Chapter Four

“There are many legends about this land,” Red Elk said. He nodded at Greeley. “Professor Nutless here could no doubt recite a few of them himself.”

Greeley’s smug grin faded.

“Most of them,” Red Elk went on, “are too far-fetched to be taken seriously.”

Clevenger said, “My concept of far-fetched has altered dramatically in the past couple hours.”

“Mine too,” Red Elk agreed. “I’d like to say I believed what I heard about the Children, that when my father told me the tale one night before bed, I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. But I didn’t.”

“But the propane,” Greeley said, “the flashlights—”

“Dad’s idea,” Red Elk said. “He was more imaginative than I am. He was a real dreamer. Course, he dreamed the cigarettes wouldn’t give him lung cancer, but there he was on life support at the ripe old age of fifty-one.”

Red Elk shook his head. “I didn’t believe in the Children any more than I believed in Santa Claus, but Dad did, and I felt like if I sold the house, it’d be like him dying a second time. So, I refreshed the food stores every now and then, checked the guns to make sure they still fired—”

“You checked them recently?” Colleen asked.

“How recent’s recent?” Red Elk said. He shook his head. “I can’t provide any guarantees.”

“You spoke of legends,” Clevenger prompted.

“The Children were one, of course. They were tied up with the Wendigo—”

“Wendigo?” Jesse asked.

“A common myth amongst North American tribes,” Greeley said, his tone suddenly pedantic. Very much how he sounded in front of his students, Jesse assumed. “The gist of the legend holds that the creature—fire-footed and winged in Canada; a furry biped in the American Northwest—can transform a human being into a cannibal with a single touch. Pioneers convicted of cannibalism were said to have been gripped by the Wendigo Psychosis.”

“What he says is true enough,” Red Elk murmured. “To me it always sounded like a way of justifying what needed no justification. I mean, if you were gonna starve, wouldn’t you eat your buddy?”

Jesse made a mental note to give Red Elk a wide berth if the provisions ran out.

“At any rate, what always sounded like hokum to me was the notion of a giant beast that could make normal people into monsters just by touching them.”

Emma turned to Jesse, her brown eyes huge with dread. He thought of the monolithic figure they had seen striding through the rain. He tried to reassure her with a smile, but she only wandered on, her eyes fixed in that doomed, starey look.

“Did your grandpa dig this tunnel?” Colleen asked.

Red Elk chuckled. “You kiddin’? The cave was here already. He just connected it to the crawlspace.”

“How did he know the caves were here?”

Red Elk slowed, his breathing heavy in the broadening cavern. It was now possible to walk in pairs, which they’d formed unthinkingly: Jesse beside Emma, ahead of them Greeley and Ruth, then Colleen and Debbie. Red Elk and Clevenger were in the lead. The green knapsack hung low on the professor’s thin shoulders even after Red Elk had removed the Ruger ammunition and pocketed it. Jesse adjusted the red gym bag slung over his own shoulders and wished Red Elk had relieved him of the dynamite. It would be just Jesse’s luck to survive the massacre at the campground only to be blown up down here because of an errant spark.

Red Elk nodded bleakly at Colleen. “If I do have a regret, it’s not believing what my dad said about the caves. Or the creatures that dwelt inside them. I guess my grandpa scoffed at the notion too until he saw his own dad—my great-grandfather—murdered by one of those sons of bitches.”

Red Elk was silent a minute, the chuff of their breathing and the sandy rasping of their shoes the only sounds in the tunnel. Jesse was grateful for the mining helmet, but he didn’t care for the way the light beaming out of it bobbed and twisted on the scaly walls. Didn’t care for it at all.

“You gonna tell us the story,” Colleen asked, “or do we have to imagine it for ourselves?”

Red Elk eyed Colleen in the near-darkness. “You got a mouth on you, don’t you?”

Colleen beamed at him.

“I like it,” Red Elk said. Debbie gave Colleen a cool look. If Red Elk noticed that, he didn’t say. “My grandpa worked on a farm above the bluffs. The farmland stretches from there all the way to the new Indian Trails Subdivision, but that’s neither here nor there. What does matter is that he and his dad were working the field one day when they came to a good-sized rock.

“If it wasn’t a boulder, it was in the same league.” Red Elk shook his head. “Had no business trying to move the damned thing—the farmer my relatives worked for should’ve done the job himself or at least provided enough men to make the work bearable—but that didn’t deter my great-grandpa. He told my grandfather, who was just a kid at the time, ‘They don’t pay us to just till the good ground.’ So they chained the big rock and looped the other end of the chain over the furrow. The ox they were using strained and snorted and had gotten the big rock halfway up when my great-grandpa decided he’d help matters along by getting down in the depression the rock had made to tip it over.”

