Alexander C. Irvine (15 page)

A
thin skein
of ice had glazed the shores of the Green River the last week or so, retreating on sunny days and reappearing every morning. Variations in the water level had left layers of ice on the riverbanks like step fungus on a tree trunk. Although it was a bit warmer today, Stephen was still glad that he would be spending the day in the cave, away from the chill winds. The cave’s steady fifty-four degrees was welcome when either heat or cold got too extreme, but Stephen liked it better in the winter, when fewer visitors were trooping through and disturbing it.

Winter itself he could live without, though. Thoughts of warm climates occupied his mind constantly since he’d begun thinking of Monrovia: thick, steaming jungles, rain warm as bathwater, sun that would bake his mulatto skin to a true dark African hue. The thoughts made him strong, and angry. He still wasn’t sleeping very well, although the mummy dreams only came every three weeks or so; he dreamed constantly of a huge city on a broad shallow lake, ringed by mountainous jungles. In this city Stephen owned property; men came to him to settle disputes and seek advice in the shadow of the great mountain to the east.

That was his dream of Monrovia, his dream of an Africa that yearned for him the way he burned to return to it. But every time he had the dream—and it came nearly every night—he grew more and more certain that the city was not the capital city Monroeville, and the place was not Africa, and the eyes he looked out of were not his own.

The dream was beginning to frighten him.

“You sure nobody down to Bowling Green gonna talk about this?” Nick Bransford sat in one of Dr. Croghan’s buggies, looking toward the hotel as if mentioning Croghan’s name would bring the man himself running.

Stephen had made arrangements to travel with Nick to Bowling Green overnight to attend a cousin’s jump over the broom, giving him an alibi to cover his solo venture into the cave against Dr. Croghan’s orders. Nick was the only person on Croghan’s estate who knew what was really going on, and as always he was jittery.

“Everything’s gonna be fine,” Stephen said. “You just go, and don’t talk to anyone you don’t know. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He slapped the drowsing horse on its flank, and Nick drove the buggy off into the early-morning mist.

Stephen skipped down the trail like a boy, hurrying to be underground before it got too light. Below him gaped the mouth of the cave, its warm breath tickling Stephen’s nose with the sweet promise of new discovery. Excitement quivered in the pit of his stomach, as it always did when he had the cave to himself. There would be no visitors today.

The sun was just beginning to sparkle on the frosted bark of the trees as Stephen adjusted his satchel and stepped into the twilight world. He passed quickly through Houchins Narrows and the majestic Rotunda, playing his lamp over the dusty remains of the saltpeter works. The Main Cave curved ahead of him, its gypsum-encrusted roof glittering brightly where smoke had not yet blackened the delicate formation. Stephen wished for a way to touch that ceiling, thirty feet over his head. It would be something no man had ever done.

Half an hour later he reached Giant’s Coffin and paused, drinking in the solitude while he decided which way to go. Continuing through the Main Cave would lead eventually to the Temple and after that Ultima Thule, where the cave ended in a gigantic breakdown. There had to be a way through the ancient cave-in, but Stephen hadn’t yet been able to find it. And Ultima Thule was a long hike, at least three miles before the real caving would begin.

The other way, beneath Giant’s Coffin and across the Bottomless Pit, though, there were more leads than he could count. Open cave gaped there at every turn, and he hadn’t returned to his new discoveries since the previous fall.

Stephen waited vainly for the ghosts to offer an opinion. But of course they didn’t, and fresher prospects made the decision. Stephen took a nip from his flask and ducked into the steep, twisting drop behind Giant’s Coffin.

I
n the last
hour before dawn, the dream returned to Archie.

He lifted his face to the sun, waiting for the moment when it would pass directly overhead into the time of false light, when the Rabbit’s antics blinded the searching Eye of the
huehueteotl.
On his left stood the mummy—
chacmool,
it called itself—resplendent in cloak of green quetzal feathers, human except for the golden slitted eyes that tracked Archie’s gaze to the sun. On Archie’s right stood Mike Dunn, naked and sweating under the flapping shreds of his overcoat. Ghostly flames flickered from his mouth as he said
No, Archie, no,
repeating the words like a psalm. Below, at the base of the terraced stone temple on which they stood, a great fire blazed, the air above it rippling from its heat. Archie looked through those waves at the broad avenue filled with people, the entire throng seeming to dance with one motion in the shimmering air. Riley Steen was there, and Udo, and Bennett and Royce McDougall. Behind Steen stood the portly figure of Phineas T. Barnum, the high dome of his forehead wrinkling as if he was trying to determine his role in the events that would follow.

Jane lay before him on a block of stone, its sides carved in a tangle of glyphs stained black by crusted blood. Her dress was a mimicry of the chacmool’s: painted red rings curved from eyebrow to cheekbone, and a jaguar pelt wrapped like a skirt around her waist. Quiet tears stood in her eyes, but she lay still, looking up into Archie’s face.

