Alexander C. Irvine (5 page)

John Croghan took
in a deep lungful of the sharp, rich September air. Fall was a beautiful season in Kentucky, all the better when the people touring the cave were as effusive as Professor Tattersfield had been at supper that night. The Englishman had talked incessantly, paying scant attention to his meal, telling Croghan repeatedly what a marvel the cave was and how excellently Stephen performed his function. Croghan had paid ten thousand dollars for the cave, the hotel, the slaves, everything. In three years he’d made it back five times over.

He tamped tobacco into his pipe and stood at the railing of the hotel porch, thinking of all he had done to make Mammoth Cave the attraction it was. The hotel itself had been little more than a blockhouse when he’d purchased it; now it had been improved and refined into a facility that, if not luxurious, was— notwithstanding the reputation of Bell’s Tavern—certainly the best between Louisville and Bowling Green. A fine dining hall, private rooms, a covered wraparound porch, all had been added at his expense. He’d even hired a seasonal orchestra.

Croghan struck a match, careful to avoid singeing his drooping musrache, and savored the smell of good tobacco mingling with the forest air.

The clop and creak of a horse-drawn wagon came from around the corner of the hotel, where the road (another thing Croghan had built himself) led out to the state highway. Croghan checked his watch, replaced it in his vest pocket. It was after nine; where was Stephen? Gone straight home and to bed after his excursion, Croghan decided. He wouldn’t have had to pass the hotel to reach the slave quarters overlooking the cave trail.

The wagon clattered into view, and Croghan cocked an eyebrow in mild surprise. He’d seen itinerant tinkers and traveling salesmen, country doctors, carnival wagons, and even wandering dentists, but never had he seen a drummer-wagon that proclaimed its driver to be all of those,
riley steen,
read the banners draped along the sideboards,
extra
ordinary elixirs for every mal
ady, painless dentistry
. Below this ran
puppet shows—
household goods bought, sold, repaired,
and a third line said
medicines for life, l
ove, prosperity. other services available
—
inquire!

Croghan squinted at a line of smaller script running along the bottom of the banner nearest him, but the oil lamps hung from the posts of the porch flickered, distracting him as the wagon creaked to a stop. The driver appeared to be peering in the direction of the cave mouth, one hand coveting the tight side of his face. He
i
;runted in satisfaction, dropped the reins, and faced Croghan.
And ibis must be Mr. Steen,
Croghan thought. He was glad he didn’t have a toothache.

Steen wore a broad-brimmed black hat of indeterminate fabric, pulled down nearly to the bridge of his nose. In the failing light of the lamps, Croghan decided he looked like a man with a toadstool for a head. His topcoat was black as well, and bore a single rose in its left lapel. Croghan caught the odor of myrth on the breeze, dimly remembered from childhood funerals. He glanced at his pipe. It had gone out.

Steen dropped the reins and pushed his hat up an inch. Croghan noted a squashed cauliflower of a nose and three silver finger rings, set with stones of bright blue and smoky green. For no reason at all, the rings disconcerted Croghan. Nervously he rumaged for a match.

“Dr. John Croghan, if I am not mistaken?” Steen’s voice carried the depth and richness one would expect of a salesman, the self-assurance of a actor or medical man, but something else was there i, as well, a quiet smirk that went well beyond self-assurance. It was the unnspoken assertion that
if I am not mistaken
had been a formality, nothing more. This man very rarely found himself mistaken, if that tone was any indication.

Croghan found himself irritated, again for no good reason. What had the man done but offer him a greeting? He was not exactly anonymous in this part of the state.

“I am,” he said, more brusquely than he’d intended.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Steen said smoothly. Croghan never doubted that the man had noticed the shortness of his response and chosen to ignore it.

“Likewise,” he replied, recovering his civility. “If you’ve come to see the cave, there’s certainly room at the hotel. Professor Tattersfield of Westfield College was through today, and I’m sure he would be happy to share some of his experiences with you if he hasn’t retired.”

Croghan indicated the hotel’s front door with the stem of his pipe. “If you would like to go inside and register … ?”

