Sam shook his head.
“I saw my own death, Sam,” Owen said. “I saw how I would die.”
Powell came out of the store and handed Sarah the envelope. “Here are the test results. The body is only around six years old.”
“Well, we knew it wasn’t a mummy, no matter what the locals wanted to call it,” Sarah said.
“I also got a letter from the people at the university,” Powell told her. “The glyphs on the wall are indecipherable. No one in the language department has a clue as to what they mean or who could have put them there.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Powell.”
Powell turned to see a young man with long hair.
“My name is Sam Crawford,” the man said. “I’m a journalism student at UC Berkeley. I was hoping to talk to you about your dig.”
Powell shook his head. “I’m afraid our story’s not going to turn out to be quite as exciting as you’d hoped.”
“What do you make of the writings you found on the walls of the burial chamber?”
“They’re no language we’ve been able to identify,” Powell answered. “Probably no more real than our ‘mummy.’ And the ‘mummy’… was only a few years old. Which makes our dig a crime scene.”
Sheriff Kerby arrived at the dig a few minutes later. “Okay, so where’s the body?” he asked.
“This way,” Powell said.
At the tent, Powell opened the entrance flap and motioned the sheriff and Sam inside the chamber.
Sam came in just behind Sheriff Kerby, his eyes combing the interior of the tent, mainly a long table where the body had been laid out, but which was now bare.
“It’s gone,” Powell said, thunderstruck. He turned to Kerby. “The body’s gone.”
“Well,” Kerby said sarcastically, “it didn’t just get up and walk away now, did it? I want you and this whole bunch up and out of here by tomorrow morning.”
Something caught Sam’s eye. “Dr. Powell, there’s something over here you ought to see.”
“What?” Kerby asked.
Sam pointed to a distinct pattern on the inside of the tent, a four-fingered handprint, each finger with an extra joint.
Kerby stared at the print for a long moment, then turned to face Powell menacingly. His lips parted, but before he could speak, a patrol car ground to a halt just beyond the entrance of the tent. A woman sat inside, her gaze wild, desperate. “Wendy’s missing,” she cried. “She went into the woods behind the store and…”
“It’s all right, Louise,” Kerby told her. “Kids wander off all the time. We find them.”
“Not in these woods,” Louise said darkly.
“Don’t you worry,” Kerby said reassuringly. “We took care of that problem a long time ago.”
Louise stared at him. “Do you really believe that, Kerby?”
Jesse Keys was not sure how he’d ended up in the Veterans Hospital, but only that the last surge of the drug had taken him far, far away, perhaps to the very rim of life, where things shimmered briefly then went dark.
For the last few days, he’d stayed in the ward, talking to three old vets, listening to their war stories. But it was a nurse named Amelia who’d cheered him, Amelia who’d seemed always to be there when he needed something, and who sat beside him now, the two of them together on the riverbank, eating hot dogs and watching a clown blow bubbles into the warm spring air while kids frolicked around him.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Amelia asked.
“Yeah, those kids look really happy,” Jesse said.
A few feet away, the bubbleman took a long wand and blew a bubble that seemed big enough to capture a small child and lift it up and up into the vast forever.
Jesse watched with horror as the bubbleman turned slowly, his face now clearly visible, a thin, emaciated face, with flinty eyes.
“The camy,” Jesse whispered.
“What?” Amelia asked.
Jesse leaped to his feet. “No!” he cried. He dashed forward, charged toward the bubbleman and knocked him to the ground. “What do you want?” he screamed. “Why do you keep taking me?”
Amelia rushed up behind him and pulled him back. “Stop it, Jesse!” she cried.
The bubbleman looked directly into Jesse’s eyes, and suddenly the features of the carny vanished into another face, tired, burned out, a street performer at the end of his rope.
Jesse released him and stepped away, Amelia at his side, her arm in his.
“You can tell me,” she said as she gently drew him away.
Jesse nodded. “Maybe someday I can explain,” he said.
Sam stood alone in the woods. Several hours before, Powell had handed out whistles and led Sarah and several other people who worked at the dig into the woods to search for Wendy. Since then he’d heard that two of the searchers were now missing. It was as if the woods had swallowed them up.
He looked at the whistle, then at the engulfing woods around him. Even in daylight, the ground was beneath a veil of deep shadow, every sound frightening. He moved forward, determined to continue the search. Gradually the woods thinned around him, and he finally emerged into a meadow where waist-high grass rippled in the wind. He looked up. The sky was still faintly blue, but the light was fading. There was no choice but to return to the camp.
It was deserted when he reached it, all the others still moving deeper into the woods or making their way back.
First he walked to the tent where the body had been placed, examined the bare table, then the floor beneath, grassy, and covered with leaves. Nothing had been touched, not any other artifact from the dig, only the body. And nothing had been left behind, no bit of metal like the one his father had taken from the safe. Only the muddy print of a four-fingered hand.
For a time he studied the print, the extra joint of each finger. It was not a human hand, of course, and the more the studied it, the more he began to wonder if all the crackpot theories, all the weird sightings, all the fantastic tales were true.
He strode out of the tent and over to the earthen chamber where the body had been found. The strange markings he’d seen on the piece of metal his father had kept for so many years were clearly visible on the wall of the chamber. Powell had told him that they were not part of any human language. Nor could they be, Sam thought now. They weren’t letters, as far as he could tell, nor numbers, nor drawings of any kind. Perhaps they were part of a funeral rite, but if so, it was not a human being who’d been buried here.
Suddenly he heard a rustling from the surrounding woods. He glanced about, looking for movement within the shadowy forest. His fear spiked, and he felt its edge like a finger down his spine. He imagined that finger with four joints, amazed at how quickly he’d absorbed his father’s dread, the sense that they were… out there… waiting… watching… that no one was alone.
The rustling sounded again.
Sam wheeled around and thought he saw a shadow pass somewhere deep in the woods. He peered out into the tangled green where a figure suddenly staggered out of the shadows: Sarah, caked with mud, in tatters, her eyes staring wildly, her mouth wide open in a scream.
Chapter Two
Jesse felt Amelia’s arm in his and it seemed to him that with each touch, some part of him gave way. To the right, the Great Lake swept northward and tumbled over the horizon.
“What happened?” she asked. “In the war, I mean.” She stopped and looked him dead in the eye. “I heard you say to one of the other men that you thought you couldn’t get hurt.”