Steen’s head jerked up, puppyish eagerness lighting up the ruin of his face. “Splendid!” he shouted. “Come with me.”
“Excuse me, Stephen. What are you doing?”
Stephen dropped the blanket he’d just taken from the shelf in the hotel laundry. He turned around to see Dr. Croghan in the doorway, in pajamas, robe, and a stern expression made grimmer by the gloomy candle in his hand.
“Chill in the air tonight, Dr. Croghan,” he said. “Charlotte’s got a little cough and I wanted to make sure it didn’t get worse.” Of all the people who might have noticed his midnight trip to the hotel storerooms, Stephen had thought Dr. Croghan would be the last. He was usually asleep before nine o’clock; what was he doing out in his bedclothes at this hour?
“My sympathies,” Croghan said. “I’ll look in on her in the morning.”
“No,” Stephen said quickly. “She just needs to stay warm. She’ll be fine.”
“Are you now a medical man, Stephen?” Croghan let the question hang in the air for just a moment. “I thought not. The last thing I need is fever spreading around just as the weather begins to warm. The next few weeks will be extremely busy.”
Stephen saw that he would have to concede the point. He wondered how Charlotte would react when he asked her to play sick for Dr. Croghan. Her good humor was part of why he’d married her, but she’d want to know what he had been doing in the laundry, and he’d have to tell her some other story. He hadn’t lied to her during the course of their young marriage, and he didn’t much relish having to start.
But, he reminded himself, bigger things were at stake.
“Yes, sir,” Stephen said. “Visitors’ll start lining up soon. I’d just as soon not have to worry about her while I’m in the cave.”
“Good. I’ll be by in the morning.” Croghan stepped into the laundry and set his candle on a shelf above an ironing board. “Empty your pockets now and then you can go.”
Stephen had already taken a step toward the door before all of the doctor’s words registered. “My pockets?” he said dumbly.
“If you would,” Croghan said, his tone of voice leaving no doubt that the phrase was just a formality. He pushed aside a pile of sheets and tapped the cleared space on the ironing board. “Here. Someone’s been stealing small items from the hotel. I didn’t think you were the type, but then here you are skulking in the middle of the night. Blood is thicker than water, I suppose.”
Fury struck Stephen so heavily that he nearly choked on his own heartbeat. A vivid fantasy streaked through his mind— Croghan strangled on the laundry floor, he and Charlotte running for their lives. But where would they run? The cave had made Stephen slightly notorious. And Croghan’s life was not worth having to leave it.
Silently he emptied his pockets, placing each item carefully on the smooth cotton draping the ironing board. Pipe, tobacco pouch, pocketknife, matches, candle, a handful of coins.
Croghan poked among Stephen’s possessions, lingering over the gold piece Stephen still carried from his trip with old Professor Tattersfield. “Fine,” he said eventually. “Go ahead with the blanket, Stephen. I’ll look in on Charlotte tomorrow.”
He paused in the doorway to give Stephen a wink. “Give her my best, will you?” he said, and left Stephen alone in the laundry.
Stephen replaced his pipe and pocketknife and other things in his pockets, smoldering with a rage that was all the more focused because of its impotence. He picked up the blanket and rolled it under his arm, then stood for a long time turning the gold piece over in his fingers. He wanted to throw it away, fling it into the river just because Croghan’s attention had fallen on it. But it reminded Stephen of other things as well: in his mind he saw it glinting on the floor of Bottomless Pit, and he thought again of promises made to him.
Come Monday morning, Dr. Croghan, he thought as he slipped the coin into his pocket, you’ll see just how thick blood really is.
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 n
ot 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
Third Nemontemi, 12-Dog—March 31, 1843
When Archie spotted 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 an
d 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 plain 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.
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