Enigmatic Pilot

CHAPTER 1. Time of the End

WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? THE YEAR IS 1844. KARL MARX IS IN Paris playing indoor tennis with Friedrich Engels, who has just authored The Condition of the Working Class in England. In Iceland the last pair of great auks have been killed, while in the booming and embattled United States the first minstrel shows are packing in crowds in the East, as former slaves Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass lecture on abolitionism, and hosts of eastern white folk are packing up and heading west via the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. War looms with Mexico, the lunatic bankrupt Charles Goodyear will receive a meaningless patent for the vulcanization of rubber, the shrewd bigot Samuel Finley Breese Morse takes credit for inventing the telegraph, and a deluded mob murders the deluded visionary Joseph Smith, Jr., and his brother Hyrum in a jail in Carthage, Illinois. Many people are asking themselves, “What hath God wrought?”

One such individual in Zanesville, Ohio, was just straggling out of a peculiar iron sphere, about the size of three B & O hopper cars, which sat balanced in a cradle of railroad ties ringed at a distance of ten feet by an assemblage of timepieces that ranged from hand-rolled, graduated beeswax candles to sundials of various descriptions, a tribe of hourglasses, and an assortment of borer-eaten cuckoo clocks-along with a once dignified but now gaunt and weather-faded grandfather clock that leaned into its own shadow like an old coot trying not to nod off in the middle of a story.

The bantamish man of apparently mixed breed wedged himself out of a fire grate-size hatch in the sphere and fished a pocket watch from his overalls. The watch casing was silver, but it had the dirty, worn fog of lead now. Still, the gears and springs gave out a satisfying report, as loud as the grasshoppers in the grain bin and as strong and regular as a healthy heartbeat.

“Hephaestus,” he heard a woman’s voice insinuate.

The name mingled with the call of the clocks, which began to chime and ping and cluck, not quite at once but close, followed a silent moment later by an answering echo from inside the sphere, which caused the man’s paprika-colored face to brighten for an instant. He heaved himself down to the ground, mopping his slick scalp with a handkerchief, and glanced up at the slanting August sun.

“Hephaestus…” he heard his wife, Rapture, call gently again.

The man, who was now standing in the circle of timepieces, looked scrawnier than the bulk of his cranium would have suggested. A scarecrow that had turned into a blacksmith, you might have said, and this would not have been far wrong. His name was Hephaestus Sitturd, and he was indeed skilled as a blacksmith, as well as a wood turner, cooper, tinker, and carpenter of great ingenuity (but no discipline); he was also a middling gunsmith, a dedicated fisherman, a maker of moonshine, a spinner of yarns, and a rhabdomancer (water diviner) of some repute. His white father had been the master mechanic responsible for the operation of a large cotton gin in Virginia until a religious vision prompted a change of career to Baptist preacher, a vagabond calling he set out to pursue with his son Micah Jefferson Sitturd, following the loss of the boy’s mother to peritonitis. This led to various digressions as a keelboat pilot, dance-hall tenor, tent boxer, and garrulous rainmaker. Along the way he met a half-breed Shawnee woman who was related to the great Chief Tecumseh and fathered another son, to whom he gave the name Hephaestus because of one slightly clubbed foot.

This clubfooted boy was the man who now stood in the Ohio sun beside the hollow iron sphere he had forged and hammered together himself. The rainmaker minister and his half-Indian bride were long dead, and Hephaestus had been left with their crumbling ruin of rabbit-weed farm on the outskirts of Zanesville, overlooking the Licking River. Half brother Micah was believed to be a Texas Ranger who had taken a Comanche wife, but Hephaestus had not heard from him in years. His family now consisted of his wife, Rapture, and their son, Lloyd, and they were such a blessing to him that he thought of little else-save his inventions.

Unfortunately, he was afflicted with that American misconception that the world was in constant, dire need of a better mousetrap, and that he was just the man for the job. He had, in fact, invented several different kinds of rodent traps (over fifty at the time), as well as a series of wind-driven bird frighteners, an automatic fishhook, a foolproof tree straightener, a hand-operated drum-cylinder motion-picture machine (which had been dismantled by the local church matrons because he had made the tactical error of demonstrating the capability with some rather bold Parisian postcards that a man in a marmot hat had sold him in Cleveland), a flyswatter that could also be used for toasting bread, as well as a wide range of outside-the-box ideas for things like disposable dentures and the creation of a pigeon-winged federal postal system.

The mania had started innocently enough, as such things often do, when he was still a wet-behind-the-ears young boy and his father had come home wounded from fighting in Benoni Pierce’s Light Horse Company at the Lakes in the War of 1812. Laid up as he was, the old man could not go fox hunting in the Moxahala Hills, which had been his great passion, and so was forced to sell his beloved hunting dogs-or would have been forced to had not the young Hephaestus hit upon the idea of using the dogs to run a drum treadmill to power the drill for gun boring. Gunsmithing became the family’s primary source of income until the father died of pneumonia.

Now, years later, the sphere was by far Hephaestus’s most ambitious undertaking. It had exhausted all his resources as well as his family’s finances and patience. Yet he was intensely proud of it, although he knew there was still much work to be done-and so little time. Time was the problem, for the sphere was not simply a hollow iron ball. Oh, no. It was meant to be a refuge, a shelter, an ark-the Time Ark, he called it, or, in sour mash-fueled moments, the Counterchronosphere.

Although not a full practicing Christian, he had become influenced by William Miller, the numerically minded New York State farmer who had worked out that the world was soon going to end or that Christ would return, depending on your point of view. Miller, who based his theory on the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, supported by calculations from Ezekiel and Numbers, had taken to sermonizing and lecturing at camp meetings back in 1831, and had since become a national and indeed international celebrity, with several newspapers devoted to spreading the word of imminent advent and hopeful paradise for the worthy.

Believing firmly in mathematics and partially in the Good Book-and being superstitious about his wife’s name and undecided about the question of “worthiness,” Hephaestus had become a default Millerite-and a very worried one at that. After all, a comet had been spotted in recent times, and just the year before a dairy farmer in Gnadenhutten had found a cow pie in the shape of the Virgin Mary. Clearly, the world was working up to something decisive. So Hephaestus had turned the bulk of his attention to the problem of how to escape time and so shield his loved ones from doomsday.

Many exceptional minds and more than a few competent engineers would have been daunted by such a challenge. But not the Sitturd patriarch. When not hobbling between the forge and the distillery shed, he pored over both engineering pamphlets and Scripture, devotional tomes and Mechanics Hall literature-anything and everything he could get his hands and mind on to help answer the eschatological call.

However, with the revised countdown on to the Lord’s Return (the original Miller prediction had put it in 1843) Hephaestus was forced to admit that the technical issues were still troubling. In the evenings when he sat watching the fireflies blinking in the pea patch-his wife, Rapture, brewing some extract of wolf mint, dressing buckskins, or working at her spinning wheel; his son, Lloyd, cataloguing his trilobites or dreaming of his twin sister, Lodema, who had died at birth-doubts would overcome Hephaestus. It was when these doubts took their darkest form that the sphere grew hopelessly heavy. Gleaming in the sunshine now, it appeared to him to be cumbersome beyond all description-ridiculous-so that all his reckonings, all his research, shone back in mockery from the surface of the hot metal.

“It needs to move,” a boy’s voice announced. “Time is a vibration. So the Ark must vibrate in time with Time-to become transparent.”

As remarkable as it may seem, the speaker was none other than his five-year-old son, Lloyd, and as the boy spoke a wishbone and paper airship wafted around the door of the barn. Powered by miniature spindlewood propellers and guided by rudder wings of dried bluegill fins, the delicate machine floated above the goat pasture, then around the barn, and finally over the peppergrass that surrounded their corncrib house, landing intact just beside the man’s mangled foot. Hephaestus looked at the airship in dismay and then over at Lloyd, the craft’s designer and fabricator, knowing that the ingenious trinket had been constructed in but a matter of minutes.

