Flinging it wide, Archie stood just outside the jamb, brandishing the knife and bracing for an assault. The door banged off the wall and swung halfway back before squeaking to a halt on rusted hinges. Inside the room, light streamed in through a bank of high windows and a breeze swirled fallen leaves around Archie’s feet. A large desk stood under the windows, swept clean of debris by the breeze. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves occupied every wall, mostly empty; what books remained had been ruined by exposure to the elements. Archie pushed the door aside and stepped into the room, his footsteps muffled by a thick rug. Two reading chairs sat across from the desk, flanking a low table. Behind them were more empty bookshelves, interrupted by a humidor and liquor cabinet.
Archie glanced behind the door and then looked the room over more closely, wondering what might have excited the talisman. There were no places for a man-sized creature to hide, and the only other thing Archie could think of to explain the talisman’s agitation was some sort of artifact Blennerhassett had left behind. Or had the chacmool itself been here? He scanned the shelves and saw nothing but dust and rotted books, and an empty alcove near the windows that might once have held a sculpture. Examining the alcove more closely, Archie found several blobs of what appeared to be quicksilver. He dabbed at one, wondering what could explain such an oddity; perhaps Blennerhassett had pursued medical interests?
The touch of his fingers smeared one blob over to connect with a second. An electric shudder ran from the talisman down Archie’s arm into the liquid, and the blobs rushed together, rippling as if in an earthquake. Several black ants crawled from seams in the woodwork and circled the pulsating blob, marching in exact, almost military, single file.
Ants drawn to quicksilver? Was that something he’d seen before? The light in the room dimmed, curdled as it had on the street in front of the Herald that day, and Archie slumped into a sitting position, one finger still thrust into the puddle of mercury.
The light, he thought. Like on the mountain; I’m outside of time again. He felt slow, disconnected.
“Wheeere’s the heeaadd? Very close? Wheeeeere?”
Archie twisted out of the alcove, feeling a nearly audible snap as his finger pulled free of the quicksilver. He stumbled against the desk and gained his feet, looking wildly around. The room seemed to fall into place around him again, and he wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t heard the eerie cry.
Heard? Fifteen minutes ago I was deaf as a post.
His eyes fell on a tiny recess above the lintel of the door through which he’d entered. A small statuette sat there, a jade carving of a crawling infant. Archie stepped closer to the doorway and inspected the carving, queerly certain that it was the source of the voice he’d heard.
It was an infant, but there was something inhuman about it as well. Even for a baby’s, its head was huge, and its face was something out of a nightmare. Curled and slitted eyes squinted out over a gaping fanged mouth, and Archie had the unsettling sensation that it was looking at him. The talisman resumed its steady heartbeat throb, and Archie stretched onto tiptoes, reaching for the sculpture.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Still balancing on the balls of his feet, Archie turned and saw a smiling black face hanging upside down in the open window over the desk. Good God, he thought, how did any of them survive the wreck?
The man hooked his fingers on the inside of the window frame and swung in like a trapeze artist, twisting in midair to land on the desk facing Archie. He wasn’t one of the slaves from the Maudie, Archie realized, but then who was he?
“Sorry, Johnny,” the black man said. One of his eyes was milk-white, with no trace of pupil or iris. “Didn’t mean to startle, but you got problems.”
“What kind of problems? Who are you?”
“John Diamond, used to be,” the man said, bowing grandly. “Used to be an acrobat, dancer. Now just a dead man who can’t die.”
The talisman had quieted, and Archie wondered if this Diamond person exerted some sort of damping influence on it. “Did you follow me here?” he asked warily.
“Follow, yes; you, no.” Diamond stepped gracefully to the floor. “That’s the problem I was saying. Thing I’m following is following you. You Presto?”
“Presto?” Archie stared blankly at Diamond for a moment before he understood. “Oh—well, Prescott. My name’s Prescott.”
Diamond laughed and slapped his forehead comically. Archie noticed that Diamond’s hand left a visible impression in the skin of his brow. “Prescott, sorry Johnny. I do that. Must be being dead.”
