Divine Madness (8 page)

Lilly pads sailed calmly on the still poza, crewed only by small frogs and small winger insects that were surely kin to the damselfly. They were not at all disturbed by the human who waded among them.

Ninon took a seat on a flat rock and watched Miguel work. He certainly seemed to be collecting stones, fitting broken pieces together, but she was having a hard time imaging that NASA really cared about these ancient rocks. He had to be up to something.

Hide or take the ride?

Damn! It was too soon to decide. She turned away, annoyed at her indecisiveness. Maybe it was just an excuse, but before she spoke to Miguel she wanted to see the
lago
—the lake—where the carved stone tablet stolen from the museum had been found. That stone…it would have told her so much. If there was some way for her to accomplish her goal without involving him, she would take it.

You’re rationalizing your delay. This is a fool’s errand.
We should go to the next village and see the shaman for a cure.

We’ve tried. There is no cure.

She always had been—and still was—a cheerleader for rational cognitive thought. The difference was that she no longer looked for consensus about reality from the rest of the world. She relied on intuition and followed her instincts. That said, there was comfort in her belief that Miguel—whatever he was—saw what she saw, knew what she knew, and therefore wouldn’t think she had sat down for tea with the Mad Hatter if and when she told him her story.

But he could be dangerous. Understanding could make him extremely dangerous. That was the fly in the ointment.

Cherie, he
is
dangerous. All that remains to be seen is if he is dangerous to you. Why tempt Fate?

Ninon stood and walked away.

She had thought her life—her lives—broken into segments: childhood, her teens, her first lover, her last lover. As each era, each identity passed, they were broken off and set adrift so that she would not become weighed down with regrets or remorse or grief. But it seemed that not all of her past had floated away in the stream of time. Perhaps Ana and Coco and Angelique were gone, but her memories of her life as Ninon were now always close by. Not just in the voice in her head, but in her dreams. She was haunted and worried about repeating past mistakes.

The past never leaves us
.

One island neighbor had called her otherworldly—which of course she was. Her first life was as
other
as it could get. There were few places in the modern world that had survived as long as she had. Buildings and statues, yes—some of them. But philosophies? Perceptions? Beliefs? No. Her world was long gone and the modern mind could never understand the part of her that still lived there and thought old thoughts and believed old teachings.

Do you think Paganini was one of the Dark Man’s get?
the voice asked suddenly.
How I loved his music
.

Maybe. They say he sold his soul to the Devil. How many Devils can there be?

I don’t know, but even one is too many.

She nodded and then pushed the thought away. Paganini’s was one ghost she did not need looking over her shoulder. She had found some of the Dark Man’s creations, but not until many were already murdered by him.

“What a horrible place this is,” she muttered to herself. “Hard to face the idea that I might die here.”

There was a violent beauty to this sun-assaulted land, but it was frozen in time—not alive, not evolving. She’d driven through a lot of small towns down here that were dead but would be slow to get a decent burial because the inhabitants were stubborn about clinging to the corpses of their old lives. The way to Hell wasn’t paved solely by good intentions; there were also a lot of lost dreams and broken hearts of people who couldn’t let go. She’d learned to avoid this trap long ago—adapt or die—but she still pitied those who lingered as human ghosts, unable to move on.

Her eyes were growing tired of this place. This landscape was the same for as far as the eye could see. The world had ghostly colors not found in any crayon box, and it was a place that had no shadows, no secrets from the sun.

There had been rain—hard rain—sometime in the past few weeks, and it had gnawed with voracious hunger at the stream’s banks as they overflowed their edges. Larger plants had been ripped away, but tiny opportunists had moved in to replace them. In a few more weeks there would be no evidence of the upheaval. This place did not like change.

World without end…

Amen
.

