Alexander C. Irvine (29 page)

The girl was
awake when Stephen entered the abandoned supply hut, and stroking the feathered cloak as if it were a purring cat. She looked up at him long enough to see the blanket and say, “I’m not cold.”

“Well, that’s fine,” Stephen said. “But you must be hungry.” He placed a small leather bag in front of her. “Bread, cheese, jerky, and some apples Charlotte—that’s my wife—dried last fall.”

“Yum, apples.” She opened the bag and started in on the dried fruit, chewing happily while her fingers played amid green feathers. “Don’t like jerky; it’s too salty,” she said between bites.

Well, isn’t she the little princess?
Stephen thought. Not scared a bit. Treated him like he was a servant come into her bedroom with the royal supper. Either she was crazy or she knew something he didn’t.

“All the same, you better eat it,” he said, because it seemed like the right thing to say.

“That’s what my Da would say,” she said, screwing up her face. “I don’t have to listen to him. Or you.”

Definitely addled, Stephen decided. But the chacmool had been very clear: she was to be treated like royalty, given whatever she wanted, but under no circumstances could she leave the hut until after sunset Saturday, when Stephen was to take her down to the Mummy Room and wait for the chacmool’s appearance. It all sounded like mumbo-jumbo to Stephen, but he had seen enough strangeness to take it seriously. And she certainly looked the part of a princess, even sitting amid dry-rotted mining implements with her mouth full of dried apple and scabs cracking as she chewed. She wasn’t pretty, no, but there was something important and striking about her. A sense that she was the pivot point for everything that was supposed to happen.

Does she know she’s going to die? he thought. She must, even if she wouldn’t say it. I knew when I laid eyes on her—she’s marked somehow.

I wonder if I am too.

He put that thought out of his mind. “Anything else you want?” he asked, hoping she wouldn’t name something he’d have to sneak around Croghan to get. Anger started frothing inside him again, but he quashed it. It wouldn’t help anything if he was sullen all week. Croghan had always kept a close eye on him, and after tonight Stephen thought he’d be lucky to get a moment alone, without either the doctor or one of his tattles snooping around.

All that would change on Monday morning. Everything would change Monday morning, and this little white girl would make it all happen.

She hadn’t answered his question. A dreamy expression dulled her features as she took to stroking the cloak again, and Stephen grew uncomfortable. She looked like she was listening to someone, maybe the same voice that spoke to Stephen; she cocked her head to the side and nodded slowly at the air in front of her.

“What’s your name?” Stephen said suddenly, spurred by jealousy. The voice had been silent since the chacmool’s arrival, and even though he knew it was because of the unlucky time, it still rankled him that she could hear
something.

“Da named me Jane,” she said sleepily. “But the chacmool— his name was Nezahualpilli once, did you know that? The chacmool calls me Nanahuatzin, and that’s my real name.”

“Oh.” The chacmool had warned Stephen that the girl’s father would be pursuing them. He wondered when the man would arrive, and if he would be marked, too, marked to die like his daughter was. Stephen didn’t know his name, and didn’t want to ask. He would find out soon enough.

The girl fell asleep, lying on her side with her hands pillowing her head. Feathers rustled as the cloak seemed to draw itself in, settling protectively around her sleeping body.
Like it was around the chacmool when I found it,
Stephen thought. He left the blanket where it was and went to the door.

Maybe tonight he would sleep. Maybe he could just slip into bed next to Charlotte, make sleepy moonlit love to her, then sleep until the sun rose and Dr. Croghan came around to bother them. To pass a night without stretches of wakeful anxiety—Stephen couldn’t think of anything he wanted more at the moment, except maybe for all of it to be over. A troubled conscience could not rest, he’d once heard a preacher say, and some of the things the chacmool wanted him to do definitely had Stephen troubled.