The child’s inventive life had begun in the cradle (or so it seemed to Hephaestus). In addition to a hyper-accelerated acquisition of language skills, although small physically, the boy’s manual dexterity was unnaturally adept while he was still theoretically confined to the old kindling scuttle that had been converted into his bassinet. His curiosity was inexhaustible, and by the time most children are just beginning to make sense of a rattle and how to move from all fours to wobbly legs, young Lloyd had already demonstrated an almost disturbing grasp of the principles of basic machines: the lever, the wheel, the pulley, the inclined plane, and the screw-even the mysterious utility of gears.

Inclined to wander, as well as to disassemble and reassemble anything his little hands touched, not long after his second birthday it had become necessary to remove him from the house and install him in his own dedicated section of the family barn, where Hephaestus kept his tools and maintained his blacksmith’s forge.

Here the father had designed a kind of labyrinth to keep the boy’s insatiable sense of experimentation occupied (and also to keep him somewhat protected from the prying eyes of visiting neighbors, whose dry, thick Zanesville tongues took to wagging whenever anything, let alone anyone, out of the ordinary crossed their paths). This combination of protective and distractive measures proved to have remarkable consequences.

What to other parents might have seemed a rather dangerous obstacle course of materials of various kinds (the debris of Hephaestus’s own inventions, miscellaneous bits of scrap metal and lumber, spare tools, and the like) provided yet more spark to the boy’s intellect and hunger for creation. To the blacksmith’s astonishment, the miniature minotaur embraced the labyrinth and began turning it into a working machine of its own unique kind, so that he was soon in no sense constrained by it but using it in the prosecution of new discovery and manufacture.

“If I didn’t know better,” Hephaestus said to himself, “I’d say that he had somehow a very good idea of what a first-rate metal shop, carpenter’s barn, and apothecary’s formulary looked like.”

It was not long before the supposed labyrinth become laboratory and workshop began to produce its own strange offspring-articulated puppets, for instance, brutish in appearance, perhaps, but subtle in their capabilities.

By the time Lloyd was four, he had produced a functioning aeolipile, a steam-driven monorail that ran from their house to the barn, a crude family telephone exchange, and an accurate clock that needed no winding. A rocking horse had turned into a simple bicycle, and a giant slingshot had propelled a meat safe over the river. The boy had even experimented with the use of primitive anesthetics while performing surgery on various farm animals. No wonder Hephaestus felt threatened-and the need to keep his son’s innovations under wraps wherever possible. Zanesville was like that.

Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd had hair the color of rye grass, skin the color of river sand, and green animal irises that gave the impression that they saw more than ordinary human eyes saw. There was nothing childlike about him other than his size. His vocabulary was already immense, and his mathematical ability was that of a savant. (When Judith Temby, the wife of the dry-goods-store owner once remarked, “The tree is best measured when it’s down,” the boy replied bluntly, “You don’t know much about trigonometry, do you?”)

After spending a single Saturday with Mr. Fleischer, the knife sharpener, he could speak passable German. The same was true for Norwegian and Spanish-and, even more remarkably, Chinese, as Hephaestus discovered following the boy’s visit to the laundry shack down by the carriage bridge. From Hayden Zogbaum, the prodigy absorbed four full years of Latin and Greek in just four afternoons, in return for supplying the former parson with a serving of pork cheese (an Ohio delicacy made from the head, tongue, and jowls of a young pig, boiled with marjoram and caraway, poured into pudding molds, and eaten cold).

The boy’s most profound aptitude lay in the area of mechanics-an innate understanding/curiosity regarding how things worked: windmills, water wheels, animals, insects, flowers. He was forever noticing and diagramming, taking things apart and putting new things together.

Though his father’s inventions failed to blossom, they ensured that Lloyd was provided with tools, problems to solve, and, above all else, a pathologically optimistic climate of possibility, which was a good thing because the little schoolhouse in town had very little to offer even an intelligent child, let alone this one.

The first exposure to the sod kickers’ children of Zanesville had brought instant ridicule upon him-and an undisguisable degree of contempt in his heart for their bacon-brained doltishness. Every time he got a question right, his fellow schoolchildren (some of whom were five years older) despised him more. Every time he encouraged the teacher to contemplate more interesting questions, a look of horror and fear passed over her face. It was not long before whispers and rumors about the “legend boy” began to spread throughout the town and the surrounding hamlets-and the parents became committed to their earlier wisdom of keeping the boy as sheltered from the community as possible. After all, with such a pronounced capacity for self-education, not to mention the special knowledge of his parents, would not he be much better off? Would not they all be? Small towns are notorious for their tendency to scythe down the tall blooms-and if the bloom is small and young, how much keener the edge of the blade! The problem was that such a retreat could go on just so long. Zanesville, like many, many towns across America then, was rife with reform-minded women who were intent on “education” and “civilization,” without the slightest clue about what either entailed. The Sitturds knew it was but a matter of time before pressure was brought to bear to drag Lloyd once more back into the glare of the local school, however little good it would do him, and however much frustration it might bring. And they were correct in thinking that they had something to offer him within the border of their own property.

Complementing his father’s anvil-and-plumb-line orientation was his mother’s organic sympathy with nature. A gifted herbalist, healer, and midwife, Rapture Meadhorn was well up on biology, generally-specifically zoology, entomology, botany, and pharmacology. It was said that she knew things the Wyandot Indians had forgotten. And she was inventive in her own way, too. She had pioneered a form of acupuncture and a remedial massage technique that had worked on subjects as different as a Clydesdale mare and a Columbus socialite-not to mention cultivating some esoteric personal abilities, including, possibly, continuous orgasms and short-distance telepathy. (It was also believed that she could talk to ghosts-like Benjamin Dumm’s sister, who had drowned in a tank at the tan yard.)

Rapture was the proud and voluptuous daughter of a Creole cane farmer from the Sea Islands, who had been born into slavery but had proved himself too shrewd for his plantation masters and so was freed. He left the islands and headed west, joining forces with a trapper who traded pelts in Kentucky. The trapper had a daughter who had been raised to be a “granny woman,” a cross between a root doctor and a witch. The girl was as pretty as a wildflower and as randy as a river pirate, and the freedman ended up eloping with her, fleeing north to Ohio to escape the father’s Hawken rifle.

Rapture’s parents had both died in a cabin fire when she was fourteen, but she survived and grew up clever and curved. Although she referred to herself as a “pumpkinskin” around the family, she was in fact blessed with a creamy complexion that had but a hint of nutmeg to suggest her colorful ancestry. Her speech she could pinch into everyday white diction, but with family and friends she would lapse into the rich rhythms and eccentric phrasings of the Gullah language she had picked up from her Cumberland Island father. (If you were to speak to her, she might in private say that you had “cracked e teet.”)

She eventually fell in love with the crippled but competent Hephaestus, not yet knowing about his predilection for inventing. Twins were conceived in a wild lovemaking session in the moonlight down on the Great Serpent Mound to the south, but the girl, Lodema, had died at birth, leaving them with just one child, Lloyd.

While Hephaestus struggled to earn a decent and regular living and to keep pace with his son, Rapture made money for the family with her valerian preparations, royal-jelly pills, and medicinal teas (along with two hardy crops of rich, green marijuana every year). Women from all over the river junction came to her for relief from menstrual discomfort, and more than a few men, once they’d conquered their embarrassment, sneaked out to meet her in the tent she set up down by the riverbank to enhance or resurrect their virility.

