Detective Joe Kavanaugh dug his heels into the bitumen at the sight of an oversized hat tilted away from the sun. Its owner, a sleek – tall woman, lifted her eyes with a smile. He wasn't fooled. Instead, he raised his hand and pointed, starting to back away.
"I knew -," he accused her, in a tone unsure whether it wanted to be disbelief or curiosity. "Magnus..."
All the while Helen Magnus continued to approach, slinking along the sidewalk with her hands clasped delicately in front. "You know me?" she asked quietly.
"Know of you," he corrected, backing into a street light. "I live here. No one with their eyes open can take a quiet stroll in this place without running into you."
"Shame," she whispered, closing the distance now that the detective was cornered. Helen stopped half a step past him, turning her head to speak. "We'd set out tea and everything."
Kavanaugh rolled his eyes, leaning towards her. "You're lucky that you're cute and I'm curious, otherwise I would have ignored that not-so-subtle invitation."
*~*~*
"I'm starting to hate this stuff," sighed Bigfoot, pulling his paw free of the loose sand. No longer planted, he began to slide down the side of one of the 'waves' of sand. He dug his claws in but with nothing to grip, it took an ungraceful tumble to bring him to a stop.
Washed over by a passing dune, the entire area had been slashed into a blank canvas. It had even parked its shifting arse right over the entrance to the tomb, making a real nuisance of itself.
This would take him hours – perhaps days to find the tomb again, let alone excavate it. He tried once again to reach Helen and Will on the radio but there was nothing but scratchy static.
Three days – four tops they had left, buried under all that sand with a couple of bottles of water let alone what else was trapped down there with them.
Don't think about it, he instructed himself. Find the rest of the group, start digging.
Find the rest of the group... Bigfoot shook his head free of sand and cast his sharp eyes over the area. Under the soft light from the stars, he could see several hundred metres easily and not one of them had so much as a footprint.
"Come on..." he muttered at nothing in particular.
*~*~*
"You know, when I was little I tried to climb over that wall," Kavanaugh grinned, as he and Magnus strode through the electric gates. Just to the right, the wall was obscured by a large elm tree, knotted and scared from its many years enduring its patch of dirt between the wall and carpark. There was a little world created in the shadow beneath its limbs where several branches rested on the brick wall creating a canopy.
"Nearly killed yourself. I remember because your mother voiced her disapproval of my wall whilst retrieving you."
He sighed with a light, embarrassed laugh.
"I've never seen so much blood come out of something so small," she continued, as the gates clicked close behind them. They made their way toward the enormous double, half foot thick doors of the house.
"Jeez, they're right about you – never forget a thing." He stood to the side as she typed in the code to the door. It swung open with a warm breeze escaping from inside and a gentle glow that did not care for the cycles of the sun or moon.
"Shall we?" Helen turned back over her shoulder to make sure that he was following.
Kavanaugh stood stupidly in the doorway, just absorbing. He'd dreamt about the insides of this house his whole life – fantasised about what was kept behind its walls out of reach from the rest of the world.
Finally he nodded, returning to his adult persona as he paced into the foyer.
"Niiiice," he eyed a set of antique chandeliers dangling down above a sweeping grand staircase. Ignoring Helen, he lingered in front of a gargoyle statue, mildly disturbed by the eyeless sockets peering back at him above fanged jaws.
"If you're going to do this in every room..." she eyed him disapprovingly.
"I like old things," he patted the statue. "Though this one might caution on the edge of creepy."
Helen Magnus hustled the detective toward the nearest lift via the shortest possible route. His ability to wander around the fringes of locked doors was only matched by his unending need to touch everything. Finally in the lift, she exhaled, no longer having to hawk-eye his every breath.
Kavanaugh had his head down, peering into his crossed arms. The lift lurched, but neither of them jolted. In a way, they were very similar. They both stood in their quiet worlds, wondering and reflecting until the lift stopped and creaked open. The barred door rolled out of the way and the two of them stepped into a bare concrete corridor.
He couldn't help but wonder what he'd gotten himself into as the labyrinth of corridors deepened and all the while they were watched by a security camera at every turn.
"It's in here," she said, pulling them both to a stop outside an unremarkable door.
Surprisingly, there were two people inside the room, both standing in front of an empty cell. One of them, a scruffy looking creature, waved. The other, Kavanaugh had already met.
"Ah, thought you'd be around somewhere Mr. Zimmerman," he said. "Got your letter – obviously," he raised his hands to the ceiling, palms up, as if to say, 'I'm here!'
