The Spider Stone

by Alex Archer

  "Horace knew one of the slaves in that basement," Christian said.

  "Our family owned slaves?"

  "Yes."

  Dack felt pretty good about that. Personally, he didn't care for blacks. Or people of color. Or African-Americans. Or whatever they were calling themselves these days. He figured they ranged from stupid and lazy to uppity and selfish.

  "Jedidiah didn't just spin the cotton into goods," Christian said. "He also raised the cotton. Had big fields of it around Kirktown. Horace worked on the fields. That's how he got to know Yohance."

  "Who's Yohance?" Dack took another sip of beer.

  "Yohance was one of the slaves that worked on the farm. He was the one that had the Spider Stone."

  Dack's head hurt. He vaguely remembered the story. Christian had always been fascinated by the story of the Spider Stone. When he'd been a kid, Christian had studied the family history at their grandfather's knee.

  "What's the Spider Stone?" Dack asked.

  "Horace believed it was a treasure map. Jedidiah wrote that in his journal. The night he killed all those people down in that basement, Horace looked for it, but he never found it."

  "Why are you telling me this?" Dack asked.

  "Because I want you to find that stone."

  Dack cursed loud enough to draw the attention of a few bystanders. "I thought you wanted me to bring that building down on top of those damn busybodies," he whispered.

  "I do," Christian said. "But I want the Spider Stone first."

  ****

  "We've got generators to provide power for the electric lamps we've used underground," Professor Hallinger explained as he led the way through the warehouse.

  "Normally the Underground Railroad wasn't literally underground," Annja said as she followed the professor, gazing around at the history showing in every plank and joist. She loved being in old buildings that had been preserved. Stepping through their doors was almost like stepping into a time machine.

  "No. It was a system of way stops used by those fleeing slavery who made their way north. Some of them went on into Canada. Usually they traveled overland through forests and swamps, off the beaten track. They used the railroad language to suit themselves. A conductor was the guide who led them out of the South along the way stops. Railroad agents were the sympathizers who hid them during the day and gave them food and supplies. But there were a few subterranean areas. Basements, root cellars, caves. This happens to be one of the latter."

  "A cave?" Annja asked.

  Hallinger nodded. "Beneath the building. It was used to house the furnace."

  Annja surveyed the massive empty space.

  The textile mills had been cavernous. Dust covered everything except the floor where pedestrians had walked it semiclean. All of the windows were boarded over, covering empty frames or remnants of glass. Empty beer cans and sleeping bags littered the floor space.

  "I see the local teens didn't hesitate about claiming squatters' rights." Annja took a small digital camera from her backpack.

  "No." Hallinger smiled. "A place like this must have been a godsend to preteens wanting to scare themselves with the idea of ghosts, and teenagers wanting somewhere to explore the prospects of sex, drinking and smoking."

  "Not exactly a lovers' lane." Annja looked at the bird droppings that streaked the floor. Glancing up, she saw a few pigeons on the rafters.

  "It was close enough," Hallinger said.

  "No one found the bodies until yesterday?"

  The professor shook his head as he led the way to the back of the building. "Construction workers shutting down gas mains under the building discovered a closed furnace room. I'll show you."

  Annja followed him into a back room, then down a flight of stairs that led underground. Dank mustiness clogged her nose and made breathing more difficult. The only illumination came from a string of electric bulbs that led into the large basement area. Wooden shelving lined the walls and occupied the center of the room. Whatever the shelves had contained had long since vanished, either through pilfering or by decomposition.

  A handful of people occupied the basement, quietly speaking among themselves as they hunkered down over ice chests with sandwiches and bottled water. They looked up at Annja and a few greeted her.

  Annja responded in kind, noticing the grimy faces and casual clothing and the uneasy look most of the younger ones wore. After a brief introduction, Hallinger led Annja through a tunnel in the basement wall.

  "Not exactly happy to be here, are they?" Annja asked.

  "It's the bodies," Hallinger replied. "You get started in archaeology, you think your first body is going to be a mummy or a caveman."

  "I know." Annja trailed the professor along the small tunnel. "My first body was less than a week old. He'd been buried at a dig site long enough to bloat and collect a number of burrowing insects."

  "Where was that?"

  "New Mexico. During my senior year."

  "Ah, the heat. That must have made things pretty horrible."

  "It was." Some nights Annja still remembered the stench.

  "Who was he?"

  "A grave robber. We were there helping local tribes recover artifacts, but we left the bodies intact. This guy was there collecting skulls to sell on eBay."

  Hallinger scowled in disgust. "Our chosen field does attract the greedy entrepreneur looking to find shortcuts to a quick buck."

  Annja agreed.

  "Did you ever find out who killed your dead man?"

  "No. They never even got his name. The tribal police conducted an investigation, but it didn't go anywhere."

  "I'm not surprised. Desecration of grave sites won't win you any points in the Native American community."

  The tunnel narrowed ahead. Timbers shored the low ceiling up in several areas. The dank smell grew stronger. Gradually, the tunnel angled upward.

