Knee Deep

Chapter 1

She will be coming, the man chanted to himself. Exhausted and numb from sitting all day on the hard ground, legs deadened by pins and needles, he reminded himself that there was a reason for all of this. Someone discovered his secret … and would be back to claim their prize.

Voices echoed from inside the cave's main cavern. This was unusual, since the Hagan Mineral Mine was as much a tourist hot spot as was the county morgue. Peering through the foggy lens of his twenty-year-old binoculars, he spotted three students leaving the main cavern, each holding sagging duffel bags, obviously with more than their five pounds of allowable fill. The lack of wind, which he had cursed all afternoon, turned out to be in his favor every time a car came down the dirt road, allowing him to hear every bump and crackle.

He detected a vehicle a few miles away now. With slow, practiced movements he rotated his head toward the direction of the sound. The far-off echo of the vehicle's impact upon the ground made a crunchy noise like someone jogging on a bed of corn flakes. But the next two sounds gave it away for him — the slamming of a car door followed by running footsteps. He stayed concealed behind one of the orange boulders on the northern knot of the mine. There was no sense rushing to catch a glimpse of whoever wanted, needed, to get to the mine before total darkness enveloped the forgotten landscape. He would find them eventually.

It won't be long now.

Several things bothered him about the discovery. If the small settlement had been dated at 1000 years old, engineers had only started mining the site for minerals one hundred years ago. Where had the access been for the first nine hundred years? Every Sunday for the last ten months, he and his worn canvas bag of rock hunting and spelunking tools had driven up to Dixon, New Mexico, burrowed through the twenty feet of loose rock, chiseled out the rest of the opening and pushed his way down into the narrow crevice to gape at the perfectly-preserved remains. Was it a forgotten civilization like Chachapoyas in Peru, or had these people simply vanished overnight like the ancient Anasazi?

He had scanned every last detail of the interior, drawing diagrams, preparing a precise map of the location and designing a topography of the site and its geographical features. He had even yelled up toward the rocky ceiling of the opening to gage the timbre of the sound of his voice. The echo was fast-moving and faded quickly, and seemed to stop at something on the ceiling beyond the point where his eyes could see. Odd, though. If that opening lead to the outside, why would the sound stop? The opening at the ceiling didn't go straight up, but funneled upwards toward the right. Even so, how would rain and debris not find its way down onto the untouched dirt floor?

He had counted on claustrophobia to be one of deterrents to keep others away from his discovery. Enclosed spaces never bothered him much. In fact, they were one of the features that first triggered his passion for spelunking. But this dwelling bore no resemblance to any of the other North American caves he had explored in the past. This one was different.

From his research at University of New Mexico's main library, the approximate age of the site seemed consistent with the Pueblo II period of southwest history dating back to about 900 A. D. He remembered reading about a particular settlement at the site of the Far View Ruins near Mesa Verde where a variety of pottery artifacts had been found. Black-on-white and gray mugs, bowls, and less recognizable pieces hand molded out of native clay and inlaid with turquoise and other precious stones. And the pottery created during this period seemed at least similar to the artifacts he had found within the walls of the dwelling.

Some were still partially buried and cracked but, for the most part, good condition considering the obvious. But more than anything else, they were moneymakers, the types of artifacts to seal a man's career in place for the rest of his life. Maybe the Smithsonian would name a wing of the museum after him, or the Discovery Channel… but at his age, the man knew the limits of his own heart, and knew that the temptation to sell the artifacts would be far too great to resist.

The uncanny lack of surface disturbances in the cave implied what he both hoped and feared more than anything — that in all this time, no one had come across this dwelling except for him. The very thought made his stomach contract to the size of a pencil eraser. Nothing in his years of readings had described a cave like this. Nothing had prepared him for underground archaeology in a sheltered inner pocket of an abandoned mineral mine between Española and Taos on deserted Route 75. And surely if the few residents of Dixon knew about it, someone, sometime in the last hundred years would have made their way down the precarious dirt road to the parking lot, through a ditch and down a rocky path to the mine entrance, dug and burrowed through sharp rock shards like a sightless rodent and found it like he had.

