Alexander C. Irvine (18 page)

From the sheltered
doorway of a warehouse shipping office, Royce watched the Bannion steamer idle at the dock, building up a full head of steam for its trip to Philadelphia. Prescott was on the boat, up to God knew what, but his aims didn’t matter. What mattered was unfinished business. It didn’t matter whether he caught up to good old Archie in Philadelphia or bloody San Francisco. Catch him Royce would.

“Charlie,” he said. “Steen’s gone to Louisville, right?”

“I told you that.”

Louisville. If Prescott was headed there as well, it would be convenient. Royce’s orders from Steen were to take care of Prescott with all haste and then go to Steen’s safe house in Louisville to locate the booger that had gotten away last December. But they weren’t to kill Prescott until they’d got their hands on some girl, who Steen was convinced would be following Archie wherever he went.

That was all fine. If the girl was near when they found Prescott, they’d bring her to Steen. But if not, it was more important to finish what had been started. The booger could do its magic whatever without the girl if it had to, but Royce had a very specific debt to settle with Archie Prescott.

Jane
crouched betw
een
two stacks of shipping crates, sheltering Da’s note from the rain and wanting to scream in frustration because she’d never learned to read properly. She could recognize words if she’d seen them on a map, and knew her letters if she could sing the tune in her head, but the note in her shaking hands might as well have been written in Chinese.

Da was going to Philadelphia, she knew that much. But if he didn’t find the black man there, he might go anywhere following him. He might never come back to New York.

The thought made Jane’s stomach hurt and nearly started her crying again. She concentrated fiercely on a map pasted to the wall of her burrow, placing first New York, then Philadelphia. The boat would steam through Kill Van Kull and Arthur Kill to the Raritan Canal across New Jersey, then down the Delaware River to Philadelphia.

Picturing her father inching across the map, Jane calmed herself. She couldn’t be sure that he would return to New York, but she could follow him wherever he was going. She had to follow him. He’d called her by name. Somewhere inside he must know that she was his daughter. But if she didn’t follow him, she might never hear him say it.

She had to get someone to read the note. Who did she know that could read? Elmer, but he was away up Broadway toward Trinity Church, and she didn’t have time to go that far. People in the crowd couldn’t be trusted; one of them would likely just take the note from her and call the policeman.

Jane walked away from the passenger boats, cutting northward across Battery Park toward the freight docks on the Hudson. She couldn’t see anyone she knew and trusted, and Da’s steamer would be leaving in ten minutes.

“Shit!” she said, drawing disapproving glances from passing adults. Shouldn’t Henry be somewhere around? He was always working the ferries and freighters, selling Top Deck cigars and crowing dire warnings about the quality of tobacco available on the boats. Perhaps he’d been run off, if one of the ferry officers had heard his pitch.

No, there he was, sitting in the lee of a row of whiskey barrels and smoking his wares. Jane realized where she was and had to take a deep breath before she could go on. Just a hundred yards north was the dock where Little Bree and the others had been pulled pale and cold from the water. For Da, she thought.

“Henry!” Jane called, hurrying over to him. “Can you read?”

“The nuns made me,” he said. “Cigar?”

She took one from the offered box and stowed it in an inside pocket. “I need a favor, Henry. I’ll give you a dollar.”

“To read? For a dollar you can choose the language.”

“Don’t tease, this is important. It’s for my father.”

She saw the flicker of disbelief in his eyes, but all he said was, “Here, let me see it.” He took the note from her and squinted at it, puffing on his cigar.

“Well, what’s it say?”

“I’ll read it for you,” he said around the cigar. ” ‘Mr. Bennett: Have gone to Philadelphia following ‘Aztec mummy’ lead. Not sure where this will end up, but have a hunch about Louisville. Will write soonest. Archie.’ ” Henry looked up, puzzled. “What’s an Aztec mummy?”

