Authors: Jeff Gunhus
Narrow rock pillars formed the walls of the cage. They were spaced at irregular intervals, though none of the spaces between the bars was large enough to push more than a fist through. The pillars extended over fifteen feet into the air where thick rope weaved in and out between the bars, binding them together. The rope was now broken and frayed, in some places hanging limply in dried tangles.
Jack walked around the entire cage, exploring it from every angle. He felt that something was missing but he couldn’t place it. Then it occurred to him. There was no door. No opening of any kind. Whoever was put in this cage was meant to stay in it for a long, long time. Given the contents of the cage, it seemed the presumed sentence was forever.
There was a pile of bones in one corner, heaped up like the discard pile at a rib house. Balanced on top of this pile was a skull, clearly human, the black holes of its eyes staring at them, intact teeth set in a disturbing grin.
It was confusing at first, there were so many bones, but Jack’s eyes slowly picked out a pattern. It wasn’t just a random pile. There was a story in front of him. One large skeleton sat in the corner, its legs straight out, back upright against the stone bars. Gathered on top of it Jack counted four or five smaller bodies. Children. Small skeletons of children. Some of them babies.
“Oh my God. They were just kids.” He moved closer. “The adult. It’s a woman, right? Their mother?” Jack asked.
“I assume she’s their mother. All the adults here are female.” Lonetree looked around the cave. “Every single one of them.”
Jack could imagine their deaths. The mother, imprisoned, maybe abandoned in this dark underground pit, gathering her children to her as they died one by one. Or did the mother die first? Her children climbing on her. Crying. Trying to shake her awake as they lost energy and finally their will to live. Either way, it was horrible, too horrible.
Jack jumped, the image of the deaths vaporizing as Lonetree tapped him on the shoulder. He pointed to an arm of one of the small skeletons, the child buried beneath the others, maybe the first to die. Jack saw gouges in the bones but he didn’t understand what it meant. “What is it?”
“Bite marks. By the end, they were eating the dead to stay alive.”
Jack saw that he was right. The marks were all over the bones. Judging how small the skeletons were, it could only have been caused by the adult.
He looked back into the vacant eyes of the skull. Her head was cocked at an angle toward him and she stared him down, as if daring him to judge. A chill passed through him, a cold as the thought filtering through his consciousness;
Did you wait until they were dead? Did you at least wait for that?
“Let’s keep going,” Lonetree said.
Jack was thankful to leave the cage and its tragic occupants behind. He wanted to remove the skull from his memory, but it lingered with him, floating around him in the dark like a black sun burned into his retina. But there was no sun in this place, no warmth, only cold night that lay over the bones like a death shawl.
The flare hissed and spat in the void ahead of them, a circle of red light that cast wild shadows across the cavern floor. Jack knew what to expect after his initial view from the platform, but seeing it up close was a different matter. Cage after cage filled with skeletons. There were hundreds of them. The same scene replayed over and over with only slight variations. A female adult with several children. Caged like animals. All left to starve to death.
They walked in awkward silence, like reluctant guests at a stranger’s funeral. Every now and then they would point to a scene in a cage that was different, a variation of suffering. One woman died lying in the center of the cage, the bodies of her children laid out in a circle around her. Another had her children stretched out on the floor in peaceful repose, each skull caved in from where she had used the rock walls as a weapon of mercy to end her children’s suffering.
Another skeleton had her arms stretched out through the cracks in her rock cage, her face pressed to an opening. Jack approached to take a closer look. He froze when he felt the crunch beneath his feet, like stepping on a pile of insects. He looked down, hoping he was wrong about what he would find there.
Crushed under his boot was a tiny skeleton. Jack tried to step back, but his feet were caught in the rib cage and his attempt to avoid the skeleton only desecrated the remains further. He regained his footing and carefully shook off the bones that clung to his foot. His shame for violating the grave of this little girl was harder to shake off.
Somehow this girl had escaped, but had stayed next to the cage until she died. Jack wondered why she hadn’t run away, but then looked around and imagined the cavern as the little girl would have experienced it. Complete darkness filled with the screams and moans of dying people. Where was she supposed to run? If they were all abandoned down here, where was the girl to go? She had escaped from one prison only to enter another. Jack imagined the woman in the cage holding the girl’s hand, soothing her as they died together.
