Jumlin's Spawn Read online

  Jumlin's Spawn

  Title Page

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Published by Evernight Publishing at Smashwords

  http://www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2011 Melody Clark

  ISBN: 978-1-926950-94-5

  Cover Artist: LF Designs

  Editor: Angela Oesterreich

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  With thanks to Robin Kickingbird of the great Sioux nation, and with love to Larry.

  JUMLIN'S SPAWN

  Melody Clark

  Copyright © 2011

  Epilogue

  There stood only one Black Hill of a different color; and yet, it was the blackest hill of all.

  The man had climbed the trail to Angel Peak for as long as he could remember. He had seen this vista through the eyes of a baby, a boy and a man. In those years, spring clung to the fresh grasslands across the tribal plains. Now, the Black Hills seemed gray; the grasslands dry and dead. The only sound he could hear was a thundering wind or a deadly calm, and both sounds blew in from the city.

  He watched the old man walk slowly from the inside the house to the outside edge of his porch. On the porch sat a big, swayback porch swing. Nearby, a middle-aged, black-braided woman sat with a cast iron pot between her legs. Her hands busily broke the backs of pea pods and spilled their bounty with steady thumps into the pot. Just beyond her, a young man watched over a little boy as the child dragged a toy metal truck over hand-built dirt mounds all around him.

  The man on the peak recognized the old metal toy truck had once been his own.

  The man who watched from Angel Peak thought the little boy looked something like the boy he once had been. He hoped the boy would climb the mountain one day, too. But, he prayed the boy would never set foot in the caves. Angel Peak Man knew too well that, inside of the mountain, lurked old and bad things. He had seen them himself - big, black, feathery demon angels, hell birds with wings big enough to smother all the breath out of the world.

  The man at Angel Peaks had not survived the caves. Not completely. He had come to know the hell birds far too well. No longer part of the world of the old man, the young people or the boy, the man at Angel Peaks had been bound to the peaks forever. Well, almost forever.

  “Čhaŋtóčhignake, Chaske,” he whispered to the wind. He wondered if that young boy had ever been taught Lakota.

  The Angel Peak man had been told the time had come. There were three strangers approaching from the city. They didn't know their path. They could not know their future.

  The man on Angel Peak only knew that, of the four of them, three would live, and one would die.

  But it would be a joyous ending.

  Chapter One

  She missed South Dakota. She missed it more than she might have missed her knees. Not that she would admit that, even to herself. New Orleans had been a fascinating place to wander, but her roots had long ago grown deep into Rapid City soil. Walking through the airport terminal, her stomach muscles twisted into tiny Gordian knots inside her. She reveled in the easy familiarity of coming home but still felt the chill of apprehension.

  She hadn’t been scared until she saw Yancey and Oliver hovering by the luggage return. They stood beside her luggage, already plucked from the carousel. Their very appearance made her want to turn and run, but she stayed. Somehow, she stayed.

  Oliver appeared as light and Irish-American as Yancey was dark and Sioux. They appeared visual opposites and, yet, were more alike than either man knew. They had been her two best friends in the world since fifth grade. And she had just turned thirty.

  Yancey’s long black hair ran past his shoulders now. He stared at her with black eyes filled with as much hurt as anger. Oliver scowled…though Oliver never scowled…and Oliver was scowling at her.

  The last time she had seen either of them, she’d told her two best friends to get the hell out of her life. At the time, she felt abandoned and discarded. At least now, she felt in control of her own life.

  She drew back a little as Yancey reached for her luggage. “I can carry that myself,” she said, trying to keep the handle.

  “We picked you up, so I’m carrying it,” Yancey said, pulling it away from her while Oliver collected the rest of her smaller bags. “I parked the car in the day lot.”

  “I didn’t think you parked it on the runway,” she replied, “and, for the record, I didn’t ask you to pick me up.”

  “No, we offered, okay?” Oliver cut in from Elfie’s other side. “Now, can we please save the screaming at each other until we reach somewhere private, like the car?”

  She pressed gently at her eyes, the miles she had travelled weighing heavily on her words, “I don’t want to scream at anybody.”

  “Good,” Yancey said, “Neither do we.”

  Yancey drove them out of the airport lot, then headed east on Highway 44 where the road splits -- one part headed toward the Cheyenne River basin and the other made tracks for Rapid City.

  Elfie gestured toward her old hometown, the so-called star of the west, “We’re going to see your Captain?”

  Yancey murmured an affirmation. “He has a few questions. Nothing major.”

  She grimaced, staring out at the familiar blur of road. “Let’s just hope I have the answers.”

  ****

  Captain Darwin always looked like a man in a perpetual search for his car keys. No matter where he was, even in his car, even with the keys in the ignition, he always seemed to be searching for them. Now, he sat at his desk, hunting-and-pecking at a keyboard until Yancey, Oliver and Elfie walked into his peripheral vision. He turned sharply toward them and nodded Elfie toward a chair.