“Dunno,” Jane said, thinking furiously. Louisville; that was all the way down the Ohio River, almost to St. Louis. She had been there once before, riding in the back of Riley Steen’s wagon with one leg chained to the wagon’s frame. The thought of traveling so far alone frightened her terribly, but it would be for Da, and she could do anything if it meant he would call her by name.

She held a crumpled paper dollar out to Henry, but snatched it away when he reached for it. “You have to do something else, too,” she said.

“What? I already read. That’s what you wanted.”

She ignored his protests. “Take that note to Mr. Bennett, at the
Herald.
You know where that is?”

“Yeah, Fulton Street,” Henry said sullenly. His cigar had gone out.

“Will you do it?” She held the dollar out again and he plucked it from her fingers.

“Yeah, I’ll do it. Haven’t sold anything today anyway.”

“Promise me, Henry. This is,” she remembered the word Da had used, “crucial.”

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

“Promise!”

He stood and dropped the soggy cigar butt. “All right, I promise. Now chase it, will you? I’m busy.”

“Thank you, Henry!” Jane called, already running south into the park.

Back down at
the ferry slip, she watched as the last of the passengers made their way up the slippery gangplank and either ducked into the shelter of the steamer’s cabin or jostled for position at the leeward side of the boiler. She couldn’t see Da; he must have paid extra to travel out of the storm.

She waited until the deckhand was ready to cast off, then burst from the crowd shouting “Please, sir! Wait! Please!”

The deckhand, a gangly youth of perhaps fifteen made larger by many layers of clothing, paused as she ran up to the very edge of the dock and looked pleadingly up at him. “Please sir, my father’s in Philadelphia and Mother—” Jane let her voice break and made a show of trying not to cry. “Mother’s too sick to go herself, and I have to tell him about her. Please,” she said again, digging a handful of pennies and lint from her trouser pocket. “This is all I have, but mother is so ill …” She stood mutely, letting tears mix with the rain stinging her face.

Throwing a nervous look over his shoulder, the deckhand hesitated, neither casting off nor moving to help her.

“Please,” Jane said again. She didn’t have to fake the tears now.

The steamer’s whistle blew, and Jane sent up a fervent prayer. . Then the deckhand bent down, caught her wrist, and hauled her over the rail.

“Find a hole, little one, and stay there,” he said. “If the captain finds you deadheading, I’ll pitch you off myself to prove I didn’t do it.” He cast off and disappeared below.

Jane worked her way to the stern and hid herself under a tarpaulin covering a pile of luggage. The ferry eased away from the dock, beginning to rock on the windblown chop. Lifting a corner of the tarp, she watched the dock fade slowly into the rain, scared but also comforted by the knowledge that Da was on this same boat. Her scars itched, and she was cold, but Jane was filled with pride at the way she’d been able to help him, and she knew that she would help him again when she got the chance.

At
dawn
,
Riley
Steen stopped at a way station just to the south of Philadelphia. The night’s travel in the storm had lamed one of his horses, and the other was blowing hard, responding to neither lash nor curse. He bought fresh horses quickly, with minimum conversation, paying an exorbitant price for nags he’d likely have to replace by the time he reached Baltimore. But horses did not matter and neither did money. The only objective of any importance was reaching Louisville in time to intercept the chacmool.

It had left New York the previous morning, he was certain of that. The ants that had plagued his office since the night of its reanimation had frozen for a moment at exactly three minutes before eleven o’clock. When they started moving again, their patterns were completely disrupted, and Steen had known immediately that the chacmool had stepped off the island. He’d sent notice to Royce that he was leaving within the hour for Louisville and instructed the Rabbit to follow Prescott and capture the girl if, as Lupita predicted, she followed her father.

If events unfolded the way Steen thought they would, quite a grand reunion would take place at his safe house in Louisville. They would reel in first the chacmool, then Archie, and finally little Nanahuatzin herself. Then, with Prescott disposed of, they could proceed to the cave and get about the business of history-making.

