Alexander C. Irvine (26 page)

Jane
heard th
e
door click shut behind Steen, and she heard him chuckling to himself as he went down the stairs, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the splatters of gore on the Oriental rug. Would they crawl around, like her blood had that night under the stairs? She imagined Steen’s eyes itching as blood crawled back up his face into the empty sockets. What would his eyes be like after the healing? Not the same, she was sure. The same thing had happened to her, hadn’t it, and afterward she had begun to heal on the outside. But inside, something was different—she wasn’t the same as she had been before.

A short scream carried up the stairs, just before the front door slammed shut and someone, it must have been the old man Simon, began rushing around downstairs.
Poor old man,
Jane thought. Steen must have been scary, with stuff from his eyes dribbling into his laughing mouth. She stroked the lovely green feathers of the cloak the chacmool had given her.

She herself hadn’t been afraid in ages, it seemed. That had been one of the first things to leave her. A small twinge here and there, when she felt that the chacmool would kill her or when Royce made his nervous threats, but even then the feeling was more a realization that she was in a dangerous situation than an actual fear that something would happen to her.

I’m charmed,
she thought.
The chacmool touched me, and it charmed me.

It had said she would soon be ready to play her role, and she was anxious to find out what that role would be. She was important somehow, and knowing that made her less afraid, too. Riley Steen might have had his eyes thumbed out, but he’d deserved it for all the things he’d done. Jane didn’t deserve anything bad, and the chacmool would protect her. Hadn’t it already?

After sleeping under staircases and once stealing bits of soggy bread from surprised gulls at Battery Park, it was an odd feeling to be important. Perhaps Da would see something different about her when she arrived. The chacmool had told Steen that Da was alive, and coming.

He must be terribly worried, she thought distantly, wishing he was there in the room so she could soothe him, show him everything was all right. See, Da, she would say. See how I’m healing. See how I’m not afraid.

Only she was, just the tiniest bit. Steen was a cruel man, and he had been cruel to her, but it was still a horrible thing the chacmool had done to him. She wondered again how it could be so vicious to others and so kind to her. Perhaps it was only cruel to men who threatened her, or abused her in some way.

In that case, she would have to make sure and tell it not to hurt Da; it had tried once already, but that was only because it didn’t know she didn’t want it to. The green feathers under her chin returned her caresses, and she started to lose track of her thoughts, but not before she remembered Royce saying
The blood and bones of little girls.

What had that meant? Surely he couldn’t have meant her, not the way the chacmool was protecting her—as a matter of fact, Royce probably should have been grateful that the chacmool hadn’t treated him as it had treated Riley Steen. He had, after all, kicked her and threatened to cut out her tongue. No, she wasn’t in any danger. She was safer here than she had been since … well, since she could remember. Still, she felt a tremor of unease hearing Royce’s words again in her head.

The splatters on the carpet didn’t move. The chacmool had been looking at them, too, Jane saw, studying them closely with its cat-eyed gaze. Now it turned and stepped to the window, silently looking out into the rainy night.

“It is now time,” the chacmool said, its back still to her. “You will make two journeys, Nanahuatzin, one with your body and the other in your spirit. Where one ends, the next begins.”

“What does that name mean, Nanahuatzin?”

“It means the Scabby One,” the chacmool replied. “But when your body has completed its journey, your skin will be whole again and your spirit will fly with the sun.”

Not more traveling,
Jane thought.
I’m already so tired.
“I’ve already gone on a journey,” she said. “What am I supposed to do?”

“The first journey is not yet over, little jade. We must prepare together if we are to finish it correctly.”

The chacmool came to her and ran its long fingers through the green feathers of her cloak. “For many years have I worn these
quetzal
feathers, little Nanahuatzin. Now you must never take them off. You must wear them until your journey ends.”

“When will that be?” Jane asked. And when will Da be here, she wanted to add, but the feel of the feathers distracted her. They moved like leaves in a breeze, making a quiet sound like nothing she’d ever heard before. What a wonderful thing this cloak was, and the chacmool had given it to her.