Ninon found the
lago
mentioned on the stone and then
walked north. She stopped outside the cave where the hieroglyphs had indicated that the god of the Smoking Mirror was supposed to appear on the final days of the year. She sniffed the air cautiously, but smelled nothing obviously sulfurous. She looked for signs of ornamentation that befitted a god, but from the outside at least there was nothing to mark this cave as special, a place of worship, just some large stones that had been defaced by man-made tools so long ago that they had again grown smooth. She reached out with other senses, but felt no ghosts, no shades of old violence. Yet legend insisted this was where the god, Smoking Mirror, lived and was worshipped.

Ninon took in another lungful of air and opened her senses. Nothing. There was nothing strange about this place. No nerve-tingling power, no aura of supernatural dread. It was, if anything, less alive than the desert around it. Annoyed, she stared at the spreading ring of mushrooms that had stopped only when they reached the edge of the turgid creek that disappeared into the cave. She knelt down, not sure why they should grab at her thoughts and insist she study them, but willing to be led by intuition.

Mushrooms. There was nothing special about them. Small, brown, they looked a great deal like Haymaker’s mushrooms, the fairy rings that were quite common all over the United States. The only thing interesting about the species was that the Haymaker mushrooms were not individual plants that marched outward in a magical expanding ring, but were actually only the fruiting part of a larger underground fungus that crept through the soil like a disease. The roots were part of the interconnected fibers of something that looked a bit like the synapses of a giant human brain.

Ninon blinked and focused on that thought.

They were each part of a larger entity.
Like groves of aspen trees that spread from rhizomes and were in fact interconnected—a single plant that looked like many
trees. Actually, she recalled that many plants did this. And there were scientists who insisted that it made them aware at some level. Damage or stimulus to one was recognized by all. Certain plants knew when insects were attacking and would emit chemicals to repel them, but didn’t react when the damage was caused by fire or crushing. Because they were part of a collective awareness?

She stepped closer to the river and looked down into its coffee-colored water that sparkled like broken obsidian. The long stringy grasses within waved sluggishly. Could it be true of the strange dark grass snaking through the underground rivers of this area—were they tapping out a watery Morse code? Might that be how Smoking Mirror kept track of where people were and when sacrifices were brought?

Too bad there wasn’t a botanist nearby to answer her questions. The other way of testing her theory was so much more dangerous.

Don’t step in the water.
The voice in Ninon’s head was alarmed.
Go back to Miguel if you must
.

But this could be another way—something that would not involve Miguel
.
If I can call the god himself…

She listened intently. Frogs ground out their painful songs at the creek’s murky edge. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that nothing urgent ever happened here, that she was imagining things. Except…sunlight seemed to stop at the mouth of the cave as though turned away by a solid darkness.

“Hello—anybody home?” she called softly, dipping a finger into the water.

Cherie, don’t!

Something stirred the air and it eddied slyly. A long tentacle of grass curled around her index finger. A foreign awareness touched her.

Oh yes,
something
was there, even if was just lackey fungoids and grasses passing on the message of her arrival.
She pulled her hand back, wiping it on her jeans. It felt…unclean.

“I’ve come to ask for passage to the god Smoking Mirror.” She kept her voice calm and rational as she turned toward the source of silent power, though she knew that what she was saying and thinking would sound patently irrational to anyone who shunned information acquired through sources other than the standard five senses, the classroom, or CNN.

She rose and walked forward, stood at the mouth of the cave, half in the dark, half in the light. She saw nothing unusual that was common to places of natural worship—nothing beautiful, amazing, or even sinister. Looking closely, she could see that the cavern may have been natural but clearly man had been at work inside it, smoothing the floor and such. And after the heat of the desert it seemed pleasantly cool, offering thousands of years of thick insulation against the sun. It tempted her.

There was a current in the air, though—an eddy of power that only a fool would ignore. The darkness felt tangible. It rubbed on her skin and she tasted it on her tongue. It was faintly metallic. Actually, it tasted of blood. If she went any farther, she would be wading into the torrents of the supernatural. Was that really what she wanted?

