by Alex Archer
He drank deeply, choked, coughed, drank a little more. Then he nodded as Annja began to daub blood from his face.
"They're a very talented bunch," he said. "And it's cheap. They lend it to me, then they don't have to store it. A lot of it's Billie's. She's one of the best."
"Your studio in back is in disarray, too," Godin said. "Suppose you tell us what happened."
The young artist sighed. His eyes were infinitely sad. They were also well blackened – he'd look like a raccoon by morning.
"They took him," he said.
"Who's 'he'?" Godin asked.
"Who's 'they'?" Annja asked.
He drank some more. His hand still shook. Water ran down his chin, diluting the blood that had halfway dried there. Annja availed herself of the opportunity to wipe most of it away when he lowered the cup to his lap. He was sitting cross-legged on a rumpled dusty throw rug in the center of the hardwood floor.
"I've been painting mostly from a sitting model," he said. He showed Annja a shy smile. "I think you suspected it from the first."
"I did," she said. Not really, she thought. But maybe. Somehow.
"As for who 'they' were – " He shrugged, then grimaced at the pain the movement caused. "They are whoever comes in the night to capture beings like the Santo Niño. Men in black suits with masks. And guns. Machine guns."
Annja looked quickly to Godin, who shrugged. They might have been the same men last seen descending from the clouds to the slaughter scene at Chimayó. They might just as well have come from any number of federal, state or even local agencies. Or from some government contractor. Or even been conventional if well-equipped criminals, although that seemed unlikely.
"How do you capture a being who can walk through walls?" she asked.
"They used Tasers to stun him," Byron said mournfully. "They were holding me down by then. Then they put him in a sort of sack. That's when they started to beat me so I didn't see what happened other than that they carried him out. I – I thought I heard a helicopter. But it was hard to tell with them hitting me."
"An eight-year-old boy?" Annja said, aghast. "Who on earth would Taser an eight-year-old boy?"
"Any of a number of your local American police agencies, to judge by the wire services," Father Godin said. "That would certainly explain his inability to escape."
"I think he wanted to help me," Byron said. "He couldn't. He isn't violent. He doesn't have that capability. He tried to talk to them, reason with them. But they just shot him with those darts and shocked him."
"Jesus," Annja said.
"He spoke to you?" Godin said, leaning forward slightly. He was twining his fists together between his knees now.
"Often," Byron said as Annja finished cleaning his face, or at least smearing the blood and grime around to a more consistent film. There was no hope of effecting any better cleanup with the tools at hand, so she tossed the pink-stained paper towel aside and sat back to give the young man space to breathe. And talk.
"Of what?" the priest asked.
Byron smiled sadly and shook his head. "Many things. Some of the same things he said to the people he met on the roads. He seemed sad tonight. That was strange. Usually he's very cheerful. That makes his prognostications of doom a little more shocking. If effective. He would never specify what exactly was going to happen, though. Only that it was bad.
"Other things we talked about – those were just for me. Please."
"It could be vital – "
Annja held up a hand, cutting the Jesuit off. "What is he?"
Byron's smile was magical. It lit his face. It seemed to light the room, small, cramped and dingy though it was. "A marvelous child."
"Is he – ?" She could not force herself to pick a next word, much less say it. Jesus? An alien? A remarkably clever impostor?
A siren cut the night like a razor. It was still thin, with distance. But unmistakable. Godin stood up. "Time to go," he said.
Annja rose. Byron waved off her attempt to help him up. "I think I'll be fine here. I'd better let them take me to the hospital."
"Good idea," Godin said. "Get X-rays, in case my field-expedient diagnosis was wrong."
"Byron, this is important," Annja said. "Is there anything else you can tell us?"
"Oh, yes," Byron said. "Just before the men burst in he said to give you a message."
"What?" Annja was gratified, if slightly, to hear Godin utter the incredulous monosyllable in unison with her.
He nodded carefully. "He said to tell what he called 'those who come after'to seek for him 'within three leagues' of the spot he was first found."
Godin stood by the door, poised to exit. The slight frown furrowing his brow indicated he was very upset. Puzzled but knowing no time remained, Annja joined him.
As he held the door for her, Annja's conscience twinged. She looked back at Byron, who now sat holding his head in his hands. He's hurt. He's innocent. Isn't my duty to look after him?
Byron looked up at her and smiled. "Don't worry, Annja," he said beatifically. "I'm not the one you're meant to look out for."
****
"Leagues?" Annja said.
Godin lay on his back on her motel-room bed with his shoes off and the backs of his hands over his eyes. "You're a historian," he said with unaccustomed asperity. "Surely you know what a league is."
He had experienced a savage coughing fit shortly after they came into the room. He had gone into the bathroom for quite a while. Even now he seemed to be slow recovering. She tried not to let herself feel concern as she sat at a round table by the floor-length curtains covering the window, waiting for her notebook PC to connect with the motel's broadband network.
"It's just not a term I'm used to hearing in everyday speech."
"What about this affair suggests the everyday?" Godin said.
She made a sound from the base of her throat and shook her head. Her insides seemed to writhe with frustration and urgency. They have the child! What are they doing to the poor little thing?
