by Alex Archer
"Choking Doberman?" Annja laughed. "I seem to be turning into an urban-legend echo machine."
Perovich waved a slim hand. "Master finds dog choking – finds house broken into – learns when he calls the cops that a burglar was just picked up in an emergency room missing some fingers...no need for more details. If you've ever seen a slasher flick your imagination will fill them in more than well enough. Oh, yeah – and the lover's lane, with the escaped maniac killer with the hook. Anyway."
"So you actually set out to study urban legends?"
"They were what drew me to folklore in the first place. When I went to college – be a dear and let me slide as to exactly when – there wasn't anything like a discipline of urban-legend study, although the term had come into use and a couple of books had been published on the subject. I'm afraid I don't have the stuff of pioneers in me. I didn't feel capable of forcing urban legendology into legitimacy all by my lonesome. The up-and-coming study of folklore was the closest thing available – though tending to be overrun with annoying granola eaters. Not that I, um, haven't been known to munch on the occasional granola bar, you understand."
"All the way around," Annja said, laughing. "How do you see what's happening now?"
"As you may know, the Holy Child – the Santo Niño – first appears in Spain, during the resistance to the Moorish occupation, feeding Christian prisoners in a village called Atocha. The apparition was supposed to be the infant Jesus."
She shrugged. "You can see why the oppressed Christian minority would want to believe that, certainly. From there the legend makes its way to New Mexico along the same twisty, colonialist trail that most of the colonists and trade goods did. Through the Spanish holdings in the Philippines, then through Mexico and finally up into northern New Mexico, which was the nether end of nowhere in those days."
"I see," Annja said.
"Now, it strikes me there's a natural match here," Perovich said. She was clearly enjoying herself. She liked spinning yarns – which Annja could guess might be a useful asset in a folklore prof. "The Holy Child associated from the get-go with succor. And of course any spiritual manifestation worth its spiritual salt possesses the gift of prophecy.
"While sightings are reported all across the Southwest from about the eighteenth century, when the myth made it up here from Plateros in Mexico, the main local belief centers upon an image of the Holy Child kept in the Sanctuary de Chimayó, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe."
"We're doing a dig not far from there, on San Esequiel Pueblo land," Annja said. "Or were. It's kind of wound down for the season now."
"Winter comes early and hard to northern New Mexico. You know what 'Sangre de Cristo' means?"
"'Blood of Christ,'" Anna stated.
"Exactly!" The professor smacked the arm of her chair. "See why I love it here?" Perovich asked, eyes shining in the gloom. She hadn't turned on any interior light. The soft polychrome glow of her computer monitor lit the side of her face and struck the occasional rainbow accent off her long hair. Annja did not feel compelled to ask for more lights. If her subject was comfortable, so was she. "You don't get that sort of thing back in Ohio."
Perovich rocked back in her chair. "Then again, you don't get mountains in Ohio, either. Not like around here. So, anyway, the image in the sanctuary is supposed to bust loose occasionally and wander the countryside doing good deeds. There's this really wonderful tradition of bringing children's shoes to the shrine, to replace the ones he wears out on his errands of mercy. And of course, he's spotted from time to time – and as mysteriously disappears."
Annja nodded. "I see where this is going."
"Wandering-saint yarns of pretty similar content are common to many cultures and religious traditions around the world. Like sightings of a benign and powerful feminine spirit. Before the Spanish got to the Valley of Mexico, they called her Tonantzin, a fertility goddess. Later they called her the Virgin of Guadalupe."
"Yes. You see her image everywhere around here," Annja said.
"Another reason to love the place. A lot of what I study isn't folklore to the people around here. It's real. Anyway, I'm researching my own paper on that very subject. How the Santo Niño may have engendered the vanishing hitchhiker. Would you like me to send you a draft?"
"I would, please. You've got my e-mail address."
"In any event, it's easy to see how the current concept of the vanishing hitchhiker might blend – or blend back – into the Holy Child myth. That's what I see happening now. It's like all those clichés we New Mexicans are so fond of. I laughingly call myself a New Mexican after living here ten years, when the real New Mexicans have roots here going back to the sixteenth century."
"Or the ice age," Annja said.
The professor laughed. "True, true. Please don't report me for having a Eurocentric moment, there. Could be fatal in my position."
"Your secret's safe with me."
"Anyway, we always like to tell ourselves about New Mexico being a land of contrasts – from ancient petroglyphs to the atom bomb. But like most clichés it's true in some important ways. And I think we see it in effect here."
The professor leaned close to Annja. Her eyes were big in the twilight. "I'm going to propound a theory that I'm sure would make your cultural-anthropologist friends hold their fingers up in crosses and hiss at me. I hope this doesn't ruin my shot at a gig on your show."
Annja laughed. "I'm not so good at political correctness myself."
"All right. You've been warned. The southwestern U.S. is basically uninhabitable. It's desert and mountain. Arid and uninviting. Even the river valley – well, you've seen our river, so-called?"
Annja nodded.