  "This leads to the coal furnace." Hallinger kept moving. "It was built before the basement."

  "The tunnel was built to connect the new basement to the furnace?"

  "I don't think so. At least, not for that reason. The furnace, the original furnace, was lost in a cave-in."

  "How did that happen?"

  Hallinger shook his head. "We don't know. There are signs of an explosion – soot on the walls and some blast damage. Some of the bodies were torn up in the explosion. Or maybe by people who found them later."

  "If the bodies were found earlier, why wasn't something done then?"

  "They haven't been found since they were buried. The entrance we came through back there had been walled over, closing off the tunnel. One of the construction workers discovered that by accident. Over the years, the mortar holding the stones together had dried out and crumbled. I don't think it was mixed well. Or perhaps the dankness of the environment contributed to the failure of the mortar. However it worked out, the team checking for gas mains discovered the tunnel. They dug it out in case there were any gas lines in there."

  "Did they know what it was?"

  "No. No blueprints of this building exist. It was built pre-Civil War and whatever records of the building might have been around were destroyed when General Sherman marched on Atlanta."

  "Why wasn't the town razed?" Annja knew from her studies of the war that Sherman had followed scorched-earth tactics, leaving nothing standing in his wake.

  "Because it was so close to the railroad. The town became the site of a Confederate military hospital in 1863. All of the larger buildings, including this one, were used in those efforts."

  "Must have made the textile mill owners happy."

  "I don't think it hurt them any. Have you heard of Christian Tatum?"

  "No. Should I have?" Annja asked.

  "Not really. He's a businessman in Atlanta now, with subsidiaries in Charlotte and Savannah. Does a lot with government contracts. Supposed to be a big deal in military engineering. He has political aspirations. His ancestor, Jedidiah, owned this building from the time it was built until he died
in the 1890s." Hallinger stopped and looked back at her. He slapped the timber across the opening. "Watch your head here."

  Annja ducked down a little more and stepped through the narrow opening. When she emerged, she found herself in a large room carved out of stone and filled with the dead.

  Chapter 2

  Annja peered around the underground room. A large furnace filled the opposite wall. A coal bin sat adjacent to it. Rotting coal filled the bin and spilled across the floor. Broad coal shovels covered in dull orange rust lay on the floor.

  What caught Annja's attention most, though, were the bodies strewed across the floor. The dank subterranean environment had contributed to the growth of dark mold on the bones. The clothing had largely rotted away, leaving only scattered pieces.

  Sixteen skeletons lay in disarray, spread outward from the furnace as if they'd been tossed by a big hand. All of them were burned and blackened, twisted by incredible force. Rock fragments lay among them.

  "Have you moved the bodies?" Annja slid out of her backpack and took out a miniflashlight. She switched on the light. The powerful halogen beam stabbed out, penetrating the darkness more strongly than the electric bulbs.

  "No, we haven't touched them yet," Hallinger said as he squatted against the wall near the opening.

  Annja breathed shallowly. After 150-plus years, the bacteria that triggered decomposition had done its work. All trace of a death odor was gone. But the musty thickness of the air was still filled with particulates. She took a disposable filtered mask from her backpack and fit it over her face.

  "I'm not an explosives expert." She aimed her beam at the furnace. The metal sides had been warped in the explosion.

  "One of the students advanced the theory that the explosion was the result of some kind of coal-gas buildup."

  Annja knew coal gas was frequently the cause of mining accidents involving explosions. It gathered in pockets, and just the slightest spark could set it off. That was one of the reasons coal miners didn't carry metal objects like rings or buttons down into a mine.

  "No." Annja played the beam around.

  "Why?"

  "With the furnace working, coal gas couldn't build up. The flames would burn it off," she said.

  "They could have shut down over the weekend. Or a long holiday."

  "With the South warring with the North over the textiles market with England, I doubt the mill closed down much for holidays or weekends. Time was money. Most mill owners worked as much as they could. Even if the furnace wasn't kept fed to warm the building, it would have been banked. I don't think a buildup of gas was likely."

  "Do you think it was an accident?" Hallinger asked.

  Annja shook her head. "I don't."

  Hallinger sighed. "Neither do I. These people were murdered."

  Playing the flashlight beam over the skeletons, Annja saw some of them couldn't have been much more than children. They hadn't had a chance inside the room.

  Hallinger sounded tired when he continued. "It's bad enough finding these bodies after all these years, especially with them being slaves, but having to confirm to those people out there that they were murdered is going to make things even worse."

  Annja silently agreed. "Why did you ask me about the Hausa people?"

  Hallinger directed his flashlight beam to a large stone lying on one side of the room. The rock was as big as two of her fists together. Someone had taken time, years probably, to smooth the rock's surface until it looked polished. Then they'd carved images with a sharp point and rubbed some kind of dye or stain into them.

  Drawn by the images, Annja knelt and inspected the stone. She recognized the letters. "Hausa had its roots in the Chadic language, which is Afro-Asiatic in origin."

  "I knew that much. It's also an official language of several West African countries these days."

