A Passing Curse (2011)

by C R Trolson

  “Did you realize that fully 90 percent of the world’s languages are extinct? Never to be spoken again?” He did not wait for an answer. “From Papua, New Guinea to the Himalayas to the Brazilian Rain Forest we’re losing language at an incredible rate. Even in the United States I doubt if you can find anyone who speaks a passable Comanche much less Chumash or any of a thousand other coastal dialects. Losing a language, especially with groups that did not write, had no alphabet, is like losing the soul of a people, everything they thought about and how they thought about it, gone.” To illustrate, he flicked his hand, scattering dust. She wondered how long ago Hamsun had lost his soul. No one had cared for years what the old coot said or what language he said it in. She saw the sadness of that settled in the disorganized room, like the vestibule in some forgotten temple.

  “There,” he finally said and scribbled across a mangled green tablet. After five minutes of writing in the tablet he walked to the chalkboard. The first piece of chalk splintered in his hands, shards hitting the floor. He rummaged around his desk and found another piece of chalk under a yellowed newspaper. Finally, he scratched out the word ETEL. “First word, to fear.” He scribbled some more. HOC. “Second word, the creature.”

  He traded the chalk for a pointer and turned to her as if she were a congress of students. “The Chumash had very complicated tenses. I learned it from studying the papers of Hayes, who laboriously wrote a Chumash dictionary in phonetic English. Of course, he did it in the early nineteenth century when there were still a few elders around who spoke Chumash. In English we have no corresponding translation, but it would go something like this: Fear the creature who contemplates being the creature. You see? It’s not simply fear something but fear the contemplation that someone has of being the creature.”

  “What creature?” she asked.

  “I would suppose Chingichiiut or Cumas or some other variety of demon they had. I suppose it would depend on where you found the words.”

  She handed him the whale.

  Hamsun turned it rapidly in his hands, mumbling to himself. “Charm stone. Definitely Chumash, notice the cigar shape. Quite a few of these at the Musse l’Homme in Paris. The Smithsonian has a bundle. Cessac carried off thirty tons of Coastal Indians’ artifacts to Paris. The Smithsonian gobbled another thirty tons. In the late Victorian era if you didn’t have an American Indian oddment in your curio cabinet you weren’t cultured - bah - first we bury them, the Indians, now we dig them back up.” He stared at her hands. He brusquely grabbed her right hand, turned it over, inspected the palm. Her calluses were the size and hardness of nickels. “What do you do?”

  She pulled her hand away from him. He was strong for an old coot. “Archeology.”

  He sneered. “I never understood the archeologist’s obsession with artifacts. Any educated person would be more interested in what ancient man did, what he felt, his motivations. Any good scholar would want to know where we came from and where we are going. Anthropology is the way.”

  “Artifacts are all that’s left,” she said. “Artifacts tell the story. Artifacts and bones.”

  “Artifacts sell,” Hamsun cackled. He picked among the trash on his desk and from under a bag of Cheetohs removed a magnifying glass. He peered at the charm stone and looked at her. “Have you examined it? Do archeologists still examine their wares?”

  “I looked it over,” she said. “It’s also a whistle. The words are carved in the side. Et El Hoc.”

  He glared at her. “I can see that much.” He peered down the hole and blew once sharply. A sharp sound. She tensed. The earth did not shake. An Indian princess did not appear. “That’s how it worked,” he said. “You blew the whistle to scare off the creature.”

  Hamsun sharply set the charm stone down to show his disappointment in her and archeologists in general. He noticed the paper grocery sack. “Lunch?”

  The sack contained the doll, the dust sample from skeleton one, and the index metacarpals from skeleton two. She’d left the strand of hair and sandal in her room. No sense in giving him everything. She pulled the doll out of the brown bag and handed it to him. His eyes looked as if a sandwich would have been more satisfying, but he ran his fingers over the rough wood, turned it around and rotated it end over end. He grunted when he set it down.

  “When one of the unmarried girl neophytes was discovered with child, usually from a priest or soldier, the priests would make the girl carve the doll and paint it. They’d whip her while she carried the child, causing miscarriage, dreadful stuff. Odd considering the Church’s stand on life.”