Steen cocked his head suddenly, as if he’d heard a voice he couldn’t quite place. He slid out of the wagon seat and bent over. When he stood again, Croghan saw that he had plucked a tuft of grass from the narrow lawn bordering the hotel. Covering one half of his face again, he studied the grass, murmuring under his breath, and Croghan looked up at the night sky. It was clear, but for a moment he could have sworn he’d smelled rain. And the damned lamps were flickering out; someone obviously hadn’t filled them properly.

When he looked back to Steen, the salesman was brushing the grass off his hands. “Perhaps I will,” he said.

“Pardon me?” Croghan was distracted again. Narrow lines of ants were working their way methodically up the railing. They crawled in sinuous curves around the support posts and onto the lamp fixtures, where they circled the glass rims. Those who fell into the floating wicks were immediately replaced by others from below.

“Perhaps I will. Register.” Steen’s eyes narrowed as he took note of the ants. He looked again at the clear autumn sky. “Would itn be too late to first have a word with your man Stephen?”

“Ah, so you’ve heard of Stephen,” Croghan said expansively. Hi stowed his pipe again. “No, I’m afraid Stephen has already retired for the evening,” he added, wondering if it was true. “He has a tour scheduled for early tomorrow morning, but when he returns I’ll certainly see that you get to speak to him. We offer quite a variety of tours—”

“I suppose I will stay the night then,” Steen said. “Could someone see to my horses?”

“Of course,” Croghan said, escaping with relief into the hotel to roust a stable hand. That man Steen certainly threw him off balance.

Croghan rose promptly
at six the next morning, as was his custom whether at his estate in Louisville or in the room kept for him at the hotel. He was dressing for breakfast when someone knocked on his door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Mat, Dr. Croghan.” Even without seeing him, Croghan could tell that the boy was upset. “Come in,” he called.

The door opened and the skinny slave rushed in, twisting his cap between long-fingered hands. Croghan saw the expression on Mat’s face and stopped fiddling with his cravat. “Well, boy? Out with it.”

“It’s Stephen, sir,” Mat began, the words coming in a trembling rush, “he ain’t come out of the cave near as anyone can tell. We was wondering if he talked to you, since Charlotte ain’t seen him, nobody seen him, he musta had an accident in the cave since he didn’t say nothing about staying the night and he hates—”

“Get Nick and Alfred!” Croghan snapped, flinging the cravat onto his bed. “Right now. He was supposed to be near Gorin’s Dome. Hurry!” Mat dashed off to the slaves’ quarters near the river.

By the time he returned with Nick and Alfred, Croghan was fully dressed and waiting at the head of the trail that led to the cave mouth. He looked them over quickly. Three young Negroes, eighteen, twenty, and thirty-one years of age; healthy, capable guidess, worth perhaps a thousand dollars apiece. Stephen’s reputation alone, to say nothing of his skills, was worth more than all three together.

“As soon as you find him,” Croghan said as they reached the entrance, heavily shadowed in the thick purple predawn darkness, “send Nick out to tell me.” Nick was the least experienced caver of the three, but he was also the fastest. “Do you have rope? Bandages and splints?” They nodded, their faces harshly lit by the glaring lamps.

“Won’t need them,” called a voice from just under the looming overhang.

Mat, Nick, and Alfred dropped their packs simultaneously and ran into the cave. Croghan started to follow, then remembered his position. A man of his stature couldn’t be running around like a schoolboy simply because a slave had gotten himself lost, but still, he barely checked himself. Stephen represented a lot of money and no little prestige.

An excited jumble of voices rolled from the cave, so riddled with echoes that they might have been speaking any language in the world. Dignity be damned, what was going on? He took a step under the overhang and nearly collided with Nick. “Mr. Croghan—”

Croghan cut him off. “Stephen is there? He’s uninjured?”

“He look like somethin’ the cat drug in, but he okay,” Nick panted. He was lighter than Croghan’s other slaves—even Stephen, whose father had been white—and a flush was visible under his caramel skin. The phenomenon piqued Croghan’s medical interests, but he shoved the thought away.

“What’s all the jabbering about, then? Bring him out.”

“He’ll come in a minute,” Nick said. “He found a mummy, just makin’ sure Mat and Fred don’t bust it up none.” Before Croghan could frame a reply, the rangy youth turned and loped back into the cave.