Hide or take the ride. Did she go back to Miguel and ask for his help, or stay and face the unknown?

She peered at the water that moved so sluggishly, a black worm burrowing through the cave. This was the local river Styx? It seemed rather dark and narrow, and generally uninspiring for a place of epic death and rebirth. But perhaps Hollywood had given her unrealistic expectations of the underworld. Would a smart god want any obvious markers guiding people to his lair?

Especially if he weren’t a god at all, but merely a very long-lived monster.

She slid a foot a few inches further into the cave and had a moment of disorientation. There was north and south, east and west, up and down—and then there was this place, this time. It felt terrible—dead. Evil. Her courage failed her.

Cherie, run!

Okay, I’m outta here
.

Suddenly a body welled up out of the dark river, an upright form but not of a man. Fast as she was, there was no chance for Ninon to get away. It dragged her into the dark and she found herself at the edge of the water, laid out flat on a small altar she hadn’t noticed before, her mind knocked clean of all logical thought as something powerful and terrible rolled through.

He was a giant, twice her size, with a face of stone and jaws wide enough to bite off her head. But that wasn’t what terrified her most. It was the feeling of power that surrounded him, an invisible aura that nevertheless burned her eyes. If he wanted, he could stop her heart, sear her flesh, cremate her mind. She was helpless, her body a prison that held her heightened senses at his mercy.

And it was slightly cliché, but the god smelled of sulfur, just as she had expected.

His obsidian eyes watched her as she tried to recall how to breathe. Something moved against her leg, inching upward. It paused at the gun she had shoved in her pants and patted the weapon curiously. She wished she thought the moving thing was a penis, but knew it was not. An image of a giant leech popped into her head, something thick like an elephant’s trunk, looking for a place to latch on to her bare flesh and suck her dry. Also, behind the gaps in his giant, grinding teeth she saw something move. It gleamed like a silver needle but was as long as an ice pick. It reminded her of a scorpion’s tail.

It didn’t seem likely, but Ninon prayed that somehow the telegraph plants outside had also carried a message to
Miguel that she was here and needed help. Her desire to keep him from her affairs had fled in the face of this monster.

Cherie? This would be a good time to panic, but if you feel that you cannot do that, perhaps you could think of something to say to distract him.

Say? To this?

But the voice had restarted her brain. Ninon stared at her captor and tried a tentative probe on the god’s mind.

When she looked with her senses, she could see into his brain, but it was through a veil of smoke where most detail was hidden. Even what she could see made little sense. Tezcatlipoca, he thought himself, god of the Smoking Mirror…He had thoughts that she couldn’t follow because there was no human context for them, no words for what he was in any human language. He dreamed about things for which humans had no conceptualization, had been things that humans had no name for, and trying to understand him made her hurt.

He probed back. His will was unsubtle but he didn’t look deep, seemingly happy to feed on her surface fear. She tried to relax, to allow her reason for coming here to present itself to him. She willed him to stay at the surface of her brain, to look no more deeply into her mind where he might find the things she truly feared. He would not be gentle and wouldn’t care how much damage he did he as he rummaged through her mind, and there were thoughts there she did not wish to share.

“This is the frontier of the dead,” the god said, speaking with a physical voice but also in her mind. “Sometimes people grow confused and the living find themselves among the dead souls, and the dead among the living. That a body moves does not mean that it has a soul. That it is still and dust doesn’t mean the soul is gone. In this land, all is mine.”

Ninon nodded at this prepared speech. She was afraid to ask if he meant she was soulless. She was more afraid
to ask if he was claiming her. Her plans for the day hadn’t included immediate sacrifice to a blood-drinking god. If that was what he was.

“I see there is a man following you, one you fear.”

Rather than try to hide this thought, Ninon concentrated hard on Saint Germain. Better to think about him than having her blood sucked out of her body by that vicious straw attached to Smoking Mirror’s tongue.