What had it been like? All these people starving to death in the dark, aware of what was happening to them and helpless to stop it. Had they screamed? Cried for help? Begged for forgiveness from their captors? How long could a person scream before it was impossible to scream anymore? Then quiet. The end had to be quiet. They would be too weak at the end.
“Don’t try to imagine it,” Lonetree’s voice came out of the darkness. “No matter what you imagine, you wouldn’t do it justice.”
Jack turned his headlamp toward the voice. The flare had died out and Lonetree’s own light was turned off, as if he preferred the security of the dark. He seemed disturbingly at home among the cages, among the dead. “What happened here? Why were they in these cages?” Jack asked.
“To control them. To use them.” Lonetree’s voice was distant, as if lost in a daydream, here but gone.
“Used them for what?”
Lonetree held up a notebook, bound in thick brown leather. “These are my father’s notes, added on to by my brother. When he came to me in the cave he told me where he would hide them. Made me repeat it over and over so I wouldn’t forget.” He slid his hand over the cover. “It tells what happened here. I think it explains what’s happening to your family. The contents of this book were the reason my father and brother were killed. Knowing that, are you sure you want the answer to your question?”
Jack reached out for the book and Lonetree allowed him to take it. He flipped through the pages, thick with writing, illustrations and charts. “Tell me,” he finally said, closing the notebook. “Tell me what happened here.”
Lonetree threaded his way through the maze of stone cages. Jack knew instinctively where they were headed. He had noticed a low circular building near the center of the cave when they first entered the chamber and used the parachute flare. His guess was confirmed as he turned the corner around a cage, careful to avoid the bony hand that extended out toward him. Lonetree stood in front of the strange structure waiting for him to catch up.
Lonetree removed a tube from his back pack. A foot long, it had black rubber nubs at each end with the center made of plastic that shone a pale yellow in the beam from the helmet light. Lonetree twisted the stick with a loud crack and shook it. The stick glowed a brilliant yellow, creating a round ball of light for them in the center of the cave.
“Turn off your helmet light to conserve the battery,” Lonetree said, turning his own light off. “This is a high-intensity stick so it’s only going to last fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Jack did as he was asked and walked up to the structure. The edge of the roof was right at eye level, but it rose at a steady slope to create a dome over a large circular wall. It looked like an overturned shallow bowl. Jack estimated that the center of the dome reached only ten or twelve feet.
The building was carved out of a solid mound of white limestone, but whatever craftsmen had created it used technique that left no sign of their work. The surface of the roof glistened, flawlessly smooth and perfectly proportioned. The curved wall of the structure, however, was covered with detailed engravings that stretched around the bend and out from the reach of Lonetree’s light.
Jack looked closely at the carvings directly in front of him. He recognized the scene. Tall pillars arranged in circles formed cages, the same cages arrayed behind him in the dark. But in the carving, ladders rested against the side of the cages and prisoners were being put into their cells. Off to the side, rows of women and girls stood attached to each other by chains. Waiting their turn. The faces of the women were carved in high detail, their wailing and crying so real that Jack felt he could almost hear them.
“These carvings are the story of what happened here,” Lonetree said. “I wouldn’t have been able to understand it all without my brother’s notes. Wouldn’t have believed it without seeing this place.” He pointed to an area on the rock wall in front of them. Bodies were stacked, one on top of another, next to a pyre with flames consuming bodies, the smoke rising to cover the roof of the cave. “Some of it doesn’t need an explanation. Mass murderers always get rid of the evidence. Maybe even the most evil men feel shame of what they do,” Lonetree said, his voice distant.
“It’s so savage. So primitive.”
“Modern man isn’t far behind. Think of the Nazi’s in WWII. The Serbs in Bosnia. Khmer Rouge. Taliban. Chechnya. The list goes on. It’s all the same. Mass murder followed by cover up. Nothing changes.”
