Outside, the second sailor was thrashing against the wall of the stair, gasping thickly and knocking his head against the loosened planks. Blood crawled into Jane’s hair, down her collar, across her back and into her sleeve. The dying sailor blocked the knothole, leaving her in complete darkness as the fierce itch in her scars began to recede.
Her face hurt, and blood was creeping in her mouth from loosened teeth and a split lip. Please let him go away, she thought. Please let him just leave. And please let them come soon and take away the dead men and not notice me.
Moonlight spilled into the knothole as the bald sailor was lifted away from the wall. She heard his body hit the ground a few feet away, and then heard the Indian tapping gently on the loose planks. Go away, Jane mouthed, tasting wriggly blood on her tongue and feeling it slick under her shirt.
“Nanahuatzin,” the Indian said. The plank was pulled aside with a rusty squeak. “Come outside.”
She didn’t respond.
“Come outside and I will stop the blood.”
“You killed them,” Jane said. “You’ll just kill me.”
“If I wanted you dead, little Nanahuatzin, you would be. Come outside now.”
Jane did, slowly, absently scratching at the fading itch and wiping at the blood gluing her shirt and hair to her skin. Once outside she stood. “Why do you call me that?” she said.
“It is your name,” the Indian answered simply. “Given long before you were born.”
“My name is Jane Prescott.” She thought the bald sailor had been right; he did look more Negro than Indian. Blood trickled from one corner of his mouth. Why wasn’t she afraid any more?
The Indian nodded. “Your mother gave you that name. This,” his fingers traced the broken landscape of Jane’s face, “named you again. Nanahuatzin; say it.”
“Nanahuatzin,” Jane repeated. At the Indian’s touch, her nose had stopped bleeding and the itching in her scars had completely gone away. He killed those two men just to talk to me, she thought.
“Good.” The Indian swiftly licked the traces of her blood from his fingertips, then held the loose plank aside. “Go and sleep now.”
Jane yawned, her jaw cracking painfully. “Ouch,” she said, and went inside. Nanahuatzin: the word fluttered in her head like a moth seeking light. My name, she thought. The last thing she heard was the Indian carefully replacing the loose plank.
Atlcahualo, 8—Rabbit—January 8, 1843
The year turned, and was drawing to a close, but Tlaloc slumbered yet, having woken briefly and seen the distance of the sun. In this time was the cold and the weakness of the sun.
The Fifth Sun was ending its days, the time approaching when the people would be swallowed by the earth and reborn. Nanahuatzin, the Scabby One, lived; it had touched her and seen the first stirrings of her rejuvenation. As the Fifth Sun set, they would return to Chicomoztoc, the place of origins, and there she would again lie in sacrifice that the world could be born anew. Then would Tlaloc return to claim the new world for his own.
To be within the earth again, beneath the roots to watch the work of He Who Makes Things Grow—soon, soon. First the journey to the west, to Chicomoztoc which lay beneath the skies from whence came the mocihuaquetzqui. Danger there and it did not know why; what had it to fear from the spirits of pregnant women? Still, it stirred and muttered in the depths of its sleep. The West was the place of danger and redemption, the place where it could wrap itself in the earth and wait for the drumming of the rains, wrap itself in the earth and hear the voices of the roots praising Tlaloc—
Archie awoke screaming through a mouthful of mud, the sound muffled by the mud clogging his ears, his arms and legs bound … he couldn’t breathe. He tried to heave himself upright, but the weight on his chest forced him back down, crushed the air from his lungs. His hands stayed pinned to his sides as he thrashed back and forth, hearing the plangent sucking of the mud over his own gasping screams. The mud was freezing, pressing down on him more with every bit of air he choked out of his panicked lungs, and he was blind. Not this way, Archie thought, please …
Water sluiced across his face, washing away some of the mud. He heard muted voices, realized he was still screaming out the last of his air; then strong hands caught around the back of his neck, holding his head out of the muck. He gasped, inhaling a tiny breath of air along with huge gobs of mud.