  "Have you touched this?"

  "No, and it's been killing me not to." Hallinger rubbed his forehead in frustration. "Everything about this place speaks of something beyond just the Civil War."

  "Why?"

  "These men were carrying weapons." Hallinger raked his flashlight over the bodies.

  "I saw those," Annja admitted. She studied the makeshift weapons, some of them no more than hoe handles inscribed with more Hausa writing. There were also three axes, their handles marked with more of the language. Close inspection of one of the ax heads revealed that it, too, had been marked.

  "Escaping slaves didn't carry weapons." Hallinger frowned. "Getting caught with one usually meant getting hung from the nearest tree when pursuers caught up with them."

  The presence of the weapons told Annja what they were looking at. "This was a war party."

  "I think so, too," the professor said.

  Annja put the miniflashlight between her teeth and lifted her digital camera. She focused on the rock, then on the weapons, finally taking pictures of the bodies.

  Hallinger waited patiently until she was done. "Can you read the writing on the stone?"

  "Some of it." Annja put the camera away. "The stone tells a story of an exodus. Of a long travel, from what I gather."

  "There was a slave market not far from Dakar, Senegal."

  "I know. Ile de Goree. It was one of the primary contact points of the Triangle Trade," she said.

  "Slaves, rum and sugar. Those are the things that built the New World. That and the search for riches." Hallinger sighed. "People think cotton is what brought the slaves to the New World, but that was only what developed out of the slave trade."

  Annja knew that was true. The early Atlantic trade had started a history of hundreds of years of pain and suffering. She pushed that out of her mind for the moment, wanting to concentrate on the dig and the unanswered questions she and the professor both had. "I'm ready to start if you are," she said grimly.

  Hallinger nodded. "I'll get the crew together."

  ****

  The excavation, even though there was no digging involved, was slow work. They always were. Annja had no problem with that. She loved her chosen field. As an orphan, she'd had no real sense of connection or family. As an archaeologist, she connected not only people but also years.

  In a map of the past, everyone had a place. It was just a matter of finding the proper pieces, she thought.

  Like the piece of the sword she'd found in France while looking for the Beast of Gévaudan. That piece had brought a number of things together. All of the other pieces of the sword that had been sought after since Joan of Arc's death on a burning pyre over five hundred years earlier had come together. Once she'd touched those pieces, the sword had reforged itself.

  Magically.

  She disapproved of the term, but there was no other explanation. Annja had seen it happen. In the blink of an eye, she'd held the sword – suddenly whole – in her hand. It had never been out of her reach since.

  Out of that experience, she'd begun forging new relationships. One with Roux, who claimed to have witnessed Joan's death and been charged with finding Joan's sword. Another with Garin, who had at one time been Roux's protégé but now sought to kill him and take the sword from Annja. Garin was afraid that whatever power had enabled him to remain relatively ageless for those years would fade now the sword was once more whole.

  Annja still didn't know if she believed her bloodline tied her to Joan of Arc. Whatever chance she might have had of ascertaining that had been destroyed during the flooding of New Orleans. The orphanage where she'd grown up had been washed away. The nuns who raised her were dead or scattered. Most of them hadn't been concerned with the pasts of the children in their care; they'd been grooming them for the future.

  But Annja believed the sword had been Joan's. Now it was hers. It had changed her life. She was still learning what all that meant.

  ****

  Annja and Hallinger worked well together, directing the expertise of the retired couple who had worked dig sites before, and training the university students. Using soft rope and pitons they drove int
o the ground with small sledges, they laid out a grid over the recovery site. Since the bodies had been scattered by the blast, the whole floor of the furnace room was designated the recovery site.

  Once the grid was laid out in twelve-inch squares, Annja and Hallinger took turns working the recovery. They moved square by square, cataloging and videotaping everything they took out. The other dig workers labeled the recovered items and packed them out.

  "I'm surprised the police released this site to you." Annja searched through a pocket of a shirt fragment she took from the latest square.

  "Are you kidding?" Hallinger snorted and shook his head. "They didn't want this. You saw that crowd outside. As soon as the story hit the news, people poured in from Atlanta and other nearby towns. They called the university and got in touch with me almost immediately."

  "You said construction workers found the bodies."

  "Yeah."

  "Did they take anything?"

  "I asked. For a moment I thought I was going to get thrown out. But the police chief stepped in and made it clear that my team and I were going to excavate the remains and see that they were handled with respect. The police chief reiterated my question. They said no." Hallinger shrugged. "You never know. Maybe they didn't. Most people are reluctant to touch the dead."

  The pocket Annja explored yielded a folded piece of paper that had browned over the years. She didn't try to open it. That would be done under laboratory conditions to help preserve the paper and the ink.

  Three coins slid from the folds of the paper. All of them were of similar design, showing a woman with braided hair under a crown surrounded by stars and a circle of wheat stalks around the words Half Cent. United States Of America circled the wheat. The dates on the coins were 1843, 1852 and 1849.

  Annja dropped them in Hallinger's waiting palm.