Alexander C. Irvine (20 page)

Maskansisil fell silent, and the bear wandered a short distance away, snuffling in the snow after strips of jerked venison. Archie shivered, bewildered and feeling lonelier than he’d ever been in his life. Had he really just spoken to the Lenape chief Tamanend, the same man who signed a treaty with William Penn and who gave his name to the society that threatened to destroy what he had worked centuries to maintain? It was impossible, surely; but so were talking bears and walking mummies who rejuvenated dead wood and stole daughters for arcane sacrificial ceremonies.

Daughters. He’d spent seven years mourning a daughter who hadn’t died, and had denied her when she came to him because self-pity had been too seductive an excuse for self-ruin. Archie thought of the hundred times Jane had begged him for a simple word, for the merest gesture of acknowledgment, thought of the dawning wonder in her face when he’d absently called her by name in front of the
Herald
building a few weeks ago. She’d asked so little, and he had denied her. He had turned away and left her, feeling only pity as her curses and entreaties fell on him like rain on desert sand. He had been a father these last seven years, and had spent them mourning for himself while his daughter had gone freezing in the streets.

Now she was in the hands of madmen ready to spill her blood in the name of a dead Mexican god. The truth of the stories didn’t matter; the bear might be a hallucination brought on by fatigue and a blow to the head, and Riley Steen might simply be a lunatic, but none of that mattered. The only important thing left was that he was a father and his daughter was going to die.

“What do I do?” Archie said.

The bear raised its head.
You found the chacmool once when you did not know you sought it,
Tamanend said.
Its token around your neck will guide you to it now. You may yet die, Archie Prescott; or you may live only to see the chacmool swallow your beating heart. But you will find help on your journey as well, if you recognize it.

I ivill tell you three things that may assist you.

Travel by water when you can. The chacmool’s spirit is in the water, and your token will better guide you if there is water beneath your feet. But stay dry, lest it see you as well as you sense it.

Seek the Mask-bearer and follow in his footsteps. But beware of him as well, for he is torn. You must offer him peace.

Lastly, remember that He Who Makes Things Grow has an enemy, an opposite principle. This enemy is your ally, and you must use his power when the time comes. But again you must be wary. Gods are greedy, and even your ally may seek to turn you to his use.

The bear walked to Archie and stood, placing its paws on his shoulders as it had Maskansisil’s.
In twenty-one days,
Tamanend said,
the ceremony will take place. But for five days before that the chacmool will not willingly act, for his people call those days
nemontemi
and consider them unlucky.

I can tell you no more. Too much remains uncertain. Events draw into focus around you, Archie Prescott, and I wish you good fortune. Remember what I have said.

A change came over the bear’s face, the intent expression in its eyes giving way to sleepy animal confusion. It dropped to all fours and swung its head back and forth, grunting and sniffing as it had when it had first wandered out of the brush.

Maskansisil approached it and laid a hand on its massive head. “Back to sleep, old friend,” he said affectionately. “We have bothered you enough.” The bear shook, its sharp stink making Archie’s eyes water even in the cold. Then it turned away from them and pushed its way back into the thicket. Blinking through his tears, Archie saw that the moon had begun moving again, and streaks of cloud were beginning to blot out the stars.

Time has found me again, he thought. Twenty-one days. Twenty-one days until the end of the world.

Maskansisil mounted his horse, pointedly not looking in the direction the bear had taken. “Have to move,” he said. “Much riding yet to do, and the sun will be up soon.”

The
cart C
ha
rlie
had stolen no longer seemed like such a godsend to Royce as it rattled along the deer-track mountain road, jolting his lean behind. Not much padding down there; if the road kept up the way it was, he’d have to sit on the girl to save his ass. And the road—if it could be called that—showed no signs of improving. It was a single track of mud and bare rock, snaking down hills and valleys with trees leaning over it like a deer’s fart might bring one down. One damned fallen tree, and they’d be walking to Pittsburgh.

They’d been driving all night, and now the sun was up, but the terrain still looked the same to Royce. Lumpy hills rolled away in all directions, the forest broken only by a farmhouse here and there. Damn this wilderness, Royce thought. Without street names and buildings to recognize, how did a man figure out where he was? And despite the bright sunshine, it was cold, maybe not quite so cold as New York but definitely uncomfortable. How far was it to Pittsburgh? There they could get on a boat, get out of the damned weather.

“Charlie,” he said over the racket of the wagon’s creaking joints. Charlie was older than Royce and had traveled. “You’ve been to Pittsburgh, right?”

“Twice.” Charlie didn’t look back from his seat. Probably like sitting on a feather pillow up there, Royce thought. He’d have taken the seat himself, but he didn’t trust Charlie to watch the girl. She was bound hand and foot, and buried under a pile of straw to boot, but Royce still worried that she might escape. After all, she’d gotten away from Steen, and that was before she’d learned God knew what sort of tricks living on the streets. Steen had underestimated her, and with all the strange things that had been happening, Royce didn’t plan to make the same mistake. It wouldn’t pay to be careless.

The girl wriggled under the straw and Royce kicked her, just to remind her that he was there. “Quiet, you,” he snapped. “You won’t suffocate.”

