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Three

They stood on the high ridge, looking down into the gorge that curled tightly below them. The whole of the village sat low and closely packed, five huts leaning in the same direction. Huge black trees stood bare all around those low-slung hovels, their naked branches twisted like monstrous claws. A pale, greenish mist hung all across the hollow, still and stagnant as the pools of stale green water that circled the village like the remains of a drying creek bed. In the middle of it all, there was a large, flat rock jutting up out of the ground, one end a bit higher than the other. The stone looked quite dark, layers chipped away from the limestone at its edges. The earth beneath it lay in a mound nearly as big as a Volkswagen Beetle.

"I don't believe it," Brian said quietly. "I thought you were so full of crap, Jacob."

"It's here," Jacob said with a broad smile. "It's really here, and we found it."

He didn't wait for the others, only started down the side of the ridge to the village below. They followed behind him, sliding down the steep rock on their backsides until they touched down on soft earth below. The green haze swirled around them, disturbed for the first time in many long years. It had a faint, musty odor that left a bitter taste in their mouths.

Brian rubbed his knee, the skin stinging worse now than before. He thought he must have gotten dirt up inside his pant leg on the way down the ridge.

"Glad I'm up to date on my tetanus shot," he muttered.

"We gotta check out the inside of those houses." Kevin chuckled. "There might be something worth serious money in there."

Jacob cut him a sideways glance, but Kevin cut him off.

"I don't want to hear any lectures about grave-robber crap, Indiana Jones. You stand there and be all noble about our discovery. I'm gonna find myself some college money."

Brian followed them across the dry creek and broke away from the group. He made a beeline for that big flat rock.

"You guys go ahead and check it out," he said. "I'm just gonna catch my breath. Be right with you."

He dropped to the highest end of the crooked rock with a sigh. He winced, determined not to let himself look like a wuss. Kevin would never let him forget it if he complained too much.

Jacob, Kevin and Rachel pushed through the old door to the smallest hut. It was woven grass and twine, and hadn't stood up against the passing of time well at all. It was brittle and broke away in pieces as they slid against it to enter the little structure that had once been someone's shelter. The interior was dark, but for the glow of flashlights, and the details of the little house seemed lost in shadow.

The three of them wandered away from one another, each finding something of interest in different corners. Jacob eyed the table in the middle of the room. Kevin gazed at the dark ash in the fire pit. Rachel took small steps, not going very far before she lifted her eyes to pitchers and other items hanging from the ceiling above. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes clinging to the dark rafters overhead.

Jacob eyed a few bowls and scraps of paper on the old table, trying desperately to make words out of the scratches in pale ink. It wasn't black. It didn't look as if it ever had been. It seemed more the color of baked bricks, a rusty red that, upon closer inspection, made his mind grope at the idea that it might have been blood.

He wrinkled his nose at that thought. He picked it up, closer inspection revealing to him shapes scrawled in spidery script that looked far too much like runes he'd seen in archeology texts that Fallon had let him borrow. One looked like Futhark. Another looked like a form of Cuneiform he couldn't really identify, the slashes vaguely familiar from those books he had briefly looked through. He thought it couldn't be real. It had to be somebody's idea of a joke, but the paper was so old and brittle that it began to crumble in his hands. It annoyed him that he could hold something so meaningful in his hands and not know what it really was. He couldn't read it, of course, and that frustrated him more. Words were right there in front of him, and he couldn't make them out.

Kevin stood in front of the fireplace, pushing at ancient ash and soot with the toe of his shoe. He mumbled something to himself about bits of things in the ashes that he thought were little bones. That wasn't so unusual to him. Primitive cultures cooked meat over fire. Meat left bones behind. Nothing sinister about that. Just good old fashioned survival.

"How old is this place?" he asked. "I mean, these are mud houses, right?" He turned to look at Jacob. "With river cane roofs...like the ones the Cherokee used?"

Jacob nodded. "Yeah." he recalled the teachings they had learned in Scouts. "But...these are old. Really old. Back before they used winter houses and cabins."

"Why would they live down here?" Kevin wondered. "Underground? I mean, social outcasts might leave the community group, but why so far back in a cave system?"

Jacob shook his head, his attention snared by Rachel's haunted stare up into the rafters. He followed her gaze, looking up overhead. His mouth went dry and he muttered a curse. Kevin followed suit, hissing a filthy word of his own and stumbling backward against the stone of the fire pit. Absent-mindedly, Jacob reached out to Rachel, pulling her to his side and sliding an arm around her. He wasn't sure if he was doing it to comfort her or himself.

In the rafters, a hideous display of bones hung like a gruesome mobile, and not one of them was animal. Human skulls and rib cages, shoulder blades, whole pelvic saddles, all hung in a dense web of bone and dark string. The sight of it made him feel strange. He wasn't light headed or sick to his stomach. He just felt a strange sort of heat wash over him, like he had a fever. It was cool down there, but sweat broke out on his lip in an instant.

"This isn't Cherokee," Jacob said, his voice weaker than he meant it to be. "It's not Indian at all. I don't know what it is."

"Let's go," Rachel whispered. "Let's go home. I don't like it here. Something awful happened here."

"Yeah," Kevin agreed, sliding along the wall toward the door, not taking his eyes from the rafters. "Yeah, what she said."