As a Homicide Detective, I’ve Investigated Many Serial Killers. But None Like This One. Here Is My Story.

The buzz of my county issued radio crackled through the quiet hum of my truck’s AC. The sun, not yet to the ninth hour, already pressed down on Luna County.

“Unit 12 to dispatch, what've you got, Sandy?” I said into the mic.

“Mac, got a call… it’s a strange one. Hiker out by the Crimson Spires reported a body. Said it's… well, you’ll need to see it. Near Coyote Jaw Arch.”

A muscle moved in my jaw. Coyote Jaw Arch was no place for a man on foot for pleasure. It lay an hour or more from the last dirt road where it rutted out into the wilderness, set deep within the broken land of ravines and stone mesas that spread eastward from the town.

“Young Deputy Miller is on his way. Sounded a bit green on the line.” Sandy said.

“Figures. Tell him to secure the scene, don’t touch anything, and wait for me.” I said.

“Will do, Mac. And, uh, be careful. The hiker sounded spooked. Really spooked.” Sandy said finally.

I made a sound and put the microphone on its hook. Spooked out here could mean the sun is in a man’s head making pictures on the air or it could mean something else.

The truck clawed its way over the last miles, the transmission in low range, the tires throwing up skirts of dust and gravel as I worked it through ruts deep enough to take a lesser vehicle down to its axles.

Then the ground rose too steep and too broken for the truck and I stopped it in the thin shadow of a Palo Verde. I took my pack and the canteens and my sidearm, the camera and the evidence kit.

The walk in was like walking into a furnace. The air above the red rock trembled in the heat and the only sounds were the crush of my boots on the baked soil and now and then the angry Z of a horsefly that circled in the still air.

When I saw Miller’s county vehicle parked near the edge of a dry wash where the earth fell away, sweat had soaked my shirt to my skin. He stood at the lip of a small canyon, looking into it, his shoulders drawn up.

“Miller,” I greeted, my voice a little raspy. “What's the situation?”

He turned and I saw the relief on his young face. He was perhaps twenty-three.

“Detective Cole. Sir. Thank God you’re here.”

He swallowed and made a motion with one hand that trembled. “Down there. At the foot of that pillar.”

I looked where he pointed. Forty feet below us the scree sloped down to the floor of the small canyon. A single shaft of stone stood there, a hoodoo, its form like a long finger of rock worn thin by wind and time. And at the foot of it, in the shadows that lay mottled on the ground, there was something. Even from that high ground I saw that it was wrong. I raised the binoculars to my eyes and brought the scene into focus.

My breath froze.

It was not at the foot of the stone pillar. It was on the pillar. Or it seemed to be. As if it grew from the rock itself some ten feet from the ground where a narrow shelf of stone jutted out, a shelf no wider than a man’s two feet set side by side.

The body, a man by the width of the shoulders, was seated upright, yet it was not the posture of a man seated but of a thing made rigid. The limbs were set wrong. One arm stretched out from the body, the bones of the fingers showing as if they pointed to the west where the sun would fall.

The other arm was bent and laid in the lap as if in a poor imitation of rest. The skin of the man was a dark leather, stretched tight upon the bones beneath. It looked like he had cured in that relentless heat for weeks.

I went down the slope, the broken rock sliding under my boots, and Miller followed, his movements clumsy on the uncertain grade. The air down in the cut was thick. It smelled of dust and hot rock and another smell beneath that, a dry and pungent smell with a sharper note to it, an acrid bite that I could not name. There was no smell of the body’s decay, and that was another thing that was wrong.

When I came closer I saw the terrible craft of it.

The arm that pointed was not bare skin and bone alone. Segments of cholla, barbed and vicious, had been woven into the flesh of it, through the flesh of it, so that the cactus formed a kind of armor over the bones.

Where the muscle had drawn away from the arm, polished stones from a riverbed had been pushed into the hollows. Milky quartz and agate that was banded, and they glowed softly in the shadow.

They were wedged between the bones and the dried sinew as if whoever did this thing meant to replace what the desert itself would have taken in its own time.