There, easy, someone was saying, wiping the mud from his eyes, digging at the mud until Archie could loosen his shoulder and drag his arm free.
He reached out, caught something and pulled on it, choking up mud and sucking it back down with a little air. Rolling out of the shallow pit formed by his torso, he coughed like a consumptive before drawing a huge clear whooping breath. Dim light leaked in through slitted windows high in sooty brick walls, and he focused on it, holding the dusty shaft of sunlight in his mind as a sign that he hadn’t gone to hell.
“Breathe slowly, sir. The air will come easier that way and the mud be less apt to follow it.” The voice was smooth, cultured, Southern. The man it came from had once been dressed fashionably, but his suit and collar were now drenched and covered with mud. Wavy dark hair hung over a domed forehead, deep-set basset-hound eyes, a neat mustache.
He saved my life, Archie thought, beginning to shiver in the near-freezing mud.
“Is this the Brewery?” Archie hauled on the chopped-off tree root he’d blindly seized before, but the mud still encased his feet and lower legs.
His savior began digging again. “Yes, the cellar. Godforsaken place,” he said, freeing Archie’s right leg.
As the left pulled free after it, Archie grimaced at a deep ache in his thigh. He suddenly remembered Royce and his knife, and that dwarf—
The man stopped digging when he saw Archie’s hand move tentatively toward his left ear. “Not much left there, I’m afraid,” he said, shaking his head. “It didn’t fester, though; God knows why.”
Something about that comment struck Archie unexpectedly. He grappled with it for a moment. “Didn’t fester? How long have I been down here?”
“In this cellar? Less than a day, I should think; you don’t seem much the worse for your inhumation. Nothing wrong, in any case, that this won’t cure.” Archie’s rescuer offered him an engraved pewter flask, another sign of either wealth or breeding that seemed incongruous given the surroundings. Archie took it and rinsed the mud from his mouth with a draught of strong whiskey.
“In the Old Brewery, though …” the man paused. “Twenty days, I think. Yes; it’ll be three weeks tomorrow.”
Archie swallowed reflexively. “Three weeks!?”
“That’s right. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it? You were—er, brought here late on the twentieth of December, and—let’s see, it’s just dawn now—today is the eighth of January. Consider that drink my New Year’s toast. Auld lang syne, et cetera.”
He smiled briefly, then his expression changed and he leaned forward, regarding Archie intently. “What’s your name, my resurrected friend?”
“What?” Three weeks. “Prescott. Archie.”
“This is truly a pleasure, Archie. Never before have I encountered a person who has actually undergone this experience. Most, you realize, are not so fortunate as yourself. Something I’ve only read about before. My name is William Wilson. I edit a magazine. Perhaps you’d be willing to offer an account of your ordeal for publication?”
I’m alive, Archie thought belatedly, surprised both at the fact and at his own surprise, and at the same time it occurred to him how odd it was for this Wilson to solicit him while he was still lying in what should have been his grave. He touched his ear, felt the stubby flap that was all that remained outside the ear canal. The scar tissue was smooth and numb. And his leg—moving it he felt just a faded ghost of agony twitch in the muscles of his thigh. It was nearly healed. Had his ear actually burst into flame after being torn free?
He remembered the feather talisman and dug into his pants, forgetting about
Wilson in his sudden panic. Just as quickly he calmed, feeling it still nestled in his groin, quietly keeping time with his heartbeat. It was a real artifact remaining amid nightmarish memories, and it meant that whatever he remembered must really have happened; a surge of relief welled up in Archie’s still-heaving chest as he realized that he hadn’t lost his mind.
Embarrassed suddenly, Archie noticed Wilson again, but his bedraggled savior hadn’t moved his gaze from Archie’s face. Wilson’s eyes, sunken and glittering in his pallid face, tracked Archie’s every motion.
“Why didn’t they just kill me?” Archie said. He didn’t really expect Wilson to know, but something about the silence was beginning to unnerve him.
