Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

It was a giant cavern at least a hundred feet across. An astonishing but not unexpected sight met his view. The only moving things in the cavern were his pale eyes and the beam of his flashlight, passing back and forth over the bizarre spectacle that lay before him.

Thirty dead horses, in full Indian battle dress, were arranged in a kneeling position in a ring at the center of the cavern. They had shriveled and mummified in the air of the cave: their bones stuck out of their hides, their dried lips were drawn back from their yellow teeth. Each was decorated in the Southern Cheyenne style, with streaks of brilliant red ochre on their faces, white and red handprints along their necks and withers, and eagle feathers tied into their manes and tails. Some carried beaded, high-cantled Cheyenne rawhide saddles on their backs; others had a blanket merely, or nothing at all. Most had been sacrificed by a massive blow to the head with a studded club, leaving a neat hole punched directly between each pair of eyes.

Arranged in a second circle, inside the first, were thirty Cheyenne braves.

The Ghost Warriors.

They had laid themselves out like the spokes of a wheel—the sacred wheel of the sun—each one touching his dead horse with his left hand, weapon in his right. They were all there: those who were killed in the raid as well as those who had survived. These latter had been sacrificed like the horses: a single blow to the forehead with a spiked club. The last one to die—the one who had sacrificed the rest—lay on his back, one mummified hand still clutching the stone knife that stuck from his heart. The knife was identical to the broken knife found with Chauncy’s body. And each brave had a quiver of arrows exactly like the arrows found near the body of Sheila Swegg.

They had been here, bearing witness beneath the earth of Medicine Creek, since the evening of August 14, 1865. Those warriors who survived the raid had sacrificed themselves and their horses here, in the darkness of the cave, choosing to die with dignity on their own land. Never would the white men herd them off to a reservation. Never would they be forced to sign a treaty, board railroad cars, send their children to distant schools to be beaten for speaking their own language, to be robbed of their dignity and culture.

These Ghost Warriors had seen the inexorable roll of the white men across their land. They knew what the future looked like.

Here, in this great cavern, was where they had hid in ambush. From here they had issued forth during the dust storm, as if out of nowhere, to wreak havoc and destruction on the Forty-Fives. And here was where they had returned to seek eternal peace and honor.

In both his oral recollections, and at far greater detail in his private journal, Brushy Jim’s great-grandfather had said the Ghost Warriors seemed to rise up out of the ground. He had been exactly right. And—though in 1865 the mounds would have been covered in dense brush—Harry Beaumont, in the moments before his death, must have realized where the warriors came from. He had cursed the ground for a very specific reason.

Pendergast paused only long enough to examine his map. Then he hurried past the silent tableau toward the dark tunnel that led deeper into the cave system.

There was very little time left—if there was any time at all.

Fifty-Eight

H azen followed Lefty and the dogs as they proceeded along the wooden walkway of Kraus’s Kaverns. Unlike the last pair, these beasts were hot on the trail. They seemed a little too eager: pulling on their leashes, straining forward, issuing growls from deep within their chests. Lefty barely had them under control, being jerked this way and that as he whined and cajoled. They were big dogs, ugly as shit, with enormous puckered assholes and giant balls that hung low like a bull’s. Presa canarios, dogs bred to kill dogs. Or anything else on two or four legs, for that matter. Hazen wouldn’t want to face them, not even with a brace of Winchesters loaded with double-ought buck. He noticed that the troopers seemed to be hanging back, too. If he had any sense, McFelty would fall to his knees and pray for mercy the moment these ugly mutts turned the corner.

“Sturm! Drang!” Lefty shouted.

“What kind of dog names are those?” Hazen asked.

“No idea. The breeder names them.”

“Well, slow ’em down, Lefty. This isn’t the Indy 500.”

“Sturm! Drang! Easy now!”

The dogs paid only the scantest of attention.

“Lefty—”

“I’m taking them as slowly as I can,” Weeks answered, his voice pitched high. “I’m not exactly dealing with a couple of Pomeranians here, in case you didn’t notice.”

With the overhead lights off, the night-vision goggles illuminated the cave in a flat red wash. Hazen had never worn the goggles before and he didn’t like the way they reduced the world to a monochromatic, creepy landscape. It was like watching an old TV. The wooden boardwalk ahead swam in the crimson light, like the pathway to hell.

They passed by the Krystal Kathedral, the Giant’s Library, the Krystal Chimes. Hazen hadn’t been in the cave since he was a kid on a school outing, but they used to come every year and he was surprised how much he remembered of it. Winifred had always done the tour. She hadn’t been such a bad-looking woman back then. He remembered his friend Tony making vulgar gestures behind her back as she hammered out some tune on the stalactites. She’d turned into a queer old hag, though.

They reached the far end of the tourist loop, and Lefty, with a great deal of trouble, reined in the dogs. Hazen stopped well short, keeping a good ten feet between himself and the animals. The dogs were looking intently into the darkness past the Infinity Pool, growling, their tongues like big red diapers hanging out of their mouths. Dripping saliva showed red in the goggles, like blood.

Hazen waited for the troopers to assemble behind him, then he spoke in a low tone.

“I’ve never been beyond this point. From now on, silence. And Lefty, do you think you can get the dogs to tone it down?”

“No, I can’t, okay? Growling’s instinctual for them.”

Hazen shook his head and signaled Lefty forward. He followed with Raskovich; Cole and Brast came next; Larssen brought up the rear.

They splashed through the pool, climbed down the far end, and then followed Lefty along a tunnel that narrowed, then rose again and took a sharp turn to the right. On the far side of the bend was a second iron door.

It was ajar, the iron padlock lying nearby on the ground.

Hazen gave them a thumbs-up, signaled Lefty on.

The dogs were growling even more insistently now, deep throaty snarls that prickled the hair on the back of Hazen’s neck. There would be no taking McFelty by complete surprise, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. The growling was enough to inspire even Rambo to throw down his weapons.

On the far side of the door, the tunnel widened into a cavern. The dogs snuffled ahead eagerly, dragging Lefty along. Hazen gestured for the group behind him to wait. Then he and Raskovich fanned out to the left and right, shotguns at the ready, scanning the room in infrared.

Bingo: the bootleggers’ nest. Hazen panned his goggles slowly across the large space. An old table; candle stubs; battered lanterns; broken crockery and bottles. At the far end, the still itself rose out of the reddish murk, a cauldron big enough to boil a horse. So big that it must’ve been brought into the cave in pieces and soldered in place—no wonder it never left.

When Hazen had satisfied himself that the room was empty, he waved the rest forward and approached the still. The smell of smoke still hung faintly in the air, mixed with other, less pleasant odors. He leaned over the cauldron and looked inside. There was something in the bottom, small and vague in the night-vision goggles.