Stephen sat
on
a rock just off the path and watched Alfred and Mat carry the carefully wrapped mummy to the hotel. They disappeared around the corner of the building, and Stephen slid gingerly to the ground, trying to ignore the throbbing in his right ankle and the high, persistent whine of fatigue keening at the base of his skull. Every muscle in his body twitched and trembled, and his hand shook as he drank from his flask.

He tried to remember how he’d gotten the mummy up out of the cave, but his memory of the trip back was gone, lost somewhere in the exhausted maze last night’s excursion had become in his mind. Stephen heard Dr. Croghan’s apologetic voice explaining to Professor Tattersfield that all tours would be postponed a day, the professor graciously accepting the delay. He rubbed his hands across his face and walked himself step by step through the previous night. The lead away from River Hall, the winding crawl, the gold coin and the rush of exhilaration at having conquered Bottomless Pit, the triangular opening that looked too regular, too
made.
Reaching the lamp in and hearing the cacophony of the ghosts, feeling certain that it led somewhere, scrambling through the short tunnel into the domed chamber beyond …

The room. Everything became confused in the room. Stephen placed his palms flat against his temples and massaged gently, trying to paint a coherent picture of the room in his mind. It wouldn’t come. Disconnected images thrashed in his head, fragments of odor and sight and sound, but he could make nothing of them.

He remembered walls, squared off into terraces rising beyond the range of the lamp, the wall opposite him completely lost in the darkness. A stone block, its top face slanted with the high edge toward the invisible far wall. A dead man, a mummy, reclining on its slanted top, head sunk into its chest and hands cupped over its stomach, bare feet dangling over the block’s lower edge. Feathers, he remembered feathers. Long and green, they sprouted from the mummy’s shoulders and flowed over the stone’s sides. Its skin was tautly drawn over the bones of its face, strong teeth bared to the silent gloom. Deeply set stains on the stone’s carved sides and at its base seemed to trickle as the lamp’s flame guttered in the still air. Figures of snakes and birds, of men in bizarre masks, undulated under the wetly gleaming stains, their strange movements leaping out at him as the rest of the room faded into a shadowy indistinct mist. He smelled rain, felt it cool on his cheeks, heard it sizzle as if falling into a fire. An immense growl rumbled through the chamber as Stephen caught the hot meaty stink of charring flesh, and then the darkness consumed the weakly flickering lamp.
Tlaloc.

He heard the word as clearly as if it had been spoken, and the chamber began slowly to fill with a murky orange light, the struggling radiance of twilight or the last hour before dawn. The clean smell of falling rain warred in his nostrils with the wicked burning stench as the far wall resolved into a giant bas-relief of a masked and cloaked figure holding what looked like a lightning bolt in one hand. A line of human skulls trailed from the other, weaving between the figure’s dancing feet. Its slanted eyes were starkly outlined in red, its lips drawn back in a fanged snarl and split by some kind of bar. Feline ears lay flat on either side of a headdress worked with feathers and a repeated pattern of a crescent moon inside a setting sun.

Tlaloc, macehuales imacpal iyoloco.
The words tolled silently through the chamber, and Stephen understood them now:
Tlaloc, He Who Makes Things Grow, he holds men in the palm of his hand.

The figure on the wall grew indistinct again, the light falling only on the line of grinning skulls. One of the skulls spoke:
Yollotl, chalchihuitl, in nelli teotl.
The words echoed from the mummy on the stone:
The heart, the pr
e
cious blood, the one true god.
The reclining figure turned toward Stephen with a grating creak of dry bones. He saw that its rictus grin had grown fangs, and its skull seemed flatter and broader, its legs drawn up and crooked, its cupped hands thickened into paws. It lifted its arms, and Stephen saw a human heart beating in the shadowed cavity of its belly. “Stephen.”

Stephen looked up, squinting in the morning sun as if he’d just come from the cave. “Dr. Croghan?”

Croghan looked disturbed and uncertain as he inspected the bowl of his pipe, turning it this way and that before he finally spoke. “How’s the leg?”

