one had been filled as well. Matt stood looking at them as the sun went down and thought about the incredible amount of human suffering they represented.
Ronnie came up beside him. 'Pretty impressive, isn't it?'
'In a gruesome sort of way, I suppose.'
'Well, yes, there's that to consider, of course. I'm not an expert in forensic archeology, but even I can tell that these people were killed, hacked apart, and eaten, probably raw. The ends of the bones where they were dismembered don't show any signs of charring, as they would if they'd been cooked.'
Matt started to take a deep breath, then stopped abruptly because of what he might smell. Then he realized that the stench of death was long gone from this place. It just smelled of dust.
'How many people are we talking about?' he asked.
'Again, I'm not an expert in that field, but I would guess somewhere between two and three dozen. And it's likely we'll find even more as we continue to dig. There's no sign of the pile ending anytime soon.'
'Dozens and dozens of people,' Matt murmured. 'Murdered and eaten.'
'I know, it's terrible. You're probably asking yourself what could cause such an atrocity.'
He looked over at her.
'Actually, it ties in with something we've come to believe about the Anasazi and why they abandoned these pueblos. There's evidence to suggest that the region was hit with a whole string of disastrous droughts and crop failures. In an area that doesn't get much rain to start with, the margin for error in such things as growing corn is very small. And when there's a severe drought, the animal population is always affected, too, and becomes smaller. So if both hunting and raising crops didn't produce enough food to feed the people who lived here . . .'
'They started eating each other,' Matt said.
'Yes, and then of course the ones who did survive probably wouldn't want to stay in those places that reminded them of what they'd done. So they moved away and the result is this.'
Ronnie waved her hand to indicate the ruins around them.
Matt shook his head as he slipped his hands in the hip pockets of his jeans. 'No offense, but I don't know if I completely buy that explanation,' he said. 'For this many people to have died so violently, it seems more like a bunch of them went crazy. Like an orgy of killing. It wouldn't have gone on and on like a gradual thing.'
'Mass hysteria?' Ronnie asked with a frown. 'That's more likely to manifest itself in group suicides, like in Jonestown or that comet cult in California. Not in mass murder. Anyway, if you don't mind my saying so, Matt . . . it sounds almost like you're speaking from personal experience.'
He shook his head. 'I just know what I've read in the papers and seen on TV,' he lied. He had seen how evil could spread like wildfire through a group of people, though he wasn't sure he had encountered it yet on this scale.
'Well, we'll keep digging,' Ronnie said. 'Maybe we'll turn up some positive evidence of what happened.'
He noticed that she was standing a little farther away from him than she had been a few minutes earlier.
But she didn't know the things he knew, couldn't see the things he could see. If she could, she would be a lot more worried.
# # # # # #
The work continued at all three digs the next day. Hammond and his group hadn't found anything worth noting, but Dr. Varley's team had dug down far enough to reveal that the four 'rocks' at the corners of the rectangle were actually the tops of four pillars. Matt paced around the excavation worriedly.
Varley wasn't doing any of the actual digging himself, due to his advanced age. Scott and Chuck did most of that while April and Sierra sifted through the dirt for artifacts.
'What does this look like to you, Doctor?' Matt asked Varley.
'Those pillars are supports for a roof,' Varley said, pointing to them. 'The irregularities on the tops indicate that they were broken off at some time, so it's safe to assume that originally they were taller. Not all kivas were underground, you know, nor were they all circular. Many of them were square or rectangular and built partially or completely aboveground. I believe what we have here are the ruins of a large, partially sunken kiva with stone walls and a roof.'
'You haven't found any bones here, have you?'
Varley smiled and shook his head. 'No, no bones. Those seem to be confined to Dr. Dupre's excavation.'
If that was the case, Matt wondered why this place bothered him even more than the one that contained evidence of murder and cannibalism.
Late that afternoon, Scott and Chuck uncovered something else. Matt was hunkered on his heels near the edge of the excavation as the two young men leaned over and brushed dirt away from what took shape as a large, smooth, flat stone surface. This wasn't sandstone. It gleamed black, like obsidian.
'Dr. Varley, look at this!' Scott called.
Varley, April, and Sierra came up to the rim of the pit and gazed down into it, along with Matt.
'What is it?' April asked.
'Keep digging,' Varley ordered. 'We need to determine the object's dimensions.'
Shovels bit into the dirt. Scott and Chuck scraped it away until the stone had been revealed down to a depth of several inches. Its edges were square cut. It was about three feet wide and maybe seven feet long.
'It's an altar,' Varley said in a hushed voice.
'Like for religious ceremonies?' Scott asked.
'Or maybe for human sacrifices, like in the movies,' Chuck said in his West Texas drawl.
Sierra took him seriously and said, 'I didn't know the Anasazi sacrificed people.'
'We didn't know they practiced cannibalism until now, either,' a new voice said. Matt glanced up and saw Andrew Hammond standing near the excavation, a smile on his disfigured face. 'This is exciting, Howard, very exciting.'
Varley nodded. 'Yes, it is.'
Scott was feeling around at one end of the altar. He said, 'Dr. Varley, something's carved into the stone down here. I can't tell what it is.'
'Uncover it,' Varley ordered as he leaned over and rested his hands on his knees so he could peer more closely into the pit. 'Dig the dirt away from it before we lose our light.'
Scott and Chuck wielded their shovels with even greater enthusiasm. Matt felt coldness growing inside him as they uncovered more and more of the altar at one end.
'What is that?' Varley muttered. 'The stone is so dark it's difficult to see the markings.'
He straightened and started for the ladder. Matt stood up, too, suddenly even more anxious than he had been.
Varley motioned to April and Sierra. 'Girls, come with me. You've been part of this, too. You deserve to see what we've found.'
Matt felt something wild growing inside him. He started to reach for the elderly professor's arm, not knowing what he would say but feeling a growing need to stop this.
Hammond got in his way. The man's rotting lips drew back from his teeth in an animal-like snarl as he said, 'Leave them alone, Cahill.'
Suddenly Matt wished he had gotten his ax out of his duffel bag and split Hammond's head open that first day, like he had thought about doing. He might have been hauled off and arrested for murder, but that would be better than what was about to happen here.
'Get the hell out of my way,' he said.
Hammond laughed. 'You're too late,' he told Matt. 'Too late.'
It was true. Time was screwy somehow. Varley, April, and Sierra had climbed down into the excavation and were crowded around the altar with Scott and Chuck. Matt stepped around Hammond so he had a good view as Scott knelt and brushed the last of the dirt away from the lines carved into the stone.
In the garish red light of late afternoon, the lines formed an unmistakable image, one that Matt had seen all too many times in the past few months.
It was the face of Mr. Dark, and just above it was another striking, sinister image, a snake eating its own tail.
