Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations (7 page)

Solid gold.

More metal than he had panned or picked in a decade of prospecting. Just lying there, in a hat-box house under the earth, down a hole Lyddy had accidentally tumbled into.

“Hello there, hello?” A voice said.

Lyddy yelped, turned.

A man walked into the house, calling again, “Hello there, hello?”

Lyddy dropped the figure, almost the light too. His knife leapt into his palm and he thrust in the same instant. The man grunted, collapsed.

Hands shook so bad he couldn’t stab the blade again if he wanted. He went over. Held up the lantern, looked down. Gazed at his own face, his own clothes—
him
, lying open-eyed and dead on the stone.

Lyddy sprinted from the house, through the alleys, sprang down the ladder, up the slope. His chest constricted and his guts cramped. Didn’t stop until open sky was overhead.

“Hello there, hello?”

Nearly jumped out of his skin. A mirror image of himself shuffled erratically by the horses.

Lyddy lunged for his Winchester in the saddle scabbard. Pumped the lever.

“You’ll stop in your tracks or I’ll blast you,” said Lyddy.

The other man halted. “Easy,” he said, holding up his hands. “I don’t mean nothing.”

Identical, clothes and all. Only minus the mustache and beard, as if fresh from the barber. Just like the last one.

“Who are you?” Lyddy said fierce. “Where did you come from?”

“Just now?” He rubbed his neck. “From one of the cellars. You know, those rooms where the only way out is a ladder.”

Lyddy shook the carbine. “I’m not crazy.
You’re real
. Now tell me where you come from.”

The other man shook his head, baffled. “Same place as anybody, I suppose—from my mother.” He looked sideways, overhead, all around. “It’s like I was asleep and just woke up.”

There was a bottle of rye in the saddlebag. Lyddy fished it out single-handed. Poured half down his throat.

Wherever the stranger came from, he wasn’t lying. Lyddy felt that. And he
did
act groggy, as if he rolled off a cot moments before.

Certainly didn’t seem dangerous. More dazed than anything.

Several items occurred to Lyddy in quick succession. Lyddy was the only one of the pair who possessed a firearm. If there was one statuette down there, there were bound to be more. Gold is heavy. They were miles away from anybody else.

Lyddy lowered the muzzle.

“There’s gold down below,” said Lyddy. “You help me carry it up to the surface, we can split it fifty-fifty.”

The man scratched his cheeks where a beard should have been. Wobbled on his feet. “That sounds fair,” he said.

Lyddy nodded, slung the Winchester over his shoulder. “Good. Now what should I call you?”

“My name is Tobias Clayton Lyddy.”

“That’s
my
name,” said Lyddy.

“It’s the only name I know. Don’t I have just as much right to it?”

Lyddy considered. “I’ll call you Clayton.”

This cheered the other man. “And I’ll call you Toby.”

“No,” said Lyddy, “You’ll call me Mister Lyddy.”

Come sunset, Lyddy and Clayton chewed their beans and bacon, facing each other across the campfire. Lyddy sat with his back to a scarp of red sandstone, the carbine across his lap. Clayton chattered away, talking fluff, telling stories Lyddy already knew. Lyddy grunted at intervals.

Flakes of ash and sparks rose into the night sky and Lyddy wondered,
Had there even been another man besides this one
? Yes, he decided, there had been—and moreover, Lyddy had cut him dead. But the features couldn’t have been his. He had gone a little crazy, his eyes playing tricks on him. In the bouncing firelight, he wasn’t even sure Clayton was the same as him.

“I wonder what would’ve happened if I had married Jenny Allen,” said Clayton. “She sure had peepers for me.”

The statement arrived out of nowhere. “She wanted to marry
me
,” said Lyddy. “You weren’t there.”

“Sure, sure.” Clayton stared at the stars, smiling. Remembering? “How many kids you think you’d have by now if you had married her?”

Lyddy said, “I haven’t thought two seconds about Jenny Allen in years.” Which was a fib.

If he had been deceived by the man’s face then he could have been deceived by the gold too. Maybe it wasn’t a golden kachina he had found—maybe it was made of pyrite. Or maybe he had never seen anything at all. What was real and what were tricks?

No. Lyddy didn’t like that. The gold was real so the faces of Clayton and the other man were real too. Whatever Lyddy saw was part and parcel with the place. Some strange Indian medicine. If he wanted the one thing, he had to accept the other.