The head of the man was canted to one side. The face, what I could see of it, was hidden by a mask. Not a mask a man might buy. It was made of clay, the color of the earth, and it was dried and cracked by the sun. Two small holes for eyes. A line for a mouth. A crude thing. It made the man beneath it not a man. A thin line of black ants moved in their fashion across the clay of the mask and down the line of the throat to disappear into the collar of the man’s shirt.

Miller spoke then, voice shaky. “Sir. Who do you think would do this?“

I looked at him but I showed him nothing of what I felt.

“This was an artist.” I looked at the man there on the rock, at the terrible care of it. “A very sick one.”

There was only the sound of the ants as they moved on the clay and the sound of the hot wind as it sighed through the rock passages of the canyon. Whoever had made this thing knew the desert. And he had taken its stark soul and made of it a stage for this.

I took the camera from my pack. Documenting this would take time. It would be a long and evil labor. And I knew with a certainty colder than a desert night that this would not be the last of his work.

The dead man from Coyote Jaw Arch lay under the white lights of the county morgue. Dental records gave him a name, Thomas Ashton, forty-five years of age, from Tucson. He had been missing three days, a birdwatcher come to the desert. Dr. Ramirez worked over him through the afternoon. She was a woman of calm demeanor, acquainted with the desert’s tally of heat and thirst and broken bones from falls. But Ashton. Ashton was of a different ledger.

I stood in that room with her and mostly I listened. The office moved with a quiet purpose that did not speak of the tremor that Ashton, his body arranged like some grim sentinel, had sent through our small number. Young Miller had been sent home. He had said little after we left the arch, that he was scarred by what he had seen there.

“The desiccation,” Ramirez said, peeling off her gloves, her voice tired but precise. “It's…accelerated. Beyond anything natural. We're talking about something that should take weeks, Mac, months even, condensed into maybe seventy-two hours, tops.” She pointed to a magnified image on her screen showing skin cells. “There’s evidence of a chemical agent, some kind of aggressive desiccant, almost a tanning solution, but cruder. Sprayed on, I think. Post-mortem.”

“So he was killed,” I said. “Then placed. Then this treatment.”

“Precisely. Cause of death for Ashton appears to be blunt force trauma to the back of the head. Quick. Almost merciful, considering what came after.” She shook her head. “The cholla insertions are deliberate, almost surgical in their placement despite the brutality. No defensive wounds suggesting he was awake for that part, thank God. The clay mask? Formed directly on his face. The ants… Mac, those ants were from a specific harvester colony I’ve only seen a few miles from the arch, near the old Cinder Cone. They don't naturally congregate like that. They were introduced.”

“Someone is bringing tools to his work,” I said.

I felt a coolness on my own skin.

“Someone strong, with knowledge of the terrain and an unnerving amount of patience. And specific natural resources.” I said finally.

The days that followed, I looked through old reports of men gone missing. I read the small words written on the internet by people who lived in this county, looking for talk of strange camps, of men who kept to themselves in the wild places. I spoke to the rangers of the parks and the men from the government lands and the old ranchers whose lands stretched out for fifty miles around Coyote Jaw Arch. No one had seen such a thing. Or no one would say if they had. Thomas Ashton was a man with no apparent enemies, no strange ways about him save that he had come to this place to watch birds and had met this end.

The pressure from the county sheriff, a good man but worried about tourist season and bad press, was mounting. “Find something, Mac. Anything. People are scared.”

I was finding things, but they were only more questions. The digital trace of Ashton’s life led nowhere. The hiker who found him was only a man who liked to walk in the open country and now wished he had not. I thought again and again of the craft of it, the terrible order in that display. It was not the work of rage. It was a thing of obsession. A message. But for who was it meant.

The cholla, the polished stones like jewels in the dead flesh, the lines of ants moving on their dark errands, these things began to inhabit my sleep. I would wake in the dark of my own room with the image of Ashton’s clay face before my eyes and I could feel the dry rasp of the desert in my own throat.