  “Is it authentic?” she asked.

  “Probably,” he said and scrambled through junk on the table until he found a pair of tweezers. He removed a tiny chip of red paint from the doll’s cheek. He took the chip to a microscope, put the chip on a slide, and examined it. “Hmmm. Filaments from berries the Indians used for red pigment. Huckleberries.”

  He washed off the slide in the sink. “I don’t remember the doll, but I dug the charm stone out of a midden in Gaviota, years ago.”

  “What?”

  “I think it was 1963, perhaps earlier. The doll, other than being authentic, I don’t know much about. They’re fairly rare. You might get a good price for it, if it’s money you want.”

  She picked up the jade whale. Her hands trembled slightly. She could not believe what he had said. “You found this in 1963?” Had he lost his mind?

  He shrugged and retrieved the chalk from the blackboard. He took the charm stone from her and rubbed the chalk lightly on the opposite side of Et el Hoc. “PKH” he said. “Look for yourself.” He handed her the stone. “I used to mark my finds. Some say it’s unprofessional, but what do they know?”

  “PKH,” she said. “Professor Knut Hamsun.” She felt the perfect fool for not seeing the initials before, but who could blame her with all the craziness going on? Hamsun smirked, he knew she was smarting. But if Hamsun had dug this up almost fifty years ago, then…no, that was impossible. Hamsun had lost his mind. Or the initials were Chumash symbols and Hamsun had adroitly fitted them to his name. “You were young to be a professor.”

  “What?” he asked. “I’ve always been a professor. Now I remember the creature who the charm stone works against. Sok-so-uh, the high demon, the high devil of the Canelino culture. It was actually against the law to mention his name. You could get banished for that, left out in the cold. He was a mischievous demon, sometimes he’d walk around holding what appeared to be a swaddled baby, inviting village women to touch the baby. But it was not a baby.” Hamsun cackled. “It was his engorged, uh, member.”

  Engorged member? Jesus. “Thanks for sharing that.”

  “It’s bizarre that American teenagers have a similar custom. At the movies, the boy holds a box of popcorn in his lap and invites the girl to eat the popcorn, all the while her hand coming closer to his - well, you know the boy is coming up through the carton…”

  She interrupted him. “ - It’s not a custom. It’s called hormones. Can you tell me anything else about the demon?” She did not have time for the mental images of a dirty old man.

  Hamsun shrugged. “Sok-so-uh was also a blood-eater.”

  “Vampire?”

  “Who knows? The Caneleno didn’t necessarily have a strong line between reality and supernatural. They were quiet people, introverted, very philosophic, as most people who live by nature are.” He looked at her and cackled. “But then you know all this. As I recall, you were a very good student, Miss Webber. It is still Miss, isn’t it?”

  “Still,” she said. The old coot. Was he implying she was married to archeology or that no one would have her? “You knew who I was all along?”

  “Yah, and you knew who I was. You were the only one in class who didn’t take notes and yet you always knew the answers.”

  “I didn’t think you’d noticed.” His tests hadn’t been difficult, mostly essay questions open to a variety of interpretations. She’d taken a point of view favoring the
Indians instead of the Europeans and passed the tests easily if not guiltily.

  “And you didn’t patronize me too much like some of them. You didn’t come off as Sacagawea’s granddaughter or something.” Hamsun rumpled his brow and gave a little laugh. “You weren’t as bad as some.”

  “It was a good class,” she lied. She had taken Hamsun’s class because of his notoriously lax regimen. She’d wanted to get out of school and into the field.

  Hamsun shook his head. “A class of uneducated ninnies trying to boost their GPA with an easy grade. The basket weaving and creative writing courses were all full, so they chose me.” He searched under a pile of newspaper and found a crinkled bag of oatmeal cookies. “I received a grant for research and quit teaching, good luck and good-bye to all that rubbish. Students - Bah.” He chewed down two cookies, strewing the front of his sweater with crumbs, before offering her one. “So, what are you doing now? I heard you were in Syria or Egypt, some godforsaken place, digging up gold. I hear you were doing good, for an archeologist, and then I heard about the accident.” He quit talking and frowned. She ate half the cookie.

