Spooky season is upon us, and I always celebrate October by writing a new horror story or two and sharing them here in my favorite online hangout! So turn down the lights and pour yourself a cup of cocoa - and don't mind the weird shrieking outside. It's probably just the owls. . . probably.
THE MISSING PAGES OF THE JOURNAL
A Short Story by
Lewis B. Smith
I hope this thing is recording. There’s a lot of dust out here, even in the springtime, and that’s not always good for electronics. I’ll scrub this part anyway, in the final edit. So now, let me go with a formal introduction to start off:
The precise fate of Dr. Simon Ledbetter has been hotly debated in the press and in academia since his remains were recovered in Hudspeth County, Texas last fall. His body was found about five miles from this base camp, where his cell phone was discovered, along with his laptop, which had been smashed and burned. Near his body was a handwritten journal that he’d kept for years. But the last ten pages of the journal had been ripped out; the narrative ended with him setting up the camp site where they were found.
Simon was a colleague of mine at Killeen University in Central Texas, and a very genuine grief that swept the campus when his death was announced. He was a gifted lecturer, well-loved by our students, a popular colleague that many of us admired – and one of my closest friends. By that point, he had been missing for several weeks, but none of us wanted to believe he was really gone.
Ledbetter was an archeologist specializing in the study of Native American cultures in the Mountains and Basins region of Texas; I was a historian at KUCT, specializing in the Texas Revolution. Our interests converged in the study of prehistoric stone artifacts; I’d collected them since I was a kid, and he studied them as a professional. At first, we’d clashed over the ethics of my privately collecting archeological relics, but over time he’d come to appreciate my academic interest in their origins, and I’d persuaded him that most of us collectors weren’t looters and vandals. I still remember his excitement as he prepared for the West Texas survey expedition he’d been planning for the entire 2022-23 school year.
“The whole area around Cerro Diablo has never been studied or surveyed,” Simon said excitedly. “There’s been tons of work done in the southern end of the county, but hardly any up north. The Jumano tribe have some fascinating traditions about the old volcano there, and I found some details about them in the A&M library last fall from a hundred years ago that has never been published! It seems as recently as the 1880’s, Jumano shamans still made a pilgrimage to the extinct volcanic cone to engage in some secret rituals. The author of the paper, a professor named MacDowell, interviewed a Jumano medicine man in El Paso who was over eighty years old in 1928. The shaman told him he’d attended the rituals often as a boy. Somewhere on the south slope of the mountain was a secret cave where the shamans met. The old man was very cagey about exactly what was there, but the natives held the place in great reverence. There’s one line in the interview that jumps out at me, Darrell – it makes me think that this could be the most significant ceremonial site ever found in Texas!”
“How do you know the old chief wasn’t just spinning a yarn to get some college professor all worked up?” I asked.
“He wasn’t a chief, he was a shaman,” said Ledbetter, giving me the stink eye. “And if he’d been ‘spinning a yarn,’ as you put it, he would have given more juicy details. If you read MacDowell’s notes, it seems like he was having a hard time getting the old man to tell him anything at all. But finally, the Jumano – his name was Grey Hawk – began talking about his childhood, and how he learned the shaman’s craft from his father. I suspect Dr. MacDowell may have plied him with a bit of liquor, although he doesn’t say so directly. But this is what Grey Hawk told him: ‘I remember my father struggling to find the entrance, for it was very well hidden. But the First Shaman, who lived there and lives there still, guided him to the hidden door, and we saw things inside which no white man can ever know.’ And after that, the old man clammed up. MacDowell couldn’t get another word out of him. But . . . the ‘first shaman’ - that’s interesting. This could be a secret burial chamber for some great patriarch of the Jumano tribe! We know so little about them as a people, Darrell – this could be a huge discovery!”
“Everything you find, you’ll have to turn over to the tribe and they’ll just bury it again,” I said. “What’s the point?”
We had often commiserated about the crime against archeology known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which allowed native tribes to claim almost any artifact held in any museum in the country for ‘repatriation and reburial,’ although I was cynical enough to believe the valuable pieces were more likely to wind up on Ebay. Egyptians could display the remains of their long-dead Pharaohs, the English could line up to see the remains of Cheddar Man, but here in the USA, it didn’t matter if bones were ten thousand years old, or if the artifacts were so rare that their study might redefine our understanding of the ancient natives – if a modern tribe wanted them, they got them, and that was that. Back in the ground they went, no further study allowed. NAGPRA was one of the few archeological issues on which Simon and I were in complete agreement.
“That’s why I’m going on this scouting trip alone,” he said. “First, to see if I can find any trace of this cave with its hidden entrance, and secondly, to document what’s inside. Then I’ll go the Jumano elders, and if I’m lucky maybe I can study the site and publish on it before everything goes back into the ground.”
“Sad state of affairs,” I said.
“Gotta work with what we have,” he replied, turning back to his maps. “Hopefully, I’ll have an adventure to relate when I get back in August!”
But that, of course, didn’t happen. Instead, searchers looked for weeks before they found poor Simon in October, his body chewed and gnawed by predators, lying in a draw a mile or so south of the extinct volcano that had been the object of his journey. His death was ruled accidental, and after a cursory search for his missing effects, police closed the case.