Then he remembered Croghan saying
Blood is thicker than water, I suppose,
and his conscience retreated to a place in his mind where he could barely hear it calling

When Archie spott
ed
a billboard advertising Bell’s Tavern at the side of the turnpike, he could scarcely restrain a cheer. The cave was only fifteen miles away. It was just before dawn, meaning they’d been on the road more than thirty hours, and even though the road was better than anything Archie had seen in Pennsylvania, he still felt like he’d been over Niagara Falls in a barrel. His ankle throbbed, and his back stung as the old blisters dried out and tightened.

the mammoth cave of kentucky
, blared another sign, at the intersection of the turnpike and the road to the cave,
largest
cave in the world. fine hotel. open every day of the year
.

“We should arrive in time for lunch,” Steen said merrily, turning the wagon onto the macadam of the cave road. “Although, if you’re unbearably hungry, we could continue on to Bell’s and enjoy a fine breakfast there.”

Steen’s relentless morbid good cheer drove Archie to the brink of mania himself, but he continued humoring the madman as he had the entire trip. After all, Steen had the gun.

“No, let’s go on,” he said, as if he had really considered Steen’s offer. “I can eat there.” In fact, he was hungry, ravenous even; the last of Marie’s edibles had run out the day before.

“As you wish,” Steen said. “But nothing will happen until Sunday night. What a shame it will be if, after all of your travails, you find these next two days
boring.”
He snickered.

After only two
hours in the wagon, Archie had already begun wondering how he would get to Mammoth Cave without either killing Steen or going mad himself. Steen babbled incessantly about the chacmool, the cave, Aaron Burr, Herodotus, his previous trips to Kentucky—anything that percolated up from the crumbling ruin of his mind. Most of it Archie didn’t understand.

Sometime late on the first night, after a rain shower had passed and the moon had risen, Steen had shouted “Of course!” and he made a circle in the air with two fingers, pointing them at the passenger-side horse.

“Mictlan,”
he said, and the horse dropped dead in its harness. “Haha!” Steen cried happily. “I knew it would work!”

He turned to Archie. “There were never any horses in Mictlan, you know,” he said. “Wonder what the people there think of them. I’ll have to ask old Lupita, next time I
see
her.” He burst out laughing as Archie clambered down to cut the dead horse free so they could go on.

It had been like that ever since. Archie began to believe that Steen had been possessed by the maddened spirit of a court jester; one moment the wagoner shouted ribald limericks at the top of his lungs, the next he misquoted Shakespeare and Ben Franklin.

At one point the previous morning, just after they’d crossed the Salt River ferry with the ferryman spitting between his fingers onto the wagon’s wheels, Steen had stood bolt upright. Throwing his head back he howled,
“I am the Rabbit!”

Misunderstanding, Archie said, “I thought they worked for you.”

The wagon rocked as Steen dropped back onto the driver’s bench. “No, you sot,” he said. “Not a Dead Rabbit. The
Tochtli,
the Rabbit in the Moon.” He pointed up, and Archie could have sworn that there
was
a rabbit in the setting moon.

Jane had said “Rabbit” once, while looking at the moon. Archie wondered if she still could see it. If she could still see anything.

“What’s the
Tochtli?”
he asked Steen.

“Trickster figure. God of chaos, of drunkenness and random action. The dead, I can tell you, are always happy to see the Rabbit; things in Mictlan can be monotonous.”

Bell’s Tavern began
to obsess Steen sometime after midnight, and Archie had been subjected to endless praise of the Tavern’s food and accommodations. Now he seemed to remember that obsession. “Roast pig they have there, it would make a man forget heaven!” Steen roared at the sunrise.

“Of course,” he added more soberly, “it’s difficult for me to eat meat now, particularly if the cut has a bone in it.” He dabbed at the corner of one of his oozing eye sockets. “Dead things seem a bit like family. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes,” Archie agreed, and then they turned off the turnpike, onto the road that Dr. Croghan had built to the cave.

The day warmed
as they plodded along the winding dirt road. On their right rose a lumpy ridge of hills, cut through by a number of streams swollen by spring runoff and the previous day’s storm. These hills gave way on the left to a grassy plain pocked by shallow conical depressions.

“Sinkholes, they call those,” Steen said suddenly. “Like hourglasses, aren’t they? Water seeps through them like time, dripping into the cave. We’re over the cave now, you know. It’s in those hills, it’s under the grass, it’s everywhere. Can you hear it?” He started to whistle a marching tune, then modulated it into “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

Almost there, Archie thought. He’d been able to glean some useful information from Steen’s raving. Now he knew who to look for when they arrived at the cave, hopefully around noon; the man who discovered the chacmool was a mulatto slave named Stephen.

