Enigmatic Pilot (15 page)

Stoked with cottonwood and cypress, the boiler of the dilapidated boat powered the craft out into the current. The telltale silhouette of a yawl rowed off south beyond them, and a beaming coal barge loomed out toward the Illinois side. Beyond that, no one appeared to be on the water except for them and the moonlight.

Schelling handed Lloyd a strip of dark muslin. “Please blindfold yourself.”

“Why?” Lloyd asked, the hair rising on the back of his neck.

“You will see,” Schelling replied. “Trust me.”

Lloyd flopped down on a crate and wrapped the cloth around his head as he was instructed. This was not at all what he had expected, but the familiar sounds of the boat surging through the river filled him with a confused sense of resignation and anticipation. Surely this man meant him well.

He listened hard, trying to picture their progress away from St. Louis. The hiss of the gauge cock. The low rumble of the mud valves. At first he was sure they were headed upriver, and then they turned, and perhaps again. Twice Schelling raised him up and spun him around, as if to further disorient him. Not a word was spoken between the humpback and his dark-skinned crew. On and on the boat plowed. Then drifted.

At last it became clear that they were docking. There were all the sounds of pulling into a wharf: the change in the rhythm of the machinery … backwash … scrambling of hands and legs … ropes heaved. Lloyd was lifted onto some sort of pier (by one of the Negroes, he surmised) and pushed gently but forcibly into a seated position. After several minutes, he heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves and the clump of a wagon. He was hoisted again in one graceful maneuver and set down in what felt like a dogcart. He could tell that Schelling was beside him by the scent of the witch hazel. Reins jingled. The cart rattled off on a rutted, hard-packed road.

They rode for perhaps twenty minutes. When the blindfold at last came off, and Lloyd’s eyes had got used to seeing again, he saw that they had come to a dismal clearing back off from the river, set on a cliff. A forbidding wall of pines ringed the lumpy open ground, which was studded with shapes that brought to mind his chapel cove back in Zanesville.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“A slave cemetery,” Schelling answered. “At least, it appears to be.”

He stepped down out of the dogcart and helped the boy to the ground. With his eyes growing more alert, Lloyd saw that the moonlight rained down across a field of primitive graves—rock markers, splintered wooden crosses, and iron bars. The eerie call of a screech owl echoed through the trees.

“Why are we here?” the boy asked, feeling a ghostly presence rising like mist from the stumps and stones.

The antiquarian did not respond but instead looked around
the perimeter of pines, listening hard. Then he lit a lucifer match and held it above his head. In the still, soft air it glowed white-gold for a few seconds before he shook it out. A moment later, a flicker of light answered back from the cliff side and a whip-poor-will called from a tangle of rosemary to the west.

“All right,” Schelling decided, and directed the boy toward a grave marked by a slab of granite that in the glare of the moon Lloyd saw had gouged into its surface the words
HIC JACET
. With unexpected agility and strength, Schelling bent down and heaved the slab to one side, revealing a sturdy wooden ladder descending into the blackness beneath the burial ground.

Lloyd was alarmed at this discovery, but intrigued.

“Wait a moment,” Schelling commanded, and disappeared down the ladder.

Lloyd heard another match crack and saw a faint flare from below. There was the clunk of a chain, then a lock clicking, and a door being pried open. Schelling’s head reappeared out of the ground. “Come,” he whispered.

Pale light streamed to meet them now, and Lloyd followed the man down ten rungs into what he took to be a crypt but which smelled like some kind of root cellar. As soon as he stepped off the ladder and had his feet planted, he saw that this “cellar” opened up into what looked like a gallery of natural catacombs, only the first of which was lit by a lantern. The air was cool but surprisingly dry. As his eyes became adjusted to the shadows, Lloyd saw that the chambers stretching into the distance were filled with paintings and statues, row upon row of shelves lined with leather-bound books, stuffed animals, skeletons, weapons, scientific instruments, and unidentified machines.

“High ground,” Schelling announced. “Part of a cave system that the river can’t reach. It has been used for many purposes in the past, but now it serves as our hiding place.”