But I wasn’t satisfied that we knew the whole truth. The missing journal pages and the destruction of his laptop seemed suspicious to me, as if there was foul play involved – and Simon’s digital camera, which he hauled with him everywhere, was never recovered. After some persuasion on my part, his sister Denise allowed me to look at the autopsy report, and what I found there disturbed me even further.
The desert heat had partially mummified Simon’s remains. He was found lying face up, and scavengers had removed most of the skin and organs from that side, but his back was still clothed and mostly intact. The detail that stuck out at me was a line of deep slashes across his back, cutting clean through his sturdy khakis – six parallel cuts, quite deep, and apparently inflicted while he was still alive, because his clothes were stained with blood all around them. The coroner said that they were the results of an animal attack, but what animal has six claws? Simon’s head was found several feet away, and most of the top of his face was gone, but his mouth was frozen in a rictus of horror that seemed to go beyond normal post-mortem stretching of the skin. It was hard for me to look at those photographs, knowing these gruesome remains were those of my friend, but I was determined to find out what had happened.
Denise also gave me Simon’s field journal after the police released it into her custody, and I studied the last entry with some interest. It was dated July 22, about two weeks after our last conversation. Simon had traveled to the small community of Dell City, several miles east of Cerro Diablo, and spoken to a few locals, including one shepherd named Dan Brokeheart who was a descendant of the Jumanos.
“My grandfather told me about that place,” he said. “He said that they ran their flocks on the north slopes of the mountains in the spring, but the south face was forbidden to all but the old shamans. He said that, in his grandfather’s day, the medicine men still made pilgrimages there, but as the tribe became more assimilated, fewer and fewer young men wanted to learn the old ways. The last shaman that he knew of died when he was a teenager, after the war. But he still wouldn’t take his sheep on the south slope, right up till the time he died in 2002. Now most of that land is Federal, and they don’t let us run sheep anywhere near the mountain.”
I asked him if he knew of any stories about a cave on the mountainside, and he paused a moment.
“They say the First Shaman lived in a cave there many centuries ago,” he said finally. “He was the one who taught our ancestors how to live in the desert, and gave them the ability to find water and game, no matter how parched with drought the land was. But that’s just a fairy tale for kids. Are you really going out there?”
I told him I was, and he shook his head.
“My grandfather said that Cerro Diablo doesn’t like white men,” he said. “You be careful, professor.”
I made my farewells and checked in with the local BLM manager, who verified my archeological survey permit, and then slowly drove west from town towards the towering, 5000-foot cone that is Cerro Diablo. It’s an impressive peak for its size, seeming all the taller for standing alone. The country was rugged, even for a Jeep, so I drove as close as I could to the south slope and finally parked at the edge of a steep arroyo that had washed the road out several years before. I hiked a few miles further – gads, this desert is HOT! - before pitching my tent. Fortunately, the spring that I spotted on Google Earth was still flowing, and I brought enough water purifying pills to last a few days. I pitched my tent, took some pictures of the mountain, and rested in the shade until twilight. I figure I’ll have a few hours in the morning and evening each day to search for this legendary cave, if it exists. I hope that it does! Otherwise, I’ll have to put up with Guilford’s teasing for the entire fall semester.
That was it. The next ten or twelve pages had been ripped out, and the rest of the book was blank. The fact that my name was in the last sentence hit me pretty hard the first time I read it; but after the pang of grief passed, I found some comfort knowing that my friend had thought about me in the last days of his life. I took the journal home and studied it for the next few days, scanning the entries repeatedly for any clue as to what had happened. Late one afternoon, a month ago, I was sitting in my office reading them again. The sun’s slanted rays were coming in the window as it set, illuminating Simon’s neat, angular handwriting on one side of the journal, and the blank white space on the other. Except that was when I noticed the page wasn’t completely blank. The angled rays of sunlight revealed faint indentations on the blank side, where the pressure of the pen as Simon wrote on that last missing page had left a mark on the next.
Any competent police officer would have spotted the faint impressions, but the Hudspeth County deputy who had investigated Simon’s death was a young rookie who didn’t strike me as particularly bright. Remembering an old trick I’d seen in the movies, I took a pencil and began carefully drawing it back and forth across the page at an angle, so it would highlight the indentations left by Simon’s trusty medium tip gel pen.
I only revealed one readable sentence, but its contents troubled me deeply. Apparently, Simon had only written on the top line of that last page, and the writing was jagged and rough, obviously done in a great hurry. One short sentence, three words - but it filled me with an unnamable dread as I read it:
He is coming!!
Who was coming? Why did their arrival spark such a frantic scrawl from a man whose writing was normally so neat and legible? What was written on the missing pages of the journal? That was when I knew I had to find the answers. It was May; the semester would be ending within a week, and I had no classes during the first summer session this year. I had six weeks to explore Cerro Diablo and find out what happened to my friend.
And that is how I wound up here, pitching my tent at the same base camp where Simon spent his last days, determined to find out what happened to him in this thinly populated corner of West Texas. I got here yesterday afternoon; lugging a small generator to provide me with enough electricity to charge my phone and laptop, and a month’s worth of food. It will take me about two hours to hike back to my jeep, but from there I can drive into Dell City if I need to buy something or just want a fresh cooked meal – the tiny town has one truck stop and a small grocery store. I spent most of yesterday hiking here, pitching my tent, and getting set up. Tomorrow my search begins in earnest.
