Cades Cove 01 - Cades Cove: A Novel of Terror (50 page)

It was very good to hear from you again this past Thanksgiving, and both Evelyn and I look forward to your family’s visit next April during your kid’s spring break from school. We’re already planning lots of fun things to do, and I’ve booked the week off from my normal tour duties. Evelyn plans to join us as well. She and her boyfriend broke up right after Thanksgiving. (She has been sad the past two weeks, but realizes it is better that it ended now instead of later, since they planned to marry next summer.)

The reason I included this letter with our card is mainly to let you know the latest news about Allie Mae. I know we discussed some of this already, but in case you wanted the specifics of what has been going on and the important people involved, you’ll now have a copy of that information.

As we discussed back in early November, Micky Webster and I visited the ravine the day before Halloween. Following your description, we found the stone slab in the nearby woods. It wasn’t easy to find, but we finally uncovered it, roughly twenty feet away from the oak tree that bears her name. Since we had a pretty good idea what was lying beneath it, we contacted Dr. Peter Kirkland and his forensic specialists at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. It was a decision I soon regretted, and now feel it better to have left her remains undisturbed where they were.

Dr. Kirkland visited the site three days later, and brought a small hoisting machine to safely lift the slab. Underneath were numerous smashed bone fragments and a few traces of soiled blue and white fabric. He soon determined the bones were human, and his team carefully lifted the remains out of the ground. To be certain they got them all, they dug down nearly six feet into the earth. The professor wanted to be sure none of the remains had settled deeper into the ground, since the ravine has been flooded on several occasions since 1916.

The team was ready to place the stone slab back over the hole, when one of the grad students noticed something unusual about the slab’s underside. Once he pointed it out to the rest of us, I was surprised no one noticed it sooner. Circular symbols had been carved in snake-like lines moving from one end of the slab to the other. Dr. Kirkland was very excited about this. He contacted another professor at the university, named Dr. Walter Pollack, whose specialty I understand is archaeology. Dr. Kirkland called on his expertise because he’s supposed to know a lot about the Indians and other ancient races living in the southeastern United States, particularly my people the Cherokee.

Dr. Pollack became quite excited once he saw the stone carvings—even more excited than Dr. Kirkland. He believes complex civilizations lived in this region long before my people’s ancestors, the Iroquois from up north, arrived around 1000 AD. From the way the symbols were carved he stated they could be two to three thousand years old.

The point of all this is that they dug into the hole again, which I didn’t object to. But I did object when they also wanted to dig into the surrounding area. Despite my concerns, they received official permission from the park service in Washington D.C. by the next afternoon. Micky and I made sure the dig stayed within the permit’s boundaries.

By nightfall on November 5
^th
, a large section of the ravine had been dug up. Several more slabs were found, including the largest one that formed the ledge at the top of the ravine. Despite their irritation with me and my earlier protests, Dr. Kirkland and Dr. Pollack allowed me to see a curious artifact found almost ten feet below where the bone and fabric fragments were discovered. The only way I can describe this object is as a golden scepter with a very sharp ivory edge on one end. The scepter is in excellent condition, measuring nearly four feet with many of the same symbols discovered earlier engraved along its length.

Bear with me, David. I needed to revisit some information so you’ll understand the importance of what I tell you next. By the end of the week, the human remains were verified as belonging to a young female, between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, which fits Allie Mae’s description. The violence you described, David, couldn’t be verified since so many of the bones were crushed when the slab was dropped on top of the body (that fact has now officially been confirmed by the forensic specialists). The most recent carbon dating test placed the bones’ presence in the hole between seventy-five to a hundred years, which also confirms what you saw that night in the ravine.

Here’s where this gets really strange. Other bones were mixed in with the first skeleton, and Dr. Kirkland wondered if we had stumbled on the ‘depository for an early twentieth century mass murderer’. But, since some of the bones were found where the scepter was located, nearly a dozen feet below the surface, the mass murderer idea doesn’t make sense. Dr. Pollack thinks that some of these older bones drifted to the earth’s surface over the years while the rest remained deeper in the earth with the scepter.

That information alone was enough to complicate things, but then another two-dozen skeletons were found in shallow graves along both sides of the ravine. The immediate evidence suggests these bones were from white settlers—men, women, and children of European descent. If the artifacts found with these other skeletons are as old as they appear, then these people predate the early 1800’s migration into Cades Cove by two hundred years. The deteriorated helmets, body armor, jewelry and muskets are similar to what the settlers of colonial Virginia wore and used in the early 1600s. It challenges what we’ve known about the early history of Cades Cove, especially since it appears these people died violently (all of the skeletons’ upper neck vertebrae have been severed, which Dr. Kirkland stated was a sure sign of decapitation).

One question for me is how did these settlers got here without any evidence they actually lived in the area? Executed and buried with their belongings, I now wonder if they encountered a legendary rogue Indian tribe that my Cherokee forefathers forced out of the area around 1650.

I thought about the jewels you said Billy Ray Hobson recovered from the hole and stuffed in his trousers’ pocket. Do you recall seeing anything else that resembles what I described above? The gold and jewels would not be important to the vast majority of Indian tribes in North America, so I am very puzzled—both by the treasures found where Allie Mae was buried and the evidence of such violence upon the settlers’ remains.

When I told Evelyn about the discovery and what happened afterward, she was immediately angry. Beyond the worry about the destruction of our Cherokee heritage, she’s upset about the university dabbling in something they have little understanding of. The ancients often enlisted powerful spirits and magic to guard over their burial places. She feels certain the older remains and the scepter belong to the other entity she told you about, and which she firmly believes was the source of Allie Mae’s exaggerated strength and wrath. Disturbing its resting-place could bring severe consequences and set in motion terrible events for all involved. That’s her strongest fear, and my heart tells me she’s right.

She contacted the NCAI (National Congress of American Indians) in Washington. When they heard what was happening, they sent their representatives to both Cades Cove and before Congress. They remain skeptical that any of the bones are from an ancient Native American race, for the same reasons I mentioned earlier. Fortunately, two small burial mounds lie near the ravine predating my people’s arrival by at least a hundred years. Using this information, Evelyn was able to get the digging stopped, at least until everything is sorted out. In the mean time, the items taken from the cove will remain in safe keeping in a secured vault at the University of Tennessee. The only thing released was Allie Mae’s remains, and it took considerable effort getting that done.

When we spoke on Thanksgiving Day, I briefly mentioned I had an eventful week. What I didn’t tell you was I revisited Allie Esther the previous Monday, this time with both Micky and Cheryl to assist me on ‘official business’. She agreed to a DNA test, and the university’s forensic folks did us a favor by making it a priority to find out if Allie Mae and the older woman were blood related. Normally this takes some time, but they had the results within a week. It’s a definite match.

This past weekend, on Sunday, Allie Mae McCormick’s bones were laid to rest in her family’s plot at the old Methodist Church in Cades Cove. Allie Esther and her two grandsons, along with Dr. Kirkland, Micky, Evelyn, and myself attended. It was a mixture of Scottish and Indian traditions, and Evelyn put together a spell to not only insure Allie Mae stays at rest, but to also bind the force that empowered her—to keep it from returning since its tomb was plundered and desecrated.

Well, that brings us up to date. I’ll keep you posted on any further developments. Until then, I look forward to our next telephone conversation, David. May the holidays be a blessed time for you, Miriam, and the kids.

John