But he didn’t know where the chacmool had hidden Jane, and that was the only topic Steen wouldn’t touch. “You’ll see her when we arrive,” was the only answer he would make to Archie’s repeated questions.

If she was in the cave, Archie gathered that Stephen would be able to find her. If not, he would at least be able to lead Archie to the cavern where the chacmool had been resting for three hundred years. The ceremony would take place there, Archie was sure; and one way or another, he had to be there before it happened.

And what would he do then? A direct assault would end with him gutted like a fish, probably in front of Jane. He wouldn’t be able to do this by himself, not against an adversary who could change shape and work magic and God only knew what else. How could Archie even the odds?

He Who Makes Things Grow has an enemy,
Tamanend had said.
This enemy is your ally.
And Steen had said something very similar:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
But Archie still didn’t understand how to tap the power of Xiuhtecuhtli. If that was what he was supposed to do.

Again he felt caught in the middle of a struggle between forces he couldn’t begin to comprehend. He knew more about what was at stake, but he still had no idea how to use what power he had. And he did have some power; the diabolical hunger that had possessed him when he’d buried the knife in Royce’s gut proved that much. Unfortunately, it also proved that whatever power he had could easily turn him into the very thing he was trying to defeat.

And wouldn’t that be ironic, he thought grimly. Yes sir, Steen would enjoy that.

He had to know where Jane was. Without that information, everything else he knew was like a map with no compass points on it.

“We’re nearly there, Steen,” Archie said wearily, trying one more time. “Where’s Jane?”

“Getting nearer all the time,” Steen said. “Really, Mr. Prescott, your single-mindedness is tedious.”

“I thought that’s why you wanted me to come with you,” Archie grumbled. “Someone who’s just a bit put out wouldn’t further your plan very much, now would he?”

“Touche. But if you must know, I don’t have any plan. Plans are only useful to those who think time is important. The rest of us simply do what is called for at any given moment. Our interests coincide at the moment; tomorrow or next Thursday, who knows? Time is odd that way. Relief from it is the chief joy of madness.”

“Well, time is important to me at this moment, and I need a plan. What do you propose we do when we get to the cave?”

“We? Nothing. I suppose you’ll speed off in search of your little girl. As for me, I’ll take the appropriate action when the moment arrives.” Steen snickered and started whistling again. He would say nothing else to Archie after that, interrupting his whistling only to point and cackle at some feature of the landscape that caught his attention.

The p
lain was
soon swallowed by forest again, oak and cedar and, maple, and shortly before noon they pulled to a creaking halt in front of the Mammoth Cave Hotel. The hotel was perhaps two hundred feet long, with broad porches extending its entire length. Four coaches were parked in front of the stable attached to the south end of the building. Across a graded turning circle stood a loose cluster of shacks, perched along the edge of a steep hillside. Black women hung laundry and hoed small garden patches, and the men were at work shingling the roof of one of the nearer shacks.

From the turning circle a trail led below the slave quarters, dropping out of sight under tall straight trees.

Archie just had time to register all of this before the sun reached its zenith and Riley Steen let out a joyous shout. “There!” he cried. “There it is! Murmuring before, now I hear it perfectly!”

Archie saw heads turn in their direction, but he couldn’t react. A tremor raced through his mind, setting off a deluge of sounds and smells. Smoke and muttering voices, dripping water and a chill damp musk.

When his senses cleared, Archie saw Steen shambling toward the trailhead. “Yes!” he was screaming, pure mad ecstasy in his voice. “There it is! There, I hear it!”

Steen broke into a run, gathering momentum until he was moving at a dead sprint. Two of the slaves shouted at him to stop and chased after him, but he had too great a lead. He sprinted down the trail and out of sight, and a few seconds later Archie felt a sound like a huge sigh ripple up from the ground.

He’s gone home, Archie thought irrationally. But before he could grasp hold of the thought, force it to yield up some sort of meaning, it was chased away by the sound of angry voices.