OK, it’s the next evening. It was a beautiful day, warm but not hot, and the rains last week have left the mountainside green with vegetation. This morning, I walked over to the place where poor Ledbetter’s body was found. The tattered remnants of crime scene tape still marked the scene, but other than that no trace of his demise remained, save a tiny scrap of cloth caught on a branch about twenty feet from where the body was recovered. I’m not sure it’s from his clothes, but it’s the same faded khaki color. So much time had passed between his disappearance and the recovery of his body that no footprints or traces of his passage remained. The police had focused most of their search along the route between his campsite and the arroyo where they found him, but found nothing.
I decided my own search would focus on two things: first, trying to locate the cave he had been seeking on the mountain’s south slope, and secondly, searching the area between where his body had been found and the slope of the mountain. If he had been fleeing something he found during his search of the mountain when he was killed, perhaps he might have hidden his missing gear somewhere along the way.
Since his search of the mountainside would have started here where I’m camping, I decided to check in that direction first. Cerro Diablo is a steep peak, and the closer you get to the slopes, the rougher the terrain becomes. I spent a good part of the day wandering along game trails and gullies leading towards the slope with no luck. I saw some rattlesnakes and deer, surprised a golden eagle perched on the body of a jackrabbit it had killed, and found some ancient fire rings in one clearing, but saw no sign that my friend had ever passed this way until late in the day.
I was hiking up a narrow, barely visible game trail when I saw the unmistakable shape of an arrowhead lying in the middle of the path. I’ve collected Indian relics since I was twelve years old, and the minute I saw this one I knew it was not a point that belonged in West Texas at all. You see, this wasn’t an Indian arrowhead at all but an “Indian” arrowhead – one of the millions of crudely knapped points chipped out of colorful agates in New Dheli and its suburbs and sold on Ebay every year. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people try to pass these off on social media pages and antique stores as authentic Native American relics. They are cruder in workmanship and thicker in cross section than true Indian artifacts, and they are always made in the same cookie-cutter shapes – not to mention being chipped from lithic materials that don’t even occur in North America!
About two years ago, a freshman had offered to give me his granddad’s arrowhead collection – all found there near Killeen, he said. I told him I couldn’t accept such a gift, but I’d be glad to look at them. The next day he’d shown up with a big jar full of these fake points from India, and when I pressed him on the issue, he admitted he’d bought them online hoping to bribe his way to a better grade. I knew that Simon sometimes used stone points hafted onto modern-made arrows and spears as part of his “Intro to Archeology” course, so I bought the whole jar full of points off the kid for what he’d paid for them (they go for less than a buck apiece) and then left them on Simon’s desk the next day. I wondered if this could be one of them?
A bit further up the trail, I found three more of the points lying in the trail, all carefully pressed into the narrow dirt path and all pointing in the same direction. I silently thanked Simon for the breadcrumbs he’d left me, and then tied a red ribbon to a nearby limb to mark the spot, since it was rapidly getting dark. Tomorrow I’ll start where I found the points, and see if he left more markers to guide me to whatever it is he found.
Day three – Wow! So much to relate. I slept fitfully last night; the owls were stirring up a tremendous ruckus all around me. One I’ll swear was right outside my tent; I got up and used my spotlight to try and scare him off, but all I saw was one pair of eye-shines reflecting the light about ten feet off the ground. Eventually they settled down, and I fell into a deep sleep and woke up long after the sun cleared the horizon. I brushed my teeth, drank a quick cup of coffee, and grabbed some jerky and dried fruit to munch on through the day.
I was able to find my way back to the spot where I found the three arrowheads pressed into the trail easily, and I continued in the direction they were pointing. About a hundred feet away, I found two more points pressed into the trail, pointing off to the right, towards a steep basalt cliff. I saw an even fainter trail splitting off in that direction, and as I neared the cliff, I found three more points pressed into the ground, aimed at a specific spot on the cliff face.
When I got there, I saw a row of petroglyphs carved into the rock face. They were fanciful renderings of Indians and game animals, with some large figure looming over them, wearing a headdress of animal horns. Was this all that Ledbetter had used the trail markers for – to mark the path to these drawings? I could see that he would want to study them, but at the same time, what could they do to help me figure out what happened to him?
Then, as I walked along the bottom of the cliff, I saw that he’d balanced three more of the colorful arrowheads along a fold in the rock about knee height above the ancient trail; all three pointed to the right, further down the cliff wall. I followed the base of the cliff for several hundred yards, finding two more sets of three arrowheads guiding me onward. I had to climb over a few ancient, fallen boulders, but every time I found the barely discernible trail continuing along the cliff bottom on the other side.
I might never have found the opening on my own; it was a fissure less than a foot wide where one giant basalt slab overlapped another. But Simon had laid three arrowheads outside the narrow opening, all pointing directly at it. Bless his soul, he had found a way to guide me to his discovery! I stuck my arm into the vertical slit in the rock and felt it growing wider the further back I reached. I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight with me, but my phone has a decent light function, so I turned it on and wriggled through the narrow cleft in the rock until it opened up to my right and I stepped into a wider chamber. I held my light aloft and gave a gasp of shock at what I saw.