  He tilted casually into his own chair, his hand sliding with easy familiarity into the handle of his coffee cup. Out of office mode, back in Captain mode, same as always. “It’s good to see you, Elfie,” he said, pulling folders from a far pile toward him. “I’m glad to hear you’re back.”

  “I’m here,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t know about back.”

  Darwin smiled reassuringly. “I appreciate your coming in. I’m just trying to piece this whole Professor Duryea thing together. We’re hoping you might remember something we need to know.”

  She shifted forward in her chair. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

  He sipped his coffee. “I remember that you left your job here to work for Professor Duryea a year ago. In what capacity did you work for him?”

  Elfie cast a look back at Yancey, who stood protectively beside her chair, and Oliver, occupying a chair behind her. Finally, she looked over at Captain Darwin and nodded. “I took a college course of Narvel Duryea’s when I was in grad school. A while after that, he offered me a field anthropology position with him. I passed on it then; but later, when I decided to leave Rapid City, I contacted him. The offer still stood, so I accepted it.”

  “It seemed to me, at the time, your leaving was rather hasty. You couldn’t even give us three weeks of notice in forensics.” Darwin glanced back at her friends. “I understand the three of you had something of a falling out. This is generally regarded as, well, the real reason you moved to New Orlean
s.”

  She folded her hands before her, trying to preserve some illusion of calm. “Yes,” she said, making clear with the empty sound of her voice that there would be no further information added to her response.

  Darwin rubbed at an eyebrow, in thought. “How much did he confide in you about his activities?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then the two of you weren’t personal friends?”

  She chuckled dryly. “No. He was a…taciturn individual to the end, okay? There were elements of his work that I've only learned about since his death.”

  Darwin scrunched up his face with a grin. “A taciturn individual?”

  “He was a suspicious asshole, is that better?”

  “That sounds more like you,” Darwin said, laughing a little. “I was wondering if you have any idea why Duryea came out here by himself.”

  Elfie shrugged at the memory. “He said he was doing some research for a new lecture series. He’d made some momentous mythological discovery, according to him. And, he wanted to research a theory he called the Lakota Book of the Dead.”

  Darwin scrunched up his brow again, this time in surprise. “What the hell might that be?”

  Elfie shook her head. “I think it dealt with his labyrinthine theory of links between ancient Egypt, Ireland and pre-Columbian Indians. It’s hardly a new idea. He posited that the striges, which supposedly was an Egyptian vampire race, were a direct ancestor of Jumlin’s spawn. He thought it had connections to a ton of different cultures, including the Irish.”

  “So what the hell is a Jumlin’s spawn?” Darwin asked.

  Yancey grinned and shook his head. “He's the Badlands Boogeyman, Cap. Jumlin was the evil spawn of Laughing Bear, who's like the Lakota Count Dracula. He went off and had little Laughing Bear Cubs. It's strictly Halloween crap.”

  “Maybe so, but interesting, given the circumstances around Duryea's death,” Darwin said.

  Elfie sat up more, paying closer attention. “What circumstances?”

  Darwin pushed the top file from the folder pile toward her. “That's the medical examiner's findings on Professor Duryea's body. Take a gander. Riddle me that.”

  She picked up the file and skimmed over it until her attention became riveted on a word. “Exsanguinous? You mean he’d bled out?”

  “He was bloodless. Drained,” the Captain said. “I’d say he was empty as a beer barrel at a college kegger. And he’s not the only one. There have been ten buffalo exsanguinations in the vicinity. On top of this, we’ve had women disappear. Another man vanished but was found dead, in much the same manner as Duryea.”

  “You can’t be serious,” she said softly, shaking her head.

  “Serious as a myocardial infarction, I'm afraid,” Darwin said. “And, we got the FBI flying down day after tomorrow, seeing as it's Federal land.”

  Elfie squinted hard, fighting to follow the conversation. “The FBI? So…animal mutilations, exsanguination. Are you thinking there’s a weird ritual killer on the loose or something?”

  “Well, we’ve pretty much ruled out UFOs and chupacabras. If it’s a ritual killer, it’s more than one,” Darwin said. “I mean, no one can pull down ten buffalo and live to tell the tale without one heck of a lot of help. To be honest, I half-suspected Duryea was the head of some blood cult or something, until he turned up dead. His work, combined with his familiarity with the north and south units, would have festooned him with motive and opportunity.”

  “I didn't know him, or his work, well enough to know for sure. I can't say I'd eliminate the possibility,” Elfie said.

  Yancey moved around her side to stare at her directly with more than a little surprise. “What the hell happened to Duryea being your own personal Indiana Jones?”

  “I was wrong, okay?” she replied, sending him an angry stare. “You were right. I found out a lot of things in the last couple of days.”

  Darwin plunked down his coffee. “This is how it works, Elfie. We need to send a team up to the Angel Caves tomorrow. It'll take a couple of days to get there while covering all the terrain. That’s the actual reason I wanted to speak with you.”