But something else bothered him still. A sound. The kind so consistently rhythmic that could only be made by something inorganic. If its pitch weren't so low, it might have been water dripping from an upper part of the ceiling. But he had thought it through a hundred times. Peering cautiously through the sidewall of the 12' x 8' dwelling, a dirt-floored space entirely protected by the intrusion of nature's elements and human curiosity, no reason seemed apparent why a uniform tapping sound could be coming from the top of that opening. He had climbed to the top of the berm on the outside northern knob of the mine and, after a day of digging, had looked inside the underground clearing from the top down. But the tapping, a noise that had repeated in his mind and haunted his sleep for the last month, was not audible from the top of the berm. Only from the underground.

The man's eyes made another perfunctory scan of the entrance. A young woman with red hair tucked under a baseball cap skulked down the rocky path toward the mine entrance as the last sliver of sun spilled into the horizon. How had he not heard her car, if she had even driven there? She glanced back every few seconds, just as he had seen someone do the previous weekend. She's the one, he thought, who came to steal my treasure.

She's going to pay.

So he used his finely tuned skills in reading human behavior to predict the woman's thoughts. She looked tall, thirties, attractive, strong but uncertain. No duffel bag with her, no water, no tools, and just the clothes on her back, a baseball cap and a light jacket tied around her waist suggested a compulsive whim to grab a few artifacts, take some notes about the site, perform a cursory authentication, and eventually notify the university of what she'd found.

The dim white rod of light from her flashlight jerked left and right. She had dug up rocks with her bare hands to find her way once again to the cave that he alone had discovered months before.

But he had been the first.

The woman coughed gently, then convulsively, as had been his own pattern during every visit. The atmosphere of cloudy air could infiltrate the lungs and bronchial tubes like smoke from a fire. A discarded tissue laid at his feet now and, just ahead a few paces, the baseball cap. He knew what she was doing in there. Digging up his pots. Unearthing his treasure.

Maybe I'm wrong, he countered to himself. Maybe she's a scholar, pure and simple, a scientist who wants a team of archaeologists to excavate that cave so our civilization can learn about our collective cultural past. Maybe all she wants is to see those artifacts preserved in the Natural History Museum.

And maybe it was snowing in hell right now.

The itchy tingle of pins and needles returned to his legs and feet. He stood weakly, knowing he would need his strength to help him think clearly and determine his next critical course of action, whatever it might be. The wind howled outside the cave and the sky had draped a charcoal cloak over the eerie landscape. A forceful gust fanned through the entrance road and parking lot. What is she doing in there? If she has found the dwelling and made her way to it, how long does it take to just look around? The inner cave is smaller than a prison cell. He looked at his watch and decided to wait a bit longer. Fifteen, twenty minutes.

A small stone jutted up against his shoe, kicked by something in the direction of the underground dwelling. She was emerging. From the dim light of her flashlight aimed inside the inner dwelling, he saw the jacket previously tied around her waist held out in front of her with her bare arms gripping it. The woman's body, head first and prostrate, struggled carefully across the rocky floor of a thousand year old dwelling into the main artery of the Hagan Mineral Mine. Only visible were her outstretched arms and white knuckles gripping a large pot covered by a jacket, along with her head and the tops of both shoulders. For seconds, his mind struggled to process this crazy, unthinkable realization. He watched her delicate white skin scraped by the tight, confining rocky entrance he had worked for weeks to protect against people like her.

Just a few feet away, he lurked in the shadowy darkness and watched her take a moment to rest. She breathed heavily as rigid fingers gripped the large pot. He heard the echoey thud of the pot hitting the floor of the mine as she struggled to balance its weight with her thin arms.

"Damn it," the woman cursed.

Then he heard the echo again. And again.

"You'll break it if you're not careful," the man said in a solid voice, out of a strength and stature he barely recognized as his own.

"Who are you? Police?" the woman strained from her awkward, prostrate angle. "BLM, maybe?"

"Why are you here?" the man replied.

"I don't see a badge, so can I safely assume I'm not going to jail for this?"

"Why would you?Are you a criminal?"