Petroglyphs covered the wall all the way around me; it seemed the Jumanos had written a pictorial history of their tribe on the inside of the cave. In the center of the chamber, which was a rough oval about forty feet in diameter, lay a single slab of black basalt, roughly rectangular, perched on top of a flat boulder to form a makeshift table or altar. At either end of the table was a complete pottery jar; they were both painted in the classic polychrome Mimbres style. Such bowls, I knew, would be worth thousands of dollars at any artifact show. Something lay between the jars on top of the table; as I drew closer, I saw that it was a magnificent flint blade, about nine inches long, hafted with sinew onto an antler handle that was about five inches long. The sinew was black with age; the flake scars on the flint were also stained black with some kind of ancient patina.
Directly behind the stone table was a huge niche, about three feet wide and over ten feet tall, that had been crudely hacked into the cave wall. It was empty, but I couldn’t help wondering what sort of statue or idol it might have once held. Shining my light around the cave, I saw many ancient, bare footprints in the clay floor – and a much more recent pair of boot prints, much like the Magellan hikers I was wearing! I was overjoyed that, at the very least, I had discovered the secret Simon was seeking when he died. But I was still no closer to solving the mystery of HOW he had died.
The light function was draining my phone’s battery, so I did a slow, panoramic video of the cave, recording the petroglyphs on the wall, the stone table, and the empty niche at the back of the chamber first. Then I filmed the cave floor, focusing on the dense clay more than the bare rock areas, anxious to get clear images of the all the footprints. Other than my own Magellans, the only modern prints visible were the boots I assumed to be Simon’s. Near the entrance, though, I spotted one huge, odd mark in the clay. It was far too large to be a human footprint, although it was similar in outline. There were no claw marks, so I knew it was not a bear. I studied it for a moment, unsure if it was an actual footprint or some native’s attempt to make an oversized replica of one in the mud.
By now my camera’s battery was below twenty-five percent, so I wriggled back through the narrow opening and back out into the light of day. I looked down the narrow defile that began at the foot of the cliff and followed it outwards with my gaze, until a familiar clump of trees about a mile distant caught my eye. I pulled out my mini-binoculars and saw the sun catching on the yellow crime scene tape I’d seen there yesterday. The clearing where Simon’s body was found lay almost due south of the cave’s mouth!
By now it was late in the afternoon, so I snapped several pictures of the cliff face, some standing at its base, and others from further off as I retreated down the trail towards my camp. Confident I could make a beeline to it from the place Simon had died, I hiked back to camp with a sense of satisfaction at a day’s work well done.
After cooking a steak from my cooler for supper, I plugged my phone into the laptop and studied the petroglyphs from inside the cave with some interest. The images seemed to proceed from left to right in chronological order, with some consistent themes found throughout. In the first panel, a small group of humanoid figures sheltered from a violent storm in the mountains, huddling around a pitifully small campfire. In the next, a dozen or more stood around a campfire, hands over their stomachs, eyes fixated on a single small animal being roasted over the fire. The next drawing showed them marching single file, bows in hand, the mountains growing smaller behind them. Had the Jumanos migrated here from the Rockies? I couldn’t remember enough of their tribe’s history to recall.
The next panel showed them marching single file towards a solitary mountain, looming ahead of them – looking remarkably like a photo of Cerro Diablo I’d seen from its north side while researching the area. Then another drawing of the tribe huddled around the fire, passing along some small scrap of meat or food. But then, in the next drawing, I saw a figure much like the one I’d seen pecked into the cliff face outside the cave entrance – a towering, anthropomorphic monster with huge, curving horns and massive, clawed hands, holding out a deer carcass to the cowering Jumanos in one hand while pointing to one of their children with the other.
The remaining panels were equally disturbing – the horned figure leading the Jumanos to shelter, pointing them to rich flocks of deer and antelope and bison, but always holding out his hand for a child or young maid in return. In several of these pictures, horned birds – owls, I presume – were depicted fluttering around the giant’s head. The last few panels showed the horned figure climbing into a cave, and a group of Jumanos wearing horned headdresses following him, bearing a small child among them. The last scene gave me a chill – the horned figure was standing inside an upright box or carved stone niche, with a giant table in front of him, on which a little girl huddled miserably as the native men looked on, their hands raised, and their heads thrown back. One of them was holding a dagger aloft. I could almost hear the echos of shamanistic chanting as I looked at it, and I was disturbed enough that I closed the laptop for a while.
This discovery could re-write the history of the Jumano tribe, assuming they allowed it to be published. Not many Native American descendants are willing to admit that their ancestors once engaged in cannibalism and human sacrifice, even though the archeological evidence of it is substantial. I needed to find Simon’s missing journal pages if I could – I'm sure he would have been way ahead of my thinking on the issue.
After I finished eating, I cleaned up my trash and bagged it, then put the bag inside an empty cooler. I took my boots off and rubbed my aching feet, and then tried to send an email to Denise, who’d asked me to keep her posted. That done, I plugged my electronics into the generator, and then climbed into my tent and then turned out the light.