Blinking, he saw a stout man in a formal morning suit staring at him. It came to Archie that the man was expecting some sort of response.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“I said where does he think he’s going?” the man demanded, his genteel Southern accent sharpened by indignation. “Visitors can’t go into the cave without a guide. This isn’t a charity exhibit.”

“I don’t know,” Archie said, confused. “He just jumped up and ran.”

“What was he shouting about? Damn.” The man—he must be Dr. Croghan, Archie realized—turned to shout at the slaves who stood looking down the trail where Steen had disappeared. “Don’t gawk, get after him! Bring him out of there!”

Returning his attention to Archie, Dr. Croghan noticed the wagon. “Was that Steen?” he asked. “What got into him?”

“You know him?”

“He was here last autumn. Bought a mummy we brought out of the cave. Didn’t seem quite right to sell it, but he offered a very handsome price. Who are you?” Croghan looked at Archie suspiciously. “If you want to see the cave, you’ll have to hire a guide. Imbecilic visitors who get themselves killed are singularly ineffective as advertisement.”

“That’s what I’ve come to do. Hire a guide, I mean. My name is Archie Prescott,” Archie said, climbing down from the driver’s bench. He offered his hand to Croghan, who shook it once and let it drop.

“Dr. John Croghan. What got into Steen?” he asked again.

“Honestly, I have no idea,” Archie said, and he didn’t. How much did Croghan know about the chacmool? Not much, Archie decided; judging from his comments, he’d sold the mummy as just another museum attraction.

“Is Stephen available?” Archie asked. “I only have a short time, and—well, I was told not to go with anyone else.”

“Were you? Well, notwithstanding Stephen’s reputation, all of our guides do a superb job here.” Croghan looked annoyed that Archie had mentioned Stephen by name. “He’s already leading a tour today, but perhaps tomorrow or Sunday. Take a room and I’ll send him to see you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to see about your addled friend Steen. Good day, Mr. Prescott.” Croghan stalked off toward the trail.

Archie checked into the hotel and made arrangements to stable the exhausted horse. He made a mental note to search Steen’s wagon.

Standing in his room, Archie felt at a loss for what to do next. He wanted to act, to force the chacmool’s hand somehow, most of all to find Jane.
Where are you, daughter?
he thought.
Do you know
I’ve come for you?
But he couldn’t very well set off into the woods searching for her, or just wander into the cave. He had to wait for Stephen. And nothing would happen until Sunday night, anyway. Well, at least I survived the trip, Archie consoled himself. After everything he’d been through, he was finally at Mammoth Cave. Now he would just have to wait.

The one thing he could do was take a bath, and that he did, scrubbing himself clean of three weeks’ traveling grime and soaking his weary bones until the water cooled and he started to get a chill. When he returned to his room, he felt incredibly refreshed. Even his thigh felt better; the scarred-over wound had stopped aching for the first time in months.

Archie didn’t realize
he’d fallen asleep until a knock at the door woke him. “Just a minute,” he called, groggy from his nap and surprised to see that darkness had fallen. It took him a moment to find his trousers and get to the door.

A young mulatto, in his early twenties perhaps, tipped his dusty hat and said, “Mr. Archie Prescott?” His clothes were grimed with reddish-brown mud, and so was his hair, which ran in unruly waves down over his collar.
My God,
Archie thought.
He looks like the very double of Frederick Douglass.

“Yes. You’re Stephen?” The mulatto nodded. “Ah. Wonderful.” Archie realized that he’d forgotten to eat earlier in the day, what with all the chaos Steen had caused. His stomach rumbled loud enough for both of them to hear. “Excuse me,” Archie said sheepishly. “I’m—could we talk over supper?”

A shadow passed across Stephen’s face, but his voice stayed level. “If you want to take your supper on the back porch.”

“Oh, God,” Archie said, terribly embarrassed. “I’m sorry; I wasn’t thinking.”

“Never mind,” Stephen said. He smiled broadly, and Archie found the sudden mood shift somehow unsettling. “You go on and get dressed. I’ll meet you on the porch.”