"Forget leagues," she muttered, typing furiously. She was barraging Google with sets of search terms, trying to track down all known Holy Child reports. "How the hell are we supposed to know where he was first found? We have dozens of encounter reports. Some of them are certainly phony. And how do we know how many sightings happened without anyone even reporting them? What if there's no way to find out the first time he was picked up? And does that mean this time around? In New Mexico? Or every Holy Child sighting clear back to Spain?"
"What if he does not mean being found in person?" the Jesuit asked.
She looked hard at him. "What do you mean?"
"Think back on the history of the sanctuary of Chimayó. Was there not some story associated with the miraculous discovery of the image on display there?"
She blinked. "I think you're right."
She started yet another Google search. The truth was, she had gotten so overloaded and jaded with tracking various images and origins of the Santo Niño, literally around the world, that she had simply glossed over the Chimayó legend.
"The quickest and easiest story to check firsthand," she said, "and the last I actually follow. I have a lot to learn about this hero business."
"Life is a process of on-the-job training," Godin said.
She was worried. His voice sounded weak. Maybe he's just showing his age. He was not a young man, not by any means, although that fact was hard to keep in mind if one spent any time in his company. His silver-gray hair, seamed face and air of worldly experience were more than counterbalanced by his vigor, physically and mentally, and a sprightly, youthful – or perhaps ageless – spirit.
And then again the events of the past few days had Annja worn to a nub, physically and emotionally. And she was a remarkably fit young woman even before the sword had brought her capabilities whose full extent she had yet to learn.
"Here we go," she said, attending to the screen. "I could kick myself for spacing this out. Legend has it that some time i
n the 1800s a man was out plowing the fields near the town of Chimayó. His daughter told him she heard church bells ringing from underground. When he dug down he found a wooden statue of the Holy Child. It's the one kept in the chapel next to the sanctuary. The hole the father dug is where the holy dirt supposedly comes from."
She clicked back and forth between several other citations. "Basically what I get are all on the same theme, with slight variations."
She looked over to Godin. "Want to hear some other versions?"
"As the accounts are likely to bear only passing resemblance to any kind of historical accuracy," he said, "I think I shall pass."
Her shoulders sagged and her back rounded. "You don't think this has any significance?"
"I didn't say that. Whatever or whoever the Holy Child – our Holy Child, as it were – may be, I doubt literal history holds much importance to him."
She rocked back in her chair and tapped her fingers on the tabletop beside her computer. "I know we're pressed for time," she said, "but would you care to elaborate on that? It seems like it ought to be significant, but I'm too fuzzed to figure out where you're going."
"Understandably, my dear." He sat up, coughed slightly into a fist, shook his head. Then, seeming to rally, he went on.
"I think we can take it for granted that our Holy Child is not literally a thirteenth-century child roaming the Earth."
"Since I seem to be stuck accepting impossibilities a lot these days," she said, "why not? Couldn't he be a ghost of the real kid who smuggled bread and water to the prisoners?"
"The shell," Godin said.
He smiled at Annja's look of puzzlement. "The golden brooch the Santo Niño wears on his cape is called a St. James shell. It was not added to portrayals of the Santo Niño until two centuries after the supposed events in Atocha."
"All right. But couldn't a ghost appear wearing it? Whatever it wanted to?" She shook her head. "For-give me for not being too up on the habits and abilities of ghosts, since I don't believe in them and all."
"You will learn," Father Godin said with a knowing smile. "In the meantime, I believe you make my point for me. Whatever this entity is, he – I prefer to call him he, rather than it, because I am a sentimental old fool – chooses to present the appearance we see."
"Okay. I'll give you that. And so – "
"He chooses, specifically, to present himself as a figure out of legend, fraught with spiritual significance. Why is that? I suspect the full truth is as unknowable as the true mind of God. But does it not suggest that our little friend is concerned more with symbology and myth than the world of the literal and material?"
"I guess," Annja said.
She turned back to her computer and brought up a Google map for Chimayó and its environs. "But what does that really do for us? A nine-mile radius around the sanctuary is a lot of terrain."
"True. And that particular region of the Rio Grande Valley north of Santa Fe happens to be full of restricted Los Alamos satellite sites, which complicates our search. My intuition tells me wherever the Santo Niño has been taken has something to do with one of those sites."
"You think this shadowy agency – or contractor – that hired your friend Mad Jack – "
"We're hardly friends," Godin said in tones of mild reproof. "Indeed, he and I have each tried to kill the other more than once. Although those were in the course of our professional lives, and so had nothing to do with friendship one way or another."
Chapter 22
She couldn't tell whether or how much the grizzled Jesuit was kidding her. She decided not to ask. "You think they're the ones who roughed up poor Byron and snatched the Holy Child?"
"You were thinking perhaps al-Qaeda?" Godin asked.
"No," Annja replied.
But she was thinking of Dr. Cogswell and his portentous warnings. She had not told Godin about the retired professor turned monster hunter. She wasn't sure why. But even now she could not bring herself to mention what Cogswell had said to her. Or how their last exchange had ended.
Yet the words of that last, interrupted call returned to ring like alarms in her brain. "You must study the sightings," he had said. "Treat them as puzzle pieces. Find how they fit..."
