Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,141

know that doesn’t mean anything. I know that’s just a bunch of shitty words. But I’m really truly sorry.”

It didn’t make any sense. She didn’t make any sense. He tore the letter up and let its pieces flutter into the toilet, but six months later the words remained imprinted on his brain like the patterns of a long-dead leaf, fossilized by the intense pressure of the moment.

Summers in Eastern Oregon, the wind blows in heated gusts, like the breath of a big animal. The July day Elwood and Denis discovered the dead Indian, to keep the seething grit from their eyes and lungs, they wore sunglasses and tied wet bandanas around their faces as bandits would.

They were hiking through a shallow canyon when they noticed among its basalt pillars a six-foot notch with a cool wind blowing from it, indicating depth. This wind brought with it a low drone, like someone blowing across the mouth of an open bottle. They clicked on their flashlights and ducked inside, and the notch opened up into a cave over a hundred-feet deep and thirty-feet wide.

They took off their sunglasses and bandanas in a hurry. Here, breathing was like drinking from a cellar floor puddle, a taste both cool and mineraly and tinged with mold. Their flashlights spotlighted the many suns and rattlesnakes and antelope and men with gigantic penises that covered the walls. Some were pictographs—colored blends of ocher and blood and berry juices—and some were petroglyphs, crudely chipped into the stone. Above all this hung many bats, chirping softly in their upside-down sleep, their brown bodies tangled together and moving so that the cave seemed a living thing.

“Man,” Elwood said, and Denis said, “Wow.”

Denis took out some butcher paper and held it against a petroglyph and rubbed it lightly with a crayon. The image of a pig or a bear or a dog—something—transferred onto the paper, and he rolled it up and put it in a plastic tube.

It wasn’t long before they prostrated their bodies and began to dig. Their fingers had darkened and thickened from so much time in the desert, and they used them now, along with their trowels, to claw away the soil.

For the next several hours they filled their backpacks with the cave soil—so cool and black with guano—and carried it outside, dumping it in a pile that grew larger as the cave grew deeper. They discovered a seed cache, a thick layer of charcoal, obsidian chips, and a collection of bones, so broken they no longer had names. Then Elwood’s trowel scraped across something smooth and brown.

“Dad,” he said. “I think I’ve got something here.”

The Indian had been buried upright, in a fetal position. A soft cocoon of dust and papery skin surrounded its brown bones. Elwood and Denis whisked away the soil, revealing first the skull’s round crown—erratically haired—and then the hollows of its eyes, and then its shriveled nose, its teeth showing in an eternal snarl.

The more they unearthed, the more agitated Denis became. He pounded his fist into his palm, his cheeks glowing a painful red, his breath coming in big gusts as if some desert storm brewed within him. From the look on his face, Elwood could not tell if his father was blissfully happy or simply afraid.

“Dad?” he said. “You okay?”

Denis ran a hand across his face, leaving dirt there, and said, “Are you kidding? This is unbelievable. I’m in Paleolithic heaven, buddy.” Despite his apparent enthusiasm, his voice struck Elwood as robotic, insincere, as a gray thing that swallowed emotion and gave nothing back.

Buried with the Indian were a pipe, a knife, an atlatal, a pair of moccasins, and a decayed leather robe braided with elk teeth. Denis and Elwood took everything.

They never thought about the legality or the rightness of what they did. They only knew that it brought them pleasure, somehow—taking these things, these hidden treasures, and making them their own.

It was nearly night when they left and a massive flapping followed them as hundreds of bats escaped the cave, like ashes blown from a chimney, riding the hot gusts into the purpling sky until they were lost from sight.

Their house was an ordinary house—a tan two-story box with plastic siding—except that it was full of dead things. Bones and fossils, tools from long-dead tribes, and now, a mummified Paiute Indian. Denis carried the body across the threshold as you would a bride, proudly, staring down at the thing in his arms as if it held great promise.

He could