"Hell no," she bellowed. "I'm no looter, for God's sake. I'm a student. I'm bringing this artifact to my graduate advisor to see if we should bring in the natural history museum for carbon dating. "

The man took two steps forward and peered down into the opening behind her, crossed his arms, and shook his head slowly. "You're not going anywhere. "

The woman's body jerked at the sound of his words. Her knees contracted to pull herself backward into the cave, but when she realized her position was all wrong for this type of maneuver, she lay sideways and tried to pull her feet toward her.

"It's too late for that now," he said.

"Too late for what?"

"A quick getaway. That's what you were thinking. Wondering how far away you are from the entrance, estimating my height and body weight, looking for a weapon in my hand. "

The woman's bright green eyes scanned the interior, barely visible now from the dark thicket all around them. "You're taking it?" she said, finally lowering her gaze to the artifact in her hands.

He snickered, and said, "It's mine. Why shouldn't I?"

"Yours?"

"I dug it up, I discovered it. "The man felt his voice rise. "And now you've tried to take it from me. "

"Sick son of a bitch. I'll see you in hell first. "She pulled the pot toward her and curled her body away from the inner cave, scrambling to place the treads of her sneakers against the dirt for traction. But the rubber soles skidded in tiny, desperate circles.

As the familiar sensation of rage rising in his body returned, he searched the mine floor for an object, anything. He noticed a jagged boulder roughly the size of a small cinderblock a few inches from his feet as he turned his head toward the origin of a faint rhythmic tapping sound. It seemed to originate from deep inside the cavernous walls of the mine, perhaps from inside the dwelling itself.

The man felt himself enter a bubble like he had done only one other time in his life -- a viscous, numb and detached womb devoid of anything human, absent of emotion or feeling of any kind. Inside that bubble, he did not think about why this woman, this stranger, should not get what was rightfully his. He did not think about the legal consequences of his actions, because there was no time now to worry about that. His fury flowed like molten lava in his face and neck. His eyes closely scrutinized the pot partially wrapped in the woman's jacket. From where he stood, he could see it was shaped like a bowling ball with a wide opening on the top, wide enough for a month's worth of corn or other grains to be stored in. With quick hands he came forward and separated the pot from the jacket, picked up the boulder and used the weight of his upper body to lower it in a blunt jerk upon the back of the woman's skull. The loud "ugh" that released from her lips resembled something between a cough and a hiccup. The large rock fell from his hands and rolled a few feet away from the woman.

He hissed and scrambled in the darkness to find it again. Listening for human sounds and scanning his opened palms across the mine floor, his hands detected the familiar shape and lifted it again. The flashlight beam flicked quickly off and then on again. But even in the cave's innate darkness, he could see her pressed deeply into the ground, hands twitching, head moving just slightly up and down. The red hair that had been fastened into a ponytail was matted now in a gushing red mass, darkening as it began to dry -- blood. It was as if he were watching her very life essence drain from her body onto the cold, unforgiving floor. He felt a flu-like sourness envelop his stomach and chest. What am I doing here, he asked himself.

The woman moaned quietly and looked as if she might be regaining consciousness. With hard, jerky movements, she raised her head an inch at a time as her right hand rose up to touch the back of her neck. A moan emerged from deep inside her throat and echoed against every exposed surface of the interior. With effort, she raised her head up, up further, until her large green eyes focused on the man's face. An expression of bewilderment quickly transformed into liquid terror as her eyes moved to the large rock held between his two hands.

"All because of some stupid pottery?" she said, reaching a hand up to her head.

"Stupid?You don't fool me for a minute. If you thought it was stupid, you wouldn't have driven up here in the dead of night, alone, completely unprepared, to unearth it from its thousand year old tomb. Would you?"

The woman moaned again, and rested her forehead on the edge of her arm, too weakened for much else. "You're not a believer. Just someone who sees dollar signs everywhere. These pieces," she leaned up and pointed toward the cave, "this civilization is preserved right here in this capsule of frozen time and space. And you want to rob the world of its history and beauty. I knew there were people like you in the world. I just never met one until now. "

Her body froze, and the green eyes stared blankly at the ceiling. Holding onto the boulder with a tighter grip this time, the man jerked it high in the air and brought it down twice as hard as before upon the back of her skull, just to be sure.