Day four – Blast those accursed owls! Their screeching started up about one in the morning and seemed to go on the rest of the night. I finally went outside and yelled at them, shining my flashlight around and even throwing rocks at some of the reflected eyes I could see up in the trees. One of the rocks must have disturbed some animal that was investigating my camp, because I heard something go crashing off through the woods right after my throw. The birds gradually tapered off after that, and I got a couple of hours’ sleep before dawn.
Once I was up and dressed, I drank two cups of coffee, ate an apple and some venison jerky, and set out cross country to the clearing where Simon had been found. It took me about an hour to get there, and the cool morning was giving way to another sunny, warm spring day in the Mountains and Basins region. Once I was inside the little circle of police tape, I used my binoculars to scan the mountainside where I had been the day before. I was able to pick out the basalt cliff where the hidden cave was located, and I plotted several landmarks between the crime scene – if that’s what it was – and the cliff face. If, as I thought, something had spooked Simon near the cave and he had fled south to the spot where his body was found, some trace of his passage might remain, even after the rains and snows of winter had intervened.
The terrain was rugged and difficult, but I stayed lined up on my landmarks as best I could. About halfway to the cliff face I spotted something lying under a juniper tree off to one side that looked familiar. I pushed the branches aside and sure enough, there was Simon’s old khaki hat lying there, a bit faded from the elements, but intact. It was the veteran of dozens of digs and field schools, and as I held it, I could still see his name neatly printed inside the hatband.
I started back towards the cliff face, and about a hundred yards further up the trail I spotted something else unusual. It was not an uncommon artifact for West Texas – a large metate, or grinding stone, lying on the ground. But the natives always left their grinders with the dished-out side facing down, to prevent water from pooling inside it, then freezing and splitting the stone. This rather large sandstone grinder had been flipped over – the dish side was facing up, and next to it I could see a rectangular depression in the ground where the hefty stone artifact had once rested. I knelt down and rolled it back into its original hole, and when I did, I saw that the ground underneath it had been disturbed. A shiny corner of plastic was poking up through the topsoil. I began brushing the loose dirt aside, and revealed a gallon Ziplock storage bag that had been buried there – and inside were several pages covered with Simon’s familiar handwriting, as well as the small digital camera that he carried with him to every dig!
Almost any non-collector would have not noticed the upside-down metate, nor realized that the arrowheads left in the trail were not local Native American artifacts. I wondered if Simon knew I would be coming for him? I tucked the bag into my backpack and Simon’s hat along with it, and then, seeing that the cliff face was closer than the crime scene, returned to the mouth of the cave Simon had discovered and from there went on back to my base camp. For a moment I thought about taking another look into the mysterious cave full of petroglyphs, but I was too anxious to discover my friend’s fate.
So now I’m back here, and I’ve removed the pages from my bag. It’s not even midday yet, but some moisture from the spring rains has got the journal pages stuck together. I’ve built a fire and laid them flat on a small aluminum pan, close enough for the fire’s heat to dry them out but not so close as to pose any danger of combustion. Now I’m about to remove the SD card from Simon’s camera and see what pictures and videos he recorded.
(Later) I think I know why Simon was killed! I’ve been looking at all his photographs for the last hour, and they’ve given me a vital clue. Something went missing from the shaman’s cave between the time he found it and when I followed his trail to it. So far, the camera has only had two videos, both shot here in his base camp, but there are hundreds of pictures, dozens of them from inside the cave. I think he meant to go back and document it on video after the initial discovery, but something kept him from it. The same something that removed – well, I’m getting ahead of myself. As you can see from the photos I copied to this laptop, the petroglyphs, altar table, pots, and knives were all in the exact same position that I found them in. But there was something standing in that carved stone niche that I saw, something massive, something that is now GONE!
I guess the technical term for it would be an idol, but of what material it was made and how it was done is beyond me. It resembled nothing so much as a giant, mummified corpse – perhaps done with animal skins and parts of human bodies? Whatever it was, it gave a diabolically clever impression of having been a real creature at one time – albeit such a creature as could never have existed on this earth! Humanoid in outline, over nine feet tall, its skull sporting horns that looked like those of a deer or antelope, canine teeth that resembled those of a black bear, and massive, clawed hands with six fingers each – it looked like an exceptionally well-done horror movie prop! But it also resembled, more than anything, the nightmarish figure depicted in the petroglyphs on the cavern wall. The Jumanos had not only drawn the hideous deity they worshipped, but they had crafted a sculpture of it that was frightfully detailed.
What would such a remarkable sculpture fetch in the relic market? I have no idea. Given its unique nature and incredible attention to detail, I wouldn’t be surprised if its value was well in the seven-digit range – certainly enough to be worth killing for. I won’t lie, the pictures gave me the creeps, and I was almost glad the monstrosity had been stolen when I entered the cave the day before – happening on it the way Simon must have done would have been a very unnerving experience. The one closeup of its face showed a visage so lifelike I almost expected its eyes to open. How could a primitive culture like the Jumanos have created such a sense of sinister realism?
All right, those pages have been drying out for over an hour now. I’m going to see if I can carefully separate them and read them before they fuse together.