“Who, the upstairs denizens?” Wilson laughed, the cultured gentility of the sound jarring in the squalid gloom. “They’re mostly born in Old World hamlets, you know, and taboos against interfering with madmen are still very much adhered to there. After seeing what happened with your ear, and watching you thrash about for a few days, they decided that you weren’t to be touched. Either you would revive on your own, or God would leave your possessions behind when he finally took your soul.
“On Christmas Day, I’m told, you made quite a display. Actually got up and walked, then settled yourself in a privy trench and made rowing motions as if you were Charon ferrying yourself to see if Cerberus would let you through. All the while you mumbled incoherencies in some foreign tongue.” Wilson held up a hand as if in warning. “I repeat this only as hearsay, of course,” he continued, “but were it not true, you most likely would have been buried down here shortly after your Dead Rabbit antagonists left you. In any case, your Christmas actions were enough to earn you nearly two weeks of precarious amnesty, despite the fact that you barely breathed during that time. Eventually, however, greed overcame traditional taboos and the rabble approached you again last evening. Holding a mirror to your lips, they shouted at you in a terrible cacophony of languages, but your only response was an indecipherable whisper and a quieting breath that even I initially took to be your last. This I saw happen, having returned from a short holiday, and I stood by as they scooped a shallow pit from the mud softened by our recent thaw; but as they looted your somnolent body I was possessed of an inexplicable intuition that some spark of life in you endured. That is why I kept vigil here tonight; I could not prevent them from interring you, but to be buried alive is the worst fate that can befall a man. It was incumbent upon me as a fellow human being to be absolutely certain that you had departed.
“As, we both now know, you have not,” Wilson finished with an odd smile. Archie grew more uncomfortable as the focus of the man’s probing gaze. It was bizarre, considering what he’d been through—beaten and mutilated, stabbed and left for dead, buried alive after three weeks feverish in the Old Brewery—but there it was. Something about this Wilson made Archie profoundly uneasy.
Did he do it? Archie thought suddenly, even though he had no earthly reason to suspect such a thing. Did he bury me alive … why? Just so he could dig me up again and get a story out of it for his bloody magazine? Even Bennett wouldn’t do that.
“Mr. Wilson,” Archie began, handing the flask back, “what you did—I am in your debt. Thank you, I can never repay you, but now I’ve got to go home, I’m starving—”
Wilson cut off Archie’s rambling speech with a luminous smile at the word starving. “Just as I expected,” he said, rummaging in the pockets of his coat. “I’ve brought a sandwich in anticipation of your appetite.”
Archie devoured the still-warm roast beef and bread in four bites, forcing it down faster than he could chew.
“God.” Archie swallowed the last mouthful and sucked at his fingers, ignoring the mud that still caked them. “Thank you again.”
Wilson nodded, and again offered Archie his flask. “Certainly Archie,” he said, hesitating the tiniest bit, “you’ll pardon my intrusion, but I’m afraid your home has been colonized by a family of black Irish fresh from the auld sod. I doubt they’re inclined to return it at this juncture.”
Archie paused to assimilate this news. He should have expected it, if three weeks had actually passed while he was senseless in the brewery. But he hadn’t, and strangely it almost seemed as if Wilson had. Archie had the feeling that Wilson was somehow guiding him along, watching his responses to each new bit of information. What else did he know that he wasn’t letting on?
“I can do you another favor, Archie,” Wilson continued. “Your house belongs to another, and I’m relatively certain given the circumstances that your employment has also passed into other hands.”
He paused, wiping distractedly at his jacket; again Archie felt he was being led by the nose. Of course Bennett wouldn’t wait three weeks on the off chance that a suddenly unreliable employee would just as suddenly become dependable again. It wasn’t strange that it had happened; what was strange was Wilson’s seeming anticipation of it, and the methodical way in which he dispensed the news.
Like an experimenter, Archie thought. He considered his situation. Barnum would surely know about his watchman’s gruesome murder, and so would Bennett. But if Archie were suddenly to arrive after three weeks, mutilated and spouting gibberish about living mummies who swallowed beating hearts … the newsman was not known for his discretion when it came to sources, but he wasn’t likely to believe anything from Archie Prescott at this point.
