Alexander C. Irvine (16 page)

Archie sat
for
a long time, the smell of smoke strong in his nose, looking at the knife as the warmth ebbed out of it. He bore small shiny scars on the fingers of his right hand, reminders of the night seven years before when his life had collapsed in a shower of sparks. The blade of this knife had burned him then, and now that he’d finally gone mad, it lay cooling in his upturned palms. Madness was no comfort; even the light of day buckled around him. But what else could be expected? Wife and child dead, job and home lost, reduced to sleeping in a groggery cellar and lugging beer casks for a ration of beef stew. And haunted by macabre visions of pagan sacrifice with his dead daughter as the victim.

This knife is hungry, Archie thought. Not for Riley Steen, or for Jane, but for me. What it wants is to carve out my beating heart and leave it for whatever demons have possessed me. Wilson had been right: Archie’s soul had left him. But it hadn’t come back.

The knife’s edge was sharp enough. If it cut out his heart, who would the sacrifice appease? The suicides Archie had seen had all been desperate—lonely drunks or jilted lovers who stepped off bridges or drank carbolic acid. Knives were too immediate, too close, too active; to kill oneself with a knife took more determination than the average suicide possessed. Suicide by knife was a self-sacrifice, an offering to the swollen hungry god of desperation.

A sacrifice, Archie realized, that he was not yet ready to perform. The point of the knife rested in the hollow below his sternum, twitching in rhythm with his heartbeat. Just above it he could feel the mummy’s talisman moving in unison with his breath.

Yollotl, eztli.

The cellar door banged open. “Archie!” Belinda shouted. “Up and about!” The door slammed shut again and floorboards creaked overhead as she moved behind the bar.

The day was beginning without him. If Belinda came downstairs and found him hunched over the knife with his hands full of his own blood, she would shake her head and enlist some other wretch to clean up the mess and take his place. Bennett would hear about it and send someone to write up a paragraph—suicides always sold papers, especially if there was a tragic tale attached— and Archie would be buried under an anonymous cross in the paupers’ ground. Helen’s parents might read about him in the
Herald,
but they wouldn’t come; he hadn’t spoken to them in years. Udo would be there, though, to pray over him and then drain a mug in his memory. And that would be all.

I won’t be someone else’s story, Archie thought. My tale is mine to tell.

And the tale began with the mummy in Barnum’s Museum. Archie thought of Barnum’s face in his dream, his quizzical expression standing out in a sea of ecstatic worshipers. Steen had taken the mummy to Barnum for a reason, he realized, and if Barnum didn’t know what that reason was, Archie was willing to wager that he had ways of finding out.

The clerk at
Barnum’s Museum, a thin balding man wearing a string tie and a tremendous mustache, steadfastly maintained that the showman couldn’t be bothered. “He’s attending to important business,” he said for the fifth time, looking over his spectacles at Archie’s mangled ear. “You must call again at another time.”

“Counting figures, is he?” Frustrated, Archie played his trump card. “Well, tell him he’d better count out a thousand dollars for me. I know who killed his watchman last December.”

The clerk sighed and sent a long-suffering look upward to the stuffed eagle hanging from the ceiling in the museum’s foyer. “You and every other rummy in the Five Points,” he said. “Fine.”

He gave Archie a sheet of paper and indicated the inkwell on his desk. “Write down what you have to say and your address. You can write?”

Archie bit back a reply. He nodded.

“I’ll see that it gets to his attention,” the clerk finished.

Archie took the paper and folded it into his coat pocket. “I was born at night, friend, but it wasn’t last night. I’ve got to see him now.”

The clerk just looked over Archie’s left shoulder.

“All right,” Archie said. “In lieu of a note, why don’t you take
this
and see that it comes to his damned attention?” He reached into his shirtfront and lifted the feathered medallion over his head. Dangling it in front of the clerk, Archie jerked his head in the direction of the stair. “Go on, take it,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

He might as well have shown the clerk a pistol. The man’s hauteur crumbled immediately and he leaped out of his high chair. “Stay where you are,” the clerk said. He took the talisman and held it gingerly at arm’s length. “I’ll summon the police if you attempt to leave.”