The man looked behind him, shuddered, and then got caught in the eerie silence all around him. Half of his consciousness seemed to be examining the mess he had made while the other half simply observed what was in front of him now from the pillow of his protective mental bubble. He slowly put down the boulder, and then decided against it. Evidence. Her hands finally released from the jacket as he grasped them in order to pull her body completely out of the opening. In order to have room to crawl in there himself, he had to pull her out first. He recalled from his previous visits the general dimensions of the inner cave and how, only in the very center of it, a man his size could stand erect. So not wanting to disturb the artifacts he knew were arranged along the perimeter, he moved within a small area. Once inside the inner dwelling, he inhaled the ancient musty odor through widened nostrils. A different odor penetrated the area now -- the woman's perfume. Again, weakness streamed through his head and limbs, this time composed in equal parts of remorse and shock. He reached through the narrow opening to where her body lay and grabbed her sneakers, then her ankles, and from there pulled her inside, careful not to disturb any of the contents. He laid her out on the floor of the tiny cave just as he had found her, on her stomach, arms held above her head. Glancing down at her, the thought crossed his mind to close her eyelids and turn her face to the side so it wouldn't get pushed against the dirt crushing her nose and mouth.

He allowed himself one last look at her, this young woman who had been alive five minutes ago and now lay flaccid on the bare ground. He examined her red hair and tried to memorize her clothing, not quite sure why. Dark blue jeans, sneakers, white T-shirt, thin faded green sweatshirt, leather-banded watch. But then, looking at her cut, dirty hands, the very same hands that had tried to exhume what was rightfully his, anger took curiosity's place.

In the stir of pulling her body into the cave, he had unwittingly blocked his own exit out of the dwelling. There simply hadn't been time to consider everything. He struggled with her leaden weight unsure of whether to drag her or push on one side. Against both possibilities, the man rolled her body to the side of the cave, pulled her in a seated position and then moved away, resisting the fiendish urge to look back and examine what he'd done. He took stock of the articles left outside the dwelling - the large boulder, pocketbook, jacket and a perfectly preserved Pueblo II Indian pot traditionally garnished and decorated. He flashed the beam from the light on the outside of the pot and then rubbed his eyes when they focused on something that was not there, could not have been there. There was no way. It was probably just nervous exhaustion causing him to hallucinate. He shined the light on the pot one more time and carefully pulled out the contents of it, contents he hadn't noticed before. He squinted his eyes, gazed down at the object and felt his entire body shiver.

Sealing up the inner cave would take a good hour or so under the best of conditions, let alone cold, wind, darkness, raw hands and the cold, nauseous feeling in the pit of his stomach. Setting the pot twenty feet away from the opening, the man lowered himself on all fours to survey the area and, as he did this, the spare mini-flashlight he'd tucked into his sock fell out and rolled along the gravel floor. He picked it up and, after flicking the ON switch, allowed himself one final indulgence - to peep through the small cave's opening. A sickening smile crept across his lips at the same time that a now-familiar despair swept through his entrails. For a second, his vision blacked out and he felt his body weight teeter to one side. He blinked, aimed the flashlight beam through the opening and pushed his head and shoulders through to get a good look.

The body was seated against a wall with her head facing straight ahead. The expression on the face was frozen in horror or disbelief, he couldn't decide which, and her mouth gaped unnaturally on the right side. The eyes, previously bright green, were closed tight onto where a mixture of dirt, sand from the crushed rock and blood had crusted in the inner corners. It was evident where blood from the head wounds had gushed and then dried quickly from the cold, dry air at the crown of her head. After the first blow, the hair had fallen out of the rubber band all around her face. The rubber band, he repeated to himself in a panic. He considered this detail and quickly scanned the rocky floor. Evidence such as this would undoubtedly carry blood, hair, scalp tissue, DNA, and maybe even tissue and fibers from his own body. He shimmied out of the inner dwelling and felt along the icy cold ground. No more than five seconds later, his right hand detected the rubber band on the ground near his right foot. He exhaled deeply and, before picking it up with his bare hands, pulled his shirt sleeve down over his fingers and stuffed it in the front right pocket of his pants.

The man exhaled out of relief as he limped toward the parking lot, and remembered how he had always been lucky that way. Lucky when it came to crime and secrets.