Despite Lupita’s derision, Steen felt that his plan was holding together brilliantly. Perhaps his anxiety of the last few months had been unwarranted. Whatever difficulties had been encountered, all of the necessary parties appeared to be on their way to a rendezvous at the proper time. His perseverance over the last thirty years was soon to be rewarded.

And oh, the rewards. With Tlaloc rejuvenated and given form in the world, Maskansisil and his followers would be swatted like mosquitoes. Steen would stand astride an empire that would grow to encompass America, Mexico, even the Floridas. Even Canada.

There was something terribly right, Steen thought, about the ancient Mexican balance of sacrifice and favor. Gods were hungry, and needed to be appeased—as Abraham no doubt had understood in those nervous moments before he’d noticed the ram caught in the thicket. What better sacrifice than to return to the gods the very creatures they had created? Nothing, Steen knew, was ever given without something equal being lost. Human beings had to die in order for the human world to exist. That balance had been ignored for too long, obscured by the absutdities of Christianity. People had flocked like sheep to Gospel platitudes because Jesus promised something for nothing. It was a fool’s bargain.

And come April the third, the world would begin to discover just how foolish it had been.

The strange stars
were out, and that meant magic was happening. John Diamond shook his head and muttered mournfully into the cold current of the Green River, hearing his voice echo through the water into the cave. “Never wanted no part of no magic.”

Sorry, Johnny,
he silently answered himself. A chorus of the Micteca, the Fleshless Ones, aroused by the magic in the air, took up the refrain:
Sorry Johnny sorrysorry Johnny sorry.

He was floating on his back about a foot below the river’s surface, watching constellations ripple and allowing the current to carry him along. “Stay off the mountains,” he said, and a remnant of air bled from his lungs, the bubbles twisting the stars into vivid streaks. “Mountains belong to Tlaloc, He Who Is Made of Earth. Everybody knows that.”

Riley Steen was coming, and soon. The calendar grew ripe and the Fleshless Ones were hysterical for days at a time. In twenty-two days, the sun would rise just as it always had, but if Steen’s plan succeeded, the world would be changed. Tlalocan would exist on earth. Somewhere in the hills of Kentucky a strange cult would reappear, growing until it became a fever that would scorch the Americas with sacrificial fires from New York to the City of Mexico and beyond. And the sun would fill with blood.

In such a world John Diamond would be very lucky if he could simply die, because he had given Rebus the tool that could foil Steen’s plan.

Had he done the right thing? The Micteca laughed.

Jane was as
exhausted as she could ever remember being. Even during the time she’d spent as Riley Steen’s captive and occasional performer, she’d been able to rest when they traveled; but for the past three days she’d been on the move constantly, hardly daring to close her eyes for fear that Da would board a train or a boat while she slept and be gone from her forever.

She’d spent the first night shivering in a stairwell across from the Philadelphia hotel where Da stayed, waking up every hour or so to see if the sun had come up and scratching at her face and back. Something was happening to her, and it didn’t seem so wonderful when she was traveling and hiding alone in strange places. Her scars seemed less lumpy to the touch, but she could feel scabs all over her body raised by her continuous scratching. They cracked painfully when she moved in certain ways. A different itch plagued her scalp; she wasn’t sure, but it felt like her hair was actually growing back.

What’s happening to me?
she thought. The itch had started the night the black Indian had killed those sailors outside her burrow. Lately it had been constant, and she didn’t always remember to remind herself not to scratch.

She wished she could ask Da about things. He would know, she was sure. After all, he had to be following the man for a reason. But she had to wait, had to bide her time until she was certain he would accept her.

In Philadelphia, Da had gone shopping, of all things, and then boarded the strangest train Jane had ever seen. It was a series of flatcars that each carried a boat. Da and the other passengers had climbed onto the cars and gone straight into the boats, staying inside when the train started to move. Jane had managed to catch the last car and hide herself from the railworkers, and she had ridden half the day huddled under the slant of the hull of the last boat. The railway ended on the bank of a canal, where the boats were lowered into the water and locked together. She hadn’t been able to sneak past the boatmen, and had panicked that she’d be left to make her own way across the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh, where the train was bound.