(Even later): Good God, I think Simon must have gone insane out here! I can certainly see how this place would prey on one’s mind after a few days – the isolation, that brooding black mountain behind you, those damned owls with their incessant nocturnal racket. My poor friend must have cracked under the strain. That’s the only explanation for the fervid, unhinged narrative I just read. Either that, or – NO! The alternative is simply too fantastic, and too horrifying, to believe. Simon just went crazy! That’s the only logical explanation. Here, you be the judge. I am about to read out loud from all the missing pages of the journal:
July 23 – Base camp set up. The mountain is about a mile to the north of me, with steep basalt cliffs, deep gullies, and arroyos running up to it. I’ve re-read the copies of MacDowell’s notes several times, trying to glean any details that I may have missed. What I have gathered thus far is that the cave entrance is very well concealed; Grey Hawk said he would have walked right by it if his father had not stopped and pointed it out to him. The trail that leads to it is narrow, and it runs along the base of a black cliff. That is all I can glean from the interview. I see several cliff faces that match the description; tomorrow I will begin searching. I have that bag of colorful modern arrowheads that Darrell gave me; I will use them as trail markers – they're easy to spot, environmentally harmless, and not too obvious to any layman. Not that anyone comes out here anymore – I've seen no sign of hunters, shepherds, or hikers anywhere near, even though we are only a few miles from Dell City. That means that the cave may well have gone untouched for a century or more, and whatever the Jumanos left there could still be there, undisturbed!
July 24 – A long day of fruitless searching. Found a cliff face pretty far up the side of the slope that was about 200 feet wide; I climbed over every inch of the base, and stuck my hand into every crack and fissure I found – narrowly missed getting tagged by a rattlesnake once! - but no sign of a cave or any concealed entrance. There are two more cliff faces further down slope; I figured I’d start with the highest one first. I am exhausted! Stupid owls never shut up around here, it seems. Fortunately, I have some headphones to sleep with; never thought I’d need noise blockers out here, but I’m glad I brought them.
July 25 – Checked half of the largest cliff face today. Found one very small cave, but its entrance was plainly visible from a hundred feet away, and it only went back a few feet. Nothing but abandoned rat’s nests and a few pottery shards, which I documented and left. I’ll try to finish checking it tomorrow. No owls tonight, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching me from the juniper trees. The feeling grew stronger as the evening wore on, but I didn’t hear a sound nor see any sign of anything. Just nerves, I guess! How Guilford would laugh at me if he read this. Now, as if on cue, after I’ve climbed into my sleeping bag and begun to write this, the owls start up their nightly chorus. Time for my headphones!
July 26 - Another long and fruitless day. One big false alarm – a deep crevasse in the cliff face along the second half of the long basalt slope I started searching yesterday. I thought it might open into a wider chamber, but the deeper I wriggled into it, the narrower it got. If I had gone any further, I might have gotten stuck! I shone my light ahead, but the cleft only seemed to get narrower the further it went into the mountainside. No shards, no petroglyphs, no sign of human occupation. One more cliff face on the south slope of the mountain, and then I may have to start working my way around, in case the narrative Grey Hawk gave to MacDowell contained some deliberate misdirection. Cerro Diablo isn’t that big a mountain – surely one cave cannot be impossible to find!
If I don’t locate something tomorrow, I may drive into Dell City to get a hot meal and hear another human voice. Between the owls and the coyotes, I see why they call this corner of Texas the Big Lonesome!
July 27 – Success! Dear God, what incredible success! I made my way to the last of the three cliff faces here on the southern side of the mountain and found a faint but unmistakable trail running along its base. The trail was blocked by boulders in a few places, but always picked up again on the other side of the rock fall. About a hundred yards down the cliff face, I began seeing petroglyphs executed in the distinct style of the Jumanos. One of them seemed to depict a horned giant interacting with members of the tribe; could this be an attempt to depict the deity they called the “First Shaman”? I was so absorbed taking pictures of the petroglyphs I almost missed the cave entrance. A fissure between two massive slabs of basalt, almost invisible until you were past it, opened up into a large oval cave about forty or fifty feet deep. It was a bit of a squeeze to get in, but the passage widened as fast as it had narrowed, and once I was past the entrance I lifted my LED flashlight and illuminated the entire chamber.
As a boy, I read the accounts of Howard Carter’s entry into the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun with great fascination – indeed, my obsession with Egyptian mummies fueled my choice to become an archeologist! I never thought I would experience a moment anything like that monumental discovery. But today, when my light illuminated the Cave of the Shamans, the beauty and majesty and terror of the place literally took my breath away.
The petroglyphs were magnificent, providing a detailed account of the Jumano’s origin myths, and the stone altar table with its flint knife and beautiful pottery was enough to send good old Guilford into a dance of joy. Yet all those things I did not notice until almost an hour later, so captivated was I by the enormous idol standing in the carved stone niche behind the altar table.
Idols are not a common artifact in North America – effigies in stone and pottery have been found, especially in a mortuary context, but I have never seen or heard of anything remotely resembling the figure that loomed behind the altar table in that cave! I took many photographs, which I have since enlarged and studied on my laptop here at the base camp. The level of detail the Jumanos achieved in this sculpture are beyond anything ever hinted at in any previous archeological discovery on this content.