It was late on the third day since we brought Ashton down from the rock. The sun was a smear of orange and purple at the western rim of the world when Sandy’s voice came over the radio. It was not sharp this time. It was low, and held tight, and there was a shading in it that was near to dread.

“Mac, you out there?”

I was, following a half-baked theory about old mining claims near the Cinder Cone – where Ramirez had mentioned the unique ants. My truck was parked near a collapsed adit, the air cooling rapidly as night approached. “Go ahead, Sandy.”

“We got a call from old man Henderson. You know him, lives out past the Ghost Rock Flats?”

I knew him. A man who lived apart from the world, who came to town two times a year for what he needed. He called no one.

“What does he want,” I said.

“He says,” Sandy’s voice was quieter now. “He says his scarecrow started moving.”

There was a silence then. “His scarecrow?” I said.

“That is what he said Mac. He kept saying it. He said it is out in his west paddock. Near the dry well. He said it is different now. He sounded terrified. He will not go near it. He will not look at it again. He just wants us to come.”

A coldness settled in my belly. Ghost Rock Flats was thirty miles more of bad road, leading out to where the land was empty. But different. Scarecrow. My mind saw Thomas Ashton on his pillar of stone, made into something not human.

“Tell Henderson to lock his doors,” I said. “And to stay inside. I am on my way. Is there anyone with him.” I said.

“Negative. He lives alone.”

“Understood,” I said. “No more radio unless it is urgent. Miller is off his shift. I will take this.”

I knew there was a risk in it. But if this was what I thought it was, bringing in a deputy, even a seasoned one, might just complicate things. This artist, he might enjoy a witness, but perhaps not a crowd.

The drive was more than an hour. The darkness had taken full possession of the desert when I reached the edge of Henderson’s land, a fence of barbed wire that sagged between its posts.

The only light was the sweep of my truck’s headlamps across the waste. His cabin was a small dark shape, a single point of fear in that great emptiness. I cut the engine and the lights and I listened.

There was nothing. Only the crickets sawing in the scrub and the small sound of the wind moving through the saltbush.

I took my heavy flashlight from the seat and my sidearm, and I walked toward the cabin.

“Mr Henderson,” I called out, my voice low. “Sheriff’s Department. Detective Cole.”

A voice came from behind a window boarded over with old wood. It shook. “You come alone?”

“Yes sir,” I said. “Just me. Are you alright.”

“The thing,” he said. “In the west paddock. You got to see it.”

“Alright Mr Henderson. You stay inside. I am going to look. Just show me the way.”

A hand, palsied and thin, came through a crack in the boards. It pointed to the west. “Out past the old tractor,” he said. “Near the bones.”

Bones. I nodded, though he could not see it in the dark. “Stay put,” I said.

The west paddock was a flat place of cracked earth. The skeletons of what might have been Joshua trees stood like markers. My flashlight cut a white path through the darkness. I saw the shape of an old tractor, its iron body rusted and canted to one side. And beyond it.

At first it looked only as he said, a scarecrow made ragged by the weather. A tall frame of sticks, with torn clothes that flapped in the night wind. But as I came closer, the beam of my light settling on it, the true shape of it began to show itself, and the air I drew into my lungs felt like ice.

It was not just different.

This scarecrow was not made of straw and old cloth stuffed onto a wooden cross. The frame was wood, yes, but it was not a simple cross. It was made more intricate, like an effigy to some dark god. And lashed to this frame with strands of rusty baling wire that caught the light from my lamp was a human form.

A woman. She was smaller than Ashton, her bones more delicate, but she was as desiccated as he, her skin drawn tight and thin like old parchment over the frame of her. Her arms were not outstretched in the common way of scarecrows. They were bent and twisted upwards, the thin fingers of her hands spread wide against the great dark vault of the sky with its uncounted stars, as if she were frozen in some last silent plea to a deaf heaven.

Her clothes were a dress of faded flowers, torn and arranged upon her with a kind of awful artistry. But where the head of a scarecrow would be a sack of cloth, her head was bare. It was tilted back, her mouth open as if in a scream that had been caught and mummified in her throat.