But the horse-drawn canal boats moved barely faster than she could walk, and Jane had kept just behind the horses, watching the boats carefully lest Da should come out on the deck and see her. Boys called hoggees stood on the decks, using long poles to push the boats off if they drifted too near the canal banks. Even with them poling, the boats often swung near the banks, and Jane was able to make the short jump onto the last boat as night fell. She’d slept gratefully that night on the rear deck, lulled by the boat’s gentle rocking and the soft slap of water against its hull.

One of the hoggees woke her at sunrise. “Where’s yer ticket?” he’d snapped, whacking her feet with his pole.

“Inside with my Da,” she’d answered defiantly. “I like to sleep outside.”

“Oh, very likely,” he’d said. “Maybe I should get the pilot to roust your Dad and we’ll see.”

She hadn’t said anything to that. After a pause the hoggee had said, “We’ll see,” again and given her another whack before walking around the side of the cabin.

Jane had stayed on the boat only long enough for it to swing near the bank again. She couldn’t risk being caught by the pilot, who would surely ask around about a runaway girl. Better to spend another day walking.

Early in the afternoon, the canal ended at the base of a mountain. The boats were once again loaded onto flatcars, and the cars began to move out of the station house—
up
the side of the mountain. Seeing this mystery, Jane had forgotten her mission for a moment. How were the train cars rolling uphill?

She’d soon discovered that the cars were pulled on thick ropes by a locomotive engine at the top of the first incline. That solved the mystery, but Jane still felt slightly awed by the whole thing. Nothing like it existed in New York, or anywhere else she’d ever been. And if something like this could be built in the wilderness, what wonders would the cities hold? Pittsburgh, or St. Louis? San Francisco even?

I
want to see everything,
she’d thought then.
Everything I’ve never
seen.

There were too many people watching from the engine houses for her to sneak aboard the train, or boat or whatever it was. So Jane spent the afternoon climbing along the tracks, watching the train with Da aboard as it passed other trains being lowered down toward Hollidaysburg, the town at the foot of the mountain. By sundown she was struggling through several inches of heavy, wet snow, and her feet were numb. With every hour she fell further behind the train.
It must stop at the top of the mountain,
she thought— surely they wouldn’t try to go down the other side in the dark.

The last length of track was arrow-straight, and she could see the lights of a town perhaps half a mile farther ahead. Jane crouched under a bridge that crossed the track just above the second-to-last engine house, catching her breath before Da’s train began its ascent. What if the rope breaks? she thought, even though she’d seen the brake attached to the back of each car. It seemed too small to stop anything so huge as a train, and the one trailing Da’s car seemed to have a branch caught in one of its wheels.

Jane’s face suddenly burned with an itch far worse than anything she’d felt before, and she fought down the urge to scratch.

The itch grew, the scarred parts of her skin crawling like they had the night she’d seen the Indian.

“Oh God,” she said, understanding. The branch wasn’t caught in the brake; it had
grown
there, just as the boards enclosing her burrow had sprouted fresh twigs where the Indian had bumped against them. She could see the rest of the brake’s frame bulge and deform, splitting as branches sprouted and grew new green leaves.

With a crack like a gunshot the brake splintered. Its wheels rolled down the track, then bounded away into a ditch. The train had nearly reached the summit, but it slowed and a second later Jane heard the snap of the tow rope breaking. The two cars began to roll back down the incline, picking up speed as they went.

Jane burst out from under the bridge and ran up the incline, veering to the side away from the runaway train. “Jump!” she screamed. “Da, jump! Get off the train!”

The rear car’s wheels crunched over the wreckage of the brake. The train shuddered and tilted to one side, jackknifing as the front car pushed the rear aside, then derailed itself. The boat on the rear car snapped its ties and rolled over into the ditch, landing with a terrific crash and sliding upside down for a hundred feet or so. Wreckage trailed up the mountainside above it.

