Looking Backward in Darkness. Kathryn Ptacek

anything to say about it.

      Suddenly she leaped forward and grabbed the infant, and turned and ran.

      “No!” Gail shrieked and tried to stagger to her feet.

      “Stay there!” he yelled back at the girl as he raced after the woman. For someone so little, she certainly ran fast, he thought. He risked a glance back over his shoulder, and saw that Gail had obeyed and was back by the nook. Good. He didn’t want to have to worry about her as well. God knew what else was wandering around this airport.

      This part of the building had grown darker now, as if it were close to nighttime, yet Chato knew it wasn’t. He glanced out the windows as he ran, and saw a gloom. But he didn’t have time to think any more about it. He saw a door closing ahead, and knew the bruja had gone through it.

      He stopped moments before he slammed into the wall, wrenched open the door and stepped through....

      ...and fell down a steep and rough slope. He tumbled and twisted and bounced, and once slammed his knee against a boulder. Finally, he came to a rest at the bottom. Puffs of dust rose around him, making him cough.

      Nothing vital, he thought, was broken, although when he managed to get to his feet he knew he was bleeding in several places; certainly he was bruised, and when he touched his side with his fingertips, he winced. He thought he might have cracked a rib or two.

      Swell.

      And just where the hell was he?

      He seemed to be in a tunnel, rough-hewn from rock and the earth. The ceiling wasn’t high, and when he lifted his arm, wincing with pain from his ribs, he found he could touch the surface easily. He was not given to claustrophobia, but he would have liked it if the place were a tad more spacious. The walls were scarcely an arm’s length away on each side. The air smelled of must, of rich loamy earth...like a newly dug grave.

      The tunnel should have been pitch-black, but it wasn’t. It was faintly lit, as though the earthen walls around him was phosphorescent. He scraped some of the dirt away, and his fingers glowed slightly. Quickly he wiped his hand on his jeans.

      His eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness now, and he could see that the walls weren’t made of just dirt; objects seemed embedded in them. He stepped closer, and brushed away some grime so he could better see. He backed hastily away when he saw the gleaming white of a human skull. The matrix of the walls were human bones: skulls and femurs, shin bones, and the thin bones of fingers and toes. Here and there stiff hair and parchment-like skin clung. Here and there he could see a bas relief carved, images of skulls and skeletons and pyramids of bones.

      He looked back up the slope, but couldn’t see the doorway. There was no way out there; that much was obvious.

      He would have to go down the tunnel.

      He didn’t want to go down the tunnel.

      No choice, old pal, he told himself, and it almost sounded like he had spoken aloud, although he knew he hadn’t.

      Something brushed by his ear, and he shook his head.

      The floor, he realized then, was made up of crushed bones. Inside his boots his toes curled, but he had no choice. He had to walk upon the dead.

      Carefully he moved forward, suspicious there might be some trapdoor waiting for him; but the ground seemed solid enough. For now.

      He noticed masks suspended from some of the walls. Intricately carved images that leered or glared down at him with the countenances of stern-faced warriors and eagles and reptiles and pumas and other feral beasts. Masks with elongated earlobes, exaggerated noses and lips, eyes that were narrow slits, tear-shaped or round as if with surprise. Masks hewn of coconut husk, of wood, of copper and silver and tin. Some had elaborate headdresses in turn, those the visages of jaguars and parrots. Bright feathers and plaits of human hair and strands of beads and teeth and shell dangled from the masks, and he saw the glint of gold and precious stones in the rings in the ears.

      More light came from ahead, and he reached an opening on the right. There was a smallish room that seemed empty, and when he stepped into it, he saw himself as a boy of fourteen when his father had taken him to Ryan Josanie. His old teacher, the man who had taught him to be a shaman.

      Josanie was showing the then-Chato how to control his dreams, and the youth was complaining that it was hard, and Josanie, not smiling, was saying that everything worth having is hard, and the then—Josanie glanced up and saw the now—Chato.

      “Josanie.” Seeing the old man brought him such sadness and regret. His teacher had been dead for years. Chato took a step forward, and with a shimmer, as it if were simply an image in water, the scene disappeared, and he was standing in an empty room.

      He went out into the tunnel, which now turned to the left. Sometimes, he thought, the eyes of the skulls in the walls seemed to watch him, but he dismissed that thought. He was just getting spooked; that was all. Nothing was watching him.

      Or was it.

      He encountered another room. There he saw himself and Ross, his brother younger by three years, and they were at a state championship football game, and the then-Chato was in uniform, and Ross was saying how much he admired his brother, and Chato was laughing and telling him he’d know better when he got older, and Ross saying he’d always respect his brother. Ross...whom he’d not seen in years, hadn’t talked to for more than a year. Ross...they’d been close once. Now they had drifted so far apart.

      Once again Chato took a step forward, and once again, the image, as if mirrored on the surface of water, disappeared.

      Out in the tunnel he grew aware again of a sound that had been with him since he’d entered this stygian world. Its rhythm was regular, he realized, and he thought it might be water dripping somewhere. No, more than that. And he recognized it then as the sound of a heart beating, and whether it was his or something else’s he didn’t know.

      Some yards away he found another room, and this time he saw his mother and father working, working hard as they had always done to make a better life for his brother and him. They never complained, even though they often held down as many as two or three jobs at once, all so that their boys could go to school, would not live in the desperate poverty which they had known all too well.

      In still another room he saw himself at the university, saw him getting his degree, saw his parents in the audience, and he knew their pride. He was the first in the family to go beyond high school. He was proud, and yet he felt as if he had lost something that night, something of his people, and he didn’t know what.

      In yet another room he saw a woman he had loved long ago; they had parted amicably enough; and then he saw his old house in Albuquerque where he had lived when a professor of geology there, and he remembered all the good times he’d had then, all the good friends he’d left behind long ago, all the memories that he had stepped away from.

      Another chamber contained niches carved deep into the earth, and in the niches lay mummified bodies. Bodies that had been dead for decades, for a century or two or even longer. The dust was thick in this room, and he did not step inside. He feared to. Here and there he could see a scrap of cloth still sticking to the leathery skin of the mummies, and the air smelled faintly of herbs. Something moved opposite him, and he watched a centipede crawl out of one of the body’s eyes.

      His stomach rebelled, and he hurried away.

      The path twisted to the right, and he stepped into the room and saw a man on a bed. The man was naked, and a blonde woman, equally exposed, sat astride him and ground her hips and moaned. Her hair was plastered in long sweaty strings down her back. The man on the bed reached up and brutally squeezed her breasts, and she cried out as she arched her back, and then she swiveled her head around and leered at him, and Chato saw with horror that the woman was Sunny.

      “No!” he screamed. He stumbled from the room, and when he glanced back it was dark. No, no, no. Sunny wasn’t with a man, wouldn’t be; she loved him. Or did she? one part of him slyly whispered. She did, she did, she did. He repeated it to himself as if it were a mantra.

      He