Red Elk hocked, spat on the wall. “Well, my great-grandaddy never considered that rock might’ve been placed there on purpose.”

“Like a cap?” Emma asked.

Red Elk nodded. “Bottled up what was under there. And what was under there was a big hole. My grandpa said his dad was there one instant and was gone the next, and the ox, maybe hearing something it didn’t like, or maybe even scenting something, went wild and began bucking against the yoke. The next thing my grandpa knew, the chain slipped off the furrow. The ox took off, and the big rock thumped down, trapping his daddy inside the hole.”

“Buried,” Jesse said.

“Buried is right. My grandpa was young, probably only nine or ten, but he was savvy. He stood there gaping a few seconds before realizing that without the ox he didn’t have a hope in hell of getting his daddy out of that hole. So he bolted after the dumb animal, which wasn’t moving too fast anyway, old and encumbered as it was by that heavy plow, and before too long he caught up to it and led it back.

“Somehow he got the chains under the rock again. While he was doing this, he was shouting at the ground to see if he could hear his daddy under there. When he calmed down enough to listen, he found he could hear my great-grandpa, but the voice was muffled and difficult to make out.

“‘You okay, Papa?’ was what he kept callin’.

“‘Move this goddamned rock!’ was what his daddy kept replyin’.”

Red Elk slowed, his flashlight doing slow sweeps over the floor. “Then my grandpa heard the other sounds.”

A crawling dread began to ooze its way down Jesse’s back, making him step closer to Emma, who didn’t seem to notice.

“The noises sounded like nothing my grandpa’d ever heard before. But they scared him. His dad’s voice changed too, a new kind of fright creeping into it. He was shouting for my grandpa to hurry, dammit, hurry, and my grandpa got up and began shoving the ox from behind to get it moving. When that didn’t work, he started in beating on the old animal, punching its dusty hide and kicking its shanks to spur it into action. Well, that must’ve worked because the beast started grinding forward, and the rock began tilting up. My great-grandfather’s hands shot out of that hole right away, and his voice, unleashed from that hellish cage, was womanish with fright. My grandpa wanted to give off pushing the animal, but he figured if he did that, the rock would smash down again and cut his daddy in half. So he kept at it, beating that old ox like a rug to get it to move.

“The rock had tilted just enough for my great-grandpa to wriggle his head and shoulders up onto the ground. He was howling with terror and what sounded to my grandpa like physical pain. My grandpa gave the animal one final kick and lurched over to where his dad was struggling his way out of the hole, and the odd thing was that the rock was more than high enough for my great-grandpa to slide through. In fact, the side of the rock had risen to an almost perpendicular angle with the ground. But despite this, my great-grandpa was still hanging on to the lip of the hole for dear life. And he was screaming louder than ever.”

Red Elk sighed. “That gave my grandpa the idea that the sinkhole was much wider than he’d thought and that his daddy’s feet were dangling over thin air. He grasped handfuls of his daddy’s shirt and reared back as hard as he could, but that didn’t help. His daddy was actually sliding back down toward the darkness.”

“‘Use your legs’, my grandpa remembered saying.

“‘I can’t feel my legs,’ was his daddy’s response.

“My grandpa couldn’t understand this, so he reached down to get a better hold on his daddy, but when his face got low enough, he saw something that changed his life. My life too, I guess you could say.”

“One of them,” Emma said.

Red Elk nodded. “One of the Children. Its green eyes blazed at my grandpa from the shadows of that hole. Its face was smeared with blood. It had hold of my great-grandpa’s legs. It was chewing on one of his ankles.

“The ox must’ve been worn out, what with having lifted that huge rock twice and all the chasing and beating it’d been through. The weight of the rock dragged it back, the door to the hole closing and my grandpa about to be crushed under it. Grandpa was bent on not leaving his daddy though, so he held on as long as he could. Held on until the white monster in the hole dragged his father screaming into the darkness. Grandpa was just able to roll out of the way before the rock crashed down on him.

“No one believed his story, of course, and who could blame them? Little Indian boy talks about a monster eating his daddy? They hardly even investigated it.

“But my grandpa did. He explored the tunnels for years but never found his daddy. Never found the monster, either. Eventually, he decided to build the house we just blew up. Where one of the tunnels ended. That way he could stay close to the mystery and maybe get some revenge.”