Jack heard the bitterness in Lonetree’s voice and he knew it was more than a history lesson. It was personal. He guessed Lonetree had seen atrocities like the ones depicted in the carvings, not frozen in rock, but live with real blood and real screams. The images were bad enough. Jack could hardly imagine what it meant to see it as it happened. He wondered what an experience like that did to a man. “Where does the story start?” Jack asked.
“Over here.” Lonetree pointed to a panel to their left. The scene was like one from a children’s history book. It was an Indian village; simple tee-pee structures, a few domestic animals, people at work tending crops, tanning hides, dancing. “This is before what my father called the Visitation. Here, in this next panel, is when everything changed.”
Jack crouched down and ran his fingers over the carving. It was the same village but now a giant man stood in the center of it. The entire village gathered around this visitor, kneeling before him. Jack leaned in and examined the figure. He ran his hands over the spot where the man’s face ought to have been. Instead of a face, there were deep gouges chiseled into the rock.
“Why is the face gone?”
“It’s that way on every panel. Removed after the fact.”
“Why?”
“It’s common when a ruler falls out of favor for his image to be eradicated. The Romans did it. Egyptians. Try to find a statue of Lenin in East Germany after the Soviet Union collapsed.”
“So who was he?”
Lonetree raised his finger in the air like a parent hushing a child who keeps asking how a movie is going to end while they are watching it. Jack followed the narrative in pictures as Lonetree kept on with the story.
“The stranger is shown here wearing the skin of a mountain lion, the sign of a shaman, a magic man. In my father’s notes he named this person by his title, Shaman. There is no other record to indicate his name. But the way he is depicted, he doesn’t appear to be one of their tribe.”
“What were these? Cherokee or something?”
Lonetree smiled. “Cherokee were about a thousand miles from here. It’s amazing how little you people know about the indigenous people here. No, these weren’t Cherokee. No one knows for sure but my father thought they were the Sumac.”
“Sumac? Never heard of them.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. They’re more myth than anything else. A warrior people found in the legends and folklore.”
“These don’t look like warriors to me. Looks like a peaceful little village.”
“The tribe changed after Shaman arrived. He made them change.”
He pointed to the next panel, holding the glo-stick close to the wall. The shadows skirted away to reveal a massacre. Bodies lay strewn across a field. Arrows filled the sky. In the center of it all was Shaman, hand outstretched with a severed head in each hand.
“This guy wasn’t messing around,” Jack breathed.
“Again, going by my father’s theory, after Shaman took control of the village the Sumac became brutal warriors and attacked the other tribes in the area. Indian warfare, in North America in particular, was typically not the kind of massacre you see here. Life was too precious to destroy like this.”
“So what was the deal?”
“Shaman was not one of them. For some reason they followed his instructions with religious frenzy. Look here, you can see what happened next.”
They moved on to the next panel. It showed Shaman leading his warriors back from the battlefield walking over the bodies of their enemies. Behind them was a line of women chained together. The next panel showed Shaman leading then tribe in a ritual sacrifice of their prisoners. The chained women were being led to a stone table where blood poured off. Body parts were heaped in a pile. Around the table the tribe danced and drank the blood of the murdered women.”
“Jesus, they killed them all.”
Lonetree nodded. “Ritual sacrifice. Happened all over the world. There are scenes just like this from the Aztecs down in the Yucatan. I mean, just like it. But until this discovery, archeologists had not every found anything like this so far north.”
“Wait a second, you’re losing me. Are you trying to say this Shaman guy was an Aztec? That’s not possible, is it? I mean, that’s like four thousand miles away.”
Lonetree shrugged. “My father and brother thought he might have been Olmec, a civilization that pre-dated the Aztec. But there’s no solid proof. Besides, after the other discoveries here, that seems almost trivial. Look at this.” Lonetree pointed to a spot on the carving. “See the Sumac warriors line up in front of Shaman after the ritual? He lays his hands on each of them. This is where the god gives the gift to his followers.”
“I don’t follow.” Jack said.
“Look at the carvings. None of the battles show a Sumac dying. Even old men are fighting like they are young warriors. My father believed that the Shaman gave the warriors special powers. Powers that made them all but invincible.”
