Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations by Eric J. Guignard (Editor) Read Free Book Online

the snakes weren’t painted. Instead formed by thousands, millions of deep hash marks incised into the adobe plaster, cut so their shadows formed scales and rattles—murals, appreciable only from a distance.
    Lyddy wandered among the hat boxes. Encountered not so much as a mouse. The darkness was too thick to see within the buildings.
    He left, slipped and scrambled back up the slope, clambered through the hole. The horse and pack mule were nowhere to be seen. Lyddy swore and slapped his hat against his knee until he found them a hundred yards down the trail. He led them back. Both shied away from the crevice, his chestnut with the crooked blaze whinnying and pulling sharply on the reins. The animal instinctually feared the pit and the broken limbs it threatened, Lyddy reasoned. He hobbled them a safe distance away under a pinyon.
    He slid to the cavern floor again with an oil lantern and a pick taken from the mule’s load of supplies. Lit the lantern. Restarted his exploration. Now he could see inside the silo structures. Dwellings, he guessed, bowls and blankets and metates arranged on low benches. As if the owners had straightened up before leaving on a trip. No, Lyddy thought, that was wrong—it was too neat and tidy, as if nobody had ever lived here at all. More like a storefront window, items arranged for display. Corncobs lay shriveled in dishes. Whatever liquids had been in the gourds had long since evaporated.
    Other chambers were mysterious to Lyddy, oubliettes dug into the rock, their only entrance or egress a ladder descending into shadows his lantern couldn’t resolve. His heart beat too hard to go down into them.
    The Cliff Dwellers , they called them. The makers of these places. Built them and then vanished.
    Lyddy searched and searched, amazed, dumbstruck, down alleys and across courtyards. He stopped peeking into the houses, their furnishings redundant. Truth was, they unnerved him. Some of the interior walls were painted. Handprints, bighorns, snakes. Ordinary animals. But there were also lizards walking on two legs. And strange figures with square heads and geometric features, feathers sprouting in place of hair. Kachinas, Lyddy knew. Spirits. The Hopi and Zuni carved fetishes of them. Their weird faces, their staring eyes. Lyddy didn’t like them.
    He passed a black window. The swinging light of the lantern caught something. A glint, a glimmer. Lyddy thrust his lantern through the opening.
    A golden statue.
    Less than a foot tall. Standing on a bench beside the usual bowls and dishes. Blocky head, ears like pie slices. A kachina fashioned from gold.
    Lyddy stood slack-jawed, asking himself if he was seeing what he was seeing. He waved the lantern, the light catching and reflecting the surfaces of the figure.
    He forgot his dislike, went inside. Picked it up. Heavy in his hand, heavier than it looked. Heavy because it was made of gold. He pushed his thumbnail into it, marked the surface.
    Solid gold.
    More metal than he had panned or picked in a decade of prospecting. Just lying there, in a hat-box house under the earth, down a hole Lyddy had accidentally tumbled into.
    “Hello there, hello?” A voice said.
    Lyddy yelped, turned.
    A man walked into the house, calling again, “Hello there, hello?”
    Lyddy dropped the figure, almost the light too. His knife leapt into his palm and he thrust in the same instant. The man grunted, collapsed.
    Hands shook so bad he couldn’t stab the blade again if he wanted. He went over. Held up the lantern, looked down. Gazed at his own face, his own clothes— him , lying open-eyed and dead on the stone.
    Lyddy sprinted from the house, through the alleys, sprang down the ladder, up the slope. His chest constricted and his guts cramped. Didn’t stop until open sky was overhead.
    “Hello there, hello?”
    Nearly jumped out of his skin. A mirror image of himself shuffled erratically by the horses.
    Lyddy lunged for his Winchester in the saddle scabbard. Pumped the