  “Okay,” she said warily, “and how am I involved?”

  “Yancey's a cop, Oliver's an archeologist, and we could use a damned good forensic anthropologist on this case. We pull them out of the sheriff's office now and the guy there, well, let's say he wouldn’t be my pick for second string. Yancey and Oliver are going out toward Angel Caves tomorrow.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” Elfie asked.

  Darwin replied, “I'd really like you to go out there with them. We need to see what's up before the FBI locks us down. Not just for us, but for the Sioux, too.”

  Elfie exhaled loud and long. She shut her eyes for a long moment before asking, “Why Angel Caves?”

  “That's where Duryea's body was found,” Yancey said.

  Elfie grew quiet, trying to sort through a thousand bits of information and decisions to be made, all of them important. Finally, she said, “Okay, I guess I owe you guys that much. I'll go along...for the investigation.”

  Darwin smiled. “Good. You three can firm up the details. Where will you be tonight if I need to speak with you again?”

  “She'll be with us,” Yancey said. “We’ll get up early. It'll be easier that way.”

  Elfie centered herself internally to firmly reply, “I have a reservation –”

  “So have I,” Yancey said. “A big one. And I have a nice house on a little part of it with a room just for you. You'll be with us.”

  Elfie smiled wanly across at the Captain. “I guess I'll be with them.”

  ****

  The big brown-hazed windows of Sioux Ann's Diner had grown glazed through many years of sand, sun and rain. The diner was located in what the three of them, when they were teenagers, had considered the middle of nowhere. All of them orbiting thirty, they now thought Sioux Ann’s was way too close to town, though nothing had built up around it in the intervening years. The distance measured had changed inside their minds.

  After surviving Sioux Ann's Diner’s unique interpretation of cheeseburgers and fries, the three friends headed toward the car. Yancey had parked it outside the main gates of the old, dead amusement park where they had spent many hours of their shared youth. Rapid Fun City sat right across the road from the diner. Yancey walked past the car and toward the amusement park's main gates.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Elfie called out.

  “We're going to the Fun Zone,” Yancey called back.

  “Small problem, Crow Wolf. It’s closed. For like fifteen years.”

  Yancey smirked, flashing his shiny badge. “Everything is open to the police, Elf. Anyway, this is where Duryea hid a lot of his grave-robbing swag.”

  She redirected her interest toward the overgrown field of thrill ride ruins. “Makes sense. There’s nowhere more out of the way than a dead amusement park.”

  Badging them past the gate guards, Yancey led the way around the Tilt-a-Whirl that had flopped over into the sand like a shed tarantula skin. The nearby booth that had once vended ride tickets now housed a gray coyote that stuck its nose through the side door and glared at them.

  The big building Yancey led them toward had once been the Dakota Arcade. The glass double doors remained unlocked. They walked inside.

  One wall had been lined with shutdown arcade games. One arcade game was situated in their direction—a Top Gun pinball machine, still playing a few shrill bars of Danger Zone, over and over, as an enticement to play. The game lights sprang on in sequence around the play screen’s edges, but the sparkle effect had been muted from the many years of dust.

  “God, that movie sucked,” Oliver said.

  Yancey tossed him a grouchy glance. “I liked it.”

  “You liked it because Tom Cruise’s ass was in it,” Elfie added.

  “Hey, say what you will, koka kola, but do not mock my first love,” Yancey replied.

  T
hey kept walking until the door marked DURYEA came into view. Yancey groped for a key from his pocket. He found it and opened the door. Boxes had been stacked floor to ceiling, in what, even in daylight, was a dark room. Elfie slapped along the wall for a light switch. She finally connected with one, and the overheads flashed on.

  At once, they all heard a burbling noise, followed by the scuffle of tiny feet. The scuffling clamored down a room beyond them and quickly departed.

  “Damned coyote puppies,” Yancey said, with some degree of forced certainty in his voice.

  “That was a weird ass sound, though,” Oliver added.

  “The Badlands are filled with weird ass sounds,” Yancey said.

  “Oliver,” Elfie said, having left the other two to open a nearby box. She removed from a thrown-together box lot a bird-shaped clay figure. “Is this Cahokian?”

  Oliver moved around to take the offered object into his hand to study. “Maybe. It looks like an Aztec grave artifact. At least the bastard wasn't picky in his grave-robbing.”

  “Looks like he stole from everybody,” Yancey said, shaking his head. “I wonder how he'd have felt if somebody dug up his grandma and sold her skull on eBay.”

  “How do we know he didn't?” Elfie asked.

  “Boy, you really don’t like him now, do you?”

  She made a hum of affirmation and then placed the artifact back in the box. “Heaven knows what else he has in here.”

  “Maybe even the sacred stuff. Boy, wouldn’t that make the traditionals crazy?” Yancey asked.

  Elfie shook her head. “No, the sacreds are somewhere else.”