“Who are you hiding from? And what … is … all this?” Lloyd asked.

“It’s but a Main Street museum of anatomy compared to what it was,” Schelling answered somberly.

“Where … where did all the things come from?”

“Europe, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia. Massachusetts. All over the world.”

“Are they yours?” the boy asked.

“I am the custodian and cataloguer, but the collection belongs to the Spirosians. Mother Tongue will explain. Are you ready to meet her?”

“I … guess … so,” Lloyd answered. Up to now he had supposed Mother Tongue to be some senile member of the Illumination Society. What if she was something else?

Schelling lit a hurricane lantern and steered him past a Chippendale cabinet on which perched a dented conquistador’s helmet. A curve in the rock wall brought them to a flight of steps hacked into the clay stone. The humped man motioned for the boy to follow.

The stairs led down to a landing that was flooded with the light from a golden candelabrum that took the shape of a tall, full tree. On each branch burned a thick green candle, and between the spitting and dripping of the wax Lloyd heard the gentle lap of water below. Outside the aura of the tapers, the cave ceiling opened up like a tunnel that had been blasted to make way for a train, and then narrowed to a tight stricture on the other side of a large obsidian-dark pool. Floating in the water before him was a small ornate steamboat stained with moss and algae. All its windows were dark except one. A black man dressed as a coachwhip stood beside a gangplank that led from the landing to the riverboat, holding an oil lamp.

“Mother Tongue is expecting you,” Schelling told him. “Blazon will be your escort. I will wait for you here.”

Lloyd was gripped with such a blend of apprehension and excitement that he could barely move, but move he did, into the black man’s lamplight and over the gangplank, half thinking that the weird boat would evaporate the moment he stepped
foot on board. It did not, but it looked as if it might well sink—or had sunk and been raised from the depths of the river. In the stillness of the cave, Lloyd imagined that he could hear the very nails aching in the swollen planks.

The man called Blazon remained stone-silent but led him straight to the central parlor on the main deck where the lamp shone. Then, just as he was opening the weather-beaten wooden door, the most miraculous thing Lloyd had ever seen in his life happened. Everything around him burst alight, so suddenly that he thought the boat was in flames. He let out a giant gasp, which seemed to please Blazon. The boat was not on fire but shimmering with tiny prisms that looked as if they were made of isinglass and filled with lightning. By what means the prisms came to life Lloyd could only guess, but as instantly as they had ignited they expired and he found himself blinking hard. He heard Blazon close the door behind him, then his own heartbeat.

A single glass oil lamp with extended wick stood on a walnut table beside an old cane plantation chair and a ladder-back rocking chair made of pine. Seated in the cane monstrosity was the oldest woman Lloyd had ever seen. Her hair was pure white and thick. Her face, which was the color of blancmange, was fantastically wrinkled, yet she sat upright without a hint of palsy, dressed in a cool-looking long white dress, like a southern lady about to serve tea. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a weary haircloth sofa on which a mangy coonhound was fast asleep.

“Come,” the old woman called to him, indicating the ladder-back.

“The lights …” Lloyd said, but he couldn’t complete his question.

He found himself meandering toward the rocking chair as if in a trance and, once seated, was startled when one of the runners pressed down on the tail of a cat—but not like any cat he had ever encountered. It was hairless. Sleek of body, its skin
was rose-pink, becoming the color of pencil lead on its paws, with a face that reminded Lloyd of a mask, and remarkable slitted eyes that were as green as his own.

“Curiosity!” the old woman commanded, and the cat leaped into her lap. “You are always putting yourself in harm’s way.”

Lloyd tried to ease himself back into the chair, glad that the hound hadn’t stirred. When he managed to settle, he was again shaken by the old woman’s eyes. He had noticed from across the room that she wore no spectacles, which had surprised him, given her obvious age, but he was surprised still further to find her now looking straight at him with eyes as green as the cat’s—and his, too. As green as absinthe, but clear.

The room was silent but for the purring of the feline and what he imagined to be the trip-hammer of his heart. He wanted to know about the lights … what he was doing there. He tried to remain still. The old coonhound slept on.