  “I guess you’ve heard about everything,” she said. “You know it all.” She finished the cookie and looked around, her mouth dry. He pointed to a weary refrigerator, chipped and greasy. It was full of canned generic diet root beer and Velveeta cheese, all covered with a light layer of dust. She grabbed a root beer, wiped the top of the can, and drank half. “I retired for a while.” She was not going to explain what had happened to her so called career.

  “But you are back at it, No? You’re employed by Ajax Rasmussen? The mission. Why are you working for him again?”

  “Again?” The old coot did know everything. He smiled and wiped crumbs off his mouth. He seemed pretty damn happy with himself. At least he wasn’t cackling. “You don’t like Ajax? Pillar of the community?”

  “We’ve had our differences. I started a referendum to stop him from using his property as a blood lab, largely ignored, as I recall, except for a nasty letter from Ajax. He does not like dissension. Not in his little corner of the world.”

  “He’s good to work for,” she said.

  “And he’ll hire anyone.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that I know all about the little mess in Romania.” Hamsun smiled, definitely on the verge of cackling. “Were you really looking for Dracula?”

  Before she could stop, she found herself explaining. “I’d been shut out after Syria, after the accident. You know how it is. I needed a patron. Ajax has enough money to support a dig anywhere. He doesn’t rely on the board of some university’s prissy directors.” No way was she telling him about Ajax’s plans to find the Temple of Arysur. He’d stroke-out laughing about that.

  “I heard three men were killed.”

  She moved a pile of brown folders, a sticky orange juice can, and sat down. She told him how she’d met Ajax. She told him about Romania and three dead soldiers.

  When she paused, he said, “It sounds like self-defense. A clear case.”

  She nodded, glad that someone agreed with her, and told him about Syria. She saved the part about killing Clark Newman for the last. She was not one to tell strangers her problems, but Hamsun was so old it was like talking to her father again. Except that Hamsun seemed to be listening. And why not, being cooped up like he was.

  After she’d finished, he was silent for a moment. “You were both doing what you enjoyed,” he finally said. “Working underground is always dangerous. No one is to be blamed. All underground work is an accident looking for a place to happen.”

  “That’s what I tell myself.” She reached into the paper sack and removed the plastic envelope containing the sample of dust she’d taken from skeleton one. “Could you have this analyzed?”

  He turned the clear envelope over in his hand. He held it to the light. “What is it? Where did it come from?”

  She didn’t want to give him any clues. She wanted an impartial test. “I’m not sure.”

  He looked at her, nodded, and casually dropped the envelope on top of some papers. He picked up the jade whale. “Are you going to tell me where you got this? I sold it years ago at an auction. I’m sure I got a good price, can’t remember offhand. Can’t recall who I sold it to, either.”

  “I’ve been wondering when you were going to ask,” she said. “I found it clasped in the hand of a skeleton covered by three feet of dirt. Those really aren’t your initials.”

  He ignored her question. “At the mission?”

  “Behind the cemetery. The doll was at the skeleton’s feet.”

  Knut Hamsun sighed. He sounded like a man running out of time. Before leaving, she handed him the plastic bag holding the three metacarpals. “These fingers were wrapped around the whistle.” He’d really hoot if he knew she’d lost a solid gold cross.

  Ajax had always enjoyed the view from his desk. He could simply turn his chair, lean back, and watch the city as it moved through the day. Far off, he saw cars hustling down the old coast road and wondered where they were headed. He felt good. Alive with purpose. He swiveled the chair and returned to his guest. He did not want the detective to think he was ignoring him.

  “So you see,” he told the detective, “I believe Reese Tarrant was responsible for all thirteen murders. He killed Homer because he needed a dupe to lay the blame on. He even manufactured this incredible tale that my gardener was a mass killer.” Ajax laughed to himself. He knew that this detective, this Hernandez, wanted to believe Reese was guilty of something, even if the story was ludicrous. Reese was a killer, true, but a righteous one who would never stoop to whimsical slaughter. “He is a very dangerous and crazy man,” Ajax added, enjoying himself tremendously. “An evildoer.”

