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the second floor revealed nothing, no more blood
and no bodies. She felt a little relieved until
she imagined him being part of the mass of rotting
bodies in the Pit. That thought drove her out of
the funeral home and over to her car. She didn t
leave, she just felt better in something large,
solid and familiar.
CHAPTER 14
The following several weeks were spent trying
to explain the unexplainable both to themselves and
to anyone else who would listen. The media was
again unavoidable, the whole train of vans having
followed the Apache mobile command center
immediately to Hawthorne from the farm field.
Welcome or not, they had to be dealt with, but
General Cochise wouldn t speak to anyone, not even
the NNS as usual. The loss of three more of her
soldiers in peacetime hit her hard, particularly
the loss of Atwell. She had come to like and
respect Atwell for some strange reason having spent
the last few days of his life with him. She found
herself reacting to his death more intensely than
she even had to Ilya O Connor s, and that death had
shaken the entire Intertribal Council. She had
felt O Connor s death was personal until then. She
had known Atwell and that was personal.
The General remained in Hawthorne through the
following weeks with a few of her soldiers, the
fully expanded command center still sitting on the
road in front of the dead house. She hadn t gone
back into the dead house for dozens of reasons, but
teams from all over the Nations were scouring the
cave uncovered over the course of the nightmare.
At some time in the past, the cave had clearly been
accessible from the surface. The builders of the
dead house had apparently come across the buried
cave during construction of a basement for the
funeral home, and the new owner of the land, a
Pierre Lemonte, had hoarded the find with a zeal
generally found in gold prospectors. There was no
telling what ancient native artifacts he had
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unearthed and sold to build his wealth. No doubt
greedy European immigrants whose cultural treasures
remained safe across the ocean had similarly
desecrated Cahokia. But both the newly found cave
and Cahokia would be preserved from then on in
memory of the ancients.
Per expert opinion, the petroglyphs in the
cave predated the Mississippian culture, and were
probably done by the first inhabitants of the
continent prior to the Adena and Hopewell cultures,
making them the oldest Native relics found to date.
Initial interpretation of the cave writings
suggested the cave wall was a connection or bridge
to the spirit world. Further translation of the
cave was already well under way, and had amazingly
been given a major leap by the scrawlings of an old
man who had worked for the Lemontes in his earlier
years. How he had managed to interpret them was
unknown, but he had reportedly died in a nursing
home in the recent past and sent the parchment to
his only known relative in the Nations. Not by
coincidence, the relative, Janet Portraire, was the
same person who had led the General s soldiers
through the dead house when the cave was
rediscovered. Janet had been tasked by her old
uncle with closing the gate and stopping the
spirits, neither of them knowing that the gate
could never be closed. The spirit world was
integrally related to her own, overlapping and
apparently intersecting it at numerous places in
the universe, notably places known for their
mystical or religious power. At least that was the
theory being touted by anyone with an interest in
the subject. The suspected sites were too numerous
to list, but among the ones postulated were
Stonehenge and Easter Island. Modern evidence of
their significance hadn t been definitively
documented until then. Skeptics still abounded of
course, but having seen the dark spirit pass into
the cave wall with a clap of thunder that knocked
her off her feet, the General s belief in the
spirit world had been greatly enhanced. She didn t
exactly have a choice in the matter.
The General spent a large part of her time in
Hawthorne speaking to the woman, Janet, who had
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gone into the dead house with her soldiers. Janet
was exceptional when it came to diverting the media
away from her and that was nearly priceless. She
also had the guts of an Apache soldier with an
additional benefit of not fearing the dead. The
General liked her almost immediately and that was
rare. It could have been because they experienced
the same bizarre and horrific event, but the
connection had most likely been there before that
when Janet asked for the opportunity to go into the
dead house, something the General couldn t imagine
ever doing herself.
The General s presence during the traumatic
event brought a tremendous amount of credibility to
the story Janet repeatedly had to tell the media
and other investigators. Without her support,
Janet believed she would have been locked away like
her old uncle.
The rediscovery of the Pit brought team after
team of investigators to Hawthorne, and they all
wanted first hand accounts from Janet, the only
coherent civilian who witnessed the event in the
cave, and the only person who was talking. It got
old quickly, but there was talk of a book deal and
she needed the money now that Norman was out of the
picture. Work was a little scarce in Hawthorne.
But she had grown up here and she couldn t imagine
leaving.
In terms of the dark spirit, little could be
said for certain. Two soldiers from her forensic
teams who were of northern Algonquian decent
believed the spirit was the nightmarish Windigo of
their myths. It had similarities to the dark
spirit with both of them shredding their victims
apart in shrieking fits of rage. But all of those
who witnessed it claimed the figure had a face that
monstrously resembled the doctor who had lived next
door, actually owned the dead house, and apparently
died around the same time the figure left the world
through the cave wall. According to the SNIU agent
who found the dying doctor, the dark figure somehow
transported the doctor s wife out of their house
next door. That same figure then appeared in the
cave with the woman out of nowhere. The General
trusted her soldiers reports and her own eyes in
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that regard, traumatized or not. The most notable
thing about the dark spirit was that it was a
killer, and possibly the one she had been hunting.
The evidence of that was still fresh in her
soldiers minds, and bore a clear and disturbing
resemblance to the deaths she had already been
investigating. The obvious increase in ferocity
remained a significant difference from the bodies
they had found, but the rest of the puzzle seemed
to fall into place with a little effort and
imagination.
The General s investigation connected further
with those horrible events by way of the bone
fragments found at the excavated dumpsites of the
bodies they had recovered. All of the bone
fragments were unexpectedly from the same source.
They would have never made a connection if the
doctor hadn t died next door and underwent not only
an autopsy, but also a subsequent genetic analysis
by Parker s lab because of the reportedly bizarre
facial similarity the doctor had to the dark
spirit. According to Parker, Marcus Lemonte s
marker pattern overlaid those from the bone squares
without a single difference. Considering the
statistical probability of that no matter how
unreasonable it sounded, science seemed to
eliminate any guesswork. But where had all of that
bone come from while he was still a living,
breathing and highly functional individual? It was
still a mystery. With the information Janet had
been able to gather from the doctor s widow, the
only possible source for the bone was a skull
section removed following a traumatic accident he
had somehow survived on the Internation highway.
His autopsy revealed a metal plate that replaced a
significant area of his skull damaged in the
accident. How and why that skull fragment was
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