At least he hoped she wouldn’t. She could breathe around the gag, he’d made sure of that, and in any case her nose was clear. But the straw dust in the wagon bed bothered him, and he didn’t have his face in it. Well, she was still kicking. Best to leave her be. If she was quiet for too long, though, he’d have to dig her out and make sure she was all right. Now that the chacmool knew they had her, they couldn’t very well deliver her dead.

He remembered the question he’d been meaning to ask Charlie. “Can you get a boat in Pittsburgh that goes to Louisville?”

Charlie snorted. “Ohio River starts there. Pittsburgh’s got more boats than people.”

Ohio. That was somewhere near Louisville, wasn’t it? Royce had never spent a day in school, either before or after leaving Ireland, and he was lost outside New York. Once he’d been to Boston, but he doubted he could find it on a map. Which way did the Ohio River run?

“Christ,” he muttered, not wanting to ask Charlie any more questions.

Ah, well. Devil take it. He didn’t need to know geography to take care of his business, and that he would do.

Another hour or
so 0f bone -jarring ruts in the road, and Royce was ready to rest his bruised fundament on anything that didn’t buck like a wild horse. He caught himself seriously returning to the idea of sitting on the girl to pad his ass and decided it was time to get out of the wagon for a bit. Stretch his legs. The sun was almost directly overhead, or as close as it got this time of year; a nip and a nap would be just the thing.

The road had dropped out of the hills to wind along the floor of a broad valley. Royce caught the sparkle of water through the trees and called out. “Whoa, Charlie! Dinner break!”

As soon as he said it he realized that they had no dinner. The chacmool had sent them running like passenger pigeons.

What are we supposed to do until Pittsburgh? he thought. Eat the goddamned grass?

But Charlie must have known something Royce didn’t. After halting the horses, he vaulted over Royce’s head into the bed of the cart. He landed near the girl, in the back left corner, and started digging through the straw. For a long, sick moment Royce just gaped at him thinking
Christ, he means to take a bite out of the girl—
and how would he explain
that
to Steen? Or never mind Steen, what would the damned
chacmool
do?

He’d already stood and flicked out his sleeve knife, ready to lance Charlie rather than deliver the girl covered in tooth marks, but at that moment Charlie said, “Aha!” and stood himself. He held up a fat brown chicken in his stubby hands, picking bits of straw from the bloody stump of its neck.

Seeing Royce with the knife, he grinned happily. “Way ahead, ain’t you?” he said.

You don’t even know, Royce thought. “Where in hell did you get a bird?”

“Old Farmer John who give us this wagon, he didn’t have a dog. Farmer should always have a dog, or his chickens learn to fly.” Charlie held the carcass out to Royce. “Gut her and let’s eat.”

Royce shook his head and tucked the knife back into his cuff. “This blade doesn’t touch birds,” he said.

“Well, why’d you get it out then?” Charlie’s bushy eyebrows bunched together. “You weren’t gonna stick the girl?”

“Only in the leg, if she tried to run,” Royce said smoothly, before Charlie’s suspicions could refocus. “Just to slow her down.”

“But she’s tied up.”

“Yeah, well, we’re gonna have to untie her so she can piss, aren’t we?”

The look on Charlie’s face was starting to annoy Royce mightily. He took a deep breath and held up a hand. “No, you’re right, bad idea. We’ll leave her tied. One of us’ll have to hold her up so she can make her water.”

“Christ, be careful,” Charlie said, still eyeing the cuff where Royce had stashed his knife. “Steen’d have our balls.”

With that, he climbed out of the cart and walked off a short distance to where the stream Royce had spotted pooled under a short waterfall. He squatted at the edge of the pool, drew his own knife and swiftly gutted the chicken.

A queasy shiver ran through Royce’s own bowels as Charlie tossed a handful of chicken guts into the pool. His head started to swim, and his eyes were having trouble focusing—it was as if he was looking through the sunlight but not seeing what was on the other side. Smelling rain, Royce looked up into a cloudless sky where stars shone alongside the murky sun, and the drumming of rain filled his ears.

Ants were crawling in perfect military single file around the rims of the wagon’s wheels, and drops of sap began to squeeze out from the wagon’s panels.

Sweet Jesus,
Royce thought, remembering the night in Barnum’s museum. He turned back to Charlie, meaning to ask him if he could smell the rain as well.

The chacmool exploded from the water amid a froth of bubbles and ropy entrails. It seized Charlie by both wrists and twisted sharply. Charlie dropped the knife and the gutted bird and his mouth dropped open, but whatever sound he might have made was drowned out by the sound of rain.

Digging in his heels, Charlie tried to pull away, but he’d been leaning forward and the chacmool dragged him easily into the pool. He looked oddly like an overgrown infant, flailing in the chacmool’s grasp, squalling and wriggling like a muddy babe on the way to his bath.

At its deepest, the pool reached only to the chacmool’s shoulders, but Charlie couldn’t swim. When the chacmool let him go in the churning water at the base of the waterfall, he sank like a stone. It shrugged off its cloak and laid it flat over the water where Charlie had gone under, and it seemed to Royce that the cloak’s feathers were standing straight up and waving as if in a strong wind.

