Andersonville (18 page)

Dooley retrieved a set of clinking mugs from a cabinet and set them on the table.

“Mastemah witnessed the total destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and devised a long plan to learn the secret of summoning and controlling the ha-Mashchit. He posed as the god Heka in ancient Egypt.”

“The deification of magic,” Day said, remembering his father's Egyptology lessons.

“That's right. As Heka, Mastemah influenced the pharaohs for generations, eventually orchestrating the enslavement of the Hebrews and setting the stage for the rise of their liberator, Moses. Mastemah imbued the two priests Jannes and Mambres with the power to oppose Moses and influenced the pharaoh against reason.”

“And the pharaoh's refusal to free the Hebrews brought about the tenth plague,” Day said.

Dooley poured the steaming coffee, nodding.

“It was what Mastemah had been working toward. The ha-Mashchit feeds upon human misery and suffering, so by the time of Moses it had grown quite strong. Mastemah spied on Moses, and when the archangels instructed Moses in the summoning of the ha-Mashchit, Mastemah learned the ritual.”

“What is the ritual?”

“Well, it's quite complex, but basically the chronicle says that Moses sacrificed male firstborn lambs and specially branded them with a sigil taught to him by the angels. As I understand it, it's sort of like giving a bloodhound the scent of its quarry. Moses painted the doors of the Hebrews with blood from the lambs to guard them against the ha-Mashchit, for while it is empowered by sacrifices, it may be controlled by the blood they shed.”

Day felt his pulse quicken even as his heart dropped into his stomach.

“Was the sigil in the book?” he asked.

Dooley nodded.

“The formula was reproduced there, yes, but I hardly think—”

“Get me a paper and a pencil. Quick.”

Dooley went to a drawer and set paper and pencil before him.

He copied the symbol Barclay had drawn in the dirt for him, then showed the paper to Dooley.

“Was it this?”

Dooley took the paper and squinted at it.

“Where have you seen this, Quitman?” he whispered.

“At Andersonville Prison.”

Day related everything he knew to Dooley, including all that Barclay had told him. The misery, the branded corpses, the visions of kastirin, the dreams of mound builders, and the spirit the sun worshipers trapped beneath the land on which the prison stood.

“Trapped in the blood of its worshipers,” Day finished. “Sound like the ha-Mashchit to you?”

“My God,” Dooley muttered, sinking into the chair across from him. “Could it be true?”

“What does the chronicle say happened to Mastemah after the tenth plague?”

“It doesn't,” Dooley said. “Aaron said the ha-Mashchit was sealed in the earth and Mastemah fled God's wrath. The rest was a lengthy call for vigilance.”

Day put his head in his hands. It had all slid into place. Mastemah had fled here, to Georgia. And ages ago he had tried to summon the ha-Mashchit again, using the mound builders, probably corrupting or possessing their high priest. When the sun worshipers had defeated him, maybe with the aid of the archangels, the ha-Mashchit had been trapped beneath the land on which the prison now stood.

He didn't know how Mastemah had escaped from his watery prison. Maybe the sun priestess's binding spell simply hadn't worked.

But one thing was for sure.

Mastemah had returned. He had to be the entity joined with Wirz.

Wirz had the book. Wirz spoke to an unseen presence Day couldn't detect.

Wirz and Mastemah.

Barclay had been right.

But to what end was Wirz working? The destruction of the North? Would Mastemah stop there?

Dooley rose from his seat, pushing back the chair with a groan, sending it clattering to the floor.

“Bring the light,” he said, and turned and went into the next room.

Day dutifully picked up the lamp and followed the librarian, who began tearing through the orderly piles of books, casting aside precious volumes without a care in his frantic search.

“Once the sacrifices have been made,” Dooley shouted as Day got up and followed him, “the only thing needed to awaken the ha-Mashchit is a word of power.”

“What word?”

“One of the names of God,” Dooley said, pausing, breathless for a moment before pulling down another stack of books with a crash.