"There weren't such drains on its flow upstream back in the day, of course. But no one was ever going to mistake it for the Orinoco. So the people who settled here were the ones they wouldn't let settle anywhere else – anywhere, well, nice to live. The natives you got were human-sacrificing hardcases like the Anasazi, or Pueblos, who kept getting chased out of wherever they settled by mean people, or Athabascan raiders. Even the Aztecs – not a kind and gentle bunch – took one look and kept on moving. Right through the Jornada del Muerte.
"The Spanish settlers were largely converted Jews and Moors for whom Spain had become too hot. Literally – ba-bum!" She did a top-hat sting on the arm of her chair. "The Christians were mostly bandits – heavily weighted to Basques and Catalans, whom any good Castilian of the day would tell you were the same thing. The Anglos, well, you know what kind of sociopaths and escaped doorknobs our pioneering forebears were. Again, they pushed compulsively west because the decent, civilized east wouldn't hold 'em."
Annja nodded. "Okay. I may have to turn in my anthro card, but you haven't said anything I'd disagree with."
Perovich reared up, looked at her and pushed her glasses up her straight nose. "Well. You're a rare one."
"That's what the nuns said." To the blank look she expanded, "At the orphanage."
The professor nodded. "So what we get here is the confluence – no – the three-way, full-on, pedal-to-the-metal collision of the most extreme elements of three pretty disparate cultures. The aftershocks reverberate into the present day – spend some time on the streets listening to people, just open your eyes and look around. You can see them – you can feel 'em."
"I already picked up on that," Annja said seriously.
Perovich sat back, unfolding her hands to her sides. "So there you have it! I was an Ohio suburban chick with a taste for the strange. Goth hadn't been invented yet, or hadn't reached Columbus. So what's a girl to do? First I got into the study of folklore, because it was the accepted discipline closest to my interest. Then I came here for grad work. And I've been here ever since."
Annja nodded. She wasn't sure if she'd discovered anything she could use. She was definitely getting a better feel for the place, though, as well as its innate weirdness. It helped her put in perspective some of the things she'd observed du
ring the two weeks she'd spent with the dig. As well as the occasional sense of eeriness she'd experienced even before the incident the previous night.
"What do you think about the reality underlying the stories?" she asked. "Is there any?"
Perovich laughed. "That's a tricky question. But since I've already opened up to you, what the hey? First, I think it's fatuous to say that all legends or myths or other stories 'must have'or 'always have' some basis in reality. People lie. They make things up, to amuse themselves, to amuse others, to make themselves look important. You can twist the definition of 'based in reality'to fit anything, up to and including most horror movies – there are teenagers and they have nightmares. I've had some doozies myself, let me tell you. So, on that basis, you could say those movies are based on something factual.
"At the same time, not all urban legends are false. Sometimes they include elements of real events. Sometimes yarns that get repeated – by word of mouth, at one time, by photocopy, then fax, then e-mail – are quite true. Like the story about the lawyer who fell to his death after hurling himself against a picture window in a high-rise to show it was shatterproof, or the guy who flew by tying helium balloons to a lawn chair, and descended by shooting the balloons with a pellet pistol. The details may be off sometimes, but those things are well documented. They really happened."
"So what you're saying is – " Annja began.
"I come down firmly on the side of waffling. We also spin yarns because we have a hardwired desire to believe in the strange – something beyond the horizon, beyond what we know. I have the same desires. At the same time, I try to keep a level head. What I do hasn't got many metrics, not a lot of reproducible results. But I try to take a rational approach.
"But still. Just rationally, looking at evidence I consider pretty trustworthy, it seems to me that things do happen in this world that defy conventional explanation. These people are experiencing something. They are talking to someone. Is it a hoaxer? When you get a Japanese family reporting that they were warned away from impending calamity by a child dressed in classic Santo Niño costume – well, something odd is happening by definition. Wouldn't you say?"
Annja shrugged. "I do wonder if we have enough information to form an opinion."
Perovich nodded. "True enough!"
She slapped a jean-clad thigh. "Well. Just be glad we're not having an outbreak of sightings of one of our really scary apparitions."
Annja felt invisible mice with cold feet run down the nape of her neck and right down her spine. "Such as what?" she asked, not sure she wanted to hear the professor's answer.
"La Llorona. The Weeping Lady. Brr." Perovich shook herself theatrically. "Those stories always give me the willies."
"The Weeping Lady," Annja repeated in a small voice. "What does she do?"
"Wanders rural areas weeping for her lost children. She murdered them herself. In some versions of the legend she was burned at the stake for it. She's also supposed to lure lone travelers – usually young men, for obvious reasons – to their doom. She keeps turning up even today, although modern encounters are sadly short on actual doom. I have collected some pretty unnerving reports that seem quite credible. I've interviewed several percipients myself, off the record. Most people who run into something really strange seem very reticent to talk about it."
That would be me, Annja thought. Unfortunately, it would not be whoever spilled the beans about our sighting last night. It was an eagle, anyway, she told herself again..