The second car plowed nearly all the way back to the engine house, finally banging to a halt against a wooden loading platform. Jane heard screams other than her own, from inside the cars and along the side of the tracks where passengers had been thrown from the rear car. Four men ran past Jane toward the upended car, shouting for help. Shortly after, passengers from the waiting cars followed, carrying blankets and lamps. Jane stood frozen. Which car had Da been riding in? She didn’t know.

“Da!” she screamed, rooted to the spot by horror and indecision.
“Daaaaaaa!”

A hand clamped over her mouth. Jane was lifted off her feet thrashing and still screaming into the callused palm.

“Dammit, girlie, hold still!” growled a rough Irish voice. “You’ve got places to go.” The man holding her grunted as he pitched her across the ditch away from the wreck. She crashed into the brush and immediately another pair of hands seized her and dragged her up an embankment into the forest. Twisting around, she caught a glimpse of the man holding her. He was short and blocky, barely taller than she, with a hump bulging under his patchy fur coat. “Da!” she screamed again, her voice nearly gone, and he punched her hard on the scarred side of her head.

Bright sparks burst behind her eyes, and she slumped in his grasp, unable to resist as he dragged her farther into the trees. Through the ringing in her ears Jane heard another man crashing through the brush behind them. They came out onto a level clearing and Jane tumbled to the ground. She tried to get up but her head kept spinning her back to the ground.

“Charlie,” the man who’d first grabbed her said, “go around the bend there and see if you can’t liberate us a buggy. I’ve lost my taste for trains.”

Good fortune comes
when you least expect it, thought Royce. It was lucky enough that he and Charlie had decided to jump off the train as it eased into the engine house, to sneak up to Summitville and surprise Prescott when he put up for the night; but to have the chacmool itself finger the bloody girl was more than an Irishman had any right to expect.

It had walked right up to Royce and caught his arm as he was having a cigar around the back of the platform, and he’d come within a whisker of stubbing the smoke out in its black face before figuring out that it wasn’t just a dressed-up nigger who didn’t know his place.

“Nanahuatzin is here,” it had said.

Before his brain caught up with his mouth, Royce nearly blurted out “Who the hell are you, Bobo?” But he put everything together just as the rope snapped and all hell broke loose on the side of the mountain. Seeing the cars plowing back toward the engine house, he’d jumped across the other track, Charlie hot on his heels, and gotten into the trees a bit. When he’d turned around the chacmool was right there, and it calmly pointed out the girlie, screeching like a banshee in the middle of the incline.

“Bring her to Louisville. I will meet you there,” it said. Then it disappeared with unholy speed into the forest.

That had been two hours ago. Since then Charlie had acquired a horse and wagon from some rickety homestead, and they’d made fairly good time along this nameless mountain road. They had the girl, they knew the booger was going to meet Steen, and best of all Archie Prescott was smashed upside down in the wrecked boat. If he survived, he’d come to Louisville following the chacmool, and Royce would take care of him then. If not, well, Royce was a bit put out at the prospect of not being able to slip a blade in Archie himself, but all things considered it was a small disappointment. In two weeks they’d be in Louisville, and then, according to Steen, the real show would begin.

Good fortune all around.

After
all he’d
been through that evening, the last thing Archie expected was that he’d be unable to sleep. He knew he should be thanking God that he had survived the crash, but his head was still throbbing from the battering he’d absorbed and, all in all, he wasn’t feeling very thankful. All he could think about was getting back on the chacmool’s trail.

The feather talisman had begun spasming wildly moments before the rope snapped, and if that weren’t proof enough, Archie had seen the remains of the derailleur scattered on the tracks. The engineer on duty had simply shaken his head in amazement, crossing himself and ordering his men to clear away the newly grown foliage as quietly as possible.

Well,
Archie thought,
at least I know I’m on the scent.
When he’d booked the passage to Pittsburgh, he hadn’t been entirely certain that his Louisville hunch was any more than that—just a hunch. But the night’s events made it pretty damned certain that his hunch had been on target.