Da had never given her a gift, she thought. She was ashamed of thinking it, but there it was. It was true.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jane saw the chacmool nodding, and the feathers nodded with it. Yes, what had Da given her? Scorn and pity, that’s what. She didn’t even know if he was coming for her, or just chasing after Steen and the chacmool. He probably wouldn’t even recognize her if he did see her, Jane thought bitterly. She wasn’t a mutilated waif any more. She was nearly healed, nearly Whole, and wrapped in this wonderful cloak she felt like a queen.

Predawn breezes
were
awakening in the trees as Stephen listened to the breath of the cave. He hadn’t slept at all. Charlotte had finally banished him to the front porch, where his tossing and turning wouldn’t keep her awake too. When he’d seen the sky begin to lighten over the treetops, he’d knocked out his pipe and walked down to the cave entrance, still tense and fidgety with the knowledge that something important would be happening today. The voice had been chattering constantly for nearly three days now, exhorting him to be ready when the time came, as soon it must. Sleep had been far away during that time, making Stephen irritable both from fatigue and from a frustrated desire to see Tlalocan once again. Even when he’d managed to drift off for an hour, he wasn’t able to dream, and he was beginning to think that he wouldn’t find that dream again unless it was in the cave. Why that should be true, he didn’t know, but he’d been afraid to go near the Mummy Room for more than a week, now, lest …

Lest what? Stephen didn’t know, and the more he thought about the voice in the cave and the chacmool and his own role in whatever was supposed to happen, the less he understood. The voice had made promises, had threatened him, had played on his love for the cave while making him afraid to enter it.
You will be a man,
the voice promised—but what was a man? A man had a family, owned property, a man controlled his destiny. The voice promised him all of that. But at the same time, it played him like a puppet on a string, and where was his control over that?

Again Stephen wondered what it wasn’t telling him. I would give anything—
anything
—to be a free man, he thought, but where is the freedom in being ordered around like … well, like a slave?

All of those questions would be answered soon, he resolved, listening to the cave breathe and half expecting the voice to return at any moment. But when he did hear a voice, it was spoken aloud, from just behind his right shoulder.

“Stephen. There is little time.”

He turned and saw the chacmool standing beside him, looking nervously at the brightening sky. It held the hand of a young white girl, her face blotched with scabs like she was weathering a pox, wearing a long black coat with a fringe of green feathers peeking out between tightly buttoned lapels. She looked like she might fall asleep standing there, but Stephen saw no trace of fear on her weary face. This was almost stranger than anything else he’d seen up to this point: how had the chacmool, to all appearances a black man dressed in simple working clothes, managed to travel any distance with a white girl? Stephen had seen men burned alive for less.

His curiosity got the better of him, and he was about to ask that very question, but the chacmool spoke first. “She must sleep, and we have much to discuss. Quickly.”

A
short p
ath
forked away from the main cave trail, skirting the edge of a shallow ravine and terminating at the entrance to Dixon Cave. Like Mammoth Cave, Dixon had been mined for saltpeter during the War of 1812, and several falling-down sheds still remained around the entrance. Dixon was a dead cave, just a few yards of unremarkable passage, and since mining operations had stopped, it had been largely ignored.

Stephen led the chacmool and the girl into an old equipment shed set back from the trail. “Sleep now, little Nanahuatzin,” the chacmool said, touching her tenderly on the forehead. The girl lay down on the bare dirt floor and fell instantly asleep.

“You must see to her there,” the chacmool said to Stephen, after they had shut the door behind them. “Bring her food, blankets. For the next five days, anything she wants.”

“Who is she?” Stephen asked. He knew he’d long since stepped outside formal rules of conduct, but it still made him edgy to be involved in the kidnapping of a white girl.

Although if she was being kidnapped, she was mighty calm about it.

“First, into the cave,” the chacmool said, again casting a wary glance at the sky. To the east, bands of yellow and pink were spreading higher. “This day, it is unlucky to speak in sight of the sun.”