"One odd thing I've noticed," Perovich said. "Sightings of the weeping lady are usually associated with the sound of a woman screaming – big surprise, huh? But sounds like that have also been cropping up in the monster-sighting reports that have started to cross my desk of late. You know – shadowy cats, anomalous dogs, bigfoot kind of things, but black and foul smelling. Peculiar, isn't it?"
Once again Annja thought she could hear the chilling noise that had accompanied the black form as it glided off out of sight – piercing screams like a woman in distress.
"Very strange," she said.
****
Outside, twilight was well advanced. Over and through the old trees across University Boulevard
she could see the dying embers of another gaudy black-velvet-painting sunset silhouetting an old church steeple. The narrow parking lot between the Maxwell Anthropology Center buildings and the street was empty but for her rented Honda and a battered minivan parked twenty or thirty yards away. She gave the van a glance and put it from her mind. It looked like the sort of third-hand vehicle a college student might own.
"'Scuse me, lady." A voice broke the silence from her left.
She snapped her head up and around. She had parked with the car facing away from the street. A raggedly dressed man – early thirties, she guessed – was walking none too steadily toward her across the strip of grass separating the inner and outer sections of the parking lot. He was gaunt. His face was half-covered by patchy dark beard.
"Sorry to bother you, ma'am," he said, speaking a little too crisply, as the mildly intoxicated tend to do when they want to decisively show they aren't drunk. "My car ran out of gas about a quarter mile back up University here." He gestured vaguely to the north. "I need to go pick up my old lady at work. She's pregnant and gets tired real easy, and I need to ask if you could please help me out with a couple of bucks for gas."
Annja frowned. She hated these situations. She'd heard such sob stories before – not infrequently repeated word for word on consecutive days, by the same "distressed" motorist. He obviously does need money, she thought. But do I really help him if I give it to him? Or only encourage him to persist in self-destructive behaviors?
"Really, lady," he said. He sounded weary and desperate. "I'm not bullshitting you. I really need it."
She almost reached in her pocket for some money. Almost. But he had entered the customary cultural limits of her personal space and kept coming. Warnings shrilling in her mind, she turned to face him squarely.
Her arms were suddenly seized from behind by powerful hands.
Chapter 6
The Vatican
Grunting, the man slowly pushed the weight-laden iron bar upward from his chest. The body lying supine on the bench was well into middle age, and had expanded and softened considerably around the middle. But he prided himself that he had lost but little of the bull-like strength that had characterized him in his youth. This despite the sedentary and indeed intellectual profession where he had spent his entire adult life since leaving the seminary.
Straining, eyes tightly shut, he fought to straighten his arms against the massive weight. Finally, with a last exertion of his will – an organ exercised perhaps more regularly and rigorously than his body – he forced his arms to lock.
Instantly they began to tremble. He felt strength flee. In a heartbeat they would buckle and drop the weight to crush his chest. In half panic he opened his eyes, although he knew his spotter stood waiting, attentive to just such situations.
Yet the spotter did not seize the bar. The man on the bench began to perspire profusely as the bar started oscillating in the air above him. He squeezed his eyes shut again, as if by not seeing his doom he could forestall it.
He felt the bar move, then, tardily, steady as it was grasped. But still the awful weight pressed down on his arms, turning them into jelly.
"Deus meu!" he gasped. "My life is in your hands."
"Yes," a deep voice said.
He opened his eyes.
The hands guiding the heavy bar as if it were featherlight were not the pale, relatively soft hands of Franz, the Swiss attendant at the modern gymnasium below the Vatican. They were as hard and sun-browned as a common laborer's, and covered with expensive rings of ruby and sapphire, gold and silver.
"You," he gasped as Garin Braden, clad in his customary Fleet Street suit, lowered the bar into the waiting rack. After his initial start the cardinal felt little surprise at seeing Braden, although access was most
carefully restricted. Garin Braden seemed to appear anywhere he willed within the confines of the Vatican.
"Thank you," the cardinal said when he caught his breath.
"It is nothing, Eminence," the newcomer said in the prelate's native Portuguese.
He knelt, took the still-shaking white hand proffered and kissed the ring of office. Braden was a big man, with dark hair, a neat black beard and mustache and piercing black eyes. He rose smoothly to his feet.
Cardinal Adalberto de Souza sat up. He gratefully accepted the towel and bottle of water the wealthy industrialist handed him. He mopped his high, sweat-sheened brow and drank.
Then he looked around. They were alone in the small but brightly lit, clean and wonderfully appointed weight room, one of many dotted throughout the sprawling Vatican City complex. The modern church had begun to pressure its shepherds to tend to the condition of their bodies, rather than regarding such as vanity and indeed the sin of pride, as in years past. Cardinal de Souza was still one of relatively few among princes of the church to avail himself of the weight rooms, although many of the younger priests were quite passionate about fitness.
He shook his head. He had seen many changes come to the church. Not all were for the better.
He looked up at his guest. "Good morning, Mr. Braden. It is an unexpected pleasure to see you."