From her, young Lloyd learned how to build a cage to protect the gooseberries from the bullfinches, and more desperate arts, too, like that moment after the mallet had slammed the skull, when you had to stick the pig in the throat and catch the blood to make black pudding. He liked catching the blood.

In an era when it was not uncommon for a child to know how to pluck a squab or tap a sugar maple, Lloyd was a bright, burning candle in a class of his own. He reveled in all the intricate detail of life, sketching, with sliced sticks of charcoal made in his father’s furnace, surgically precise drawings and technical determinations of the tensile strength of an orb weaver’s web or some new design for a water turbine.

So all Hephaestus could do when the boy passed judgment on the progress of the Time Ark was the hardest thing of all:consider, once again, that he might very well be right. He shifted on his clubfoot and stepped between the hourglasses. This time he heard his wife instruct him to water down the burlap walls of the earthworm farm. “C’mon,” he called to Lloyd.

After seeing to the earthworms, father and son scrubbed up at the pump. They found Rapture hanging curds and whey with rennet in a muslin bag in the cool room. Waiting for them on the kitchen table was a plate of smoked trout with horseradish sauce, asparagus sprinkled with lemon juice, and a small pitcher of beer.

Rapture let the two males take a few bites before opening her mouth in a grin.

“Berry well, den…”

Hephaestus cleared his throat and shuffled in his chair.

“Yass?” she purred.

“All right,” he confessed at last with a shrug. “I heard you. Even inside the Ark.”

“T’engk Gawd, man!” Rapture declared in her spiced Gullah. “So yuh woan be sayn me peepul be fass.”

“I don’t know how you do it. It’s some kind of witched-up ventriloquism.”

“Na treken, man. Tru!”

“Magic,” her husband insisted.

“Kerse tis! Kerse tis!”

“Well, I heard you all right.” Hephaestus shrugged again, thinking to himself that it was sometimes surprising that he could understand his wife’s more conventional style of conversation, let alone her conjure-woman mind talk. As the man of the house, it was difficult for him to accept that his son had developed a speaking form of telegraphy, while his wife, when the “sperit” moved her, could communicate without any apparent means whatsoever. Yet he loved them both dearly. Whenever Rapture grew excited, which was often, her accent and her idiomatic expressions became as thick as Spanish moss, and then he would become enraptured with her all over again. And when he thought of what Lloyd might one day accomplish-if they could survive the Second Coming-he felt profound stirrings of father-bear pride that more than offset his jealousy, most of the time.

Glancing at the boy now, Hephaestus noticed that the child had crumbled some soda bread and rolled it into a human form, but with the antlered head of a stag.

“Where did you get the idea for that?” Hephaestus asked, wiping his chin.

“In a dream,” Lloyd replied, thinking of all the strange dreams that seemed to possess him. In catacombs, creatures beyond description shrieked-living sphinxes with forked tongues and stinging tails… serving maidens with the heads of ibises and dogs… hooded cobra women… things with wings and scales… and a hulking silhouette with the legs of a camel, the barrel-chested torso of a rude galley slave, and the awful engorged head of a baboon.

Monkish shapes in tornado-green tunics shuffled behind frail curtains of snakeskins where embalmed and dismantled bodies sprawled on stone tables. Jackal-faced children could be seen gnawing on carcasses in a cage-and in transparent jars floated lilies that looked as if they had sprouted tentacled nerves… frogs becoming human embryos, or almost human… while in slick, drained pits there lurked soft machine reptiles and enormous tube worms made of meticulous spun metal wrapped in an oozing tissue cultivated in vats.

In the hotter months the boy would flail about in his corn-shuck bed, so that Rapture took to giving him a hypnotic that she made using melatonin. While this remedy often controlled the sleeping problem, it did not alter the periods of black depression the boy could slip into, or the relationship he carried on with his dead twin sister, whom, of course, he had never known except in that blind amphibious time within Rapture’s womb. He often said that his sister was right beside him, and if asked whether he could see her he would answer that he could feel her and that he could smell her. Like licorice and rain wind, he said. Rapture, who had grown up with revenants and hairball oracles, was more accepting of the boy’s beliefs-but Hephaestus argued that imaginary friends were one thing, an imaginary dead sister something else.

On top of his already radically superior intelligence, the boy’s mood swings and bouts of disjointed behavior did not make his socializing with other children in Zanesville any easier. That he would have some kind of seizure or burst into tears without reason, or perform some inexplicably cruel deed, made any hope for his schooling awkward and trips into town tense. Hephaestus even steered clear of other Adventists (although in truth he was worried about them learning about the Ark).

The family was just finishing their repast and Hephaestus was about to inquire further about the boy’s ideas on the Ark (a discussion he hoped would lead to an opportunity to suggest the possibility, at least, of returning to school in autumn and spending more time with children his own age before this became an issue that the reform marms would raise), when their fifteen-year-old redbone, Tip (short for Tippecanoe), woke up under the porch and began howling lugubriously to announce the arrival of Philomela Ogulnick and Edna Vanderkamp, the town’s two most notorious gossips and exactly the kind of women the family most dreaded seeing. Neither parent was surprised to look up and see that the lad had skedaddled.

Hephaestus had an inkling that the women were an advance party sent out by the men of Zanesville he was in debt to, while Rapture was pretty sure they were on a mission regarding Lloyd’s lack of attendance in school (a tedious waste of time for him and all too often a torture of taunts and spitballs to boot). As it turned out, they were both right-and what was more, Philomela’s Joe had eaten some horse chestnuts by accident and had the trots and would Rapture recommend barley water?

Of course, little Lloyd gave all this not a thought, slipping off in his mind the moment he had slipped away from the house. He went, as he always did in such situations, to his secret refuge beyond the veronica that Rapture harvested for her soporifics. The main Zanesville cemetery extended from the old Wheeling Road to Mill Run and was surrounded by chestnut trees, but this was a different, eldritch sort of place. The sprinkling of humble graves dated back only to the days of Ebenezer Zane and John McIntire, who had founded the town, but Lloyd liked to think they were much older. The tombs were marked by unnamed lichen-stricken stones but they filled him with admiration and awe, for he saw them not as stones but as doors to the world where his sister lived and played, whirling about in a singsong game until, dizzy and laughing, she would fall to the ground, looking up at the sky. That was how he pictured her-blowing dandelions to bits and tying satin ribbons between the alders and the buckeyes to give shape to the wind.

Rapture had kept Lodema’s burial plot a secret to herself-an old superstition she inherited from her mother-but Lloyd identified the cove with his lost twin and had taken to grounds-keeping and decorating this secluded burial ground as a monument to her. Over the months he had made pinwheels, windmills, weather vanes, and whirligigs of all descriptions and from all materials (junk wood, scrap metal, animal bones, hunting arrows, and scavenged glass), placing them in precise arrangements, so that each blade fed off the breeze created by the others, however slight or gusty, creating a constant energy exchange that he believed would please and invigorate his sister’s spirit-perhaps even, one day, call her forth to join him.

You could not have stood amid the Lilliputian wind machines and not be moved by both the ingenuity of their design and the air of devotion that drove them. This was what the boy had meant in speaking to his father about the need to vibrate at a harmonic angle to Time. Here, among the crude graves and ever-moving vanes that defined and responded to even the stillest air, Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd felt the kind of peace that deep motion can bring.