They ducked through Houchins Narrows as the first rays of real sunlight began to sparkle on dewy leaves outside. Stephen moved by feel along the trail into the Rotunda but stopped when the chacmool moved to the right ahead of him, toward Audobon Avenue instead of the Main Cave. He found a stack of hollowed-out poplar trunks and located a lamp he’d set behind them some months before.

“I don’t travel without light,” he said, striking a match. “Not everybody can see in the dark, you know.”

“Darkness only frightens if you rely on your eyes,” the chacmool replied, slowing its pace but not stopping.

“Oh, I see,” Stephen said sarcastically. He was fast losing patience with cryptic comments. “Well, I don’t need eyes to know that if you’re going where I think you’re going, that’s the wrong way.”

The chacmool stopped and looked back at him, impatience clear on its face even in the weak lamplight. “I came to this place when your ancestors still hunted monkeys in Africa,” it said. “Follow.”

Stephen didn’t care much for its tone of voice, and he nearly said so. But again his curiosity got the better of him; he swallowed his pride and followed.

They turned off Audobon Avenue, winding their way down a short passage Stephen called Little Bat Avenue. Near the end of Little Bat was Crevice Pit, a deep crack in the floor that Stephen had never more than looked into. At the end of Little Bat, he knew, was a tremendous domed pit, but there was no way down. Unless the chacmool knew one that he hadn’t been able to find? Stephen’s pulse quickened a bit at the thought, although he was annoyed that he hadn’t found the cutaround himself.

Sure enough, the chacmool lowered itself into Crevice Pit. “Damn, damn, damn,” Stephen muttered under his breath. He should have looked into it when he’d had the chance.

“Put out your light.” The chacmool’s voice floated up from the pit, already sounding far away. “You will need both hands.”

Climb down a virgin pit with no light? Stephen wasn’t averse CO risk, if new cave was to be found, but this was crazy. He hesitated at the edge of the crescent-shaped pit.

“Is this your cave, Stephen?” Echoes muddied the chacmool’s words, but Stephen understood it well enough. It sounded as if it must already be near the bottom, pausing to taunt him.

Stephen bit his lip. So he had to prove himself again. It was always the same, people treating him like a trained dog until he I >assed some test. Well, he’d done it before—hadn’t he taught him-leli to read in Franklin Gorin’s library? hadn’t he crossed Bottomless Pit on a ladder?—but this was the last time. The chacmool had made him promises, and he was damn well going to collect.

He put out the lamp and took a deep breath, allowing the darkness to settle around him. Sitting on the lip of the narrow pit, he extended a foot and found a toehold on the opposite wall. The pit was a bit less than four feet wide, at least near the top. Narrow enough to chimney, but barely and not for very long. Stephen planted his other foot and lowered himself in, bracing his shoulders against one wall and walking himself slowly down. His eyes were wide open and he began to feel that he could see, that even in the absence of light he could pick out each new foothold before actually putting weight on it. The pit narrowed as he descended, until he could let himself down by working hand to hand, foot to foot— like climbing down two ladders at once. The muscles in his shoulders and thighs began to tremble with the effort of holding his body against both walls at once.
Gonna be a long climb back up,
he thought,
unless I can return by way of Giant’s Coffin.

Below him, the pit narrowed into a glottal opening barely wide enough to squeeze through. He could see the opening, one kind of darkness gaping in the middle of another like the difference between the sun and a star. Rocking back and forth, he worked his hips through, then waved his legs, searching for places to put his feet.

Stephen had heard a story once about a caver who had chimneyed down a pit, only to find that it suddenly belled out below him after a hundred feet or so. The man hadn’t been strong enough after that distance to haul himself back up. The only thing to do in that situation was drop your light so you could see where you would land and hope the fall didn’t kill you. Or that you didn’t fall into water that siphoned into one of the underground rivers that had carved the cave. Or that if the fall only left you trapped with a broken leg, someone would come along before you died of your injuries or thirst or exposure.

