to find the ledge. Yet from here there was a clear, broad view over Pyrites Canyon. The gravel bar on which they’d camped was in plain sight almost directly below, on the other side of the stream. The orange backpacks they’d left behind were clearly visible-just as visible, Gideon thought, as they themselves would have been in last night’s pellucid moonlight.

The ledge was obviously deserted and apparently abandoned, but Gideon was jumpy and vaguely apprehensive. Even in the daylight, with birds singing vigorously, he had continued to feel under scrutiny. Julie did, too. He could see it in the way her eyes darted at little snaps and creaks from the woods.

The ledge, about seventy feet long and thirty feet wide, was screened and camouflaged by trees that grew on it and on the slope beneath. Above, a forested, nearly vertical bluff rose two hundred feet. Below, the barely discernible path that had led them to the ledge, as it had led the Zanders, dropped steeply toward the river far below.

Part of his uneasiness, Gideon knew, stemmed from the weather. The temperature had dropped, and there was a high, pearly overcast, as heavy and solid as a stone roof. Underneath that, somber, iron-gray clouds were moving in from the west to pile and swirl against the mountains. Yet there was no wind. The air seemed viscous and torpid, dank and raw. Julie said the rainy season was on the way.

As they approached the eastern end of the ledge, Julie wrinkled her nose and frowned.

"Yes, I smell it too," Gideon said. "And I know the stories. Bigfoot lairs are always supposed to be pervaded by an awful stink. Or is that the Abominable Snowman?"

"No, that’s Bigfoot; a pungent, unidentifiable stench. That’s what made the Zanders think of Bigfoot."

"It’s pungent, all right, but I wouldn’t call it unidentifiable. It smells like a latrine that’s been stopped up for a week."

That was very much what it was: a circular depression at the very end of the ledge that had obviously seen a lot of use as a toilet pit.

"Either they had an army up here for a few nights," Gideon said, "or this ledge has been inhabited for a long time."

"Can we move back upwind, please?" Julie asked.

When they were a few feet away she spoke, frowning. "It’s awful that anyone would live this way: an open toilet-"

He looked at her in surprise. "Everyone lived like this until a couple of hundred years ago. There are plenty of people who still do. The toilet’s on the very end of the ledge, so the wind would almost always carry the stench away. Really, it’s better than indiscriminately fouling the forest or the river. And they’ve been scooping earth over the feces so they’d degrade quickly."

"Yes, but this isn’t a hundred years ago, and there aren’t any primitive people living in the rain forest." She shook her head. "That is, there aren’t supposed to be."

Gideon raised his eyebrows, "There wasn’t supposed to be anyone living in the rain forest."

"That’s right," she said, "but somebody obviously lives here. What’s this?"

They had come upon a smaller fire ring only about twenty feet from the first, also shielded with slabs of bark toward the open side of the ledge. Gideon knelt to poke at the cold charcoal.

" Two fire pits?" Julie said. "What would be the point of that? Two separate groups?"

"I don’t think so. See how there’s a layer of sand under the charcoal?" He scrabbled in the pit with a twig. "And then another layer of charcoal? I bet there’s another layer under that, of"-he dug some more-"of sand. See?" He sat back on his heels. "Know what this is?"

She shook her head. "Some kind of kiln? For firing pots? Baking bread?"

"You’re close. It’s a kiln, all right, but it’s for making stone tools. Right out of the Lower Paleolithic."

"You can make stone tools in a kiln?"

He laughed. "No, but you can heat-treat the rocks before you make them. There are certain kinds of rocks-coarse-textured ones like jasper-that need heat-treating before you can do a good job of flaking them. It’s very delicate. Glassier stones like obsidian and agate don’t need it."

"So you’re telling me somebody has been making stone tools here in 1982?"

"I sure am. Look."

She got down on her knees to watch him turn over the earth just outside the rim of the pit. "The ground’s full of little flakes of rock," she said.

"Yes, the pieces that get chipped away when you’re making a stone implement."

"But," Julie said, frowning, "if they can make stone tools why make those horrible bone spears? Aren’t stone points better?"

"Infinitely better, if you’re skilled at making them. But making stone points is different from making stone hammers, say. It requires some difficult techniques-percussion chipping, then striking off the core blades, then pressure-flaking. It’s not easy. Bone points, on the other hand, you can more or less make by carving and abrading; no specialized knowledge necessary."

She sat back on her haunches, her arms around her knees. Her voice was dreamy. "You’re saying, then, that whoever lived here is able to make crude stone tools but not fine ones. What would that make them equivalent to-Mesolithic people?"

"I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s right."

"And the Mesolithic ended in Europe, what, fifty thousand years ago?"

"Thirty-five thousand, say."

"All right, thirty-five thousand. Thirty-five thousand years! Gideon, you’re not saying these Indians, if that’s what they are, have been lost here for thirty-five thousand years?"

"No, of course not. Here in the New World the Indians had Mesolithic technologies, so to speak, until the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century. And in a lot of tribes, practically up to the twentieth century. No, what I’m suggesting is that some Indian group came here maybe a hundred years ago and has been here ever since." He shook his head suddenly. "It is on the fantastic side, isn’t it?"

"It really is. Look, why does it have to be an Indian group? Why couldn’t it be a bunch of hermits, or hippies maybe, who want to live a simple, more primitive life?"

He got up and brushed himself off, and brushed Julie off as well. "No. How would they know about heat-treating rocks?"