Stephen noticed he was rubbing at his right ankle. Trying not to wince as he stood and tested it, he shrugged. “It’s fine. Good as new in a day or so.” In truth, his ankle throbbed fiercely. He wouldn’t be much good in the cave for a week.

“Good.” Croghan paused a moment. “I’m afraid there won’t be any more of these solitaty excursions into the cave. From now on, you take one of the others with you.” Croghan mouthed the stem of the pipe, working it from one corner to the other. “Paying guests not included. If you want to chart new cave, there has to be someone with you to get you out of any trouble.”

“Wasn’t no trouble last night. It just took longer than I expected.”

Croghan’s jaw tightened, his lips compressing into a thin line around the pipe stem. “I will brook no argument on this point, Stephen. You would be difficult, I daresay impossible to replace, both in terms of skill and reputation. Shenanigans like your jaunt last night are far too great a risk to my investment. Understood?”

Stephen stared at his feet, not trusting himself to respond.

“Fine,” Croghan said. Stephen watched an ant scramble between blades of grass as the doctor turned back up the trail.

Riley Steen examined
the artifact he had placed on the windowsill of his room. It was a carved obsidian bowl approximately a foot across with a flattened bottom that allowed it to sit without rocking. The Aztecs had called it
tezcatlipoca,
smoking mirror, and Steen had liberated it from Harman Blennerhassett’s library after the Wood County Militia had finished in the wine cellar and gone off chasing after Aaron Burr. The glossy surface of the mercury filling the bowl cast a perfectly circular reflection of the sun on the ceiling, a good sign. It would cast no reflection of Steen at all, though; he tried not to think of that and returned instead to the delicate task that awaited him.

Perhaps he had calculated correctly from Burr’s garbled commentary. Steen looked out the window, watching the two slaves carry the wrapped figure of the chacmool up the trail and around to the back of the hotel. He chuckled softly as he imagined what Croghan must be thinking: another desiccated savage, more free publicity for his precious investment.
Mr. Croghan,
he thought,
you’ll never know the debt I owe you. You and your crew of cave-crawling niggers have made this easier than I ever dreamed possible.
Burr had spent years fruitlessly searching for the chacmool, and now Steen had simply waited for it to show itself. Now he would take hold of the moment. Croghan needed money, Steen needed the chacmool: a mutually beneficial exchange. After conducting necessary business, Steen would take the chacmool back East and safeguard it until it reanimated in December.

The only problem now was the girl. He had underestimated her, and she had escaped from him in Richmond almost eighteen months ago. But how many places could an eleven-year-old girl with disfiguring burns hide? He would find her.

She knew, after all, that her father hadn’t died in the Great Fire seven years before. Therefore she had most likely returned to New York in search of him, and if she had, the Rabbits would soon enough locate her and return her to him.

But back to the task. Steen stepped back, closing his eyes and moving from side to side until he felt the reflected sun shining directly into his face. Opening his eyes, he gazed steadily into the blinding glare for a full second. When he closed them again, the afterimage was bright and sharp, a perfect sphere with no darkened spot within. Definitely an auspicious sign, but he wished he’d had a chance to look at the moon last night around nine-twenty, when the ants on the porch had so shaken Croghan. The chacmool must have awakened, if only briefly; it would be useful to know how long it had been able to sustain itself.

But now, in the morning sun, it was dormant, and if Steen had any luck at all, it would remain so until he had it safely in New York. He ran through Burr’s figures again in his head, remembering the feel of the moldering book in his hands. Phineas Taylor Barnum, there was another man he owed a debt. If Barnum had not bought his American Museum’s collection whole from John Scudder, who previously had come into possession of the Tammany Society’s early archives and with them Aaron Burr’s other journals, Steen would never have been able to find his way to Kentucky.

The journal Steen had taken from Burr back in 1806 held a partial solution to the puzzle of the chacmool, but Steen hadn’t put the rest of it together until he had gone through Burr’s papers in the basement of the American Museum—before he and Barnum had fallen out. Burr had dated the
xiuhpohualli
, the Aztec year-count, from A.D. 1011. Steen had been puzzled by the figure until he researched other accounts from Mexico and Pennsylvania, whereupon he discovered that A.D. 1011 was the year when Aztec records and those of the Lenni Lenape, the Delaware tribe of North America, coincided. The Red Record of the Lenni Lenape gave that as the year they had driven the people they called the Snake down into the “land of swamps.” Steen had been to Mexico and seen the ruins of Teotihuacan on Lake Texcoco, all but obliterated by the bustling squalor of the City of Mexico. Land of swamps; it was an apt description.