"Seek the center, Annja Creed," she muttered to herself.
"I beg your pardon?" Godin said.
She shook her head. Damn! A sure sign I'm wearing down – I start thinking aloud without knowing it.
She opened her geographic-information-system software.
"Okay," she said, pushing her chair back and inviting Godin to come and look. "I've got something."
He swung off the bed and came to join her. She was pleased to see that he displayed his customary vigor, and the color had come back to his cheeks. The skin looked a little tauter and less porous, too, as he leaned in close.
"I've plotted all reports of Holy Child encounters from the latest flap," she said. The screen displayed a map of New Mexico covered with a surprising number of little red dots. A sort of vague pink paramecium shape enveloped them, defining the area where sightings had occurred.
"The distribution is nowhere near circular – that Murakami case skews it all to heck and gone to the West. But look what happens if I weight by total number of sightings," she said.
She pressed a key. A darker pink circle appeared, much smaller. A blinking red cross indicated its geometric center.
"That's the sanctuary of Chimayó," she said. "Cool. No?"
"Indeed. But your objection would still seem to apply. A diameter of nearly twenty miles gives us a great deal of ground to cover."
She slumped back in her chair. Deflated again. "Betrayed once more by technology's bright promise."
"Wait," he said.
She looked up at him.
"What about the monster sightings?" he asked.
"What about them?"
"Can you plot them, as well?"
She felt a weird falling-elevator sensation in her throat. "You must study the sightings." She recalled Cogswell's words. "Seek the center..."
What if he was talking about the creature reports? They were his main interest. Monsters. Not the Holy Child.
"You know," she said, typing furiously, "you're probably almost as clever as you think you are."
"My dear, I have inhabited this mortal shell long enough, and in alarming enough circumstances, that I believe I can honestly say I know exactly how clever I actually am. But as a Jesuit, might I not choose to pose as deeming myself more or less clever than I am? Or perhaps – "
She held up a palm. "Okay, we've just reached my maximum recommended dose of Jesuitry for one day. Feel free to run that by me tomorrow if you want. But you'd better do it early," she said.
He laughed.
She turned back to the screen and pumped her fist. "Yes! I've got you now, you little – "
She felt Godin's deceptively bland gaze upon her, and decided not to finish the sentence.
"Behold. We have the anomalous-creature reports plotted in shades of blue. Courtesy of a cryptozoology Web site that kept a running of them all."
"A wondrous thing is the Internet," Godin said drily. The variegated colors of the screen reflected on the lenses of his glasses.
"A wondrous thing is nerds." That didn't sound quite grammatical, but she was tired and on a roll. "And here – "
She stabbed the screen with a triumphant forefinger. It flexed slightly to her touch, momentarily distorting the image in a polychrome swirl. "The statistical center of the monster reports. Including the ones I was involved in."
Godin's eyebrows rose from behind his spectacles. "Just within our three-league limit," he said, "and north-northwest of the sanctuary."
Annja sucked in a deep breath and made a fretful sound, half nasal, half hum. "But we still don't have any evidence. Just circles on a computer screen. And one thing going on digs has taught me – computer projections are one thing. What's really in the ground is another."
The Jesuit smiled. "I thi
nk I've got something to contribute here." With his first two fingers extended he made a rolling gesture at her notebook computer. "If I may?"
She pushed back from the table. "Knock yourself out."
He sat in the chair across from her and swung the computer around to face him. Frowning slightly, she got up to come around and look over his shoulder.
He held up a finger.
She stopped. "You have got to be kidding me!"
The finger wagged. "Please. Allow me a few secrets. Or at least a little professional mystification."
She jutted her chin and scowled. Ignoring her, he began to type.
"I've had enough run-ins with guys in black helicopters," she said finally. "Don't do anything that's going to get my motel room door kicked in, okay?"
"I assure you," he said, gazing intently at the screen, "I will do nothing that is illegal. For me."
She spun and walked huffily into the bathroom to splash water on her face. "Damn him," she said to her image in the mirror, behind a safely closed door. "I do all this awesome sleuthing, and he dismisses me as if I'm a schoolgirl."
She scowled more fiercely and flared her nostrils at herself. Then she exhaled and relaxed, laughing softly. "He's right," she said. For all the mad exigency of her curiosity it occurred to her there might be some things she was best off not seeing. Especially if they did happen to draw official interest. "And I am acting like a schoolgirl. A little bit."
She felt better when she opened the door and went back into the main room.
He had thrust himself back from the table and was sitting with long legs stretched out before him, arms folded and chin on clavicle, gazing at the screen.
"No luck?" she asked, coming around to stand behind him.
"It depends, I suppose, upon one's definition of luck."
He swiveled the PC toward her. Its screen showed an overhead shot of what looked like a farmhouse with a pitched tin roof. It was hard to tell exactly. The picture was slightly blurry. She got an impression of general disuse and disrepair.
"There is indeed an underground facility in the vicinity of our epicenter," he said. "It was built late in WWII as a Los Alamos auxiliary. Nothing so unusual in that – the Manhattan Project was scattered all over the United States."