Jack groaned and shifted his weight uncomfortably.
“I know how it sounds,” Lonetree said. “I’m straight-edge military. I spent fifteen years in a world of hard and fast rules. You don’t think I know this sounds crazy? Stay with me though. Just keep an open mind. I mean, just look around you for a second. Remember what’s happened to your family in the last few days. This is some strange shit, but it’s real. It’s going to test your beliefs big time. But it’s real.”
Jack took a deep breath. “All right. Go on. I’m listening.”
Lonetree shuffled over to the next panel, about half way around the circumference of the stone structure. Shaman was depicted horizontally, surrounded by warriors hacking at his body. “Wow, looks like they got tired of whatever this guy was giving them,” Jack said.
“Or greedy for more of it. No one knows, but my father’s theory was that the warriors demanded something and the Shaman refused, so they decided to force it from him.”
“And so they killed him,” Jack said.
“According to the notebook, that didn’t end the terror. The Sumac continued the ritual sacrifice. With one small addition.” Lonetree pointed to a scene where decapitated bodies were stacked up. Next to the table to was a round hut, a smaller version of the stone structure in front on them.
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
“A new part of the ritual they incorporated after the shaman. An idol. A temple, something like that. My father wasn’t sure. He thought maybe they put the Shaman’s body there. Whatever it was, it’s obviously an earlier version of this structure here in the cave, so it had to be important to them. Anyway, to keep the rituals going they needed more victims. For years, they lived in a constant state of war, ranging far to find new tribes, killing the men and capturing the women. My father studied Native American folklore all over the Eastern seaboard and up into the Great Lakes. Over and over he found stories that matched up with this. Even the plains Indians of the Midwest have references in their mythology of a tribe of cruel and evil warriors. A tribe who enslave women and who could not be killed by an arrow. They called the Sumac the ‘ones who walk with dark spirits’.” Lonetree cleared his throat. “Anyway, it wasn’t long before the Sumac destroyed the tribes nearby. Others simple moved away to avoid the danger. So without an easy source of people for their sacrifices they had to get more creative.”
“So they grew people. Like growing a crop,” Jack muttered.
“They bred them in captivity. Primarily women since that was what the ritual called for. They no longer had to hunt. They had a renewable supply for their sacrifice. This worked for years until a man from a distant tribe discovered their secret.” Lonetree pointed to a spot on the carving. “It shows it here. This warrior goes back to his own tribe and returns leading a war party.”
“To free the slaves?”
“It’s a nice thought, but unlikely. The tribe probably wanted the power for themselves. In any case, they failed. You can see it right there. At the end there isn’t a single man from the invading tribe standing. They slaughtered them all. But the village sustained heavy losses themselves.”
“I thought they you said they couldn’t be killed?” Jack said.
“I don’t think they thought so either. But with massive enough injuries they died like normal men. There’s a difference between infinite longevity and invincibility. They could live forever, but they had to be careful. Accidents, war, anything that could inflict a massive trauma could kill them. Understanding this changed everything.”
Jack traced his fingers over the rock, resting his hands over the scene where the crowds of women were herded into a hole in the ground. “So they went underground to keep it secret,” he whispered.
“And to keep out of harm’s way. Look, it shows they brought the round structure down with them. They must have built this new building later.”
“But how did they get in here? They couldn’t have come the way we just did.”
“Maybe, this whole area is unstable. Most of the tight spots we came through are that way because of cave-ins. There might have been an easier way in that’s since collapsed.”
Jack looked around at the great cave, especially at the jagged stalactites pointing down at them from high above. “So this place could cave in at any time?”
“Possible, but unlikely. The smaller tunnels are a greater risk. This whole area is a giant catacomb. There’s a similar system in West Virginia that’s over a hundred miles long. Who knows how far some of these tunnels go.”
“But it’s stable?”
Lonetree shrugged. “The drought this year makes cave-ins more likely. The water table is low and that can cause shifts.”
“Shifts are bad?”
“Yeah. But I wouldn’t worry about it. This place has made it this long, right?”