And the things that had been added to her. My God, the things.

Wisps of dried tumbleweed, gray and brittle, had been woven into her hair, so that it formed a wild corona about her head, like the snakes of Medusa. In the hollows of her eyes there was no clay. There were round flat pieces of turquoise, set carefully into the sockets. Her lips, drawn back from gums that were dry and hard, were stained a deep and unnatural red, a color that might have come from crushed berries, or from some powdered stone.

But the worst of it, the thing that made my stomach tighten in a cold knot and the hairs on my arms rise up, was what lay arranged around her on the ground. The bones Henderson had spoken of.

Skulls. The small skulls of desert animals. Coyotes and jackrabbits. Birds. Even the skull of a gopher. There were dozens of them. They had been laid out in a perfect spiral on the cracked earth around the foot of the effigy, a spiral that tightened as it reached her bare, mummified feet. Each skull was turned to face her, looking inward, as if they were a silent congregation of skeletons come to worship at her altar.

I took a step back. The beam of my flashlight wavered. This was not just murder. This was not what he had made of Ashton. This was a ritual. This was a form of worship.

And a new horror took root in my chest. This woman, she could not have been here for more than a day. Perhaps two. He was working faster now. He was growing bolder. His theater was becoming more grand.

I swept the beam of my light around the silent paddock. The wind sighed. It carried the faint dry scent of creosote and sage. And beneath it, that other scent, faint and acrid, that I had known before.

He could be out there in the darkness. Watching me. Waiting to see what I would make of his new work.

My hand went to the butt of the Sig Sauer at my hip. The silence of the desert was no longer a peaceful thing. It was a silence that waited.

And I was standing in the middle of his gallery.

The beam of my light held the woman in Henderson’s west paddock.

I keyed the radio. “Sandy. Its Mac.”

Her voice came back quick and with a wire in it. “Mac? He said you found it. Henderson. He will not be still.”

“Yeah, I found it. Sandy, listen carefully. I need a full team out here at dawn. Forensics, backup, the ME. Until then, I need you to tell Mr. Henderson to stay locked inside and not come out for any reason. And patch me through to Sheriff Brody, his home line. Wake him if you have to.”

“Copy that, Mac. On it.” She said.

I brought the truck closer and set the work lights to throw their hard glare upon that place, but I kept them from the ground. I photographed the woman from all quarters. My breath smoked in the cooling air. The care of it was a thing to see up close, the wire turned with a knot he had used before, a specific and looping tie. The woman was younger than the man at Coyote Jaw. Late twenties perhaps. No name for her yet.

The sun and whatever chemicals he had used had drawn the flesh tight to the bone, so that she was a thing of leather and wood and wire. The tumbleweed was woven through her dark hair so it stood out like horns touched by a mad wind, a cruel halo against the black sky. And in her eyes he had set polished stones, round and flat, the color of the deep sky at noon, and they caught the light, high-grade turquoise.

Brody’s voice when Sandy patched me to his house was thick with sleep but it cleared.

“Another one, Mac? As bad as the first?”

“Worse, Sheriff. Different, more… performative. This one feels like it's addressed to someone.”

The dawn came up gray and pitiless on that country and with it came the cars of the county. The forensics men moved quiet about their work, their voices low in the face of it. Dr. Ramirez, wore a face like a stone carving as she began her preliminary on-site examination.
Old Henderson was led from his house, and he would not turn his eyes to the west field.

I looked again at the skulls set about her feet. Clean bone, sun-bleached, each one facing the woman on her strange crucifix. Dr. Ramirez spoke beside me, her voice low as she examined the stones in the woman’s eyes.

“Notice anything odd about the materials, Mac?” Ramirez asked, as she gently probed one of the turquoise eye-coverings with a gloved finger. “This turquoise isn't the cheap stuff you find in roadside souvenir shops. This is old mine quality. Specific veins. Bisbee Blue, maybe, or Sleeping Beauty, though that’s rarer this far south.”

My mind started to click. Bisbee and Sleeping Beauty mines were hundreds of miles away. Too far for casual acquisition by a desert loner. “Anything local that would match?”