  Hernandez swirled the crystal snifter and took a sip of Martell’s. “Are you going to paint?”

  “What?” Ajax asked. He thought Hernandez a bit wet and was thankful it was Reese Tarrant who was aligned against him and not this Hernandez. Ah, the vicissitudes of life.

  “Are you going to paint?” Hernandez nodded to the blue plastic under the desk and the chair he sat on. “The drop covers.”

  “Oh yes, I’m going to paint,” Ajax said. “Just a little something. Shall we get back to our topic?”

  “Sure,” Hernandez said and took another drink. He seemed very much at ease. “You were telling me that Reese is the Anaheim Vampire. I mean, with all due respect, sir, I know Reese killed Richard Lamb, who you knew as Homer Wermels, but I don’t think he’s crazy, not in the legal sense, and I don’t think he’s a serial killer. Homer was innocent and I think Reese killed him because he wanted to solve the case. He wanted to be a hero. So, obviously, the real killer is still out there.”

  “Go on, detective.”

  Hernandez took another drink. “This afternoon Reese told me you were responsible for the murders. That somehow you ordered Homer Wermels to kill thirteen women. He spent thirty minutes telling me you were going to kill both of us. He warned me to get back to LA.” Hernandez laughed. “He said my life was in danger.”

  “I’ll kill you and Reese?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Why?”

  “He claims you’re a vampire. Not a real vampire, but a guy who thinks he’s a vampire. He claims you killed some kid and a priest. It’s nuts, right?”

  Ajax concentrated on the detective. His lips moved but Ajax heard no sound. Hernandez was a large Hispanic male who might run a good fifteen pints, at least. He’d called two hours ago, claiming that he had concerns about Mr. Rasmussen’s safety. This Hernandez had stressed confidentiality. He was on some sort of undercover assignment to nab Reese. Ajax felt so ecstatic for this opportunity, that it was difficult to hide his enthusiasm. He could smell the blood coming. So caught up in the anticipation, he was lost for a moment before realizing that Hernandez had quit talking and was staring at him, waiting for a reply.

  “Sorry,” Ajax said, “I was contemplating t
he day ahead. Now then, back to the case in hand - Reese is not a real policeman, is he? He has no authority?”

  “That’s right,” Hernandez said. “He’s retired. He never was much of a cop. Always on the edge. Had a string of disciplinary problems.”

  “Fantastic,” Ajax said. “And no one knows that you are here, besides Reese?”

  “That’s right. I’m undercover,” he said slowly, the drink starting to take effect. “I’m doing a classified internal investigation. Normally, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but I’m warning you as a courtesy so you can alert your security to watch for Reese.” Hernandez smiled. “I’m doing a classified internal investigation - ”

  Ajax broke in. “And your courtesy is appreciated.” Ajax laughed and clapped his hands. “You have no idea how happy this makes me.” The detective laughed along with him, somewhat sluggishly because of the eight milligrams of Xanax added to his drink, but laughing hard enough not to notice Ted behind him with the garden shears.

  When the blood came, Ajax gently pushed his chair back to keep from getting splashed.

  15

  In the castle’s grim study, Ajax considered his reflection in a floor-length oval mirror, connected with brass hinges to a walnut stand. The mirror, once owned by Marie Antoinette and backed with ground diamonds, had depth, had resonance. He wore a black cloak and Cheevy’s floppy hat. He’d drilled a hole though the top of the cross and it now swung freely from his neck on a heavy gold chain, stolen centuries earlier from an Incan priest.

  He stuck out his chest. He put his hand on his hip. He could pass for a Spanish grandee, possibly a duke, even one of the pretty Kings of Castille. His image, his reflection, was clearer than it had been for weeks.

  He was becoming substantial. He felt heavy, almost viscous. He glanced at the desk, at the plain looking, frightfully banal, cardboard box ready for the postman. He reflected that there was fruition in hard work and careful planning.