Toniatuh,
the chacmool said: the Sun. Archie looked directly up and saw the change come over the sun, saw its light bend under the weight of He Who Makes Things Grow, saw the ghosts of the
tianquiztli,
the Pleiades, appear as a speckled shadow in the center of the burning hollow sphere.

Tlaloc, in tonan in tota,
the chacmool said: our Mother, our Father. It lay down on a lower stone block next to the altar, drawing its knees up and cupping its hands over its stomach
Im
acpal iyoloco:
He holds men in the palm of His hand.

Archie realized he held Helen’s old kitchen knife in his hands. Silence spread like a wave over the crowd, and Archie saw Barnum still wearing the determined frown of a man tugging on a memory that will not quite appear.

No, Archie, no,
Mike said.

As Archie raised the knife, the chacmool said
Yollotl, eztli; ompa onquiza’n tlalticpac.

The heart, the blood, the world spills out.

He awoke with the knife in his hands and the quetzal talisman thrumming like a heartbeat in the hollow of his throat. In the subterranean darkness of the Bright’s cellar, Archie watched the gleam of the false sun play along the knife’s keen edge.

The voices — no
, the
voice
—returned as Stephen carefully skirted the edge of Bottomless Pit, the corners of his eyes crinkling in the beginnings of a smile, as they always did now when he thought of that name. The smile faded as he heard the voice.

The cave had stopped whispering when he’d found the mummy. The voices, the ghosts, had gone away. In the few times since then that he’d been able to get in the cave alone, Stephen had realized what it was to be lonely. Solitude by itself was not loneliness; loneliness was when you expected a companion and none appeared. It wasn’t a feeling he’d ever thought to experience in the cave. The whispers had always been there to guide him.

Now, Stephen realized, he understood why the cave frightened some people.

Visitors are coming, Stephen. I will return soon.

“Visitors are always coming,” Stephen said. “How will I know them?”

You will know me.

Stephen stopped and squatted against the curving wall. Just ahead the passage narrowed into the muddy crawl he’d named Winding Way. After Winding Way came Great Relief Hall, a platter-shaped room barely tall enough to stand erect in. The name was a bit grand, maybe, but it had been perfect when Stephen had stretched his legs there after the first harrowing trip through Winding Way, his mouth and nose caked with mud. He’d had to push the lantern ahead of him, and one of the tight spots had forced him to turn his head sideways in order to get through it. But he’d smelled big cave ahead, just as he had the night he’d found the mummy.

“Yes, I’ll know you,” he said. “What is it you want from me?”

You will have a task to perform. A new world depends on your task, and when you have completed it you will stand at my left hand a free man. Prepare for visitors, Stephen. I will guide you.

The voice subsided, leaving Stephen very much aware of how alone he was, separated from the sun by a hundred feet and more of solid limestone. And the whispers were still silenced. What was it about that voice that made him fear the cave? What threat hid behind its promise of freedom?

Stephen felt as he had before he’d taught himself to read, when visitors talked about books and goaded him about stories he’d never heard. Angry frustration welled up with those memories, the feeling that just out of earshot scornful laughter was drifting in his direction. The voice was hiding something, lying about something. And if it was lying at all, its promises couldn’t be trusted.

“I
will
be free,” Stephen growled into the pit. The darkness swallowed his words and kept them.

He needed answers. If the voice was lying, he had to know what it was lying about; otherwise he was no better than a tool, like he was for Dr. Croghan. When the visitors came, they might have information, but in the meantime Stephen resolved to learn as much as he could on his own. And he would start in the room where he’d found the mummy.

I
n
Riv
er
Hall
, Stephen paused beside a large pool called the Dead Sea, to have a drink and consider his options. The River Styx murmured softly from around the next bend in the passage, beckoning him. Down here the cave was different, the passages more secretive. A sense of openness waiting to be revealed hung in the damp air with the smell of the water.

The river had several branches, and Stephen had followed every one until the water rose within inches of the roof and his teeth were chattering with the cold. There was more cave beyond the rivers, he had no doubt about that. He just had to listen to the ghosts and find his way when the water was low. The one way he’d found on the other side of the river had been named Purgatory, a cold and miserable tube that opened out into some magnificent sights after a mile or so. He’d found grand high canyon passages, their walls whipped into strange ridges and scallops by long-gone rushing water, and dozens of tiny cracks and crevices like mole-holes. Someday all would bear the names of visitors, Stephen thought bitterly. People who come just to say they’ve done it.