God had made the universe through words of power. Specific number-letter combinations with mystic, gematriac meanings. by utilizing them, it was said, a mystic could tap into various aspects of God's power. The tetragrammaton mentioned again and again in the Bible was the most well known. Day's father had told him there were more than seventy, some hidden in esoteric texts or hidden in the Scripture itself. It was said the Hebrew Torah taken in its entirety was a name of God.

“Which name?” Day pressed.

Dooley ran his hand across his balding head.

“The Shem ha-Mephorash,” he said.

He scampered across the book-strewn room and attacked another tall stack.

Day thought back to his lessons again. Shem ha-Mephorash. The phrase meant “the explicit name.” It was only a substitute for the actual name, probably for brevity's sake or to ward against profaning the actual name.

“It's the 216-letter name of God,” Dooley went on, “encoded in three sequential verses in the Book of Exodus. Each verse has seventy-two letters. You arrange the verses boustrophedon.”

“Alternating left-right-right-left?”

“Good, yes,” said Dooley. “The second line is reversed. You group all the letters in columns of three. The names of seventy-two angels result, each with its own sphere of influence in creation, each an aspect of God Himself. But if you add them, the sum total is the name which Moses used to trigger the ha-Mashchit.”

“What verses?”

“I only remember one of them. ‘
And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided
.' ”

“Well, that's fine, but is it the first of the two, the second, or the third?” Day asked impatiently.

“It's easily discerned,” Dooley said, waving his hand dismissively. “You just have to count out the letters in the adjoining verses. But it's written out in the
Chronicle
. I just have to find it.”

“You said the ha-Mashchit is charged by human suffering,” Day said.

“Yes,” Dooley said distractedly as he flung aside book after book.

“Even assuming Mastemah is making the Union prisoners suffer to increase its strength, surely enough blood's been spilled in the prison now to wipe out the North. What's he waiting for?”

“Here it is!” Dooley said.

He plunged his hand behind a wavering pile and produced a moldy old tome with oversized yellowing pages.

He carried it to the table and plunked it down, flipping it open.

Day set the hissing lamp beside it and looked over Dooley's shoulder. The book was in Hebrew, and he was admittedly rusty.

“Is there anything else in there that can help me?”

Dooley shushed him.

“Go and get my horse saddled,” Dooley said.

“What?”

“You'll need my help. We'll ride tonight back to the prison. We can't spare a moment more. You say this Captain Wirz is the culprit, the man you suspect of consorting with Mastemah?”

“He is the most likely candidate.”

“Then he has to die,” Dooley said gravely. “There's no other way.”

Day nodded slowly. For Mastemah to be stopped, he had to be disincorporated. His host body had to die. Maybe Wirz was in over his head, but he couldn't be entirely ignorant of what he had opened himself to. He had
The
Chronicle of Mastemah
. He knew what he was dealing with.

So be it. A bullet for Wirz, then.

Day went outside and stopped cold.

In the road before the cabin were three riders, the breeze stirring the black manes of their horses and causing the hems of their gray greatcoats to flap.

“Evening, Lieutenant,” said the middle rider in his easy backwoods drawl.

“Turner,” Day said. “What are you doing here?”

“Might ask the same of you,” Turner answered. “Hospital's back thataway.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder toward the lights of the town. “I do believe you stated to the general that your intent was to see your sickly pa. What're you really here for? Takin' a catamite's vacation? Got yourself another big buck in there?”

“You shut your mouth, Sergeant,” Day hissed. “By what right have you followed me? I have a pass from General Winder.”

“So do I,” said Turner, crossing his arms over his saddle horn.

“Is it his orders you're here on,” Day asked, moving his hand to the pistol beneath his voluminous coat, “or Mastemah's?”

Turner frowned and straightened.

“Well. I guess I was wrong about you, after all, Lieutenant. You are a sly one, ain't you? But you ain't figured all that out on your own. You got a man inside the stockade, don't you? Who is it? Your black boy?”

Day swallowed.

Turner leered and nodded.