Ramirez shrugged. “Most of the old claims around here played out decades ago. They were small operations. But… there are stories. Some of the really remote box canyons up in the Diablo Range, near the Twisted Sisters peaks… local prospectors swore there were untouched veins of gem-grade turquoise up there. Hard to get to. Treacherous terrain.”

The Diablo Range. Twisted Sisters. I knew the area. A broken country of canyons that cut deep and ridges like the bones of some old dead beast. Cell service did not reach there. No help comes there for a man who finds himself lost. And the small owl whose skull lay among the others, Ramirez said its kind nested in those high canyons, nowhere else in this county.

Over the next twenty-four hours, we canvassed known turquoise claims and rock hound haunts, but the Diablo Range theory solidified. The type of animal skulls also began to create a more refined geographical profile when cross-referenced with specific habitats; a particular sub-species of ground owl, whose tiny skull was nestled amongst the others, predominantly nested in the higher-altitude rock formations found within the Diablo canyons.

The second victim was identified as Sarah Kim, a geology student from UNM, reported overdue from a solo mapping expedition in the Diablos a week ago. She hadn't even been officially listed as “missing” until yesterday, her check-in window having just expired. Her car was found abandoned at a little-used trailhead leading directly towards the Twisted Sisters peaks, precisely where the high-grade turquoise veins and unique ground owl habitats converged. He had not made his work of her there where she fell. He had brought her down from the mountains to Henderson’s flat land and set her up for us to see, a signpost in the desolation.

He had made Ashton for practice, to learn his craft. But this woman. She was a map. He drew the lines and he set the markers for me to read, as if he knew the man who would come looking. As if he expected a certain eye to follow his sign.

“He wants me to find him, Sheriff,” I said, standing in Brody's office, the preliminary report on Sarah Kim in my hand. “These aren't random victims anymore, and their placement isn't random. He's leaving clues, geographical markers.”

The Sheriff looked at the report on the woman, Sarah Kim, and the lines in his face were deep.
“And you think this ‘workshop’ of his is up in the Diablos?”

“I'm almost certain of it. The turquoise, the specific owls, Sarah Kim’s last known location – it all points to those canyons around Twisted Sisters.”

“That’s suicide, Mac, going in there after him. That's his home turf. We can set up a perimeter, maybe use a helicopter for aerial recon…”

“If he even has a fixed base. We could search those canyons for weeks and find nothing. He’s moving his victims. He knows the terrain too well. By the time a full search team is organized and deployed effectively, he'll have vanished, or worse, taken another life. No, if I go in quiet, alone, he might just lead me to wherever he feels most comfortable, most powerful. It’s a risk, a huge one, but…”

Brody put his hand flat on the wood of his desk and he stared at it. After a time he said, “But you feel it's the only way to get ahead of him.”

He stared at me for a long moment. “Alright, Mac. Alright. But you go in with full comms, as long as they last. Check in every thirty minutes once you're past the trailhead. One missed check in, and I’m sending in everything we’ve got, protocols be damned.”

“Understood.” I said.

The sun was falling toward the western mountains when I turned the truck toward the Diablos. The good road ran out and then the graded dirt ran out and then it was a track among the stones that clawed at the tires. The land rose up in walls of stone, ancient and brooding, and the air in that place felt older, holding a charge. I parked my truck near the same deserted trailhead where Sarah Kim had left hers, I took a deep breath.

I took my pack and the rifle and my sidearm, and extra water. I stood a moment where the trail began, a faint depression in the gravel and rock. Only the wind moved through the narrow rock passages with a sighing sound. Sarah Kim’s tire tracks were there, already faded by that wind. There was no other sign.

I went into the canyon. The stone walls climbed into the failing light, streaked with ochre and crimson and the green sickness of copper where turquoise might be found. The gravel turned under my boots and the sound was loud in that great silence. My radio crackled a last time before the stone would take the signal.

“Unit 12, what’s your 20?” Sandy’s voice.