The cloak heaved as Charlie thrashed his way up from the bottom. Like a mother swaddling an infant, the chacmool caught him and wrapped the cloak tightly around him, cocooning him in shiny green feathers. Charlie struggled against the cloak and the strength of the chacmool’s grasp, and Royce wondered how the cloak held together; Charlie had once throttled a horse with his bare hands.

But the chacmool held him fast, and Charlie’s jerky wriggling became blurred as it carried him under the waterfall. Royce could see it outlined there in the torrent of falling water, standing erect with its ghastly bundle, even rocking it gently back and forth. He imagined he could hear a lullaby over the sound of rain and distant thunder.

A
little while
later—Royce wasn’t sure how long—Charlie’s cocooned body drifted out into the pool, looking like a huge obscene waterbug with long green feathers splayed out into the water like waving legs. It turned over once in the quiet eddies, then sank.

The chacmool came out from under the waterfall and climbed up onto the bank, its homespun shirt and trousers clinging to its bony frame. Water ran from it in streams, puddling about its bare feet. Without the cloak, it looked just like Bobo Nigger again, like it had behind the engine house the night before.

Royce sat slumped in the mud at the side of the road, his arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees. He tried not to shiver, tried to get a handle on what had just happened and what it meant, but he was plain scared and feeling much more like a boy than a man. The situation had spun completely out of his control. Charlie was dead, God knew why, and Royce felt that he would be very lucky himself to live out the day. All because of Riley Steen.

Obviously Steen had no control over the chacmool, and that meant a switch of allegiance was in order. If the chacmool didn’t kill him in the next few minutes, Royce might be able to make himself useful to it in some way, until it had what it wanted and he could forget he’d ever been to Pennsylvania.

The chacmool walked over to Royce and gazed down on him with its yellow cat’s eyes. “It is because of you that I have to do this,” it said.

“Me?” Royce said. “Do what?”

The chacmool waved at the pool. “This making. This
chaneque,”
it said. “Because you did not kill Prescott. Uncover the girl.”

Royce smarted a bit at its tone. Magic or no, it rankled him to be talked down to by a nigger. But he swallowed his pride for the moment and leaned into the wagon bed to brush straw away from the girl.

His eyes widened and he swallowed hard when he saw her. She was alive all right, but her face was covered with scabs, as if someone had spent hours carefully peeling away pieces of her skin. Royce looked fearfully at the chacmool, starting to protest that he hadn’t done it, she hadn’t looked anything like that when he put her in the wagon, but he shut his mouth again when he saw that it was smiling.

Seeing it, the girl started to struggle again, and Royce shuddered, imagining the chacmool smiling down at Charlie the way it now regarded her.

“See, she’s all right,” he said resentfully.

The chacmool ignored him.
“Nanahuatzin, yolteotl,”
it said— purred, really. “Your time is coming, small one. You can feel it? Your father does, too. His time comes as well.”

It turned its attention to Royce. “Her father, Prescott. You must forget him now. The
chaneque
will find him soon enough. Take Nanahuatzin to Wide Hat, to Steen, and I will meet you. That is your only task now.”

“Why don’t you just take her now?” Royce asked. “God knows I don’t want her.”

“Too many eyes would be drawn to us if we traveled together. Too many delays, explanations. She goes with you. Make up whatever lie you need, but do not let her out of your sight.”

The chacmool looked Royce steadily in the eye. Its slitted pupils narrowed to black lines in its golden irises. “Much more than your life depends on this.”

“Right, okay.” Royce swallowed again; his throat was dry and his voice sounded like an old man’s. “Can we at least take a boat when we get to Pittsburgh?”

“Go quickly. That is all that matters.”

Splashing from the pool distracted the chacmool. It turned away from Royce, and he looked over its shoulder. What he saw made him cross himself for the first time since he’d left Galway as a boy of nine. “Mary, mother of Jesus, protect us,” he whispered.

The thing crawling out of the icy water was recognizably Charlie. Royce could still see the old Geek in its face, and it was about the same size. But it was Charlie as he might have looked had he come from his mother’s womb fully grown, his head huge and bald, his smooth cheeks pouchy around a puckered infant’s mouth. It stood naked and completely hairless on the bank, holding the chacmool’s cloak in one hand like a babe with its favorite blanket. Its slitted eyes focused on the gutted chicken and it dropped the blanket, scuttling over to the bird carcass and scooping it up in fat greedy fists. Royce saw that its mouth was open, exposing hooked fangs like a snake’s, and its chin slick with spittle. It turned the bird over in its hands, pulling at the wings and feet and finally grasping it by the stump of its neck. Staring at the headless chicken, the
chaneque’s
lower lip actually began to tremble.

“Where’s the head?”
it shrieked, and Royce was chilled to his very soul because it still spoke in Charlie’s voice.

In a gruesome parody of a baby’s tantrum, the
chaneque
shook the bird at the chacmool and stamped its blocky feet.
“No brains! No brains!”
it howled, and the feathers of the chacmool’s cloak rippled at the sound of its voice.
“Where’s the heeeeaaaaadd?”