The other river branches might also lead to big cave, but something about the water made Stephen nervous this day. The Dead Sea lay still, and Stephen became convinced that the water had somehow silenced the ghosts.
They used to call out when new cave was close,
he thought,
and since they stopped, I’ve been afraid of water. There’s got to be a connection.
And he had to find out what that connection was, had to get the voice out of his head and the cave so the whispering ghosts would come back.

Stephen squeezed into the branch that led to Bottomless Pit, moving at a steady crawl and bearwalking when the ceiling rose enough. Working his way up the corkscrew at the end, he thought he heard someone speaking, and stopped until his own breathing quieted enough to hear; but if there had been a sound, it was gone, and he put it down to a freak echo from a tour in another part of the cave. No tours had been scheduled, but things changed. Perhaps Croghan himself had taken a surprise visitor for a ramble.

Be just my luck,
he thought,
if someone dropped a torch into the pit while I was standing at the bottom. Probably scare some eastern dentist half to death, and what would Dr. Croghan say about that?

He heard no other noises as he worked his way down the rock-fall to the bottom of the pit, but Stephen caught himself looking up several times when he should have been paying attention to his feet. He had a prickling sensation on his scalp, like he was expecting to bump his head. Was someone up there?

It was then that Stephen noticed the footprints leading into the Mummy Room. He stopped short, feeling the prickle spread to the nape of his neck and down his arms.

No one else knew about the branch, and he was sure that no other way led to Bottomless Pit. Were the footprints his? It was possible, he guessed; but the pit flooded fairly often when the rivers rose. Who else’s would they be, though? Had someone else found the branch and the Mummy Room?

He was surprised at the jealous chill he felt when imagining someone else standing before the great statue.
It’s mine,
he thought,
or should be if anything in this cave should. Nobody else has a right to it.

Holding his lamp closer to one of the tracks, Stephen saw something that sent a chill through him: they were prints of bare feet, each toe clearly outlined by a tiny ridge of sand. And there were no prints leading out, either bare or shod. Whoever had entered the Mummy Room was still there.

The voice had said visitors were coming. Had one of them arrived already? Or was it the mummy itself, already returned from the museum back East where Croghan had sold it?

Neither seemed likely. Whatever the voice had held back, it clearly wanted him to do something before the visitors came. It didn’t follow, then, that it would deceive him about the visitors’ arrival, and that meant that whoever was in the Mummy Room wasn’t on an errand from the mummy itself. There was nothing to do but go on in and see what was what.

Following an old habit, Stephen stepped exactly in the mysterious tracks as he crossed to the triangular portal that led to the Mummy Room. The lamp would give him away to whoever was inside, but that couldn’t be helped. Going in without light would be foolish.

He ducked quickly through the quick tight turn between the leaning slabs and the opening into the terraced chamber itself. Standing again, with the altar stone facing the immense carved statue to his right, Stephen was once more overwhelmed by the strangeness of it. The square-cut walls, the stone god’s watchful face, the tangled panorama carved into the altar’s sides: nothing else in the cave had prepared him for this. And now there was an intruder, a tall lithe black man wearing only shirtsleeves and homespun trousers and carrying a shoulder bag, dripping wet and squinting at the statue like he was in a museum. He was nobody Stephen knew.

“How did you get here?” Stephen asked.

“Same way you did. There’s only the one way.” The intruder turned to Stephen, his eyes bulging out of sockets ringed by black dead flesh. A swampy odor rode on his breath, and his skin sagged like a bloodhound’s jowls.

“Think, Johnny, introductions.” Smiling, the intruder said, “John Diamond. You must be Rebus.” He stuck out a skinny hand, the tips of the fingers wrinkled like he’d been too long in his bathwater.

Stephen shook before it occurred to him not to. “Who’s Rebus?” he said. “My name is Stephen.”

“Oh,
Stephen!
Sorry, Johnny; Christ. Dead man’s mistake. They told me you were Rebus.” John shook his head and scratched behind one ear, laughing at the joke.

“Dead people?” The swamp smell was coming not from Diamond’s breath, Stephen realized, but directly out of his skin.

“They talk to me. I’m one of them, after all. Terrible racket, lucky I don’t sleep any more.”

Stephen struggled to make sense of what this Diamond was saying. Was he dead? Stephen had heard of haunts and zombies, but never of one who could speak, much less laugh. This man, John, said that the dead spoke to him—was that what Stephen was hearing, voices from the grave?

In any case, Diamond’s being in the Mummy Room was no accident. He’d expected Stephen, even if he had a different name in mind.

The realization clicked into place: The mummy wasn’t expecting this Diamond. He had come here on his own, or been sent by someone or something else.

“Did the mummy send you?” Stephen asked, to be sure.

“Mummy? Oh, chacmool. No. Chacmool works for Steen, or he thinks it does. Steen’s the man that drowned me. Hateful thing. Bastard. He wants to be king. Shut up, you.” This last was snapped at the air just above Diamond’s head. “Sorry, Johnny, not you. My tongue gets loose, too many voices want out.”