Archie had no energy to reply. He stood perfectly still, trying to weather the wave of vertigo that washed through his head as the talisman left his hand. A whine rose in his ears, grew to a deafening roar as he pitched over onto the hardwood floor.
It will subside,
he told himself.
It
has to.

But instead of subsiding, the attack grew worse. Archie’s vision narrowed to a dim pinhole and his hands shook as if palsied. He tried to pull himself up using the clerk’s chair, but a tremendous weight seemed to be pressing on his chest, squeezing out his breath. He fell again, thinking
I can’t live without it.
It connected him somehow; that’s what the dreams meant. Without it he was a babe in the womb, umbilicus wrapped around its neck.

In his desperation, a single thought formed: He had to find the mummy, free himself of it before the madness it drove him to became permanent. Kill it if need be.

“Where did you find this?” The voice rammed into Archie’s ears and sparked thundering echoes in his head.

Archie looked up, tried to focus on the speaker and couldn’t. “Please,” he whispered, reaching out, “please give it back.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I—I took it from the mummy.” Archie began to cry with fear and embarrassment. “Please give it back.”

The talisman dropped into his outstretched hands. Archie clutched it fiercely, trembling as the delirium began to fade and things around him took their shapes again. He hitched a great sob, tried to let it out slowly and regain some control over himself.

“Can you walk?” The man in front of Archie came into focus. Thickly built, well dressed, familiar broad features scowling under a receding crop of unruly dark hair.

“I think so.” Archie’s voice was shaky, but he thought he’d be able to stand.

“Come with me, then,” said Phineas Taylor Barnum, indicating the stairs.

Neither of them spoke as Barnum led Archie up four flights of stairs and into a small sunlit study. A desk and two chairs occupied nearly all of the floor space, and all four walls were lined by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Sitting on one corner of the desk, Barnum gestured for Archie to sit. Archie did, replacing the medallion around his neck.

“Being deprived of that charm seems to have quite a deleterious effect on you, Mr.—?”

“Prescott.”

“Yes. I am Phineas Barnum, although I’m sure you know that. Still, one must observe proprieties. Perhaps you could explain the effect, Mr. Prescott?”

“No, Mr. Barnum, I can’t. It’s just… I need it.”

“Hm.” Barnum considered this for a moment. “Secondary in any event. Of primary importance here is how you came into possession of part of the Aztec Mummy’s regalia, after it disappeared on the same night as the brutal murder of my night man. You realize what you have?”

“I do.” Archie was beginning to breathe more easily, and the shaking in his hands had mostly subsided. Seeing that Barnum took him seriously, he began to relax just a fraction.

“How does your possession of this item relate to the murder of my employee?”

How doesn’t it?
Archie thought. But spinning the entire tale for Barnum would likely get him nowhere, except back on the street no closer either to the chacmool or his sanity.

“I’m a desperate man, Mr. Barnum,” Archie said at last. “I used to have a family, a daughter, but now … the night your watchman was killed I was planning to break into the museum myself.”

Barnum didn’t visibly react, but Archie knew that if the rest of his story wasn’t believed, he’d see nothing but the inside of the Tombs for the rest of his life. “Go on,” the showman said.

“I work—well, did until recently—for the
Herald,
as a typesetter. I’ve harbored ambitions of being a journalist, though, and Mr. Bennett gave me to understand that an expose concerning your museum would help realize that goal.”

“Do tell,” Barnum said, and a broad smile broke across his jowly face. “Pity for both of us it didn’t come off. You’d have had your position and I would have gained notice I never could have bought. Bennett has done that for me before, you know, with dear old Joke Heth.” Barnum cleared his throat. “But back to your tale.”

“Well, when I arrived at the museum I saw a group of Dead Rabbits being ordered around by a man named Riley Steen.”

“Steen? You’re certain?”

“I am.”

Barnum lapsed into thought, and Archie began to feel that he might yet escape this encounter a free man.

“Hm,” Barnum grunted at last, rousing himself. “Conduct business with scoundrels, reap the rewards.”