More than anything, the giant standing in the carved niche resembled a mummified body – so much so in fact that the illusion of reality increased, rather than diminished, upon closer examination. Obviously, this thing cannot be the remains of any actual creature that has ever existed on this planet, but my eyes kept trying to convince me otherwise! For one thing, it is larger than even the most extreme cases of human gigantism on record, standing over three meters tall. Its form is basically humanoid – bipedal, with long, sturdy legs and once-muscular arms – but each foot had four widely splayed, clawed toes, and each hand featured six long fingers with sharp claws at the end. The face – even now, with it well out of sight, I am unnerved by the photographs I took of that face! Three-forked horns sprouting from its forehead, massive eye sockets twice the size of a human’s, and long, curving tusks jutting up from both upper and lower jaws – it was truly a nightmare-inducing image!
But the most remarkable thing about this idol was how carefully it had been constructed. I think the natives must have used real human bones and skin to create the frame, perhaps incorporating extra vertebrae and splicing limb bones to give the monstrous figure its abnormal height, and then stretched a new frame of skin over the whole thing. The most puzzling thing about it was the complete absence of any visible seams or stitching! The creature did wear what appeared to be bearskin breeches and some sort of shaggy cape over its shoulders, but most of its body was simply bare skin, tightly stretched over ribs and limb bones, and nowhere could I find any sign of the skin being sewn together. How were the Jumanos able to construct such a thing without giving any trace that it was artificially done? I had no idea, but I knew this thing must be studied, and studied closely. NAGPRA be damned; this was the most important archeological discovery in America since Spiro mound! Surely the Jumano elders would be proud enough of their ancestors’ magnificent creation to let it be shared with the world.
My head is still spinning with the shock of discovery; I’ve been studying the pictures I took in the cave for hours now. It’s past dark and I need to plug my electronics into the generator battery to recharge, but I can’t quit looking at the pictures I took. I discovered the Cave of the First Shaman! I’ve started composing a dozen papers in my head, each one more sweeping and groundbreaking than the one before. THIS is what archeology is all about! Now to sleep the slumber of the joyous and vindicated.
July 28 – An odd day. Owls screeched and wailed around the camp all night; even with my headphones I hardly slept. Yet I felt strangely energized as I drank my coffee and headed back to the cave; I couldn’t wait to study the petroglyphs and other artifacts which I’d neglected to even take pictures of the day before.
I planted my little flint trail markers all the way to the mouth of the cave, so that I can find my way back when I return to do an official survey and site report this fall. I arrived at the cave around 10 AM, and once I entered, I gave only the most cursory inspection of the First Shaman idol; I knew if I started studying it too closely, I would lose track of time and waste the opportunity to record the other artifacts and art. So I carefully photographed, measured, and documented each panel of the petroglyphs that ran all the way around the wall of the chamber.
They seem to depict the mythical account of the Jumano’s discovery by the First Shaman, who led them to a land rich in game and wild foods, but always demanded a price for his aid. In Jumano folk tales I had heard, the First Shaman demanded that children be sworn to his service and trained them to become tribal shamans, but these drawings seemed to depict an earlier, bloodier, and less benevolent form of the myth. Had the Jumanos actually engaged in human sacrifice in this cave long ago?
I think my nerves began to work on me at that point, because as I documented the petroglyphs on the right-hand wall, I could have sworn I heard a slow, creaky movement in the cave with me. I spun around and shone my flashlight at the entrance, and all around the cave. Nothing had changed, except that, for a half second, I could have sworn the statue of the First Shaman had turned its head to look at me. Yet when I shone my light directly on it, I could see that the bizarre figure was in exactly the same position I left it in.
But then, something odd happened. After photographing the pottery jars and knife on the altar table, I set my camera down for a moment to massage my aching temples – I had a fierce headache brewing. But suddenly I found myself standing in front of the idol, staring intently at its face – only to discover, when I came to myself, that three hours had passed! My LED light was dimming, so I quickly gathered my gear and left the cave behind.
Now, as I sit here studying the petroglyphs on my computer screen, I keep returning to that last grisly image – the young girl kneeling on the altar table, hands bound, as the shamans of the Jumano tribe dance around her, with the statue of the First Shaman looming over them. I recalled the hafted flint knife lying there on the slab of stone, and the strange, dark patina covering the grey flint blade.
Suddenly, I remembered a passage in the Grey Hawk interview that I had ignored before. It took on a whole new and more sinister meeting, as I recalled the old shaman’s words, recorded nearly a century ago: ‘My little sister accompanied us to the mountains, but she did not return home with us.’ When I first read it, I assumed she had left with representatives of another tribe or village. But what if she hadn’t?
July 29 – Dear God! The Spanish knew. They knew what they were talking about when they named this place ‘The Devil’s Mountain!’ There’s a reason I couldn’t find any stitches or seams on that mummified monstrosity in the cave – because it isn’t a human construct! It is the desiccated corpse of a very real, monstrous creature, and it IS NOT FULLY DEAD! I returned to the cave this morning to film the First Shaman effigy up close, in full detail. I set up two LED flashlights on the altar table, and slowly approached the bizarre figure standing in the niche. It seemed even more realistic than it had the day before, and for some reason I found myself reluctant to approach it too closely.
