Bentley Little - The Burning

"There's more."

Henry steeled himself.

"This is the part I don't want to get out. You understand me? I wouldn't even be telling you if you hadn't found what you had out there." He took a deep breath. "There's a dead body. A woman. She's not Laurie, too small, but she's someone, and I found her here in the building, in the workroom. I haven't told Pedley or Jill or Raul or anyone. The police are on their way, but I told them to keep things quiet. I don't want to alarm anyone unnecessarily."

"I understand why you don't want the public to know," Henry said. A decade or so back, there'd been a serial killer on the loose near Yosemite, and attendance had fallen precipitously, jeopardizing several park projects. Canyonlands was much more primitive, much more remote and much less popular than Yosemite. "But why not tell us? What's the point?"

"I need time to figure out what to say. I don't want | to get everyone all ... panicked."

"No one's going to panic. Who do you think you're dealing with here?"

"Nevertheless, keep it to yourself until I say so, got | it? I'll decide when the time is right."

From down the road leading into the park came the whine of sirens.

Henry stood, and despite the circumstances it was all he could do not to smile. "Good luck with that," he said.

The body had been beaten into unrecognizability. Along with the other rangers on duty, Henry peeked around the corner of the doorframe into the workroom. He'd imagined the dead woman's body lying naked on one of the long worktables next to the battered tools and artifacts like a corpse ready to be autopsied. So it was a surprise to see it slumped on the floor next to one of the bookcases in faded jeans and a torn bloodstained T-shirt, her head a pulpy red mess dripping on the dark bruised skin of her neck. A forensics team was examining the body, inspecting it with gloved fingers, touching it with metal calipers, photographing and videotaping it from various angles.

Her, he had to remind himself. She was a her, not an it.

The woman did not appear to be a park employee or anyone he recognized, and quick conversations with the other lookiloos confirmed that they were just as much in the dark as he was. Speculation was rife that one of their own had murdered the woman-who else could have gotten into the building at night?-but Henry did not believe it for a second, and he knew from their earlier conversation that the superintendent didn't either. No, this was of a piece with the vandalism out there, and he could easily imagine those naked twins beating the woman to death with the same primitive tools with which they defaced the rock art, then carrying her body back here.

He shifted his legs slightly, pressing them together, trying to keep down his erection.

Despite the day's heat, the night was chill, and, unable to sleep, Henry walked onto the small porch of his cabin, staring out at the desert, half expecting to see two female figures sauntering sexily toward him. He thought about the defaced cliffs. He wanted to believe that the vandalism was random, pointless, but he kept coming back to those twins. Somewhere deep down, he knew the two were connected, and he could not help wondering if the revised artwork was meant as a message, was a way for something to tell him ... tell him ... tell him what? He didn't know, had not even the faintest clue, and as much as anything else, it was the incomprehensibility of it all that gnawed at him, that kept his brain spinning and unable to sleep.

Henry glanced toward the other cabins, saw nothing but darkness. A porch light had been turned on at Laurie Chambers' place-Why? Was it supposed to act as some sort of homing beacon, drawing her back?-but other than that, the cabins appeared deserted. Ironic, he thought, that the one cabin that appeared to be occupied was the dead woman's.

Dead woman's?

She's only missing, he told himself, but he thought about the bloody pulpy face of the body in the workroom and knew in his gut that Laurie had been murdered, too.

A meteor streaked across the starry southern sky, visible for a fraction of a second in his peripheral vision, and he was reminded of those shadows in the box canyon, those brief glimpses of darting black forms that he'd been given and that even in broad daylight had scared the living hell out of him. Were they still there now? he wondered. If so, what were they doing? He had the sudden desire to drive out to the canyon and see for himself. It was stupid, he knew; it was wrong; it violated every rule and every scrap of common sense he had, but he wanted to see the rock art at night, to look for those mysterious dark forms and see if they were once again defacing ancient cliff drawings.

Must be that Indian blood in his veins.

He didn't hesitate, didn't try and talk himself out of it, but immediately went back inside the cabin, got his keys and closed the front door. Before he could change his mind, he was in the Jeep and off.

But of course he was not about to change his mind. The desire to be out there in the canyons, to see for himself what went on at night, was strong within him, a drive, almost a need, and though he didn't understand it, he accepted it.

Henry knew the trails of the park like the back of his cock, and once off the pavement he sped over eroded sandstone and hard-packed dirt as easily as if he'd been navigating city streets on a bright sunny day. There were numerous other cliffs and rocks containing petroglyphs, but instinct led him back to the box canyon, and once again he arrived in a cloud of dust. He braked to a stop and waited until the dust had settled before he got out of the Jeep. He'd brought several flashlights and a high-powered handheld halogen, and he trained the powerful search beam on the cliff directly before him. The light played across the dark rock wall, illuminating the train track going into a tunnel, the collection of sledgehammers, but not showing anything new. He shone the light around the canyon, but it revealed nothing and served only to make the surrounding darkness blacker, so he shut it off, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

The world was silent, and that seemed strange. He could hear the snickering of his shoes on the sand, the ticking of the Jeep's engine cooling down, but that was it. Ordinarily, the cries of nocturnal animals from owls to coyotes sounded in these canyons, but tonight all was still, and Henry found that extremely disconcerting.

He wished he'd brought his shotgun.

But he knew a gun wouldn't do any good against what was out here.

He stood next to the Jeep.

Waited.

Watched.

And then he saw them. Shadows on the canyon floor, two shadows moving in tandem across the moonlit sand, and Henry's heart accelerated from its usual laconic tom-tom to the rat-a-tat-tat of a high-powered assault rifle. They were not hiding as they had been earlier in the day, not confining themselves to the edges of his vision, but sliding directly toward him in full view, defiant, proud, threatening. He realized as they moved closer that they were upright. Not only were the shadows autonomous, unattached to any concrete form or object; they were not, as he had originally thought, projected onto the ground. That was an optical illusion fostered by distance. They were flat and one-dimensional, but they stood like people, feet to the sand, head in the air, and though they glided rather than walked, they were human figures.

He was frightened but excited, and made no effort to escape. The shadows reached him, began slowly and sensuously swirling about his body. He saw silhouetted nipples, outlines of perfect vaginal clefts. He was aroused as he had never been before, and he reached down, half-hypnotized, and unfastened his jeans, pulling down his briefs, freeing himself, letting the pants fall around his ankles. The shadows bent before him, appeared to be kissing his quivering erection, and although there was no sensation of touch and he could feel nothing, the sight was too much for him, and he began spurting, thrusting uselessly into the air as his seed spilled onto the sand below.