“Hell, you oughta try your lies our in a mirror first, boy. You may's well of said Barclay Lourdes right to me.”

“What do you get out of this, Turner?” Day said, buying time. “That's what I can't figure out. What makes a man trade in his immortal soul?”

“That's my end. You needn't concern yourself with it. You won't be around to see the end result anyhow.” He turned to his two subordinates. “Boys, clap the lieutenant here in irons. We'll ride back directly and collect his buck, too.”

One of the men pulled a set of chains from his saddlebag and slid off his horse.

As he came cautiously over, Turner drew a Tranter pistol.

In that moment, Day saw the sergeant's play. He would be killed resisting capture.

Day dropped to one knee, the muzzle of his Colt revolver clearing its scabbard and leaping from the opening in his coat.

Turner's .44 boomed, but the big bullet snapped over Day's head and struck the cabin wall.

“Cut him down!” Turner yelled.

The private with the chains swung them at Day's head, lashing his ear and lip. He put a bullet through the man's breadbasket for that, the discharge so close that his belly erupted in flame and he staggered back into the road wheezing.

The second soldier unslung a Maynard rifle and got off a withering shot that passed through Day's midsection somewhere above his belt line and left of center. Day returned fire and saw the man flip off the back of the horse. He leaped back and fell through the cabin doorway, landing on his back in the kitchen.

Dooley pulled him to his feet.

“My God, who are they?”

“Get down,” Day croaked, but too late. Another bullet came through the doorway. It punched into Dooley's right temple and burst from his left, felling the old librarian like a lightning bolt.

Day wriggled out from underneath the old man's body and dragged himself to the back of the cabin, trailing blood.

He pulled himself from the lamplight of the kitchen into the shadows of the book-cluttered back room. He looked back to see Turner step into the doorway. Turner cocked his Tranter pistol and made Dooley's body jump once on the floor just to be sure. His eyes followed the blood trail to where Day lay in the dark, bleeding on the scattered books. He raised his pistol.

“Next one's yours, Lieutenant.”

On the table, the priceless yellowed pages of the original
Chronicle of Mastemah
fluttered and crackled in the breeze from the open door, the Hebrew letters clear on the paper, which glowed from the light of the lamp.

Day cringed as he aimed and fired. His Colt wouldn't have much effect on the possessed Turner, but he knew one element that the demon inside the man could not protect his borrowed flesh against.

The bullet smashed the lamp to pieces, sending liquid flame spurting in all directions. A gust of wind blew in fortuitously at that instant, and the books piled all around the kitchen became roaring pyres.
The
Chronicle of Mastemah
flared on the table like the Israelites' pillar of fire. A splash of burning kerosene cascaded across Turner's face, and he screamed and fell back, flailing. His elbow struck the door and slammed it shut behind him, and his gun fired reflexively into the dark room, booming again over Day's head and blasting open a back window.

The fire trailed across the floor, igniting the pages of the books Dooley had carelessly scattered. It lit up the back room and climbed the walls of haphazard old tomes, seeking the wooden walls behind them.

Day pulled himself up to the windowsill, cutting his hands and arms on the broken glass as he lifted himself up and over and tumbled in a heap outside.

He dragged himself from the tinderbox cabin with its belly of old kindling. The fire spread fast. Inside, he could hear Turner roaring. The gunshots could have been him blindly shooting or the furnace heat touching off his gunpowder.

Day got to his feet and staggered around the side of the flaming house, clutching his bleeding belly. He staggered to the horse, which was straining at its tether, screaming in fear at the sight and smell of the fire.

The two Rebel soldiers still lay where they'd fallen in the road. They had been men, not demonically possessed. Not members of Wirz's inner circle, then. He had killed two Confederate soldiers.

Day freed the horse and fought hard to keep it from bolting. He managed to pull himself over the saddle, but before he could situate himself, it went galloping off. Every buck of the hard saddle at his wound was a mule kick, forcing a scream from his trembling lips. Finally he let go of the fire-maddened animal and crashed into the road somewhere in the darkness between the light of town and the burning cabin.