And obviously Wilson had known that.
“What do you want?” Archie said.
“I can find you lodging, Archie, and employment sufficient to meet your needs, if slightly sordid. What I want in return is a simple answer to a simple question.” Wilson leaned forward again, peering at Archie with unnerving intensity.
“When you were feverish these last three weeks … no, never mind that. While you were interred here, dead by any known standard, cooling and breathless—” Wilson began to grow visibly agitated. He calmed himself, placing his hands flat on the ground.
“When you were buried here, where was your soul?”
The ants had returned with the brief thaw and were marching in a strange pattern on Riley Steen’s desk blotter. He watched as a silhouette emerged from the pattern, a reclining figure that stood and moved its arms in a hypnotic semaphore. Furious, he pounded a fist into the middle of the pattern, crushing several of the ants. Their pattern broken, the remainder milled aimlessly, wandering eventually over the edges of the oaken desktop and down to the floor.
He stood and faced his bookshelf, regarding the leather bindings in hopes that they would inspire him. Tomorrow it would be three weeks since the chacmool effected its surprisingly resourceful escape from Barnum’s museum, and in that time Steen’s eyes and ears around the city had reported only two killings that could reasonably be attributed to the avatar. Other than the children in the canoe, of course.
That incident disturbed Steen because while the calendar had been properly aligned, the canoe ritual should not have been possible in the chacmool’s newly awakened state. All those lives, taken and carefully focused … that it had happened at all led Steen to a disturbing conclusion: The avatar was more powerful on its own than he’d expected. It was performing the proper rituals and staying out of sight in a foreign city after more than three hundred years of hibernation. But how was it feeding? Was it able to maintain itself on only two lives in the space of three weeks?
Steen tapped a finger along his bookshelf until he located Bernal Diaz’s Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nuevo Espana. He returned to his desk with it and paged through it without paying the slightest attention to its contents. Damn Archie Prescott, he thought. If one can damn a man already dead.
It would have been soothing to blame all of his misfortunes on the dear departed, but Steen had only a sporadic talent for self-delusion. The truth was that the chacmool might well have escaped even without Prescott’s annoying diversion. The sight of the Rabbit perimeter guard Steen had set up, stumbling into the alley festooned with freshly sp
routing corn, was good for a chuckle, but it was also clear evidence that the chacmool was significantly more powerful than he had assumed. But you knew that, he told himself. Stop thinking in circles.
The goal remained the same: with the chacmool harnessed and young Jane Prescott properly sacrificed in her role as Nanahuatzin, Steen could assure himself a powerful position in—what? The Sixth Sun? No; however useful the old gods were, their names and concepts were at bottom pitifully naive. The return of a living Tlaloc would create more than simply another in a series of epochs. It would be a New World, a Kingdom of Earth, and Riley Steen would be kingmaker. It was a position worthy of him.
There were obstacles, of course. The Tammany machine was the most obvious avenue through which to transform Tlaloc’s return into real political power, but it had fallen on hard times and withdrawn to consolidate its hold on local politics. This past fall the sachems had been in a fight for their political lives, barely managing to retain their influence in Albany. But that was a quibble, really. With God on their side, as the old saying went…
And what a deliciously ironic reversal that would be, to use the society—founded on the ideals of Tamanend himself—to finally strike the decisive blow against the Pathfinders on behalf of the Snake. Aaron Burr would have been proud.
Steen chuckled, but his mind was already moving on to more serious problems. He knew the whereabouts of neither the chacmool nor Jane Prescott, and his inability to locate either had to be a result of his bungling of the operation at Barnum’s.
Or, perhaps, Prescott’s bungling. None of the old codices offered any insight into the meaning of the fiery, knife-wielding Rabbit that had risen that night. Ometeotl’s Eye had been open, that much was certain—an inexplicable occurrence on a night when Tlaloc should have held sway. And to complicate matters further, signs in the Smoke Mirror insisted that the chacmool had been in contact—actual physical contact—with Jane Prescott on Christmas Day. Yet she was still alive.
Alexander C. Irvine Page 13