But so deep was the meditative state he fell into that afternoon, he did not hear the figures creeping toward him until they were upon him. Jeering and stamping, and smashing his beautiful wind ghosts and carnival-colored prayer wheels! It was Grady Smeg and the Marietta Street Boys, a snotnosed gang with a fondness for decapitating geese and pelting the wood alcohol-imbibing town drunk with rotten pears. The moment they realized they had happened upon Lloyd, who was maybe half the size of any one of them, the brats knew what they were going to do-and when they were close enough to strike they charged him with a whoop of derision. Their fear and hatred of the boy was well known throughout the town and shared by more than a few adults. Not even a Jew should be able to do long division in his head, they thought. And the gift he gave to Mrs. Czeskì-a butternut squash with the likeness of her own face-was unnatural. The boy was bright, people agreed, but maybe it was the light of the Devil.

Such sentiments did not fuss Lloyd much (although his parents, who were already sensitive about their mixed blood, were plenty troubled). He had never known otherwise, and most of it was just talk. Still, he was not so foolish now not to run-or, at least, to appear to run-and he led the Marietta Street tribe through a stand of poplars into an area that Hephaestus had used as a scrap yard until he found a black cat dead of snakebite. Lloyd had since turned the wasteland into a maze of chicanes and surprises.

Booth Tanner and Buddy Pitch took the first hits, tripping a crawdad wire that hurled a corn-popping basket full of fishing shot at them. A smaller but more tightly wound hairspring catapult almost plinked out Mason Griddle’s left eye, while Andy Cudrup took a palm-size flywheel straight to the forehead. Then Willie Best and Oscar Trogdon stepped on partially buried potato rakes and knocked themselves silly, while Ezra Fudge planted both feet in a concealed wagon wheel and just about broke off at the ankles. The gang halted or retreated in disarray at this point-all except the hellion general, Grady Smeg, who lumbered after Lloyd with the sticking plaster from his father’s strappings hanging off him.

Even with his comrades downed or deserted, Grady could not grasp that he had been led into a trap. Lloyd had covered the hole with a big swath of burlap floured with dirt and sneezeweed. Grady never suspected a thing until he landed with a thud. Everything hurt, and blood filled his mouth with a taste of iron and chagrin.

As predicted, Lloyd came home as the lengthening shadows of dusk were spreading out over the goat pen, where Hephaestus was milking the two long-eared Anglo-Nubians for the second time that day. The boy stopped by the well and washed his face, but his father could tell that something was up by the way he flustered the Indian Runner they called Cotton Mather (because the duck would often alight on the roof of the forge and “preach”). The bottle-shaped drake squawked with indignation and wobbled off to what green ooze was left of the pond. The boy marched on toward the house without pause. Such behavior worried Hephaestus more than the fits and the invisible friends. There was a scary side to the child. Normally, Lloyd was kind to all creatures, a lover of animals-but things could change, as Hephaestus had discovered to his disgust and anguish one afternoon when he interrupted the young student in the midst of a vivisection of his once favorite Flemish giant rabbit, Phineas. The sounds the creature made, its long soft ears drooping-it was something he would never forget. The boy’s punishment had been to dig a regal tomb for the creature and to tend the grave every day. But Hephaestus could never get the pitiful rabbit’s eyes out of his mind.

That evening they ate a pale celery soup served cool and a spatterdock-and-spikenard salad tossed with crushed coriander. Not much was said. Then, just as they were washing up and Hephaestus was thinking about getting out of working in the garden and enjoying some parsnip wine, Lionel Smeg, Grady’s ham-fisted father, rattled into their yard in his logging cart, old Tip crooning balefully.

“Sitturd! Yoo get that boy-a-yoors out here!” Lionel commanded.

The elder Smeg had been top bulldog in the local sport of brawling until his love of the “Democratic comforter” had made him too stout for such exertions, so he had taken to imbibing vinegar to reduce his flesh, and this was now ruining his stomach.

Lloyd was already out in the settling dust, patting Tip and staring defiantly at the blood pressure-red visitor, whose cheek bulged with chewing tobacco.

“Somep’n’s heppend to ma boy!” the man blubbered. “This one done somep’n to ’im!”

“What?” asked Hephaestus, limping out of the house. “Lloyd? He’s only a runt compared to Grady. What do you mean?

Lionel’s face blotched even redder at this reminder of the physical inequity of the boys, but he stammered on, lolling the tobacco wad around in his mouth like a second tongue.

“Thair ’as some shenanigans. Lloyd heer done somep’n dirty to Grady. Now we kaint fine ’im.”

“What’s this about, Lloyd?” Hephaestus asked.

The boy looked back with his green eyes and said, without blinking, “Grady plays with some rough boys and in some rough places. Remember when Corky Niles almost drowned in that sinkhole? I’d be talking to them if I were you, Mr. Smeg.”

“Oh, yoo wudd, wudd yoo? Yoo little freak! Let me tell yoo what they said-them that weernt too humped up to talk.”

“That’ll be enough, Smeg,” snapped Hephaestus. “You don’t come to my house to insult my family. You can do your own foaling and blacksmithing-your business isn’t wanted anymore.”

“Zat so?” the big red-faced man snarled. “Well, wee’ll see about that. Be a shame if that furnace-a-yoors was to set yoor barn on fire. Happens in summer, yoo know.”

“You threaten me and my family and you’ll be the one who’s sorry, Smeg. I’ll get my wife to put a spell on your pecker and it’ll never rise again!”

Hephaestus gave a snort of laughter at the expression on Smeg’s face, for he knew that Rapture’s hoodoo reputation held sway over many people in town. As hard as Smeg talked, he would be worried now. You could see it in his eyes.

Lloyd’s eyes, meanwhile, shone back in the deepening sunset like lightning bugs.

“All right, Sitturd. But yoo’re bad business and the word’s out. I reckon yoo’ll lose all that high an’ mighty come winter. Yoo kaint git by on what that witch cooks up firever.”

“Good evening, Smeg. And don’t drive those nags too hard-I can see you’re about to bust an axle.”

“Pshaw!” Smeg exclaimed, and spat out a stream of stringy black juice that landed on his boot before hauling himself onto the wagon and whipping the two rib-stickers out of the yard.

After Grady’s father was gone, Lloyd said, “Farruh, do you think he’ll try to burn down our barn?”

“Naw,” Hephaestus mused. “But I reckon we should keep an eye open for trouble. He’s right when he says there’s folks in town who are mad with me about money.”

“Because of the Ark?” Lloyd asked.

“Yep,” his father said, sighing. “And the self-pulling planter… and the milking glove… and the air wheel. You don’t know anything about what Smeg was saying, do you? I get the impression that you did have a run-in with them Marietta whelps.”

“They chased me. I got away.”

“Did they?”

“What do you mean?” asked the boy, his eyes flaring.

“I mean did you lead them into some snare of yours? That deer noose ’bout broke my good leg.”

“They tripped a catapult,” Lloyd answered.

Hephaestus wanted to believe that that was all there was to the story. It was enough to accept that his son even knew what a catapult was, let alone how to build and wire one.

“All right. You go lock up the hens and tend to Phineas’s grave. I’m going to help your mother bring in some beans.”

Hephaestus did not see that the boy headed back to the well and then off toward the no-man’s-land where he had led the stooges to ambush. And he did not know how many other secrets Lloyd had on hand, from wild-turkey snares he had modified in size to deadfall netting and fermentation jars full of nasty things ready to fly up off a hidden springboard. The pit Lloyd had captured Grady in was an example of taking advantage of a natural asset. The hole was part of a seam of clay and had been excavated years before. All that had been required was to disguise it and lead the quarry there. Lloyd set down one of the well buckets to pick up a few stones along the path. A long summer twilight was settling in, full of whip-poor-wills and spoon frog chirping. But there was another sound as Lloyd approached the pit, which he had covered with a section of mite-ridden thatching. A plaintive moaning.

“Any bones broken?” he called, lifting the thatching.