“At the Twisted Sisters trailhead, Sandy,” I said.
“Entering Diablo Canyon now. Beginning thirty-minute check-ins.”

“Copy that, Mac. Godspeed.”

I thought, yes, God speed. I’d need it. And I went on into the dark where he waited, or where he did not. But he knew the way of my coming. I was walking into his country, into the stone heart of his work. He had the place chosen. And he had the shape of the thing he would make of what I brought him, which was myself.

The canyon became a stricture in the rock and the walls drew in upon me so tight that I was able to lay hands to stone on either side with my arms stretched wide. The air held a chill as of a cellar cut from the mountain, heavy with the damp scent of unlit earth and something more, a taste of metal and chemicals raw in the throat that overlaid the dead dust of the place and the breath of its old decay. The wind that had moved with some life in the upper reaches was dead here. There was only a great stillness and the sound of water weeping from hidden seams within the stone.

The light failed within the deepening stone. I traded the flood of the handlamp for the harder beam upon the rifle, a spear of light that drove into the gloom before me but left the world to either side in greater shadow. The smallest sound of my passage, the whisper of cloth or the grit of a bootsole upon the rock, came back from the stone walls magnified and ill-omened, so that I moved like a man beating a drum in that silence, announcing his coming.

The thirty-minute transmissions to Sandy were terse, my voice tight in my own ears.

“Still moving west into Diablo’s main gorge. Nothing to report.”

Yet the hairs on my neck stood for what I did not see, and a knowledge grew in me that I was being watched.

Then the signs appeared, set forth upon the rock as markers. A stone rounded like a dark egg upon a high shelf where no stone should be, and it gave off a faint sheen as of some hoary luminescence or the very damp of the grave.

A posy of dried desert sage tied with that same deliberate loop and twist of old wire that had bound the woman at Henderson’s ruin.

And then the rock turned sharp upon itself and the beam found a spray of raven feathers black against the pale stone, pinned there with slivers of bone driven into the crevices, and at the tip of each feather a chip of blue stone was affixed, gleaming like a mad eye.

The narrows gave way then to a hollow in the stone, a kind of grotto no more than twenty feet from wall to wall, roofed over by the mountain itself. And I saw his place.

My breath went still in my chest. I had schooled myself for what might be there, but the thing itself was beyond the geometries of any sane man’s imagining.

It was a small space. Along the far wall shelves of weathered wood, wrack of some ancient flood, and stones balanced one upon another in defiance of their nature, were laden with the tools of his artifice. Chisels from some old mine, hammered and honed to a cruel edge.

Sinew of animals, dried and coiled like snakes. Awls shaped from bone. Buckets held clays of different earth, dun and ochre and a black like night. Pouches of powdered pigment. Cholla segments lay in rows, their spines clipped with a terrible care. And jars. Glass jars holding liquids of a strange color, and in them swam shapes I would not name, fragments of things, feather and tooth and hair and what looked to be the parings of human nails.

But the altar of that place was a slab of sandstone at its center, and upon it pulsed a light not of this earth. Great fungi he had brought from some deeper dark clung to the rock nearby, and their ghostly luminescence lit the slab and what lay upon it. Polished stones. Flakes of obsidian, black and sharp. And human bones. The long bones of legs, a femur, a tibia. A collarbone like a piece of white porcelain. All cleaned, burnished, with small holes drilled into their surfaces as if for stringing.

From the cracks in the rock walls hung his other works, his sketches in flesh and bone. The carcass of a coyote, dried and stretched, its ribcage broken open and packed tight with glittering quartz crystals. A thing made of bird wings and the skulls of small beasts, all wired together to turn and shift in some breath of air I could not feel. It was a charnel house and the atelier of a daemon. I could smell the iron scent of old blood and the sharp bite of his chemicals, and a sweetness too, the cloying perfume of rot held in careful stasis.

I swept the rifle’s beam into the deeper shadows. “Alright,” I said. My voice was a rasp in that dead air. “I know you are here. Show yourself.”

Nothing. Only the ceaseless drip of water that measured out eternity.

Then a sound scraped stone behind me.