If he wanted the gold.

Lyddy slept rough that night, dozing every few minutes before jarring awake, but by the time the eastern sky was smeared pink and purple, he had a notion. He and Clayton would return to the chamber, grab the statue, and search for others. There had to be others. When they had loaded as much as Lyddy’s two animals could carry—Lyddy would walk, leading them both—he would make a careful map of the crevice and the surrounding countryside. Head back to civilization. Live like a king. Tell no one. If he ever needed more, he had the map. Only Lyddy would know.

Because killing a man who resembles your twin and popped out of nowhere can’t be a crime. If no one else knows about a man living, then no one else should care if he stops.

The dead body was right where he had left it. Both Clayton and Lyddy studied it for a long while.

“If that isn’t the damnedest,” said Clayton.

The same frayed threads were on the jacket cuffs. The same scar on the temple from when Lyddy fell down the kitchen stairs at six years old. The only difference was the body had no lip or chin whiskers. Like Clayton.

Lyddy pulled off the hat. The dead man’s scalp was smooth and hairless.

“Perfect match except he’s bald,” said Lyddy.

Clayton shrugged. “Any morning every man in creation decides whether to shave his face or not. This guy just kept going.”

It bothered Lyddy. He and Clayton grabbed the corpse’s collar and dragged it inside a building, not the one with the statue but another empty hat box. His hand brushed its cheek and he shuddered—the skin was cool and dry and raspy, like very fine sandpaper.

They began the extraction. Lyddy had a sack with a drawstring. In went the golden kachina. Then they searched the other buildings, scoring the adobe beside the doorway when a chamber was clear. There were other items too, buffalo hides and eagle feathers and woven blankets, junk things. They ignored those. Only gold interested them. They found other kachinas all right. Some bigger, some smaller. Not in every house. But in enough.

Lyddy and Clayton filled the sack with as much as it could carry without the seams tearing, their coat pockets too, then trudged all the way out and up to dump it. Lyddy thought maybe the figures would vanish in the sunlight, but no—they were real. The gold blazed in the light, dancing like reflected water on the surrounding rock.

“It sparkles, all right.” Clayton winked. “But not like Jenny Allen’s eyes.”

Lyddy turned on him, hands balled. “Why you gotta bring her up again?”

Clayton patted the mule’s muzzle. “Little point throwing punches. I was there too.”

“No. You weren’t,” said Lyddy. Then: “What kind of life could I have given her? Coaxing weeds from the dirt. She deserved better.”

“You don’t know it would’ve always stayed that way. She would have married you poor or sick.”

Lyddy said, “Money is the only thing that matters in this lifetime. Women, marriage—they all follow after.”

The two left the gold with the nervous old stallion and mule and went down to liberate more.

“You know where I reckon we are?” said Clayton, as they returned along their circuit.

Lyddy said nothing. He was still hot from before. But he had been puzzling the same question in his head.
Quivira
.

Clayton laughed and clapped his hands. “In the Year of Our Lord 1539, Coronado traveled north from Mexico into the Territories. Searching for the Seven Cities of Gold.”

“He found the pueblos of the desert but no gold,” said Lyddy.

“The Indians he talked to pleaded ignorance. Eventually he met an Indian guide who promised to take him to Quivira, one of the seven. He led Coronado’s expedition into Kansas.”

There they found a place the guide called Quivira,
Lyddy thought.
But it was only more mud huts and naked savages.

“Right. It struck Coronado during the long weeks of plodding over hill and canyon that if
he
had a city of gold, a good way to protect said city would be to lead plunderers
away
from it with promises of taking them
to
it.”

“Which, Coronado surmised, had happened to him.”

“Exhausted, depleted—hornswoggled—Coronado gave up the hunt.”

“Returned to Mexico.”

“But first he ordered his men to strangle the guide.”

And here Lyddy was. Not the Quivira Coronado found but the Quivira he wanted to find. All because Lyddy had glimpsed an old Indian footpath from the main road and estimated it shortcutted across the desert to his claim and then after stepped off it to piss. There may not have been seven cities but there was one of them, in the Territory, right where Coronado had suspected it lay. But underground, hidden from the Spaniard’s greed—and maybe even from most of the Indians he talked to.