“I suppose so,” Archie said cautiously. Nothing Diamond said made any sense. “Who’s following me? Is it the chacmool?”
“No, no, chacmool’s in Kentucky already. Not exactly who, more what. Chaneque. Statue of it, up there.” Diamond pointed at the carving over the lintel.
“You touch that,” Diamond continued, “it’ll come right to you. Sorry Johnny, if it hasn’t already.”
“What—” Archie’s question was cut off by a bone-chilling wail from the hall.
“Verrryy close, the heeeaad!”
Archie jumped away from the door, spinning to face out into the hall. The thing crouched on the balcony rail, barely six feet away, was the jade carving come to life, only much larger. Its head was twice the size of Archie’s own, its infantile body grotesquely bulging with slabs of muscle. Vile breath poured from its pouting mouth between bared fangs. And something about its face was familiar.
Jesus, Archie thought as he caught sight of the hump deforming its naked back, it’s the Geek. What in God’s name happened to him?
Before he could move, the chaneque sprang on him, digging long fingernails into Archie’s shoulders and knocking him to the floor. Flinging his arms up to ward it off, Archie lost the knife; he grabbed the chaneque around the neck with both hands, barely holding its snapping mouth away from his face.
“Oh boy,” he heard Diamond say from across the room.
“Head the brains, Archiee,” the chaneque hissed, its forked tongue flicking across the tip of Archie’s nose. “Bit you once, this time the brain—yum yum yum.”
It locked its fat fingers around Archie’s wrists and jerked his hands from its neck, pinning his arms to the floor as easily as he would have a child’s.
“Brain—yum yum yum,” it giggled, and lunged at his face.
John Diamond’s arm shot across Archie’s field of vision, blocking the chaneque’s snap. Instead of tearing Archie’s face from his skull, the chaneque buried its fangs in the crook of Diamond’s elbow, driving his forearm into Archie’s face. A swampy stench choked Archie’s nose and mouth; he fought against the weight pinning him to the floor but couldn’t get free. Cold stinking blood flooded over his face as the chaneque gnawed through Diamond’s elbow joint.
Then, suddenly, it released its grip on Archie’s arms and bounded away, howling through a ragged mouthful of Diamond’s flesh. Archie scrambled backward, coming up short against the bookshelves facing the door. He saw Diamond sitting in the middle of the library floor, shaking his head and saying, “Oh boy,” over and over as he poked at his mangled arm.
The chaneque fell onto its back, flailing its limbs and gagging. “Baaad foood,” it choked, bits of Diamond’s skin hanging from its lips. It shook its head violently, spraying gobbets of flesh across the room. “Didn’t bite him, bit him, bad, where’s the heeeadd… ?”
It rolled over onto its side and vomited up a torrent of black sludge, flecked with red and. white bits of bone and tissue. Trying to stand, it slipped on the puddle of vomit and fell back to the floor, where it gnawed at the rug. “Baaad foood,” it gasped again. Then it fell still, a trickle of thin black fluid leaking from its open mouth.
“Hoped that would work,” Diamond said after a long pause. “Ouch.”
His forearm was attached only by the merest strip of tendon. He stood, holding the nearly severed limb by the wrist, and walked over to Archie. “Lend a hand he
re?” he asked.
“What?” Archie tore his gaze from the dead chaneque. Even smeared with blood and vomit, it looked horribly like a sleeping infant.
“Sorry, Johnny. Ha. Bad joke. Pull it off.” Diamond nodded at his mutilated arm. When Archie didn’t move, he said, “Come on, help us out. It don’t do me no good now.”
Before he could think about what he was doing, Archie grasped Diamond’s right wrist in both hands and jerked his forearm loose with a pop of parting tendons. “Ouch,” Diamond said again, and Archie flung the limb away toward the chaneque‘s corpse.
Diamond inspected the naked end of his humerus, picking away a strip of skin. “Wondered about that,” he said.
“About what?” Archie said shakily.
“Doesn’t bleed.”
Another long silence passed. Finally, when Archie was relatively certain that the chaneque wouldn’t spring up and attack him again, he got to his feet. “I guess I should thank you.”
