Alexander C. Irvine (11 page)

Royce leaned a forearm on Archie’s neck. “Hold still for the doctor, now.”

The Geek grabbed a fistful of Archie’s hair and twisted his head to the right. He clamped his other hand over Archie’s mouth and bent closer, moaning like a hungry animal. The moan opened into a throaty growl as he darted forward and bit into Archie’s crushed ear. Royce pressed down, choking Archie’s scream as the Geek chewed through the cartilage, making noises in his throat like a pig at his trough.

Archie felt his eardrum fill up with blood and saliva; then the Geek whipped his head back and forth three times like a terrier killing rats. After the third jerk, Archie realized that his ear had come free. Like having a tooth extracted, he thought strangely; I should be drunk.

The Geek shook his head back and forth over Archie’s face, scattering droplets of blood and growling deep in his throat. Then he screamed and reeled away as Archie’s ear exploded into flame—

and it flinched away from the dream of the light, wishing for rain to cool the pain in its head, desperate and weak, praying only for the fire to die down so it could rest and heal and grow.

The
bells
of
Trinity Church rang Christmas good cheer, echoing off Broadway storefronts and lending a bouncy air of purpose to Jane Prescott’s step. She hummed along with the melody as she wove her way through carriages and vendor carts on her way to St. Paul’s.

Joyful all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies …

The last two weeks, Trinity had been ringing that tune three or four times a day; Jane didn’t know all the words, but she knew the tune as well as if she’d written the song herself. She’d been dreaming bells.

The past fortnight had also seen the spirit of charity reappear among New York’s gentry. Where a quarter-dollar or even a handful of pennies made up a good day’s take the rest of the year, she’d cadged as much as a dollar four times in the last ten days alone. Her stomach was full, and the roll of silver coin tightly wrapped around her right ankle meant she wouldn’t be hungry again for quite a while. Yuletide was a time of pity for fatherless young girls with scarred faces.

“Merry Christmas, sir and madam!” she cried brightly, swinging up onto the running board of a stopped carriage. Keeping a weather eye out for the coachman’s whip, she pressed her face to the passenger window. “Rejoice at our Savior’s birth! ‘Tis the season, is it not? The season of fellowship and charity?”

The carriage door swung open and a gloved hand appeared, tossing coins onto Broadway’s grimed cobblestones. “Merry Christmas, guttersnipe.” The voice was lofty and English. “Merry Christmas, and be on your way.”

“Bless you, sir!” Jane cried, leaping off the running board and gathering the coins. “Merry Christmas and a joyous New Year!” Clenching the silver, she ran around the back of the carriage and continued up Broadway in the direction of Barnum’s museum. Six pennies and a dime; she had nearly six dollars, and it was time to go home and hide it.

“Jane!” She looked around and saw her friend Mitten calling her, his narrow face drawn and tense beneath an enormous fur hat. He beckoned her into the alley next to Segar’s Exchange.

She stopped reluctantly, feeling the coins in her palm. There was more to be had and she was impatient to have it, but Mitten looked frightened. “What is it?” she said.

Instead of answering, Mitten grabbed her hand and pulled her down the alley, stopping only when they were out of sight of the street. “Little Bree’s been murdered,” he said breathlessly.

“Murdered? Who says?” Street arabs often disappeared, for any number of reasons, but everyone always assumed that they’d been killed in some devilish fashion. All too often, it was true. Or so she’d heard.

Little Bree had been Jane’s first friend in New York; he’d shared his corner of a basement with her when she’d first fled Riley Steen’s traveling carnival in Richmond the year before. The trip to New York had left her starving and feverish, and Little Bree had looked after her until she’d been strong enough to go begging on her own.

If he was dead—Jane calmed herself and repeated her question. “Who says, Mitten?”

“Everybody says. There’s a whole lot of children murdered, they say, down under the docks above Battery Place. There’ll be an extra coming out—I’m going to the
Herald.
You should come, too.”

Jane thought about it. An extra would mean more silver, especially covering a murder. But if Little Bree was really dead …

“No,” she said. “I’ve got to go see.”

“The papers’ll be gone! We have to go to the
Herald.”

“You go.” Jane pulled away from Mitten’s grasp. “I have to see.” Crying now, she ran back out onto Broadway and turned south toward Battery Place.