“Hey!” bellowed Grady from below. “Yoo li’l weasel. Ah’ll git yoo! Let me up! I mean it!”

“I’m sorry, Grady,” Lloyd answered. “You need to learn a lesson. Three days should do it.”

“Three days! Yoo lissen to me!”

Lloyd dropped one of the stones he had picked up along the path.

“Aw! Sheet! Damn thang hit me.”

“I have plenty more,” Lloyd assured him. “Now, if you want some water-and believe me you do, then you’re going to say you’re sorry for what you did to my windmills.”

“Sorry? Yoo goddamned mongrel!”

Another stone fell, with similar results. Then another.

“Hey! Hey! All right, Ah give. Ah’m sorry for breakin’ up yer toys.”

“They’re not toys,” Lloyd hissed. “They’re machines. Reverence machines-and they’re not for hogswill like you to touch or even see. You’re going to learn that lesson over the next three days. And you’ll never breathe a word, because you’ll be so ashamed. Now stand back, I’m going to lower a bucket of water. I don’t want you to die of thirst before the lesson’s over.”

The creature in the pit was very quiet now, bruised and hoarse and completely bamboozled. But the sploshing bucket came down, as promised, on a length of rope, and there followed a slurping sound of relief.

Lloyd waited for the darkening hole to go almost silent again before he unbuttoned his britches and pulled his peter out. At first the trickle of fluid provoked no reaction. Then, when it dawned on the boy imprisoned below what was happening, the yelping was louder than that caused by the stones. But there was no one else around to hear. Lloyd had made sure of that.

CHAPTER 2. A New Kind of Animal

GRADY SMEG DID INDEED LEARN A LESSON, AND LLOYD WAS CORRECT in his prediction that the bully would say nothing. The story that went into circulation was that Grady had been angry with his father for a licking and so had lit out on an adventure. Then, dirty and tired of living on carp and branch water, the dumb nut had slunk home to take his medicine, only to find that his razor-strop father was too glad to have him back to whip him.

Lionel Smeg never made good on his threat to burn down the Sitturds’ barn, but he did stir up a hornet’s nest about the money Hephaestus owed, and racial tensions that had long been suppressed began to simmer. The lame inventor’s creditors knew of his Millerite leanings and the talk around Zanesville began to suggest that maybe the oddball blacksmith was going to run up as big a bill as he could, and then he and his brood were going to drink hemlock on the End of the World Day (a sensational fear implanted by anti-Adventist forces throughout the country), leaving everyone he owed high and dry.

The autumn harvest came early, and a snake-oil salesman showed up in a bright wagon covered in pictures of rajas and angels. He said his name was Professor Umberto, and he had two assistants, a squirrel monkey in a black swallowtail coat, and a fancy house woman he called Anastasia, who wore a champagne-colored ball gown. She never said a word, but strutted around playing a squeezebox and helped out with the magic tricks he did between pitches. She was especially clever at disappearing and then reappearing someplace else. Even Lloyd was impressed by that feat. He also liked the way her bosom always seemed ready to burst out of her gown.

The professor sold Indian root pills, white-eye alcohol in bottles with a picture of Saint George skewering a dragon on the side, and some expensive jars full of stuff for men that he claimed came from “the business end of a Bengal tiger.” It didn’t help or heal anyone for long, of course, but it made a big dent in Rapture’s income. Every time Hephaestus went to town he got cold stares and dirty looks. Legal-looking notices started piling up, and a man who claimed to work for the town council came out to the property and prowled around. After that, Rapture started insisting that anyone who rode past the house was a “puhlicitor.” It was humiliating and posed severe problems for the completion of the Time Ark (which, with so many people poking around, Hephaestus was forced to roll inside the forge). The mood grew darker as the days counted down.

Hephaestus had held such high hopes for the Ark based on the “magnetic properties” of the material, some of which had come from bits of what he thought were meteorites that he had unearthed. Lloyd’s concept was to build a spiral track and to mount the sphere on a shaft set into a swiveling frame so that it was capable of spinning 360 degrees, driven by the force of an elaborate series of sails and windmills. While rotating thus independently in one axis, the frame, which was attached to flanged wheels that sat on the rails, would propel the entire sphere along the spiral track.

Between comments from his father regarding gyrostats and luminiferous ether (which Lloyd was disinclined to believe in), the boy produced a number of foolscap pages with fine duckquill blueprints and infinitesimal calculations, as well as several attempts at working models-along with the pregnant speculation that “seen from the sphere, the past might lie beyond the future.” But it was all to no avail. The iron of the Ark was hopelessly heavy and dense. It was all wrong. Everything.

Frustrated to the point of violence, Lloyd could not work out how to maintain a constant speed along the track, or the more difficult technical issue of how to sustain the spiral motion of the sphere without the source of power, the sails and windmills, impeding the action. He needed more and better equipment-more tools, more resources-more than what the rank barn and the dust trap of Zanesville had to offer. Ever so much more. In his young heart, he raged for precision instruments, a proper assembly space, books (books!), ideas, materials, money-and, most of all, someone to talk to, someone who truly had his wits about him. Someone of his own ilk.

Most infuriating of all, he thought he had seen the solution in a dream. Hephaestus was sympathetic in this regard. How often had he woken just before their rooster in a helpless panic at the fading vision of some grand new invention! That was what had happened to the High Speed Chicken Plucker and the Musical Millet Grinder.

Being a blacksmith who fancied himself an engineer, and a modern man of fire and steel, once he had recognized the need for power and motion Hephaestus felt that the question could be resolved with steam, and so set about collecting boilerplate and rocker arms and designing a shining piston-driven beast that looked like a cross between a grasshopper locomotive and a calliope. But the harder he worked and scratched his head, the thirstier he got for elderberry brandy and the more he realized that time was running out. Their money already had. He was trying to build the prototype for a new form of power, and day by day the hourglasses emptied themselves, the beeswax candles burned down-and one day the grandfather clock fell over in an exhausted clash of chimes, glass, and splintered wood.

But where it all came unglued once and for all was the fair to mark the reopening of the local school (which Mabel Peanut, the earnest Episcopalian school marm, dubbed “A Celebration of Progress”). The owners of the flour mill, the pottery factory, and the new tool-and-die works had all chipped in to offer a cash prize in honor of Brazilla Rice, the first brickmaker in Zanesville, to be awarded to the youngster with the best scientific exhibit-with the exception of Lloyd.

Lloyd’s exclusion was phrased subtly but unmistakably, based on a condition of entry the family could not argue with: the number of days of school attendance in the past calendar year. No one was in doubt, however, about the real reason. If Lloyd was allowed to enter, there would be no contest. The other children would look ridiculous and the school itself would be revealed for the backwater log chink box of birds and mud pies that it was.

And there was another point at issue-one that no one involved, not even Lloyd, saw at the moment. Although progress was being celebrated, there was an inherent fear of it as well. Throughout all America this was true-but nowhere was that fear sharper than in a realm like Zanesville, which was neither an eastern bastion of culture and emerging convenience nor a frontier town anymore, on the edge of the wilderness. It was a crossroads town, torn between two worlds, resentful and anxious regarding them both.

The Sitturds were stung by the unfairness. The prize money seemed a small fortune to them, and any award for excellence, intelligence, and innovation had Lloyd’s name on it-and the whole town knew, despite Hephaestus’s efforts to keep the boy’s genius hidden. Rapture insisted that they go along to the showcase, anyway, as a matter of pride. Hephaestus agreed but was still so angry and so hurt by what was happening to them that he had to take on a good load of elderberry brandy for the occasion. When it came time, they could not find Lloyd anywhere and concluded that it was perhaps just as well. Why should he want to see what to him was idiocy being celebrated?