As it happened, the bottom of that pit had been only another six feet or so down, and the caver had gotten out unbroken. But if the same thing happened here, Stephen had a feeling he would fall a long way.

He managed to stuff his toe in a crack, and with that leg taking his weight Stephen forced his shoulders down through the squeeze. After that it was easy—he felt like he was climbing down the inside of a tree, the damp stone walls of the pit like rough bark. When his feet touched level ground, Stephen was nearly disappointed.

That one’s named after me,
he thought, the muscles in his back and legs thrumming.
Bishop’s Drop, and it’s a bitch. Guess I know why nobody ever tried it before.

That had been real caving. Everything else he’d ever done, even the daredevil crossing of Bottomless Pit, paled in comparison. The chacmool had been right: Stephen didn’t need his eyes, not in
his
cave. It would go on forever, and he would explore it to its very end without light—hell, without water. He could eat and drink this darkness, breathe it inside him and never need air. This was freedom.

“Your first taste, Stephen,” the chacmool said. Its voice floated on the darkness and the breath of the cave, coming from everywhere at once.

Stephen smelled the water and knew he was in River Hall. Behind and above him he sensed Crevice Pit, and he could feel the river flowing beneath his feet.

“This is how it feels to know something cannot be taken away from you,” the chacmool said. “The senses no longer matter when one is certain. But this feeling does not come without cost.”

Stephen blinked and reached out to touch the wall as the darkness closed in around him again. He stood squinting, vainly hoping for some shadow of that—vision wasn’t the right word—of that sensation to linger. But he was blind again, blind as the crickets that scampered among the rocks. And his lamp lay by the edge of the pit, far above in Little Bat Avenue.

“Now we must speak of costs, Stephen,” the chacmool said, its voice coming closer.

“Tell me,” Stephen breathed, pleading against his blindness.

“All deeds have costs, and great deeds exact their toll in lives.”

Stephen leaned against the cool stone of River Hall, knowing what would come next. “You’re going to kill that girl,” he said.

The chacmool paused before answering. “You had a dream. A dream of paradise, yes? The girl, Nanahuatzin, must be taken to that place if we are to succeed at our task.”

In the silence that followed, Stephen heard the faint drip and murmur of water echoing up from the river. The adrenaline rush he’d felt during the chimney down Crevice Pit was still fresh in his mind, the feeling that the moments when he was most alive took place surrounded by limestone walls. Dr. Croghan insisted every day on building roads, improving the hotel, doing everything he could to open the cave to a flood of visitors who would destroy its peace. Many times Stephen had sworn to himself that he would do anything to keep the cave as it was when he’d come five years before. Now here was his chance.

But was it worth a girl’s life?

“Far more than this cave is at stake,” the chacmool said. Could it read his thoughts? “A new world waits to be born. You are a slave now, and have always been; what price would you put on a world in which you could breathe free? A world in which your children would never know the whip or the auctioneer’s bark?

“Greatness exacts its toll in lives. Through the girl Nanahuatzin, a world of men will be born and the world of master and slave will pass into memory.”

“I
—
”

“Decide, Stephen,” the chacmool commanded. “Time grows short.”

His Christmas talk with Nick Bransford replayed itself in Stephen’s mind.
Got to get them big ideas out of your head,
Nick had said.
Best leave that other alone.
Dr.
Croghan ain’t gonna let you go to Africa.

For you, Nick,
Stephen thought, and in that moment he could almost believe himself.
You and all the others like you.

“What do you want me to do?” he said.

Archie sat
in
the bow of the Daigles’ boat, trying to soak the lingering unease of nightmares out of his mind in the warm morning sun. The sun was well up, but the boat was strangely silent, and when he stood he felt tired, as if the sun was setting rather than rising.

He couldn’t remember any of the dreams, which was strange. Lately his problem had been remembering—and experiencing— dreams too much.

“Good morning!” he sang out, trying to banish his willies with forced good cheer. “Made any of that wonderful coffee, Marie?”