“Guess so.”
“You poisoned it?”
Diamond shrugged. “Chaneque needs living flesh. I’m not. I was made same way it was, only Steen don’t have the chacmool’s magic.”
“Steen? Riley Steen made you?”
“Drowned me. Bastard. Sorry, Johnny. Didn’t know if that would work,” Diamond said, gesturing toward the dead chaneque and his own severed forearm.
Archie was beginning to regain some composure, enough to realize that John Diamond might have answers to some of the questions that kept him wandering through his quest like a blind man. “Why were you following that—thing, the chaneque?”
“Looking more than following,” Diamond said. “Forming chaneque is damn noisy, if you have ears to hear. I spend lots of time in water, can’t abide land for long. Heard chaneque far off and old Lupita started me on the trail. Only one reason for chaneque, she said, and sorry Johnny, that’s to get Presto. Prescott, ha.
“Chacmool set it on you, and I knew it would come here if it could. Chaneque’s like me, only worse. Can’t much remember what it was and don’t know for sure what it is. So that,” Diamond pointed his truncated arm at the jade carving over the door, “would draw it. Like looking in a mirror.”
“Wait a minute,” Archie said. “Lupita?”
Diamond nodded, a sorrowful expression on his face. “She’s sorry, real sorry for what she did, sorry Johnny. Bad act for good reason, way she saw it. But Steen killed her too. Bastard. Drowned me.”
Archie felt a pressure in his head, as if the Maudie was exploding again all around him. “Lupita did this? The fire, the … Helen?” His mouth worked, but he couldn’t form any more words.
“Bad act for good reason, she thought. Like I said. Little Jade, she was marked before she was born. Calendar was just right. When she got free of Steen, nearly ruined the whole thing, but now—” Diamond shuffled uncomfortably and looked at his bare feet. “You got to get her, Presto, or bad things gonna happen.”
The more the shape of things came clear to Archie, the worse it got. He’d come halfway across the country thinking only that Steen was exacting some incomprehensible revenge on him for mucking up the plan to capture the chacmool. Now, to find out that this plot had been simmering for years … decades even … had killed his wife, disfigured his daughter …
He had an overpowering urge to burn Blennerhassett’s crumbling mansion to the ground, simply destroy the statue, the books, the memory of the plot hatched by Burr and Blennerhassett that had reached across years to destroy Archie’s life.
But wait, Archie thought. The mansion’s already burned. Barnum wouldn’t be wrong about something like that. Where am I? What kind of a place is this? He remembered the Allegheny mountaintop, the arrested arc of the moon and the stink of the bear that for a moment had been Tamanend. I have to get back to the world, Archie thought, find Riley Steen. No doubt he’s been in on this from the beginning.
Archie had let his anger at Steen go in the past two weeks, consumed instead by guilty resolve to rescue Jane and restore what was left of his family; but now he saw that the two goals were the same. He would have to go through Riley Steen to recover his daughter.
And that was just fine. That, in fact, was exactly how he wanted it.
“Look, Diamond,” he said, hunger and damp clothes forgotten, “do you have a boat? How did you get here?”
“Sorry, Johnny, no boat. Swam. Can’t stay long out of the water now, anyway.” Diamond peeled off one of his fingernails and held it up as if in evidence. “Right yonder’s the river, though; plenty of boats there.”
Archie found his knife and sheathed it. “Can you show me?”
“Right yonder,” Diamond said again. He started toward the window.
“The door, could we?” Archie said. “I’m not an acrobat.”
As they left the clearing, Archie looked back. The mansion was gone. Only a rough square of stones, a too-regular depression in the ground, hinted at its location. Half an hour later, he and Diamond reached the south bank of the Ohio. The sun was moving again, dropping toward the hills.
“You might see me again, Presto. Guess I owe old Steen a bad turn or two,” Diamond said, and slipped out of sight in the shadowy river.
I can hear again, Archie realized, and it must be real. Time seems to be going along again. Barnum had said that travelers called Blennerhassett’s wilderness enclave the Enchanted Island, and Archie, thinking of the chaneque and the vanished mansion, laughed quietly. If they had only known.
