Something Wilder

“There.”

He caught his balance by holding on to her shoulders and trying to see what had pulled her up short. He saw the same thing he’d been seeing: the river, cottonwoods, dirt, rocks, rocks, and more rocks. But then the shapes came into focus. He wasn’t staring at a disorganized tumble of broken boulders. He was looking at a collapsed stone chimney covered in layer upon layer of red rock dust. He was looking at crumbled and rotting planks of wood buried beneath wild sagebrush tangles and thorny bushes. He was looking, very clearly, at a dust-covered and brush-obscured tree stump.

“Holy crap,” he said. “Duke’s tree.”

In hyperaware unison, they whipped their attention behind them and all around: no one. He listened for the sounds of people: nothing. Only the river roared nearby, cascading over a small pointy cluster of rocks and crashing onto a shallow stretch of pebbled riverbed.

Lily ran to the stump, falling to her knees and dusting it off. “Hurry, Leo.”

He joined her, setting his pack on the ground and helping her wipe the bumpy surface clean. The dirt had been there too long undisturbed, ground into the rings and crevices. Cursing, he scratched at it with a blunt fingernail.

Clearly the thinker of the two, Lily poured water over the top, washing away the last few layers of dirt. At first, the pattern looked like nothing more than holes burned into the wood, but something tripped in his brain.

He bent at the waist, examining it closely. There was a series of perfectly round charred marks, each only a bit smaller than the diameter of a pencil eraser.

“Is it one you recognize?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not really. He used mostly letter codes with me. Caesar. ROT cipher. Atbash.”

He turned his attention to the task at hand. There were seven distinct groupings, spaced a couple of inches apart. The first was a series of three dots, stacked vertically, with a single dot to the left at the bottom—like a backward L. Beside that were two dots, side by side, horizontal. Next, there was a single dot, low on the line of the pattern. The next was two dots stacked on top of each other vertically again. The fifth were two again but positioned diagonally. The sixth were two dots stacked vertically, and then a third positioned diagonal from the top left dot. The seventh cluster was the same as the fifth.

His brain rushed through patterns and ciphers related to numbers, positions, shapes.

Four, two, one, two, two, three, two.

Is it a dice cipher? Rosicrucian?

No. Position is clearly important.

The longer he stared, the more his ability to think was thwarted by the heavy, thrumming sense of a ticking clock. He felt understanding just out of grasp; maddening. They might have only a matter of minutes to figure it out, cover the stump, and head out in search of whatever was encoded there.

Leo rubbed his eyes. “Fuck.”

Beside him, Lily let out a little growl. “What if there’s more to it?” she asked. “Are we missing something, or is this it?”

“Burning it in was smart.” Reaching forward, he traced the seven distinct groups with a fingertip. “I think it’s spelling something. We just have to figure out if it’s a numeric code or something else.”

She shuffled to the other side of the stump to see it from a different angle. “Maybe we’re looking at it wrong.”

“The more I stare,” he told her, “the more I feel like I can’t see anything.”

Her breath escaped in an audible gust. “Oh my God. Leo. You’re a genius.”

“What’d I say?”

“You said you can’t see it.” She grinned. “It’s flat, but it’s written as braille. Duke didn’t use it often, but he knew it. He taught me forever ago.”

She let out a little squeal and he peered down, realizing she was right. He scraped through his brain, trying to remember the braille he’d learned for an Eagle Scout badge.

“Okay.” She pointed to the first cluster. “This first one, the backward L? Means a number is next. So, I think the second pattern is a three.”

He stared at the others. “Right, and doesn’t this dot mean a capital letter?”

“Yeah,” Lily said, nodding excitedly.

“I’m almost positive this is B,” he told her. “This one is e. And I’m pretty sure this one is s.”

“I think you’re right, but…” She pointed to the last one. “That means this is e again.”

Frowning, Lily sounded it out. “Three-Bese? ‘Bese’ is not a place. It’s not even a word.” She looked up at him dubiously.

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I know.”

“Wait.” Lily’s voice was so loud and forceful that he startled. She dug for the notebook in her bag and pulled it out, extracting the other loose page that Terry had torn free—the intricately drawn and labeled map of a section of the slot canyons. It looked like a dense network of capillaries. “There.” She set it down on the stump, smacking it with a hand. “Look.”