But I am a scientist, and I was determined not to let juvenile superstition ruin my discovery. So I walked right up to the giant figure propped up inside the niche, leaning in nice and close and preparing to take some video of that leering face with its monstrous fangs. Just as I prepared to hit RECORD, those leathery eyelids rolled back, and I found myself staring into two hideous, crimson orbs that flamed with hatred and hunger! I shrieked like a child and retreated across the room, barely having the presence of mind to grab one of the lights. I kept it trained on the monstrous creature as I backed away, unwilling to turn my back on it for an instant. With a ghastly creaking and popping, the First Shaman stepped out of his niche and began slowly advancing across the floor towards me.
I felt the crevasse that concealed the cave entry opening up in the wall behind me and quickly wriggled through, dropping my camera as I fled. How quickly I ran back to my familiar base camp! Now I am sitting here, shaking my head, and trying to confront the impossible reality of what I saw.
There is no evidence of a race of ten foot tall, horned men anywhere in the archeological record. Mummies don’t come back to life just because you shine a light on them. There’s no such thing as monsters. I kept telling myself that over and over, and as I did, I slowly began to calm down. More than likely, some hallucinogenic fumes inside the cave had preyed on my already jumpy nerves and caused me to imagine that the giant figure had returned to life. Wasn’t that easier to believe than the alternative?
And yet, as darkness gathers, I realize that there were no fumes in the cave, and that my eyes saw what they saw. Or did they? I no longer know. What has happened to me.
July 30 – IT WAS HERE!!!! Last night, I could not sleep, no matter how hard I tried. The owls were no longer hooting and calling outside my tent, they were screaming! I took my remaining flashlight outside around 3 in the morning and shone it into the trees. There they were, at least fifty of them, their cursed glowing eyes reflecting my pale light back at me. But as I swung the light around, it caught on a tree trunk in a spot where I knew no tree stood. That was when I realized that the “trunk” was a standing figure, its legs together, barely twenty feet away, watching me. Hands shaking, I raised my light up, until I saw those two blood red orbs glaring out at me from the hideous, fanged face of the “First Shaman!” Fortunately, I had brought a pistol with me to deal with rattlesnakes and coyotes, and I snatched it from its holster and opened fire – but the huge figure, moving at remarkable speed, disappeared into the trees before I could see if I hit it or not. I retired to my tent and huddled there, flashlight in one hand and pistol in the other, until the day finally dawned.
No one can know. The Shaman’s Cave is a myth; there is no Jumano sacred site here. I spent the last hour completely destroying my laptop; now I have to return to the cave and retrieve my camera. Only this journal shall remain, and I may well decide to burn it when I get back to civilization. I know I have to retrieve my camera, but how I dread setting foot in that accursed cave again! Still, better to do it now, while the sun is high in the sky.
LATER – the niche was empty. I stepped into the cave, and quickly ran to the table and grabbed my camera and flashlight, and turned to leave. That was when I saw him standing there, blocking the way to the entrance. He’d set a trap for me, clever Shaman, and now I had no way out.
An alien presence found its way into my head then; for a moment, I saw a series of images in my mind – of my face in all the archeological journals, of movies and TV shows about my discovery, of talk show appearances and supermodel girlfriends and wealth beyond my dreams. All mine, the wordless voice whispered, for a small price. A price of blood – but the blood of other people, never my own. The images were powerful, seductive, insistent. I could have the life I’d always dreamed of, as long as I provided the First Shaman with his meals every now and then. For a moment, I was tempted.
Then, I raised my gun and fired.
A hideous shriek filled the cave, and I darted past the towering figure, even as black blood dripped to the floor from the hole in its chest. I fled as fast as I could, due south, skipping my campsite altogether, hoping to get back to my Jeep before dark.
I’m sitting here beneath a tree, on top of an old Indian corn grinder, jotting down these last pages before I rip out these notes and bury them with my camera. That. . . that THING is not dead. I can hear its angry cries behind me, getting closer, and I can feel its alien thoughts in my head, no longer making promises but threats of death and suffering. No more time to spare.
HE IS COMING.
The first time I read that last entry, I will admit, a chill ran down the back of my neck. Poor Simon! The isolation, the loneliness, and the macabre nature of his discovery must have caused him to have a psychotic break. From the pictures I had viewed, I could easily imagine how that hideous idol might have preyed on his mind until it drove him mad. But then I recalled – Simon's back. Those parallel gouges that cut through his coat, and his skin. SIX parallel gouges. No animal on this earth has such claws. . . but the First Shaman did.
No. That’s ridiculous. It couldn’t be real – could it?
Now the owls are starting up again, in broad daylight, no less! Simon’s journal must be getting to me – I swear I can hear
NOTE from the Hudspeth County Sheriff’s office: This narrative was recorded on a laptop owned by Darrell Guilford, a history professor from Killeen State University, who entered the Cerro Diablo Wildlife Preserve on May 16 of this year, to look for clues about the death of his colleague Simon Ledbetter last summer.
Despite an extensive search by deputies and volunteers, no trace of Professor Guilford has been found, although there were significant blood spatters around his campsite. The journal and camera he mentioned were not recovered, nor was any trace of the cave opening he described ever found – perhaps because fresh rockslides have buried a large portion of the cliff that he described. Pending any further discovery of evidence, Dr. Guilford’s case file shall be listed as “unsolved,” and his status as “missing, presumed dead.”