I spun with the rifle, my finger at the trigger’s curve, and he stood there in the mouth of the passage where I had entered. A figure dark against the lesser dark of the canyon beyond. He blocked the only exit. He was tall and built of wire and bone, and his clothes were the color of the dried earth that he seemed a thing come forth from the rock itself. He held no weapon that I could see, but his hands were there before him, dark with clay and with some other substance, older and blacker.

His face was lost to the shadow but his gaze I felt upon me, a pressure.

“You appreciate it, Detective.” His voice was a soft and reedy thing, not the growl of a beast but some dry rustle, the voice of a man certain in his vision. “Not many can see the beauty in transformation. The way the desert takes, and the way I. Help it along.”

“Beauty,” I said, the rifle steady on his heart. “Ashton. Sarah Kim. Is that what you call beauty.”

A nod from the shadows, slow as the turn of a season. “They are constant now Detective. Beyond time’s reach. Their decay is arrested. I gave them permanence. The desert is a slow artist. I. I accelerate. I refine.” He took a step, a small shift of his weight forward into the fungal light.

“You stay where you are,” I said.

He did not listen and came on another step.

“You, Detective Cole. Marcus. You understand the land. You see the patterns. I saw it in the way you studied Thomas. You looked… properly. Like a connoisseur. Sarah… she was destined for my 'Celestial Offering' piece. Henderson's scarecrow, you called it? Fitting, in its own way. She gazes at the stars I adorned her with. Forever.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the cave’s air moved in my blood. He had heard me. He had been there in the dark paddock at Henderson’s, listening.

“This is not art,” I said, my voice a hollow sound. “This is murder. This is sickness.”

“There’s a difference,” he whispered, and then he moved, not at me, but to the side, a lean and sudden motion like a striking snake, his hand outstretched to the rock wall beside the passage. His fingers found some purchase there.

A groan of tortured stone came from above me, a deep guttural sound of the mountain shifting in its sleep. The overhang, that roof of rock, dislodged by some hidden lever or rope, began to fall. Tons of stone and ancient earth.

Without thinking I threw myself sideways. I struck the hard floor of the cave and the rifle spun from my grasp. Dust rose in a choking cloud, thick as ash, and the chamber was thrown into a deeper blackness as the fungi’s light was buried. I coughed, sucking dust, blind.

He was on me before I could draw breath. I did not see him. I smelled him, the scent of the raw earth and the bite of his chemicals and an older, graver stink. A wiry strength, fueled by madness, his fingers, like talons, clawed at my face. I lashed out, connecting with something solid, and heard a grunt.

We rolled on the cave floor, a thrashing knot of limbs in the stinking dust. His thumbs found the line of my throat and pressed, and the light behind my eyes burst into novas. I bucked, twisted, my hand flailing on the broken stone, and my fingers closed upon a shard of rock, heavy and sharp-edged.

I drove it upward to where I judged his head to be in that blackness. A flat sound. A choked noise. The pressure on my throat eased a hair. I struck again with the stone. And again.

He hissed and recoiled from me. I scrambled back, gulping air like a landed fish, my hands sweeping the floor for the rifle, for the handlamp. Where.

“You do not see,” he rasped, his voice ragged now, shot through with rage. “I was going to make you… magnificent!”

A glint in the ruin, what faint light of the disturbed fungi still seeped through the dust. He had armed himself from his table, a long knife of obsidian, polished and wickedly sharp. He came at me then, a shadow wielding a fang of black glass.

My hand went to my boot and found the hilt of the Ka-Bar. I drew it as he lunged.

I met his charge. Steel struck stone with a screech and a spray of tiny sparks, like angry sprites in the dark. We were too close for any other weapon, locked in that deadly grapple. He moved with a frenzied speed, the obsidian blade a whisper of air before my face, then a line of fire across my left forearm as it bit deep. Pain bloomed, hot and sudden. He made sounds now, low in his throat, like a beast.