A large crowd was on hand at the schoolhouse, some clapping, others gawking sympathetically when Sterling Riddle battled his speech impediment to present a swollen bladder worm that he had cut out of a Poland China sow all by himself. Millie Rambush introduced a charming, novel method of caring for small plants by using eggshells as flowerpots, but then went off on a tangent about where her sixth finger used to be, and how her daddy had removed it with a violin string. Hermione Witherspoon and Lucy Dalrymple had no exhibits. They had cooked rabbit pie for the judges, and as Mrs. Witherspoon pointed out, “Progress is very fine, but you can’t throw out tradition.” (To which Rapture telepathed to Hephaestus, “Na, w’ich tradishun she be sayn ’bout?”)

Caleb Holcomb was awarded the cash prize for his simple but effective idea of installing a Paint Can Hook on his Uncle Shute’s ladder. However, when the applause died down something unexpected happened, which would trigger the Sitturds’ end in Zanesville.

The “thingum” (to use the cogent phrase of Burgess Fluff) made its way across the floor with a telltale ticking sound and a distinctive wiggling motion. One man, the draper Herman Moody, would have reached for his pheasant gun if he had had it with him (remember, in those days some men refused to go anywhere, including church, without a firearm), but instead he was reduced to shouting, “Jehoshaphat! It’s… it’s… a… beaver!”

And he was right. It was a life-size, fully operational mechanical beaver. Cunningly made of corset ribbing, fencing wire, and the spokes from two umbrellas, with gears and chains cannibalized from a range of devices (including the late grandfather clock), it inched across the floor in a kind of waddling crawl and, every two steps, raised and lowered its tail. The detail was remarkable-right down to the prominent incisors, which took the form of old piano keys.

The arrival of the mechanical creature caused pandemonium to break out (which, among other results, led to Reverend Lightbody’s stepping into the rabbit pie). Everyone knew who was responsible and all eyes turned to Rapture and Hephaestus, who had been taken as much by surprise as the rest of them. Lloyd was nowhere to be seen, but in the minds of many people in that room it was his presence that animated the beaver, not the gearwheels and the clicking chainworks. It was just like that little Sitturd to show up the other children, people thought. “I don’t want my Andy a-goin’ to school with him!” Clara Petersby hollered. “That boy is evil!” Obedict Renfrew pronounced.

Lloyd’s parents slunk out of the hall. The beaver was not so fortunate. It was not quite crushed, but it was beaten into mechanical submission. Stalwart Crane, the furnace man at the kiln, had the decency to return it to the Sitturds that evening. He took off his slouch hat in respect when he knocked on their door to hand over the trashed contraption to Hephaestus. Lloyd was hiding just out of sight when the visit was paid.

“I just want you all to know,” Crane said. “Not ever-body thinks like ever-body else. I reckon this is-or it was-a damn fine thing. Opened my eyes, it did. Doan you fret about them that says ‘the Devil’s work.’ They’re just green with the demon of envy. If I could make something like this, I’d set it loose, too. And the hell with the consy-kwences. This little critter gave me some new hope. I hope it duddn’t bring you all more trouble. Try not to let it.”

Oh, but that was easier said than done. The next morning, old Tip was found dead in the barn. Most likely it was just chance-the dog was very old and there were no signs of violence. But the timing was suggestive. Rapture saw “homens.” Had one of the infuriated townspeople taken his revenge? The intentional poisoning of animals was not an uncommon way of making a point in places like Zanesville. Lloyd wanted to do an autopsy, but Hephaestus insisted on keeping Tip’s dignity and body intact. He was an old dog that had lived a good life. Maybe it was just his time to go. Besides, if anyone was to blame…

Despite Crane’s good-intentioned support, which would not have been popular just at that moment if it had been voiced in public, Hephaestus felt inclined to reprimand his son for causing such a ruckus when they were in such heavy debt. But the compulsive inventor in him was curious about how the boy had made the creature. Lloyd shrugged, as if there were no more to it than making a daisy chain. He showed no sign of regret, and felt none, although he was angry and depressed about Tip. He retreated into his own labyrinthine section of the barn-the lamentable workshop designed to restrain him, which he had turned into a subtle machine and in which he had constructed the beaver every bit as easily as he said he had.

It was at the burial of dear Tip, with fleas still departing the carcass like the proverbial rats fleeing a sinking ship, that Lloyd conceded that immunity from Time was beyond his present capabilities and Hephaestus announced his plans to curtail work on the Ark. “Let’s hope Farmer Miller got his arithmetic wrong.”

When the old dog was in the ground, wrapped in his favorite blanket, Hephaestus, Rapture, and Lloyd, with the help of Pegasus, their splay-backed cream draft horse, tugged the Time Ark across the wreck of their farm and, on Lloyd’s suggestion, toppled it into the pit where Grady Smeg had endured his enforced therapy.

Lloyd insisted that the moment should not be considered a defeat but a release, and so the family filled the sphere with items that had been important to them during their latest trials. Rapture added some of her root bags, Hephaestus the broken clocks and one of his old wine jugs. Lloyd laid the remains of the beaver to rest inside. It was a kind of time capsule, in the end, and it tumbled into the earth as if it were pleased to be there, free too, at last, reprieved from grand ambition.

William Miller was indeed proved wrong, as many had been before him. October 22, 1844, arrived, and with it the Great Disappointment for Millerites around the world. In November, the dark-horse candidate from Tennessee, James K. Polk, was elected to the presidency on the platform of annexing Texas for the purpose of expanding slavery. Lloyd turned six and had his first wet dream.

But the Sitturds’ world kept ending. A cold Christmas came, and the family dined on their last pig and was forced to break up and burn much of their furniture to stay warm. Even Lloyd’s airship got laid on the fire, much to Hephaestus’s distress.

“It won’t be the last one I make,” Lloyd said to console him. The old man may occasionally have been miffed at the boy’s precocious abilities, but he had always been proud of them, too. Or, perhaps, just in awe.

At last there came a hint of spring. For the Sitturds it brought an eviction notice for failure to pay their land tax, threats of seizure of property and chattels to repay debts-and a gut-shot Anglo-Nubian goat. There was no mistaking that sign. Perhaps Miller had been right after all, at least as far as the family was concerned.

That same week a traveling Methodist minister came to town, or at least a man who called himself a minister. He delivered no sermons. He did, however, deliver a packet that took their minds off all other matters, for its contents were exceptional in the extreme: a small knotted bag of gold, a hand-drawn map, and a letter addressed to Hephaestus from Captain Micah Jefferson Sitturd of the Texas Rangers, dated eight months earlier, from “Forever the Great Republic of Texas.” It read:

Dear Brother,

I pray that this missive will promote kind thoughts towards myself. If you have heard little from me in recent years, or if the little you have heard has caused you unhappiness, it is with my regrets.

The fruits of my labors have been few and bitter, but I have at last built for myself a kind of home, a simple property of some three hundred acres that lies halfway between the western border of the Indian Territory and the settlement known as Kixworth, northeast of Amarillo.

Some would think it barren, bleak country, but it has some artesian water and soil that suits a committed agriculturalist experiment such as a hardy drought-resistant strain of cattle. I have named it Dustdevil, on account of the sudden funnels of wind that appear. I have a deed in perpetuity for this land, signed by Sam Houston himself and countersigned by Juan Herrero and the great Chief Buffalo Hump, leader of the Comanches. Of course, no title to any land can ever be secure, especially in this troubled region-and not without heirs. Hence this letter to you.

You are my only living relative, and should anything happen to me I would desire that you take possession of the property. I have found within it something of extraordinary interest but far beyond my poor powers to interpret or explain. My training has been as a soldier, not a scientist. Faced with such a riddle, I am out of my depths.

