Anita turned to go, paused, and turned back. "Hey, I mean lock you in for real. These doors don't have panic bars, and you need a key both sides. Not a public space. But we've got a sprinkler system, and nothing down here would burn, anyway. Just, you won't be able to get to a powder room if you feel the urge. You okay?"
Caroline consulted her bladder. No coffee since an early breakfast . . . "Yeah, that's fine. I'll make it."
And with that, Anita was gone, striding away with the air of somebody who really needed to be somewhere else half an hour ago, doors clicking and banging with the finality of a jail. Which was just peachy keen as far as Caroline was concerned. She busied herself with unpacking the camera, a compact tripod, the centimeter reference stick and grids, and a few squares of black and gray velvet that she used for photo backdrops. There was no work table in the storage vault, but the floor would do fine for what she needed.
Grandmother Walks' voice whispered in Caroline's head, "The. English. School. Gives. You. Nothing." Wrong, Grandmother. They give me the keys to places like this. Get my degree, and I have a license to poke my nose into all sorts of interesting places. Research. Union card.
The basement under the Memorial Gym even smelled like the trash-bin of history, stale dusty air and old concrete and a taint of moth crystals. One reason Anita was so casual, the whole department was so casual, about this place, was there was damn-all here worth stealing. The Big U didn't even bother with security cameras down here, far as she could tell, just locks and perimeter alarms. Which was also peachy keen. All the good stuff was either on display or in the active research collection. This was potsherds and stone flakes and archaeological GOKs, "God Only Knows."
And maybe, just maybe, a wooden doll ugly enough to curdle new milk at forty paces. If Grandmother Walks' source was right.
But Caroline started down her list in catalog order just as if someone was watching, pulling out cardboard storage trays and sorting through the shards, museum gloves on, browsing the field notes that went with them, finding misses rather than hits nine times out of ten. A few bits of whiteware, Keet Seel 1937, nothing to show they fit her search template. A whole pot, whiteware, a couple of anomalies that might relate, so she set it on the gray velvet with the ruler and shot five frames from various angles and put it back in its bin.
But that one had been bought at a trading post back in the hills, not dug up in situ and tied to a provenance. Pain in the butt, the sort of thing her father did.
She worked down her list and along the bins to G-53 and its contents, allegedly collected in Texas in 1937. Pulled it out casually, as if misreading the label. Looked inside.
Dirty brown wooden semi-face, looked like someone had gouged eye-sockets and nose and chin and the suggestion of a neck out of a rotten pine branch using a dull rock. Close to a corpse two weeks drowned and chewed by crabs, and she'd seen one washed up on the cobble beach near Aunt Alice's. Clothing to match, a muddy dress ragged like it had been caught in a flash flood out in some canyon.
She reached down to touch it, feel the reality of the calico dress. It felt warmer than the storage vault. God damn, that thing was whopped hard with the ugly stick.
"The world of the dead is an ugly place, child of water. That is why spirits will do ugly things to escape it."
Caroline swallowed a scream and came within an inch of climbing the storage rack. She had been alone in here, three layers of doors locked behind her. Now her right side prickled as if she stood next to a high-voltage line. She took a deep breath and turned.
The generic Indian woman stood there, feet not quite bothering with the floor. The Hunter.
Caroline let her breath escape and captured another. She blinked, swallowed, and forced her fisted hands to open. If she hadn't studied under Aunt Alice for more than ten years, she'd be fainting right about now. As it was, the world had turned a bit fuzzy around the edges and cold sweat trickled down her back. Another breath, concentrate, keep oxygen flowing through the lungs and into the blood and up to the brain.
"So this is the one?"
"This is what you hunt."
"If you can show up here, why do you need me?"
"You had to find it for me to follow, and wood cannot move itself."
Surreal. "Why don't you move it?"
The generic Indian woman stood there, eyes narrowed, and studied Caroline from head to foot. Studied her sort of the way Aunt Alice would study a slug she'd found on one of her antique rose bushes. Cross-cultural folklore lesson number one — It's generally a bad idea to piss off God.
Time to grow up and quit being a smart-ass teenager. Caroline swallowed again, her mouth painfully dry. This "woman" ate souls.
*~*~*
Second session, after lunch, 'twere best done quickly; Caroline had met Anita after an extra hour to chase down a couple of pieces of wood to prop up subjects for the camera. And again, she'd been left alone to do her tedious and mostly wasted research. This so-called anthropologist she was tracking hadn't been much interested in data, just artifacts, and "pretty" ones, at that. Only reason the Hunter was here was that it was an oddity. A GOK. Caroline muttered under her breath, comments on ancestry, personal habits, and probable destination of "pot hunters." Like her father.
Pine wood. The Hunter had insisted on chunks of pine, close to size and