The Pennsylvania Main Line Canal Company had provided lodging for all of the passengers who hadn’t needed emergency medical attention, and Archie had been put up in the Lemon House, a square stone inn right alongside the tracks in the center of Summitville. Work at the accident site had stopped several hours ago, after all of the passengers had been accounted for. Now it was after midnight, and the only sound was the rustling of the wind in the forest that fell away into the valley behind Lemon House. Archie’s room was at the rear of the inn, on the second floor, and he was glad that he didn’t have to look out on the lamplit tracks. Outside his window was nearly absolute darkness; only a patch of sloping lawn, splotched with clumps of wet snow, and the nearest trees were visible under a cloudy sky.

So the chacmool had tried to kill him, and in such a way as to suggest that it didn’t want to confront him directly. Was it now afraid of him for some reason, or merely anxious to keep moving and leave him behind? In either case, something fundamental had changed since the December night in Barnum’s Museum, when it had backed away instead of gulping down Archie’s
yollotl.
But why, that was the question, and Archie couldn’t wring an answer from his battered brain. It had recognized him, that seemed certain, but he hadn’t changed all that much in the past three months, had he? It must have learned something about him.

If the chacmool thought he was dead, though, he had a slim advantage over it. It wouldn’t be expecting him to arrive in Louisville or at the Mammoth Cave, if that was where it was bound.

One way or another, Archie resolved, he would be rid of it. No more grisly dreams, no more attempts on his life, no more horrible afternoons when the sun looked as if it had contracted a wasting disease. If killing was involved, so be it.

And that went for Steen and the Rabbit youth Royce as well. Archie didn’t know where Steen was, but he had a strong intuition that a gaudy drummer-wagon was bumping its way toward Louisville. Whatever pagan madness was being planned would surely involve Steen, whether he regained control of the chacmool or not.

Christ, what have I gotten myself into?
Archie thought, rolling over on the soft hotel bed and gazing out the window of his room. I don’t even know what’s supposed to happen at the cave.

Again he felt like a walking adage, a sort of object lesson in the dangers of curiosity. After all, it was his inquisitive nature that had cost him his ear, gotten him stabbed and buried alive—generally run him afoul of homicidal madmen. Tonight he’d been lucky, surviving the train crash in fairly good form except for bruises and a twisted ankle. The injuries he’d suffered at the hands of the two Rabbits had been much worse, but it was becoming clear to Archie that no matter how his enemies proliferated, the chacmool was by far the most dangerous.

Which, he thought, should not surprise me, since it has already murdered two dozen children in cold blood and, like a cat marking its territory, left them to be found in the Hudson.

Archie sat up in bed and scratched at the stub of his left ear. Someone was pacing the length of the corridor, most likely a fellow insomniac.
A walk might do me some good, too,
he thought, swinging his aching legs off the bed and feeling around for his shoes.

The footsteps outside halted in front of his door. Archie straightened, listening, and the feather talisman swung against his bare chest. It was wriggling just as it had before the crash, and at the first chill touch of brass against his skin, Archie found himself looking out of someone else’s eyes.

There was no light, but he could see a door in front of him. The wallpaper border around the frame was an ornate floral pattern, one that had provoked a remote exhausted annoyance when Archie had walked through that door earlier in the night.

Desolate fear rose churning in Archie’s gut.
It found me somehow,
he thought,
and came back to finish the job.

He swept his hand under the bed, locating his shoes and pulling them on. He was wearing only a woolen johnny, but there was no time to dress, and his coat was hanging on a peg by the door. He had to escape before the chacmool realized that he knew it was there.

Archie almost shouted for help, for whatever passed for a police force in this hamlet. But the memory of Barnum’s watchman, his arm torn off and ribs cracked open like an autopsy cadaver, choked off the cry. Whatever happens to me, Archie thought, I’ll not kill anyone else through ignorance or cowardice. Stumbling over his untied laces, he fell against the bureau and grabbed the traveling valise he’d purchased in Philadelphia. In it were Helen’s knife and some of Barnum’s money, both of which were more important than trousers at the moment.