For a long time, no one responded. Then, instead of a smiling Marie, it was a solemn Peter Daigle who stepped through the curtain that partitioned off his family’s sleeping area. “Good morning, Archie,” he said quietly.

“Something the matter, Peter? Where are the girls?”

“Inside. And they’ll stay there until you’ve gotten off.”

Peter’s voice was barely a shade away from open hostility. Archie couldn’t for the life of him understand why, when they’d spent the previous evening laughing and joking around a cooking fire, Marie leading them in choruses of French folk songs. Archie had sung right along with them, although he knew only a few words of French, and the entire time he’d been quietly awestruck. He couldn’t remember ever spending such an evening sober. The memory of it amazed him still, seeming at once distant and present— like a comforting vision one could return to for shelter in unpleasant times.

And now Peter, at least, seemed to have forgotten it completely. Archie was struck by a sense of loss, as if Peter’s change in attitude had stripped the memory of all of its beauty. “Peter,” he began, “what’s the—”

“What’s the matter?” Peter snapped. “Archie, I swear to you on the Virgin, you nearly ended last night underwater. If I did not believe you were at heart a decent man, I would have—”

He stopped himself, and walked up to where Archie stood in the bow. “I don’t want the girls to hear this, especially Sonia.”

“What did I do?” Archie asked, hating the pleading tone in his voice. But something much more important than a disagreement between two men was happening. Archie had a terrible intuition that he was being excommunicated from the happiness he’d felt at the memory of the past evening, and he didn’t even know what he’d done.

A sudden slippage seemed to fracture everything around him, and dream memories began to slip through the cracks.

“What you did was not so terrible,” Daigle said. “My uncle Michel used to walk in his sleep, and I knew you were sleeping even as you spoke. But what you said … I have a pistol, Archie, and I tell you again, you nearly did not survive this night.”

“I’m sorry, Peter. Christ, whatever it was I did, I’m sorry. Please.” Archie felt even more dislocated as he spoke, asking for— begging for—forgiveness when his accuser wouldn’t tell him what this was all about.
Don’t you realize what this time has meant to me?
he wanted to shout.

But all he could do was repeat himself: “What, Peter? What did I do?”

“You stepped through that curtain last night, flung it aside as if expecting to catch your wife with a lover. Marie and I awoke at once, but the girls, they sleep like the dead. This is God’s grace, I think, for they are fond of you, my girls. They don’t understand why I keep them inside this morning.”

Peter looked out over the river. He started to speak, then shut his mouth. Archie waited him out, desperately anxious but not wanting to hurry him.

Finally Peter turned to look at him. “You have a knife there, in your belt,” he said. “You held it last night.”

“Peter, in God’s name you can’t believe I wanted to hurt you,” Archie began. Peter shushed him, casting a nervous glance back toward the closed curtain.

“This is not about me,” he said. “A fight between you and me, that would be simple. It is Sonia I am concerned for.”

A cold lump swelled in the pit of Archie’s stomach as a fragment of the night’s dream reawakened in his memory.
Jane, dressed as the chacmool, recumbent on a flat stone altar with a blissful smile on her face. Her unmarked face.

Smiling up at him as he stood over her, watching his own hands raise the knife.

“Never,” Archie whispered. “I would never harm Jane.”

“Archie!” Peter snapped. “If you do this again—who is Jane?”

“I meant Sonia.” Archie’s voice trembled, and he could feel the feather talisman coming alive, beating in time with his heart.

“Who is Jane?”

“My daughter. She’s about Sonia’s age, and I—I haven’t seen her in a very long time.” Archie sat back down, fearing that the dream-dislocation would unbalance him. His mind teemed with grotesque images—skeletal hands fumbling for life in dark waters, the hungry warmth of blood coursing over his hands.

“Please tell me, Peter,” he managed to say. “Did I threaten Sonia?”

Peter sat facing Archie. “No. You held the knife turned inward, toward yourself. But you spoke to her … no, that’s wrong. You weren’t speaking to any of us. You looked at her as you spoke, never taking your eyes from her. And your hands, they looked like you were fighting the knife, forcing it toward yourself instead of someone else. Whoever you were speaking to, you were fighting them too.”