At first the woman’s green eyes stabbed at him like darning needles, but gradually the intensity of her scrutiny eased. There was no decaying odor of ravaged flesh or incontinence about her, as he had experienced with the older Zanesville biddies; rather, a clean simple scent of lemon verbena. Despite the alien surroundings and the circumstances that had brought him there, he began to feel reassured. Until the ancient lady spoke.

“You’ve already been with a woman, haven’t you? A grown woman.”

“How did you know that?” Lloyd cried. “Can you read minds?”

“I’ve heard that you can,” the woman answered, and her face assumed an inscrutable smile. “Can you guess how old I am?”

“Eighty?” Lloyd tried, afraid that he might offend her.

“Fiddlesticks!” She laughed.

“One hundred, then.”

“Oh, I’m every bit of that.” She sighed. “Every bit and then some.”

“I think you’re the oldest person I’ve ever seen,” Lloyd admitted.

The old coon dog dozed.

“I am. And I don’t know how much longer I have. So let me cut off the gristle and get to the meat. There’s nothing wrong with your discovery of your manhood, even if you are still a child. The first experience of the flesh is a great challenge for everyone, but it is a special trial for males and you have passed yours. That may bode well. You are destined to run well before yourself in many ways. Now, before I tell you the things you were brought here to hear I will let you ask me one question. What would you like to know about—the lights?”

Lloyd pondered for a moment, feeling for the woman’s intent.

“I think you’ll tell me about the lights,” he replied at last. “What I’d like to know is how you get this boat through such a narrow passage.”

The woman gave the cat a long, deep stroke.

“The boat never leaves this grotto. Nor do I. It wouldn’t be safe for me to move about anymore.”

She clutched the hairless animal tighter and lowered her voice.

“And I don’t mean to frighten you, Lloyd, but there may come a time, sooner than you think, when it won’t be safe for you to move about so freely, either.”

Lloyd shifted in his chair, unable to turn his gaze from the woman’s eyes, which reached out and embraced him, her words filling the sparsely furnished room like the shadows that closed in around the lamp.

“D
ID
I
SCARE YOU
, L
LOYD?”
M
OTHER
T
ONGUE ASKED AFTER A
moment of silence. “Or is your hunger for secrets so great that you are immune to fear?”

Lloyd tried to feel in his mind, reaching inside and then outward into the shadows for some sense of his dead sister’s protective presence. Why was there a museum under a graveyard and a riverboat stuck inside a cliff? How did the darkness suddenly burst into light? A wave of fatigue washed over him and he longed to snuggle with the dog on the rough couch.

“We’ll see,” he answered at last, not wanting to show that he was scared—and scared because he did not know why. “Who are the Spirosians?”

Mother Tongue gave another one of her odd smiles.

“The movement dates back to very olden times in Europe and the Middle East, but it draws its strength from even longer ago, in ancient Greece and Egypt. It is based on the thought of one exemplary man, Spiro of Lemnos. Some stories tell that he was a hermaphrodite—both a male and a female. But that may be just a legend. We do know that he was a Phoenician by birth—sometimes called a son of Atlantis, the original philosopher-scientist. But he was also a practitioner of what some might describe as magic. A man of unique genius. The superior
of Thales, Pythagoras, and Archimedes, and greater than all those who followed—Leonardo, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. He saw more deeply into the mysteries of life than anyone else before or since. In fact, his ideas were so far ahead of his time that he was constantly in danger of persecution, imprisonment, and death. So he concealed his discoveries and teachings in a secret language—hierograms embedded in beautiful, intricate puzzles that he called Enigmas. No one knows how he came by this language or the design for these puzzles, but there is a myth that this knowledge was given to him by the gods. Others believe he stole it.”

“What sort of things did he know?” Lloyd inquired.

“The intimate dependencies of energy and matter—hidden correspondences. The lights you witnessed? They are his conception. A form of electrical power harnessed two thousand years before Benjamin Franklin experimented with his kite and key.”

“Two thousand years ago!” Lloyd coughed.

“The world is not always what you think it is, and history is most certainly not what you have been told,” Mother Tongue replied.