I ducked under a wide sweep of the black blade that would have opened my throat and drove my shoulder hard into his chest. We went stumbling backward together into the deeper part of the cave, over loose rock, and crashed into his workbench of sandstone. His tools and his jars, his hideous creations, went skittering and smashing to the floor.

“My collection!” he shrieked, momentarily distracted.

It was the opening I needed. He’d turned his head for a split second to survey the damage.

I thrust upward with the Ka-Bar. He twisted like a cat but the blade found him, not cleanly, glancing off a rib then sinking deep into his side beneath his arm.

He gave a roar, a sound of ultimate outrage and pain, and staggered back from me, his hands clamped to his side. A dark fluid, black in that dim light, poured through his fingers.

I gave him no time. I lunged and tackled him, driving him down amongst the ruin of his workshop, amidst the shards of clay and the scattered bones of men and animals. He thrashed beneath me, his strength still a terrible thing, his breath hot on my face, stinking of his own blood.

My lamp. I saw it, half buried in the rockfall at the cave’s mouth, its beam pointing crookedly to the roof, broken but alive. I could not reach it.

He heaved under me, his free hand groping, and closed upon one of the human femurs from his collection. He swung it like a club and it met my shoulder with a sickening crack of bone. A white and blinding numbness shot down my arm. My grip on the knife loosened.

He tried to roll me, to gain the top, his eyes burning with a feral light. “The desert,” he gasped, blood at his lips. “Accepts. Your. Offering.”

He was strong. God, he was strong. I brought my knee up hard into his wounded side. He screamed, a thin sound, and his back arched. In that instant my eyes, accustomed now to the faint lumina, saw a stone glinting on the floor beside his flailing hand. One of the pieces of blue turquoise he had shown the girl at Henderson’s, heavy, angular.

As he drew back the femur for another blow, I snatched the turquoise. It filled my hand, heavy, its broken edge sharp. With a grunt that was torn from me by pain and desperation, I brought it down not on his head but upon the wrist of the hand that held the bone.

He howled, a sound thin and high and terrible that echoed from the unseeing rock.

He was hurt now. I pressed it, striking with the heel of my good hand at his face, again and again, until he went slack beneath me, his breath coming in shallow, ragged pulls.

I rolled off him. Every part of me was a fire of pain. My arm. My shoulder. I lay there in the dust and the ruin of his madness and breathed the air that was grit and blood and the reek of his chemicals. Above me the stone was indifferent to the affairs of men. His breath beside me was a wet and halting sound that diminished slowly toward silence.

With an age of effort I found my Ka-Bar. Then the handlamp. The lens was cracked but the light held. I turned it upon him.

He was younger than I would have thought beneath the grime and the wildness of his eyes, perhaps thirty. Those eyes, empty now, still held some ghost of his terrible devotion. Around him lay the broken instruments of his worship, the ruined icons. The turquoise stone lay near his shattered hand, dark with his blood.

My radio. It lay in pieces. Useless.

It took what felt like a lifetime, moving through a fog of pain, to reach the emergency beacon in my pack. My hands trembled.

Then there was only the waiting. I leaned against the cold stone. The desert wind had found a way into that tomb, and it sighed a low note through the fallen rock. It did not sound like a lament. It sounded like nothing at all.

Time had no measure in that place. It might have been hours before I heard the beating of the helicopter rotors against the air, a sound that came from a world beyond the stone, growing louder. Brody had said he would send what he had.

They found me there amongst the detritus of his visions, the man himself a sprawled offering a few feet from where I sat. They used words like shock. Perhaps. What I felt was a great hollowness, and an age I had not earned.

I had lived. He had not. But a piece of me was buried in that dark cleft of rock, with the bones and the clay and the turquoise stained dark. The desert had taken its due. And that beauty which I had known in the stark and silent places, that spare solace of the rock and the sun, it was now overlaid with the memory of this man and what he had made of that solitude, a darker shape within the shadow.

The wind still called in the high rocks but now it carried a different voice. And I knew that in the quiet places when the sun was low I would look for signs in the dust and listen for a footfall that was not my own, and the safety of my weapon would be a familiar thing beneath my hand. Always.