The doorknob turned, first quietly and then with increasing violence as the chacmool jerked against the deadbolt lock. Archie tried to open the window and discovered that it was frozen shut. Behind him the chacmool threw itself against the door, cracking the frame and nearly breaking loose the lock assembly. A strange sound came from the doorframe, a crackling that triggered Archie’s memory of Royce McDougall bound by resurrected ropes of cornstalk. The chacmool was
growing
the door off its hinges.

The window wouldn’t budge, and drops of rain were beginning to fall from the ceiling. Archie took a step back and swung the valise, aiming for the center of the cross formed by the four panes. The iron-capped corner of the valise shattered the window, leaving the broken sash hanging in the frame. The crackling behind Archie grew in intensity, and a pin from one of the door’s hinges sprang loose and pinged on the wooden floor.

Not looking behind him, Archie took two steps back and dove headfirst out the window, carrying with him the remains of the sash and the bits of glass clinging to it. He turned over once in the air before landing heavily on his right hip and skidding on the frosted grass.

Archie gained his feet quickly, his teeth aching from the awkward landing and his ankle shooting sharp pains up into his calf. The sound of splintering wood reached his ears, along with a gathering chorus of angry shouts as the commotion awoke Lemon House’s other bruised and irritable guests, but Archie didn’t wait to see if the chacmool was pursuing him. He ran, slipping and stumbling on the steep hillside, too terrified even to stop and lace his shoes.

He ran downhill until his lungs were wheezing from the cold night air and the pain in his ankle hobbled him. Then he staggered into a tangle of brush and fell to the ground, listening carefully over the sound of his own ragged panting and feeling the chacmool’s feather talisman answer his pounding heart with its own quiet tremors.

Oh God,
he thought,
it’ll track me by the talisman.
But he couldn’t take it off.

The broad valley below Lemon House had narrowed to a steep ravine that swallowed every sound save for the soft rustle of wind and the occasional plop of snow falling from the bare branches of trees. Overhead, the clouds were breaking up, and a half moon peered through the forest canopy. The craters and shadows on the moon’s face seemed oddly like a rabbit.

Had that happened before? Steen had been looking at the moon when he killed that boy’s rabbit behind the Old Brewery. What, then? Archie couldn’t follow the thought. He jumped, hearing voices, but realized the sound was just the ringing in his ears from the blow to the head he’d suffered in the wreck.

Now that he’d stopped, the cold struck forcefully, biting through his johnny. Archie tied his shoes with numb fingers, knotting the laces when he couldn’t make the proper bows.
I can’t stay out here all night dressed like this,
he thought, fighting to stop his teeth from chattering;
the temperature’s below freezing.

If he didn’t keep moving, he would die in this godforsaken ravine. The chacmool, if it even bothered to look, would find him blue and cold, and set about its arcane business without a care in the world. Well, it could go to flaming hell, Archie thought. His days of going passively mad and waiting for his death like a trussed hog for the knife were over.

He took Helen’s knife from the muddy valise and stood, chilled muscles groaning. He was soaked to the skin and shivering like a man with St. Vitus’s, and his head felt as if it were packed with nails, but his mind was clear. If he didn’t find a roof, and soon, he would die. And if the chacmool wanted to get between him and that roof, it would have to tear out his bleeding heart.

Archie began working his way down the ravine, favoring his swelling ankle. If he found a stream, eventually it would lead him to a farm, or even a town—if he wasn’t disemboweled first.

At the bottom of the ravine was a faint path, paralleling a rocky streambed swollen with early-spring meltwater. Archie hesitated over the stream, remembering stories of fugitive slaves who hid their scents in water; but he stepped over the narrow brook instead, both in an effort to stay as dry as he could and because of an inexplicable intuition that he should stay clear of running water. When he’d crossed, he looked downstream and noticed the figure straddling the brook.