“Hello there, hello?”

Lyddy jumped even though he should’ve been used to it by now. But that morning his carbine was slung across his back instead of above-ground with the horse.

The figure tottered into view around the curve of a house. Lyddy shrank back, Winchester aimed. This one was just as hairless as the last—more so, even lacking eyebrows. And shaped different. The legs and arms were truncated, like those of a dwarf.

“Don’t shoot,” the little man said, holding up his stubby fingers.

Lyddy took a few breaths, licked his lips, adjusting to the newcomer’s presence.
Another porter,
he told himself.

“I won’t if you help us move the gold,” said Lyddy.

Clayton leaned in and whispered, “I thought you said we was gonna split it halfsies.”

“Sure,” Lyddy hissed back, “But he don’t know that.”

“Ah,” said Clayton. “The old double-cross.” He squinted at the newcomer.

“I’ll help,” said the stranger.

“Good.” Lyddy put the gun up. “We’ll call you Shorty. Now let’s go.”

They freighted another load. But on the return, Lyddy couldn’t find a chamber without a score mark beside the doorway. They had cleaned out the kachinas from this level.

So Lyddy commanded they set off to explore the city to find other treasure rooms. They climbed ladders to higher terraces, shone the lantern into countless doorways, breathed the cool niter-tanged air. Only empty chambers awaited them.

Lyddy and Clayton led the way. Shorty stumbled after them. He had some kind of bad itch—he unbuttoned his shirt to scratch his chest and shoulders better.

“You know,” said Clayton, “For a town like this with so many people, there don’t seem to be any water.”

Lyddy had been thinking the exact same thing at that exact same moment. He recognized that he needed to quit this place by morning; he had only two skins left and his animals hadn’t drunk since yesterday. By his reckoning, the nearest watering hole was some ten, twelve miles off. Whatever they grabbed today was what Lyddy walked away with.

“Maybe it all dried up,” said Lyddy.

“No, Mister Lyddy. I don’t believe anybody ever lived here,” said Clayton. “It’s like it was built by one set of folks for another set who never bothered with it.”

They searched for hours, climbing higher and higher, lunching on some cornbread Lyddy had brought along. Shorty pecked at his.

“What’s wrong?” Lyddy asked, annoyed. “You too picky to eat?”

“Not to my taste,” said Shorty and he tossed the bread away. Coat and shirt discarded completely, he toddled over to scratch his spine on the jamb of a doorway.

There was nowhere else to go but the top shelf. In a courtyard they found a ladder leading through a tunnel-like square.

Lyddy pulled himself up and out of the hole. The other two muttered and fussed below him. “Both of you shut your yaps and come on,” he called down.

Clayton and Shorty huffed up the ladder after him. Lyddy sniffed. Musty. Bad. He held the lantern overhead.

Bones.

The cavern’s attic was like the other levels—the round rooms, the snake etchings—but polluted. Littered with femurs and humeri and skulls. They spilled from chamber entrances, packed too tight to contain them all, like waterfalls of white calcium. Not just human bones, but buffalo bones, horse and cattle and deer bones, too. Tiny ribs of mice or rats cracked under Lyddy’s feet.

Clayton stooped, picked up a leg bone. “Smashed,” he said, studying it. “Like to get the marrow out.”

“So?” Lyddy’s head raced, not knowing what to think or do. “Beef marrow makes for a good soup.”

“This is human,” said Clayton.

“Man corn!” said Shorty.

Lyddy spun on him, waved a fist. “Shut the hell up, Shorty.”

Shorty cowered. Eyes slit.

“He’s right,” said Clayton. “I’ve read stories. About bad times what done in the Cliff Dwellers. Civil war. Murder. No food. Hungry stomachs.”

“What stories?” said Lyddy. “I never heard those stories. How can you know that?”

Clayton shrugged. “The paintings inside the houses. It’s like they’re words to me.”

The lantern light bobbed, tremors reverberating through Lyddy’s grip on the handle. “We should go,” he said. “Take what we got and go.”

Shorty screamed, charged Lyddy. He dropped the lantern, whipped the carbine from his shoulder. No time to aim—he swung the stock like a club, batting Shorty’s shoulder. The arm sheared off, dropped to the ground. It was empty and desiccate like the hive of a paper wasp.