Alexander C. Irvine (24 page)

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 here?” 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.”

A
s
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.

W
hen 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.

“Two breakfasts,” she finally said.

“Two?” Archie said, sputtering biscuit crumbs. But she hadn’t heard him; she was already picking her way among the Daigle family’s piled belongings toward the stern. “Papa!” she called. “Mr. Archie’s waked up!”

Peter poked his head out from under the canvas stretched across the boat’s middle portion. “So he has. Good morning, Mr. Prescott. Afternoon, I should say.”

Archie stood up and stretched, grunting at the sting of cloth peeling away from blisters. “Anyone who saves my life gets to call me Archie,” he said.

“I am Peter, then,” Peter said.

“Great. Ah, your daughter—Martha?”

Daigle nodded.

“Martha said … Peter, how long was I asleep?”

“Ah. Hm,” Peter said. “It’s past noon now, so,” he counted briefly on his fingers, “forty hours or so.”

“Forty hours?” Nearly two days. The realization brought a fearsome aching pressure to bear on Archie’s bladder.

“More or less,” Peter shrugged. “We thought you had died for a while, but you kept having nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” Archie couldn’t remember any. “Did I say anything?”

“Just sleep-talking. In any case, it’s Thursday. Come, eat; you must be starving.”

Archie worked his
way methodically through three bowls of wonderful fish stew, a miraculous change from several days of salt pork and whiskey. “Mrs. Daigle,” he finally said, “I could eat this all the way around the world.”

She laughed and took his bowl to a washbasin filled with river water. “A starving man will say anything. But thank you.”

“No,” Archie said. “I should thank you. I haven’t yet been— properly grateful to you for picking me up. I’ll certainly do whatever I can to make good on your hospitality.” He felt stilted and formal, but for some reason it was important to get all of that said.

“Nonsense,” Marie said, completely disrupting the gravity of the situation. “It wouldn’t be hospitality if you had to work for it.”

“I suppose he could fish, couldn’t he, Marie?” Peter said. “That is, if he’s going to eat like that all the way—”

“Peter, please.” Marie glared at him while trying to suppress a smile.

“Or, if he can’t
fish,”
Peter said, his voice rising, “perhaps he could teach me to
read,
because everyone on this boat now
knows
that Peter Daigle won’t listen to a woman.” Marie was laughing now, and Peter himself was having trouble keeping a straight face.

He stopped in mid-gesticulation. “Where is it you’re going, anyway?”

“Only to Louisville,” Archie said.

“Well, you’ll have all the fish stew you can choke down for the next six days, then.”

“Six days,” Archie repeated. That put their arrival on the twenty-ninth, the first of the
nemontemi,
the unlucky days. If the chacmool had to be inactive on those days, then it would already be at the cave by then—and would already have ensconced Jane, God knew where. In another six days, Archie’s only hope would be to intercept them at the cave itself.

Seeing the look on Archie’s face, Peter shrugged apologetically. “We can’t travel at night,” he said. “And the river only flows so fast. But we could drop you in Maysville, or Cincinnati if you need to hurry …” he shrugged again.

“No,” Archie said quickly, although Peter’s offer made perfect sense. A steamer could carry him from Maysville to Louisville in two days, if he remembered the schedule correctly. But his experience aboard
Maudie
was too fresh in his mind; traveling by keelboat with a migrating family of French-Canadians seemed so much safer, so much more sane.

Deeper fears were at work as well, Archie had to admit. Keelboats could hit snags and sink as easily as steamers could explode. Sitting there with Peter Daigle, surrounded by the happy chaos of his family, Archie realized that despite his single-minded obsession with rescuing Jane from her abductors, the prospect of their reunion terrified him. What would he say to her, this eleven-year-old girl whom he hadn’t given a kind word since she was a toddler? Would he be able to face her if she was angry?

Archie watched the three Daigle girls—son Ramon, at two-and-a-half, was too young to work yet, and clung to his mother—go about minor chores, drying dishes or sweeping windblown leaves from the deck. Even in the middle of a months-long journey to an uncertain destination, they had created a home on an Ohio River keelboat. There is something I have to learn from this, Archie thought. Something a father should know.

Thinking back to Jane’s infancy, Archie realized that the Prescott household—when there had been one—had never been so calmly cheerful. He had loved Helen as much as he thought it was possible for a man to love a woman, but he had used her death as an excuse to dive headfirst into a morass of self-pity from which he was only now beginning to emerge. Now he was being offered an opportunity to redeem himself, and all he could think was
Do I deserve this? Do I deserve a daughter who has the faith to pursue me through seven years of abandonment and rejection?

If I’m doing this just to prove that I’m not the bastard I thought I was, Archie thought, then I’d just as well not do it. Good acts for bad reasons aren’t any better than bad ones for good.

“No,” he said again suddenly, remembering that he was in a conversation. “You’ve been too generous.” He managed a weak smile. “I couldn’t reject your hospitality at this point, could I?”