Archie brandished the knife, resisting the urge to shout a challenge. Instead he waited for the chacmool to make its move. It was bigger and broader than he remembered, likely from all its meals of children’s hearts, and Archie stood where he was facing it down.
Come on, you son of a bitch,
he thought.
I’ll spill your damned
eztli
on these stones.

The wind shifted, blowing up the ravine and lifting long straight hair away from the figure’s silhouette. But the mummy’s skull in the museum had only a patchy covering of curly hair like a mulatto’s, Archie remembered.
Damn; if I could see its face I could be sure.
But the moon was high and behind the figure, shadowing its features, and even as Archie readied himself to mount a limping charge, it looked up at the moon and disappeared into the cover of trees.

Archie immediately crossed back over the stream, keeping the water between himself and his pursuer. He started moving downstream again, staying clear of the water and looking warily across to the steep rocky slope on the other side of the brook. The chacmool had been looking right at him, or at least he thought it had. Perhaps by some trick of moonlight it had failed to see him.

No, he decided, that couldn’t be it. The beast had seen clearly enough in the museum with only the diffused glow of Barnum’s spotlight to go by.

A high-pitched yowl ripped through the still night from just upstream. Whirling to face it, Archie lost his balance as he swiped the knife at the air in front of him, expecting to see the chacmool changed into its feline demon-shape and dropping onto him from the trees. Instead he saw an Indian, facing upstream with both feet planted firmly in the center of the stream.

That’s who I saw before, Archie realized. God Almighty, he got upstream fast.

The Indian was beckoning to the trees, his long beaver coat waving in the night wind. Archie thought the Indian was speaking, but no sound reached his ears.

Faint shadows cast by the moon twisted and slithered away from the chacmool as it stalked reluctantly out onto the streambed, changed into the horror Archie had seen in Barnum’s museum. Its ears lay flat against its feline skull, and its lips, outlined by feathers rather than whiskers, were drawn back in a quavering snarl as it hunched before the Indian, spitting its anger.

The talisman lay cold and inert against Archie’s chest.
The Indian’s faced it down,
he thought wonderingly.
Somehow he’s robbed it of its power.

A sound like distant thunder vibrated in the talisman as the chacmool’s form rippled, becoming nearly human. “Stand aside, Maskansisil,” it hissed, its forked tongue flicking out between jaguar’s fangs. “He is mine this night.”

The Indian stood his ground. “You own only your skin tonight, blood-drinker, and be grateful of that. These waters are mine, and this mountain. You will not pass.”

A long moment passed. Archie stood perfectly still. Finally the chacmool took a step back, the shadows around it shifting as if the moon wished to keep it in sight. “Your heart I will have for this, Maskansisil. I will drain your life and feed it to this mountain and these waters. You and I will not pass one another by again.” It spat into the rushing water at the Indian’s feet and vanished back into the trees, shambling awkwardly on still-crooked legs.

Archie let out a long shuddering breath and lowered the knife. Was this Indian really Maskansisil, the Pathfinder of Lenape legend? The name had come up in Burr’s ravings, but Archie hadn’t connected it with any real person. It had seemed more an honorific than a true name, a title given to a series of valiant men in Lenape history. But the chacmool had used the name without hesitation, had recognized the Indian standing before it with his feet anchored in frigid spring runoff.

And it had fled.

And here I am,
Archie wondered. He felt foolish in his sodden johnny and muddy brogans, brandishing a kitchen knife and carrying the new leather valise in his other hand.
What is my role in all of this?

He saw the Indian, Maskansisil, turn toward him and realized he’d spoken the question aloud.

“It is not my place to answer questions,” Maskansisil said softly, “only to bring you to the place where they may be answered.” He walked down the streambed to the spot where Archie had first seen him. From there he began climbing up the other side of the ravine. “If you seek answers, follow me,” he said over his shoulder.