A
crowd had
gathered, their Christmas finery bringing bright splashes of color to the gritty dockside. Stacked crates and piles of rope and sail canvas provided the more enterprising onlookers with lookouts, while the rest of the crowd pressed closely against a roped-off area guarded by police, recognizable by the brass or copper stars pinned to their lapels. Jane worked her way toward the ropes, making herself small, practicing the art of invisibility she’d learned in her year of living on New York’s streets. She edged her way between two brawny longshoremen and came up short against a policeman, who immediately caught hold of her collar. “Not so fast, missy,” he said.

“I have to see,” she pleaded, putting on her best Scared Little Sister face and letting the tears she’d tried to hide from Mitten flow freely. “Please, I have to see if my brother is there. Mum is so afraid, she can’t bear to come.”

“So she sent you?” The policeman shook his head. “Not too likely, I don’t think. Go on, now. Nothing here a young girl needs to see.” He turned her around and gave her a gentle push back into the crowd. “Get along. I don’t want to run you into the workhouse.”

The threat was enough to make Jane abandon Scared Little Sister and put some distance between her and the policeman. She’d been in the workhouse once already, and had escaped after the longest month of her life. Going back there would be worse even than being caught again by Riley Steen.

Moving quickly, invisible again, she skirted the crowd and hopped nimbly into the empty bed of a fish cart. From there she could see that the ropes blocked off one of the docks. Crowds were gathered on the adjacent docks, people pointing occasionally and shaking their heads much as the policeman had. So there was something to see, but how to see it? Jane looked around, kicking the cart in frustration.

There: the docks each had ladders at their sides going down to the water. Jane jumped out of the cart and hurried to the base of the dock that extended White Hart Street. Just to the east, between White Hart and Broad Streets, a cluster of police sat in a small boat, lashed to the pilings of the roped-off dock. She climbed down the slippery ladder and spider-crawled across the struts supporting the White Hart dock on its pilings, a tang in her nostrils that seemed to be more than just rotten seaweed from the brackish water lapping at her feet.

Peering from underneath the dock, Jane saw the policemen in the boat, aided by dockworkers with a block and tackle, raise a long, wide canoe from the waters. One of the ropes caught and the canoe tilted toward her, spilling dirty water and exposing the pale bodies of naked children, packed side to side with bent knees and hands clasped over the ragged wounds in their breasts.

“Oh, Daddy,” Jane whispered. “Poor Little Bree.” She could see him near the back of the skiff, a trickle of water running from his open mouth. The canoe shifted again, and his dark purple heart fell from his dead hands to splash in the river.

And she could see Deirdre, and Paulo, before the canoe swung back level and was hoisted onto the deck. A wave of gasps and shocked cries swept through the crowd, and the police began shoving people farther away from the horror that sat dripping on the weatherbeaten dock.

Little Bree, and Deirdre and Paulo and all the rest, had lain dead in the same water that slapped at the pilings just below Jane’s feet. Their hearts are still there, she thought. Their hearts are still in the water, beating in time to the dirty waves. Her own heart seemed to stop for a very long time, building a sickening ache in her throat; when it finally beat again, its hammering shook her grip on the slick timbers. She scrambled up underneath the dock and pressed herself into a corner amid spiderwebs, afraid to stay near the water but more terrified still that if she moved she would slip and fall in, to drown in the dark water among the ghosts of dead children.

Steph
en stood on
the slanting porch of his small cabin, listening to the laughter of the other slaves gathered inside for Christmas supper. It wasn’t in him to smile today, and he had come outside to sit and have a pipe and figure out why; but he was neither sitting nor smoking. Instead he was looking to his left at the broad path that sloped down from the hotel’s sun porch, crossing the packed earth of the stagecoach turnaround and winding amid debris from the saltpeter mining—old poplar trunks used as piping, mounds of leached earth and sprouting weeds, a broken wheelbarrow—and ending out of his sight, at the rim of the gaping pit that enclosed the cave entrance. Under Stephen’s feet lay Houchins Narrows, the stoop that marked the end of the entrance and the beginning of the real cave. After that came the vast Rotunda, which split into the Main Cave and Audobon Avenue. And after that … he rubbed his face, trying to get the sand out of his eyes and his head. Sleep had been difficult these last few days, and all of his dreams were of the cave, in particular of the odd square chamber behind Bottomless Pit and the voice he’d heard here. This voice spoke to him, drowning out the other voices in the cave, swelling into a thunder that left him headachy and irritable when he woke. It came not from the mummy, but from the stone face looming over the altar, the face with its ringed eyes and fanged mouth. Its lips did not move, but the voice was clear, and Stephen feared that he was going insane.

When I return, Stephen,
a new world will be born. A new
world, and in it you will have all that is forbidden you now. Not a slave, but a man, Stephen.

Would you be a man?