I know that you are rooted in Ohio and that perhaps you have a family now and a bright, happy life you would be hard put to abandon. But perhaps not. Perhaps something of our father’s restlessness, which I seem to have inherited in disproportion, is also at work in your heart. If so, I offer you and yours a chance for a new beginning, and the guarantee of something exceedingly curious that will stir your excellent mind. If not, then I still ask you, as my brother, to consider coming.

It is not an easy task I set for you. It is a long and difficult route and not without danger. Yet I still ask. Come, Hephaestus. Beyond my own selfish desire to share something of this life with you before I am gone, I have a suspicion that if you were to take up residence on this property and hold it you would find that it holds more value than I can speak of here. I have enclosed what money I have to offer to help you afford the journey, or to use as you see fit. Set out as soon as you can if you are able, or forget me and carry on with your life with my blessings.

MJS

PS. You may inquire of me at the trading station in Perryton and head south to the Canadian River. A man named Bloxcomb will assist you.

CHAPTER 3. The Necessity of Adventure

HEPHAESTUS CONFIRMED THAT BOTH THE LETTER AND THE MAP were evidence of his brother’s handwriting. None of the Sitturds could sleep or eat (which was just as well, because there was precious little for the pot). The proposition that the letter advanced, with its combination of familial support and an invitation to adventure, was, in their current state of finances and mind, irresistible. Still, it left them with what Rapture could not stop describing as a “big’un recishun!”

Despite their avowed intention of mulling over the matter in detail, come the next morning, by the time Rapture had prepared their daily dose of tansy bitters to keep off the ague, Micah’s proposal had been embraced by the whole family with the unquestioning conviction that desperation can bring. There was no “recishun” to be made. They had to leave Zanesville. That Texas lay a long distance away, and a war with Mexico could break out any day, did not dissuade them. This was an offer and a request that could not be refused. Not in their present circumstances-and not in Hephaestus’s heart, either. There was about the communication a suggestive timeliness and a hint of redemptive possibility that hooked him as cleanly as the sturgeon he used to pull from the head of the falls.

With a door of refuge open, it was their lot “ta tek ’e foot een ’e han,” as Rapture put it (which was not a concept that Lloyd thought was sound from an engineering point of view). What to try to salvage was not so clear. The gold that Micah had sent was sufficient to cover only the debts they felt most honor-bound to pay, and, given the financial claims their neighbors wanted to impose upon them, removing any of their remaining possessions would technically have been stealing. None of their farm animals would make it out of Ohio except the draft horse Pegasus, and the one suitable vehicle was an old humdinger night-soil wagon that Hephaestus had traded for a pile of corncob coal. The wagon had been airing out among the snares and spring-loaded traps of Lloyd’s minefield maze garden all winter, but it still retained a pungency that announced its history well before arrival. No matter. If embarking on a journey to a promised land (however “sabbidge” and under threat) had to be started in a cart that reeked of dung, so be it. Better to risk life, limb, and olfactory discomfort than remain in Zanesville as outcasts and debtors.

They considered rafting down the Muskingum to its intersection with the Ohio River at Marietta and catching a steamboat to Louisville and then St. Louis (if they could earn some money along the way). Hephaestus could get work in the cities, and with any luck they could save enough to take a steamboat along the Missouri River to somewhere like Independence and head south across the wild Indian country from there. But the Muskingum was a difficult river to navigate in spring, running high with ice melt and prone to flood, plus unsavory folk were rumored to live along its banks waiting to prey upon the flatboats and their cargoes of grain, lumber, and livestock. The other obvious alternative was the National Road, or the Old Pike, as it was called-the original interstate-which ran through Columbus all the way to Vandalia, Illinois.

Fearing that their creditors might try to pursue them on so open a route, they opted for the more difficult but less predictable plan of making for Cincinnati overland via the Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, which had been a place of good luck for them in the past-the place where Lloyd and Lodema were conceived, back when nothing but love seemed to be in the air and hope grew like the sparrowgrass. Pegasus and the humdinger could get them that far, Hephaestus felt. After that, they were in God’s hands.

They took blankets and oilskins and the drunkard’s path quilt Rapture had made. For provisions they took a sack of cornmeal and one of flour, a small side of bacon, a bag of snow apples, one jug of wolf-mint tea, one of homemade whiskey, a bottle of taproot beer, coffee, sugar, salt, some bottled preserves, and taters. They took their old Kentucky rifle and the horse pistol that Parson Shide had used in his famous duel with the alcoholic tobacconist Daniel Christ (who later cut his own throat with a razor in his smokehouse), which Hephaestus had been paid in return for repairing a mill wheel, along with powder and shot, and what Rapture called, “de t’ings fuh mek we libbin’.”

In addition to the richness of Rapture’s phraseology, they took Hephaestus’s blacksmith tools (except for the anvil), his main woodworking tools, an ax, some rope and drag chains, a bolt of twill plus needles and thread, and matches, candles, a lantern, Rapture’s midwife bag, and Lloyd’s notebook. The rest of his dreams and inventions the boy had to leave behind-but, unlike Hephaestus, he felt that he carried them with him in his mind. All these provisions they loaded on the humdinger, but Lloyd’s mind was more loaded still.

Early one morning, while the mist was still rising from the pastures, like the ghosts of all their memories, they each said a silent goodbye to the family farm that was no longer theirs. One last look behind the muddy, rutted road that led either into town or into the woods and the past was gone… a final farewell to the animals buried on the property, the vegetable patches, and the shrouded fruit trees… to Lodema… the hidden Time Ark and its tragic treasure trove.

Even with the promise and the challenging journey ahead of them, Lloyd’s mind lingered behind long after the bend that took the farm out of sight. He vowed that he would rebuild Lodema’s shrine in Texas. He would one day build a city in her honor-a city of cyclones, so full of energy and life it would be. A place where only marvels were allowed.

If anyone saw the family leave, they didn’t shout or wave. The whole countryside had a sleeping, dead stillness to it, so that the wheels of the humdinger and the steady clop of Pegasus’s heavy hooves echoed in the mist.

By the time the sun was high enough to burn away the dewy fog, they were on the poor excuse for a post road through the rolling Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, corduroy at the best of times, now sloppy and treacherous with the slow spring thaw.

Calamity after inconvenience beset them as they made their way through pastureland into thin forest and then into rugged stretches of hardwoods. Sometimes they had to chop down small trees and hitch them to the hind part of the wagon to slow their descent down hills (an endeavor that left Rapture “skaytodet”). Skirting creeks and ravines, they passed mounds and prehistoric earthworks. The trees and undergrowth were fleeting with reemerging wildlife-white-tailed deer, gray foxes, pileated woodpeckers, and hosts of woodland songbirds-but they saw few people: an Indian who vaporized into the budding trees and a mean-looking white man in dirty clothes, who looked as if he had been startled answering the call of nature. Whenever they grew tired or afraid they pulled out the letter from Micah (which Lloyd was given charge of) and savored the enticing conundrum of promise that lay ahead for them in Texas-if they could get there.

It was this hope that got them through the woods and back into farmers’ fields and pumpkin patches and down to the Great Serpent Mound, which was in what is today Adams County, near the town of Locust Grove. Three times the cart had threatened to overturn. At every moment they expected trouble. But they arrived.

Still, it did not fill them with the joy and renewal they had hoped for. Both parents were shy and bumbling, recalling the passionate lovemaking that they had once known there-that had brought Lloyd into being, and Lodema almost.