Scoundrel doesn’t even begin to do Steen justice,
Archie thought. But something else was tickling his brain, a connection begging to be made. “What business?” he asked.

“Oh, I’ve dealt with Steen from time to time these past few years, but his ‘discoveries’ inevitably turn out to be frauds. That mummy you took your token from was my latest and last purchase from Mr. Steen. I bought it last fall in Philadelphia. He’d brought it from Kentucky expressly to sell it to me, he said, but now I believe he meant the transaction merely as a short-term lease. Steen was at the museum to steal the mummy when you saw him?”

Archie nodded, although
steal
didn’t seem quite the right word. Kidnap, perhaps, or capture.

“And how did you come into contact with it?” Archie paused. If Barnum disbelieved him for any reason, he was in the deepest of deep trouble. Mentioning Steen’s name appeared to have divided Barnum’s attention, and bought Archie a little credibility, but Archie had no illusions about his own innocence in the showman’s eyes.
All I have is the story,
he thought.
And all I can do is tell it.

“The Rabbits caught me in your main gallery,” he said, speaking slowly to keep his voice steady. “They’d posted lookouts, and were using some kind of cornstalk rope that they thought would keep the … mummy … from escaping. They thought it was going to come back to life, apparently. When Steen saw me, he made it clear that I wouldn’t be leaving, but I got free of the Rabbit holding me and the only place I could go was into the museum.” Archie continued the story, skipping over Royce’s odd threats and his earlier encounter with the Rabbits on Water Celebration Day. “The watchman accosted me in the corner near the chacmool’s case—”

“Where did you learn that word?”
Barnum barked, levering himself off the desk to stand over Archie.

Flustered, Archie lost his train of thought. “I—in a dream, I think.”

“A dream?” Barnum looked out the study’s single window and studied the sky for a moment. When he turned back to Archie, his face had settled somewhat. “Look here, Mr. Prescott. When you came in here I was presuming you to be a small-time hoodlum, reporter aspirations or no. But if you continue to bandy about words such as
chacmool,
I will think you something else entirely. There aren’t twenty white men on this earth who know that name, and you’ve got a bit of a task explaining to me how you could have innocently come across it.”

“It was a dream, I swear it,” Archie insisted. With an effort he remained seated, thinking
Mad or not, I don’t want to end my days in the Tombs.

“More than one dream, they happen all the time,” he began to babble, all of his fear and angry frustration channeled into a confessional flood. “Mr. Barnum, that thing leaped out of its case like a damned lion and tried to tear out my heart!”

Archie’s voice cracked on the last word, and he swallowed before going on. “I did kill your guard, you know; he tried to save my life and the chacmool tore him to pieces because he distracted it. If I hadn’t been there, it would have been out the window before the Rabbits or Steen or anyone else knew what was happening, and your watchman would be alive, and I wouldn’t have these horrible … these …”

Archie ripped open his shirt. “Here!” he shouted, standing and baring his chest for Barnum. “Look at this and tell me what I have to fear from jail.”

Barnum’s eyes widened at the sight of the four thin white lines hooking from Archie’s left collarbone across his chest. They ended in thick apostrophes of scar tissue just below his sternum, at the very point where Archie had held his knife that morning.

“It did this to me, and then it was through the window and gone, but it’s still in my head. I dream its dreams, Mister Barnum, because I can’t find my own any more. Or maybe they are my own.
I don’t know any more.”
Archie grabbed the talisman hanging around his neck. “It all comes from this. The chacmool, it’s marked me somehow, left me this token as some kind of window into its mind, and
I
can’t let it go.”

His anger spent, Archie’s chest began to hitch with racking exhausted sobs. Barnum began to speak, but Archie cut him off, determined to finish whether the showman wanted to hear him or not. “I see—horrible things,” he said pleadingly. “I think I’m going mad, and I can’t let it go.”

He dropped the talisman and wiped tears from his eyes. “You’ve got to help me, Mr. Barrium. Y0u know something about this. You know what it is.

“Please. Tell me how I can get free.”