“I am,” he said softly, seeing his breath in the afternoon sun and knowing he lied. He was privileged, certainly; perhaps indispensable, even, to Dr. Croghan and his grand plans for “The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky.” Stephen’s lip curled as he thought of all of the gaudy names Croghan insisted he attach to rooms and rocks in the cave, names like River Styx and Audobon Avenue that bent the cave out of shape, making it a toy for Croghan’s self-regard and the wealthy visitors who made Stephen so useful. And Stephen used the names, too, but he knew them for what they were: words that had no real bearing on the places they were supposed to define. This knowledge had come by way of the voice, the silent statue speaking the word
Chicomoztoc
and the syllables reverberating through Stephen’s mind. The cave’s true name.

Freedom, it promised him, but something was missing. Stephen was canny enough to realize when he was being treated as a resource—which was, in his experience, always—and he instinctively questioned the voice’s promises. What was this new world and how would it be different from the one he lived in now?

You will be a man.
The simple assertion, confident and infuriating.

I
am already.

Stephen’s reverie was interrupted by Nick Bransford’s arrival on the porch. “Lord help me if Charlotte can’t cook,” Nick said, patting his lean stomach. He sat on the step, stretching his long legs out onto the ground and contentedly picking his teeth.

“What’s on your mind, Stephen?” Nick asked after a silence punctuated by a burst of laughter from the cabin. “It’s Christmas, ain’t it?”

Stephen didn’t answer immediately. When he did, the sound of his voice surprised him; he sounded old. “Sure, Nick, it’s Christmas. I’m just not sure what I’m celebrating.”

“Charlotte’s cooking, for starters.” Nick laughed and tossed his toothpick into the grass. Frost was beginning to form in the lengthening afternoon shadows, and those shadows grew in Nick’s face as his smile faded. “Your problem is too many ideas. You got to get all them big schemes out of your head. Christmas is just a day when we don’t have to work and we can sing around a fire without the white folks bothering us. Don’t have to be no more than that.”

“Maybe not.”

Stephen packed his pipe, feeling the texture of the clay and tobacco, smelling the richness of the weed’s smell against the sharp clarity of winter air. He struck a match on the sole of his shoe and sat next to Nick, trying to rid himself of the strange distance he’d been feeling since the dreams began; it wouldn’t hurt just to sing around a fire and enjoy a full belly.

But the big ideas wouldn’t go away.

“Ever hear of Monrovia, Nick?”

“Town in Illinois, ain’t it?”

“No, a place in Africa. Set up by free Negroes who wanted to go back. Feel like I want to go there sometimes, take the boat the other way, see my mother’s country. Be free. Be a man.” The smoke tasted good on Stephen’s tongue. He started to relax the slightest bit.

“Got to get that idea out of your head too.” Nick looked troubled, shadows marking creases in his forehead and chin. “Dr. Croghan ain’t gonna let you go to Africa. If you left, who’d show off for fancy English doctors? Problem with you, boy, is you learned how to read and got full of ideas that don’t have nothing to do with you. We ever get whipped? We ever go without? No. The woods is full of deer, there’s fish in the river, and people come from all around the world just to go into the cave with you. Think you’ll have it that good in Monrovia?” Nick let the question hang in the air for a while before he went on. “You got to live where you are, not go moonin’ around about Africa. Besides, your daddy was a Indian, so you’re in his country. Best leave that other alone.”

“My daddy wasn’t an Indian,” Stephen said. “That’s just another story for British doctors.” His pipe had gone out; he struck another match and gazed into the flame. “My father is a white man,” he said, the quiet words ruffling the flame, “and I know who he is. You know him too,” Stephen finished, and relit his pipe.

“Hold on.” Nick looked away and stood, his hands fluttering like bat’s wings, as if to brush away Stephen’s words. “I don’t know nothing and I don’t want to. Your daddy could be Andrew Jackson and it wouldn’t make no difference—you’d still be a nigger in Kentucky with a pretty wife inside cutting mince pie. You know what’s good for you, you’ll go on in and have some of that pie and forget all about Africa and your white daddy. I know that’s what I’m going to do.”

Stephen smoked the rest of his pipe after Nick went inside, wondering if perhaps the Bransford boy was right.
Boy,
he thought.
When did an eighteen-year-old get to be a boy to you? That’s a white man’s thought.
Stephen shook his head and tapped out his pipe; his twenty-second birthday was months away yet, but in the last week he’d felt a hundred.

I am a man,
he thought, hearing the voice again. It whispered in the leaves of the tulip poplars lining the cave trail.
I am.