Steen. The man who’d bought the mummy had been named Steen. “What’s this chacmool?” Stephen asked before Diamond started yammering again.

Diamond peered at him as if trying to detect a joke. “You don’t know anything, do you?” he said finally, a delighted smile breaking out on his wasted face. “Chacmool’s a … hm. From the beginning, Johnny.

“Big things afoot. You involved. I wasn’t but now I am. Chacmool’s a, sort of eyes and ears for him.” Diamond pointed at the statue. “He Who Makes Things Grow, Tlaloc,
imacpal iyoloco.”

“Eemac-what?”

“Sorry, Johnny. Nahuatl; his language. I hear him, too. Means he holds us in the palm of his hand. More like a fist for me ‘cause I drowned. You he still tries to convince.”

You will be a man,
Stephen thought, hearing the voice’s encouraging echo.

“Right,” Diamond nodded, then caught himself. “Sorry, Johnny. Eavesdrop sometimes. Tlaloc in my head, makes me do things, I don’t remember all of them.

“But that’s his only form now,” Diamond said, pointing over his shoulder at the grotesque carving on the cave wall, “that and others like it. All lost in the jungle except this one, and it is trapped in the wall. He can’t walk in this world without form. And chacmool isn’t strong enough on its own to bring him back. So it plans a sacrifice to feed him, give him strength and form.”

Excitement built in Diamond’s breathy voice. “That’s where this comes in,” he continued, pulling a wooden box from his bag and dropping a canvas bundle on the floor. He flinched as he opened the box.

When fully open, the halves of the box met and formed a figure. “Look familiar?” Diamond said.

Stephen nodded. The figure on the box was the mummy. The chacmool.

“Thought so. Now this,” Diamond scooped up the canvas bundle, “is for you. I’m not supposed to have it. Maskansisil doesn’t want that.” He unwrapped a polished wooden mask, featureless except for a lump where a nose might be and a two-inch slit of a mouth.

“Lupita told me to look for this, and—sorry Johnny—I told Steen about it. Steen killed her too. Bastard. He drowned me— guess I owe him a bad turn or two. I opened the box and now Maskansisil is in my head, too. Tells me to hate Tlaloc, but I can’t. Can hate Steen, though. He wouldn’t want you to have this.”

Diamond held the mask out to Stephen, but Stephen took a step away from him. “Hold on, now,” he said. “I’m not in the habit of talking to dead men, and I don’t understand half of what you say. Why should I wear this mask? Who’s Maskansisil?”

Diamond shrugged, still offering Stephen the mask. “Maybe you won’t. Maybe you give it to someone. Maskansisil is in the mask. The Pathfinder.”

“Who is Maskansisil?” Stephen said again.

“Sorry, Johnny. Too fast. Beginning again: Tlaloc’s people … Maskansisil is like the chacmool. He is eyes and ears for a different god, who also has no form. Good and evil is too simple, but … He fights Tlaloc, fights the chacmool. For a very long time.”

Diamond shrugged again. “All I know. You are a pathfinder, too. Maskansisil says give the mask to you, you’ll know what to do.”

Stephen reached for the mask, then hesitated. “Maskansisil sent you to me?”

Diamond nodded, grinning.

“Who sent you to get the mask?”

The grin faded and Diamond looked at his feet. “Tlaloc showed me where it was.”

“You’re serving two masters, dead man. How do I know which one is talking?” He would have to take the mask, Stephen knew that. He was caught too deep already to just step aside. But before he committed, he was damn sure going to know who was pulling Diamond’s strings.

Diamond looked at him coldly, and the force of that angry gaze battered Stephen’s mind with the realization that he was talking to a dead man. A man who heard the voices of the gods.

“
I
speak,” Diamond said, injured fury simmering in his whispery voice. “I could give the mask to another, could throw it into the sea. I give it to you.”

Stephen took the mask. It was heavier than it should have been, and he felt part of its weight settle into him, as if he had betrayed a confidence. Now I’m serving two masters too, he thought, half expecting the voice to return or the featureless mask to suddenly speak; but the only sound in the cave was a hollow click as Diamond shut the carved box.

“I’ll keep this,” he said. “It should be apart from the mask.”

Am I really ready to cross this chacmool?
Stephen wasn’t sure, but he guessed he already had. Guilt began to gnaw at him as he remembered the city from his dreams, remembered again the feeling of being a citizen rather than a slave.

“Diamond,” he blurted, “have you seen the city?”

“Afternoon city?” Diamond said, and Stephen nodded, seeing again the sun reddened by plumes of smoke.

“Ha,” Diamond said, his bare feet slapping on the floor as he walked away. “Have I seen it? Rebus, I
live
there.”