The Aztecs recorded the date as the year in which they left the “northern paradise” and wandered until their hummingbird god, Huitzilopochtli, showed them the sign: an eagle perched on a cactus eating a snake. There they settled and lived until Cortes destroyed them. The Aztecs, believing him to be Quetzalcoatl himself returning from over the sea, had been betrayed by their own myths.

Living amid a clutter of gods and ceremonies borrowed from the peoples they conquered, the Aztecs had blurred the distinction between those that were merely empty ritual and the few that had any real potency. Their Achilles’ heel had been losing sight of the old gods, the elemental deities whose worship began in the faded mists of Mesoamerican antiquity. And if Steen had read the old account correctly, the swathed figure lying amid wine racks in the hotel storeroom was one of those few, the very avatar of the ancient god of earth and rain whom the Aztecs had named Tlaloc. The god’s true name was lost, as was the name of its avatar; the Quiche Maya, hoping to tame it, had named the avatar Chacmool, or Red Jaguar.

Steen was reluctant to accept Aztec history at face value. Their recordkeeping tended to be metaphorical, on the order of the Seven Days that began the Book of Genesis, and Burr himself was hardly more reliable. But even if the date 1011 was not accurate (and the appearance of the chacmool at this time strongly argued that it was), the fact that the same date appeared in both histories was definitely significant. Aztec and Lenape history agreed that the date was sacred, the beginning of a new cycle of fifty-two years.

Such cycles were the basic unit of chronology in ancient Mesoamerica. At the end of every one, the gods grew fickle and great sacrifice was required to prevent them from destroying the world. Counting forward from A.D. 1011, one came forward fifteen cycles to 1791, the date of the American Museum’s founding with the Tammany collection and of the white man’s discovery of Mammoth Cave. The Tammany Society had been founded a few decades earlier, in honor of the Lenape chief Tamanend, and early Tammany braves had been the first Pathfinders, assisting the Lenape in their task of keeping watch over the threat of the Snake.

Later, of course, the Tammany Society’s more immediate political goals had gotten in the way of such mystical altruism. Aaron Burr’s search for the chacmool had been every bit as perfidious to Tammany ideals as his attempt to splinter the Republic had been to the Founders’ idea of America. After Burr, Tammany Hall had forgotten its origins. Steen, however, had not.

The next cycle would begin in 1843, April third to be precise. Jane Prescott’s twelfth birthday. It was a time when new gods could be created and old ones resurrected from the oblivion of forgotten worship. A time when the Pathfinders could be eradicated once and for all. A time when history could be written, when anything was possible for the man who knew how to avoid the errors of his predecessors.

There was a respectful knock at the doot. Steen turned to stand in front of the mercury mirror. “Who is it?”

“Nick Bransford, Mister Steen.”

Steen recognized the name after a moment; one of the slaves who worked as guides to the cave. “Come in,” he said.

The door opened and Nick stepped into the room, keeping one hand on the doorknob. “There’s a visitor for you, sir,” he said. “Colored man.”

“A colored man?” Steen’s brow furrowed. What Negro would know he was here? “What’s his name?”

“He called himself John Diamond, say he come from New Orleans. You forgive my saying, sir, he look like a drunk.”

It took Steen a full ten seconds of gaping astonishment before he could gather himself to speak. “Send him up,” he finally murmured.

As the door closed, Steen found himself fingering the chipped edge of the obsidian bowl. “John Diamond,” he murmured to himself. He hadn’t spoken the name in over a year, since he had drowned Diamond in a nameless tributary of the Mississippi River near Natchez Under the Hill.

Steen replaced the carved lid on the
tezcatlipoca;
a chat with Lupita would have to wait. Portent after portent, he thought. Eighteen forty-three was going to be a very big year indeed.