Royce was damned
glad that the chacmool hadn’t decided to come along with him. After what it had done to Charlie, he wasn’t sure if he could stand to be near it, wondering when it would get ideas about changing him into some kind of baby vampire too. He could still hear the thing that had been Charlie wailing in its awful old infant voice, for all the world like a hungry babe. And for the chacmool to blame it all on him, because Prescott hadn’t died when he was supposed to …

God, what sort of mad fairy tale could give rise to something like that?

He didn’t want to know, really. In fact, Royce was wishing that he knew a great deal less about Riley Steen’s plans, and the chacmool, and wherever it had come from. And he wanted to know nothing at all about the girl.

He’d had to untie her after being left alone to drive old Farmer John’s wagon. She couldn’t lie under the straw in the back all day, even if she would have, which he doubted; either she would roll herself to the slats and hop over them while he wasn’t looking, or she’d have some sort of reaction to all the dust and keel over dead. So he’d untied her and warned that if she made any trouble, he’d cut out her tongue and tell anyone who asked that she was mad. “People are always willing to believe that about little girls, you know,” he’d said, “especially with the way you look.” She’d nodded and touched one of the thick scabs on her scalp, and Royce had felt a bit low. It wasn’t right to hurt a little girl’s feelings.

So now she rode next to him on the driver’s bench, her feet hobbled by a short length of rope and the knots covered by a blanket that had until recently cushioned the bench for Charlie’s delicate bum. Even when I get the driver’s seat, Royce thought sourly, my ass still suffers.

Having the girl with him gave him a twenty-four-hour case of the shakes, even though they’d passed through several small villages and she hadn’t given a peep. They were making fairly good time, but Royce hadn’t really slept since sometime before the train wreck, and he was starting to hear things. Now they were off in the wilderness again, he hadn’t any idea where, and every time she had to pee he was afraid she’d go hopping off like a rabbit into the deep woods, and then how would he find her?

I’m a city b’hoy, he thought. Forests and fields aren’t for me. He felt out of place in the country. Everything from his soap-locks to the red piping on his pants marked him as an Easterner. Worse, an Irish Easterner. In New York, times could be rough, but an Irishman/could always find kin; out here, though, some Nativist sons of bitches could ride up and hang him at any moment. He’d heard stories.

At least then he wouldn’t have to think about what would happen to the girl, though. Royce had worked for Riley Steen since he was a boy, but he hadn’t killed anyone until he was sixteen, three years ago. He’d been frightened half to death when he volunteered for the job, and nearly pissed himself when he’d actually carried it out, but with time he’d grown fond of his reputation. Killing was probably wrong, he thought, but everyone he’d ever slipped a blade into had known the rules of the game. Even Archie Prescott. Hadn’t Royce warned him to stay clear of Tammany business and then found him smack in the middle of the chaos at the museum?

The girl, though, Prescott’s daughter, was different. She hadn’t crossed a Tammany brave or interfered with Steen’s day-to-day operations. She was, so far as Royce could tell, just a little girlie who had the misfortune to be born on a singularly unlucky day. A girl who reminded him uncomfortably of himself seven or eight years before: all toughness and snap on the outside, but on the inside … poor creature. Royce had a bit of a chill at the thought. What had seven years done to him?

Well, he thought. I know the rules of the game too, and I’ve long since gotten in too deep to stop playing now. Royce McDougall still had a reputation to uphold as a man who finished the business that he started. This job he would get over with as soon as possible, handing the girl off in Louisville and getting shut of the whole sordid mess.

That is, as soon as he’d dealt with the elder Prescott. The only thing keeping Royce in the driving seat of the damned wagon, bouncing down nameless ruts until his spine felt like it was made of broken glass, was unfinished business with Prescott. He had known the rules of the game, if not that night at the Brewery then certainly by the time he’d lit out after the chacmool. Royce was man enough to admit his mistakes, and leaving Prescott still breathing in the Brewery had been a big one. Too many insane things had happened that night, and he’d let his fear get the better of him when Prescott’s ear had blazed up like a Roman candle between Charlie’s teeth. Next time there would be no mistake. Royce would take care of Archie Prescott, like he should have a long time ago, and be on the first boat back to New York. Reputation was all a man had sometimes.

Memories of that night still made him uneasy. Not that he was squeamish when it came to violence, but from first to last Steen hadn’t seemed in control of the situation. Royce was beginning to wonder just how much of the chacmool’s escape was due to Prescott’s meddling and how much could be laid at the feet of Steen’s poor planning. He’d thought the cordon of cornstalks was a ridiculous idea from the beginning, and said so, but Steen had insisted that interfering with the chacmool while it was still dormant would queer the whole enterprise. That had seemed reasonable enough at the time—reasonable, at least, as anything else Steen ever cooked up—but now, with the advantage of three months’ time to look back on it, Royce doubted that Steen had really known what he was doing. He’d spent enough time with his nose in old books, but books didn’t tell the whole story. And even with all his learning, Steen had admitted to Royce later that they’d all nearly been killed by the Old God, whatever that was.

Yes sir, it was clear that Riley Steen had lost whatever control he might once have had over the situation. Some other force was opposing him, or the chacmool, it didn’t matter which. And Steen, although he knew his enemy’s name, didn’t seem able to anticipate it or fight back.