Joe Kavanaugh's eyes fell to a bloodied bandage on Will's shoulder where his sleeve had been rolled up out of the way. Actually, now he looked, all three of them were covered in injuries ranging from very serious to humorously trivial.
"What happened to you?" he asked Will, nodding at the shoulder.
Will glanced at it, winced and replied, "I shot myself."
"And..." Kavanaugh continued, pacing right up to Will. He reached around behind him and retrieved the gun, still tucked into Will's waistband. "Isn't this mine?" The detective turned it over in his hands, brushing his fingers over it as if it were a precious object.
Helen took Kavanaugh by the shoulders and steered him toward the cell. "I was going to give that back to you. I swear."
Kavanaugh opened his jacket and tucked the gun away. In front of him was a distinctly empty cell, something he'd travelled all this way to see via the unusual request of a doctor he hardly knew. There better be a good reason for it.
"An empty cage?" he said, unimpressed. Kavanaugh tried to move a little closer but Helen kept a firm hold of his shoulders. "You brought me all this way to see an empty cage?"
Henry fidgeted. "It was there a moment ago. Vanished when it heard the door go."
Kavanaugh frowned, "Vanished?"
Will was being eyed sternly by Helen.
"I told you to keep it calm," she hissed at them.
"We did!" they replied in unison, before Henry finished. "At least it's still here."
"Hold back, vanished?" the detective peered into the cage and thought that he caught a glimpse of something move. "What's going on Magnus and why am I here?"
Helen reached forward and tapped the cage bars. "Don't stuff around," she yelled at the emptiness, and was promptly answered by a roar. The deep, guttural noise hurt their eardrums, distracting them as the sand creature made itself visible by leaping forward at the bars with its mouth open in warning. It wound its fingers around the metal rods and eyed Kavanaugh coldly.
Unlike the others, the detective didn't flinch. He stood his ground, nose to the cell where the creature continued to hiss and scratch.
"Now this is something interesting," he whispered, staring right back at the creature.
*~*~*
Bigfoot stared down at the ground at his feet. Grain by grain, it seemed to be draining away into a point – funnelled off into nowhere deep below.
He stepped back and knelt beside, just watching. Eventually the depression grew so that he had to shuffle out of the way where the ground became unsteady. A freezing wind backed over him and he considered leaving the curious phenomenon until, from its centre, a small mound appeared and the sinking halted.
Bigfoot raised his hand, ready to slap whatever was welling up through the sand. It grew closer and closer to the surface until three fingers burst through into night air, clawing their way upward.
He startled before clambering to his feet, standing over the hand, and pulling whoever it was free of their prison. A head popped up, shortly followed by the rest of the human body. Frans, one of the members of the expedition, ripped the material away from his face and gasped.
Bigfoot sat on the ground in front of him, shaking his head in disbelief. "Frans, you're lucky my boss makes me look first, kill later."
Frans nodded, holding up a 'peace' sign while his skeletal body enjoyed breathing.
'Expedition Team, this is Base Camp, come in please. Over.'
Bigfoot frowned. After hours of radio silence, his mind had begun inventing its own. It wasn't until the message repeated and Frans tapped him on the shoulder that he realised it was for real.
"Base Camp, this is Expedition Team. Over," he replied, standing up for better signal.
'Finally!' the voice exclaimed. 'Expedition Team, you are requested to return to base immediately. Magnus and team are safe repeat, return to base immediately. Over.'
"Confirm message," he replied. "Expedition Team has been compromised by a sand storm. So far only Frans and I are accounted for. Suggest course of action. Over."
There was a pause as if she were relaying information to someone else. 'Expedition Team, head back to Base Camp. We're sending out an aerial team in twenty minutes. Over.'
Big foot agreed. Deciding that the best course of action was to cut toward the desert cliffs in a straight line, heading for the firefly lights of the camp, they set out at once. After all the noise of the storm, the world seemed so quiet.
The big, fury man kept his ears pricked to the ground beside and his eyes searching for other survivors. Occasional trails of wind kept them turning in circles, checking their backs for another approaching storm. All they found was a calm, clear night and still ground, slumbering under the stars.
"Over there," Frans pointed toward a small lump in the sand, incongruent with the surrounds. They picked up their pace, stopping just short of it.
Big foot reached down and, after a moment's hesitation, brushed the sand off to reveal a sight that made Frans stumble to the side and hurl.
The severed hand tumbled to the ground when Bigfoot realised that it wasn't attached to a human. "Jake," he muttered, noting the tacky jewelled ring.
Frans coughed, trying to straighten. "There's another one," he pointed ahead to a longer bump in the sand, and again to their left where a tuft of hair was caught above the sand. "What in the gods..."