He breathed a sigh of relief that the river had been clear of traffic when Diamond disappeared. Chacmools, chaneques and Riley Steen were enough for any fugitive’s plate, thank you very much, without worrying about the local sheriff as well. He washed his hands and face, scrubbing the blood of dead man and chaneque with river sand and worrying what sort of signal his contact with the river was sending to the chacmool. After that, there was nothing to do but wait.
Toxcatl, 4-Wind—March 23, 1843
When he awoke to brilliant midday sun and a warm breeze carrying smells of plants awakening for spring, it took Archie several seconds to arrange everything that had happened to him the day before. The race, the explosion, Blennerhassett’s mansion and the thing that had once been the Geek, John Diamond’s sacrificial intervention: all of it seemed like a strange fever dream now that Archie was stretched comfortably out on the deck of Peter Daigle’s overloaded keelboat.
Archie had nearly resigned himself to spending a cold night on the riverbank when a burst of singing had signaled the approach of a boat. He splashed out into waist-deep water, shouting and waving his arms at the boat when it came casually drifting near the island. The family steering the keelboat picked him up without hesitation, offering him dry clothes and leftover stew after hearing his tale of the wreck of the Maudie.
They were the Daigles, of Bangor, Maine, leaving New England’s winters and rocky soil for better prospects in the West. “Oregon, I think.” Peter Daigle said, and his four children immediately set up a clamor about California and the Pacific Ocean.
“No, children, not California,” Daigle said. “Who knows when the Mexicans might claim it again?” Archie had choked a bit on his stew at that point, and then nearly suffered a concussion as Peter pounded him on the back.
“Isn’t,” he wheezed when he could speak again, “isn’t Oregon all British possession?”
“Ah,” Peter said. “A man who reads the newspapers. Marie, our guest can read.”
“Wonderful,” said Marie. “Perhaps he will teach you.” She was a few years younger than Peter, with no gray yet showing in her lustrous chestnut hair. Archie could imagine her as a girl; how many hearts had she broken before settling on Peter Daigle? She was the sort of lively woman that Baptists wrote fiery tracts about.
“Peter won’t let me teach him to read, Mr. Prescott,” Marie said, her French accent thickened by mock indignation. “He says it would be too humiliating to have a woman teach him. So perhaps you can, so I won’t have a
daydreaming illiterate for a husband.”
“My wife exaggerates,” Peter said. “I would have a woman teach me, but I don’t want it to be common knowledge, you see? Some men are not so enlightened as I.” He winked at Archie and leaned forward conspiratorially.
“Right now, Oregon is British, but Americans are settling there. I think the queen would rather be rid of the whole territory than bother with a flood of rabble-rousing Americans, no? Oregon will not be British for long.
“So, children,” he proclaimed, thrusting a hand into his coat a la Napoleon, “Oregon it is. We’ll farm by a river and smile at the rain because it isn’t snow.”
The children immediately switched their attention to Archie, barraging him with questions about the explosion: Was he a pirate? Was there treasure to be had, and should they ask Papa to turn around so they could look for it? Was it loud? Was he hurt? How far had he swum?
“Enough,” Marie said finally. “Let Mr. Prescott tell his story tomorrow if he will, but let him sleep first.”
Archie had accepted this invitation gratefully, stretching out on the deck and asleep almost immediately. Before sleep took him, though, he had a moment to marvel at the Daigle family, laughing and singing after more than a thousand miles of hard travel and with two thousand miles more ahead. I’ve made it back to the real world, he thought as he drifted away. There are no chacmools here.
That thought was still in his mind as he sat up and blinked at the colors of the day. The youngest Daigle daughter appeared in front of him. “Are you hungry? Mama said you would be.”
“Mama was right,” Archie said. He smiled at the little girl, even though he could feel blisters on his back splitting open. Peter was going to regret lending him a shirt.
She offered him a biscuit—Martha, he thought her name was. “Mama’s cooking dinner,” she said.
“Missed breakfast, did I?” Archie took the biscuit, and the girl looked at him oddly, as if she couldn’t decide whether to take him seriously or not.
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