Subterrestrial by Michael McBride Read Free Book Online Page A

left with a single course of action. If he wanted to find the truth, there was only one place to go.
    Down.
    “Where do you think he’s going to land?” the woman beside him asked. Her nose and cheeks were bright red and she looked like she was part lion with the fur fringe around the hood of her parka. “We’ve been over water for half an hour.”
    Nabahe’s teeth chattered when he spoke.
    “I was w-wondering the same t-thing.”
    “I might not be qualified to teach geography, but I’ve looked at the globe long enough to know that the only thing out here is ocean and ice.”
    “I c-can’t believe people actually live out here.”
    “It’s not people we’re out here to find, is it?” She smiled and proffered her hand. “Brooke Calder. Marine biologist.”
    He looked at her curiously as he shook her gloved hand. Surely she was being flown out here for an entirely different reason than he was.
    “Ahiga Nabahe. Anthropologist.” He shrugged self-consciously. “Retired.”
    “Looks like we’re in for a little excitement,” the pilot said. “I’m getting reports of winds coming off the Arctic in the neighborhood of seventy knots.”
    Nabahe looked back out the window. All he could see through the blowing snow was a whole lot of nothing.
    The man who showed up at his house had told him that various confidentiality agreements prohibited him from disclosing exactly where they were going, but that all would be revealed soon enough, even though Nabahe had signed his name on roughly a hundred legally binding forms that prevented him from so much as hinting that anyone had ever knocked on his door. There should have been alarm bells going off in his head. And there might have been. The problem was his curiosity was more than piqued. After all, the man with the silver hair had shown up with a rubbing nearly identical to his own, only unlike any he’d ever seen before.
    It was in a cave below the peak of Baboquivari Mountain on the Tohono O’odham Reservation in Southern Arizona that he had discovered the first one. By then, Nabahe’s eyesight had diminished to such an extent that he could hardly see by the light of both a headlamp and a flashlight, let alone well enough to clearly see the petroglyphs on the walls. He’d taken to grazing his fingertips along the stone while feeling for the telltale indentations and grooves.
    The O’odham believed that the sacred cave was where I’itoi, their mischievous creator god, first led their ancestors from the underworld. The pictograms and petroglyphs he’d been following had been created for one simple purpose: to be seen. But what good were pictures to people who dwelled in darkness? In theory, people emerging from the underworld would be every bit as eager to tell their tales as their light-dwelling descendants, only the means by which they did so would be informed by senses other than sight. It only made sense that theirs would be a story told by feel, a relief shaped by subtle gradations in the stone made by smoothing rather than by carving, by polishing instead of painting.
    Nabahe’d been so surprised when he detected the first one that he threw himself backward so quickly he tripped over his own feet and hit the ground hard enough to chip a tooth. He’d even apologized to whoever was in there with him for groping his face. It was only when he shined his lights directly onto the wall and realized that he was completely alone inside the cavern that he had understood. What he’d discovered was as clear as day to anyone who traced the walls’ contours with sensitive fingertips, but it was invisible to the naked eye. It wasn’t until he returned with a pencil and paper and created a rubbing of what turned out to be a face, one he knew would haunt him to his dying day, that he was able to show off his findings.
    The department chair hadn’t openly mocked him when he displayed his rubbing any more than the editor of the school’s Journal of Southwest