Peter’s speech slowed as if he were choosing each word with extreme care. “I believe you to be a good man, Archie,” he said. “I have intuitions about such things, and follow them. I didn’t—I don’t believe that you wanted to harm my girls.” He took a silver crucifix from his pocket and kissed it, looking again at the curtain before going on.

“My fear was that you would lose your struggle, and whatever possesses you would bend you to its will. You are possessed, Archie. A demon has gotten inside you, and you must cast it out. If I were a priest, perhaps I could help you … but perhaps not.” Peter lapsed into silence, turning the crucifix over in his hands.

Some of the panicked weight began to lift from Archie’s chest as Peter’s anger cooled a bit. “Why wouldn’t a priest be able to help me?” he asked.

“It is not a Christian demon inside you,” Peter said. “You did not appeal to God for help, and the names you spoke are not written in the Scriptures. I cannot say those names, I think, but—who is Nawazee?”

“Nawazee? I don’t know.” But even as he said it, Archie realized that he did know, and he began to understand what had happened. “Nanahuatzin,” he said.

“Yes. You called Sonia by that name. Who is that?”

“That’s Jane,” Archie said. “I don’t call her by that name, but—someone else does.” Archie was certain now. The chacmool had been speaking through him during his dream, just as he had taken its role in his vision of the sacrifice. Can it control me now? he wondered. Can it make me see dreaming things as real? And if it can, how can I begin to fight it?

But he had fought it, at least last night. God only knew what would have happened if he hadn’t; very likely his body would be snagged like
Maudie’s
wreck on a sunken log in the Ohio. And that, Archie realized, was exactly what the chacmool had wanted. It had tried to kill him again; it feared him for some reason. Why?

Casting about for an answer, Archie remembered something Tamanend had said:
He Who Makes Things Grow has an enemy. This enemy is your ally.
Who is this ally, Archie wondered, and how can I make the alliance work for me?

The answer had to be somewhere in the information he’d gathered since the day in February when he’d spoken to Phineas Barnum. He turned inward to the problem, forgetting Peter Daigle and everything else around him, and there it was: the answer swam up out of the tangled morass of Aaron Burr’s
Wallam Olum
commentary.

Xiuhtecuhtli. Lord of Fire and Time. If Tlaloc controlled water and earth, it was only natural that Xiuhtecuhtli should be opposed to him.

Everything began to fall into place for Archie: Steen’s fear when the boy’s rabbit had burst into flame, the incineration of Archie’s ear when the Geek bit it off, the knife. Most of all, the knife. It was a token of Xiuhtecuhtli, just as the feathered medallion was Tlaloc’s; Archie couldn’t bear to be without either because he stood in some no-man’s-land between the two gods. That was why the chacmool had tried to kill him or, failing that, drive him mad. He was a thorn in its side, an unknowing agent of an opposed principle. If it couldn’t use him, it wanted him dead.

And it had nearly succeeded the night before.

“Peter,” Archie said slowly, “why didn’t you just kill me last night?”

“I have never killed a man,” Peter said. “Always I hoped I would never have to. Last night it seemed I would, but I could not pull the trigger. If you had moved at one of my children, or Marie or me—then I would have shot you dead. But instead I watched you wrestle your demon. I did not want to send you to hell, Archie. Your demon would have ridden your soul straight into the pit.”

He laughed without humor. “Perhaps I am simply a coward. But I wanted you to live and free yourself.

“I wish you luck and God’s grace, Archie,” Peter finished. He stood and offered Archie his hand. “May you find your daughter.”

Archie shook Peter’s hand, blinking tears out of his eyes. God’s grace, he thought. The grace of the Daigles is what will save me, if anything can.

“There is coffee,” Peter said as he returned to his family. “Also yesterday’s bread, if you would like breakfast.”

“Thank you,” Archie said, his voice breaking. “I would.”