Lloyd, meanwhile, went into a deep funk after their visit to the Mound, which Rapture attributed to some hypersensitive connection with his “sperit” twin. Hephaestus was of the view that constipation was the cause, and that a large dose of cod liver oil would help. In truth, both parents noticed that the boy was less fixated on Lodema-as if the connection had been broken by their removal from Zanesville. Perhaps that was a good thing, Hephaestus thought. Rapture was less sure, knowing from her own experience how helpful a relationship with ghosts could be. Lloyd kept his thoughts to himself and said not a word to allay their apprehension. In truth, he did not know himself what bothered him. It was some indefinite form of foreboding-as if they were being followed by something of much greater concern than had ever plagued them in Zanesville.

The rains came and they got bogged down for two days, only to pull free of the sucking mud and resume their journey to be struck with another violent thunderstorm and a lashing downpour that forced them to huddle on what high ground they could find while they watched their possessions get drenched. Several they were forced to leave behind. They had overpacked and did their best to keep their optimism from being ejected, along with soaked salt beef and ruined tea leaves.

Back on the road, a filthy-faced man with a spongy goiter and a woman without teeth tried to beg from them. Rapture made hardtack for them, but they continued lurking about, so that Hephaestus had to take a potshot at them with the horse pistol. By lantern light they discovered weevils in the flour.

The next day the horse pistol wasn’t enough. Coming into a clearing, they were surrounded. It was more an extended backcountry family than an organized gang of robbers, but robbery was what the interlopers had in mind. As outraged and aggrieved as the Sitturds felt, they were all in silent agreement that it was a blessing that the clan had no more malicious intent, for given the number of them and their pocky, lice-ridden appearance, their desires might have taken a very different and considerably nastier turn.

The leader, a gnarled salt-and-pepper-bearded git with a scar that ran from his left temple deep into his mess of grizzle, spoke in a broken-toothed accent they could barely understand, like a wild hill preacher, directing with a musket a weasel-quick boy of about sixteen and two older men with gopher teeth and eyes like toads, each armed with long, cruel skinning knives shoved in their rope belts.

With an unsettling politeness, they plundered the wagon of food and the best and most important of Hephaestus’s tools as three moonfaced women in sack dresses and threadbare shawls, and another fidgety male with an eyepatch, looked on without expression down the long barrels of well-used squirrel guns, and then melted back into the woods as suddenly as they’d appeared.

When it was over, Rapture burst into tears and stamped her feet, while Lloyd’s locked jaws clicked with fury. Hephaestus summed up the situation. “We’re still alive. Let’s keep moving. While we can.”

And so they did, making do with what they had left, eating wild game they caught along the way, and pushing hard to get through the hill country.

Easter found them in Cincinnati, or Porkopolis, as it was being called-a booming new metropolis of 150,000 energetic souls, many of them German immigrants, Irish, Scots, and Poles. The family was able to find temporary lodging and employment with a man named Schloss, who made knockwurst and sculpted pigs’ heads of offal and jellied marrow. Lloyd’s grasp of German came in handy, and he was assigned the task of taking orders and assisting with deliveries. Rapture did laundry and cooking, while Hephaestus got work with the Cincinnati Steamship Company repairing machinery. At night they snuggled amid the pork fat and candle smoke and pored over Micah’s letter, which Lloyd kept hidden in his precious bag along with his notebook.

For three weeks they lived above Schloss’s meaty-smelling slop kitchen in a frame-house-and-vegetable-plot district running up from the river, where the smell of kettles full of boiling shirts mingled with the fumes of schnapps. The sounds of polka music (which was relatively new then) alternated with the lieder and the occasional hatchet fight. During that time they sold Pegasus and what was left of the humdinger to an Irish-Shawnee giant named Mulligan Hawk. Despite his fearsome appearance, he gave the impression of knowing horses and appreciating animals. Their goodbye to this, their last living friend from the farm, was less moody as a result. Old Pegasus would be looked after-perhaps much better than they would be.

The combined sale, along with a good word from the giant, yielded enough money for rough-deck keelboat passage in the company of a cable-armed Serb named Holava, who carried a bowie knife strapped to his belt that he called a “genuine Arkansas toothpick,” and made his living hauling coal, nails, timber shake, and sacks of milled corn to Louisville.

Just over 110 miles of twisting river, it was. Sometimes swollen and foaming around them, other times snagged and vicious with overhang from the banks. The flow could rise three feet in the night, frothing with driftwood, fallen timber, and rubbish. And the bizarre people! Jug-swilling maniacs calling out from fortified bluffs-the last of the beaver trappers drifting like leaves in long birchbark canoes-flatboats covered in skins, writhing with children and clattering pots.

Hephaestus read, whittled, and chewed to pass the time (trying to keep ideas for new inventions from filling his mind),while Rapture would point out to Lloyd the hollyhocks and the yellow spikes of toadflax.

By the time they reached Louisville and Holava had traded in some of their Ohio cargo for a load of burley tobacco and cured meat, Lloyd had filled his notebook with elegant scribbles of ospreys with shad clutched in their talons and an idea for a huge barge to be pulled by swimming buffalo.

But the farther the family got from Zanesville the more strained their sense of family became. Hephaestus missed his tools and his inventions. Rapture missed her herbs and concoctions. Lloyd missed his secret link with his dead sister, and the ability not just to draw things but to make them. Texas seemed a world away. They reread the magical letter and hardened themselves for the next phase of their journey, each of them wondering where the elusive presentiment of deepening shadow came from-whether it came from within them or moved on larger, darker wings across America itself.

There was something in the wind that no one quite understood, and so could not talk about in any of the mélange of languages that swirled around like junk in the river.

The Sitturds were puzzles to themselves even. Were they intrepid adventurers reaching out for the bounty of a new day? Or cowardly bankrupts fleeing like frightened beasts?

It is sometimes hard to tell the pilgrim from the fugitive, just as dawn always has a hint of the gloaming. In every opportunity, there is an invitation to failure and defeat. And in every defeat there is an opportunity… for…

CHAPTER 4. River of Secrets, River of Mercy

LOUISVILLE WAS A TOWN OF EXTREMES. THE THICK SMELL OF horse piss alternated with gentle sniffs of blooming wisteria. Newly rich planters mixed sugar into their bourbon while slaves hauled tobacco and cotton crops to market, and the streets flurried with open-air stalls that sold live animals along with dried catfish, mud turtles, and skinned rabbits swarming with yellow jackets-a sight that fascinated Lloyd and disgusted Hephaestus (stirring memories of Phineas the rabbit). There was a friend left behind in Zanesville that the family never spoke of, and the blacksmith rather feared that Lloyd gave more thought to the mechanical beaver he had made than to the life he had taken.

Desperate again for funds, the family hocked most of their remaining possessions for food and lodging, and for raising enough money to cover waterline passage on a stern-wheeler called the City of Paducah all the way to Cairo, where the Ohio melds into the Mississippi. There they found planks and piers, mule-lined dust streets, and frame houses peering across the river to Kentucky.

Amid hanging sides of bacon and buckets of nails that smelled like dirty rain, the Sitturds negotiated passage to St. Louis on board a paddle wheeler that had been christened the Festus in a Memphis shipyard but which its prudent new owners had renamed the Fidèle. The steamboat was crowded with all manner of unusual passengers, but none who intrigued Lloyd more than the man with the silver hand.

The possessor of the mechanical prosthesis was supposedly named Henri St. Ives and while he claimed to be from Vicksburg, he had the aura of those who habitually obscure their origins. It was at a card table in one of the parlors on the upper deck, surrounded by a stack of coins and greasy notes, that young Lloyd officially made his acquaintance.

The boy had been attracted to the drawing room by the smoky male voices of the players, punctuated by the ping and rustle of money and cards on the thick felt cloth. Once in position, Lloyd had refused to leave, standing so steadfast that the general conclusion around the table was that he was simpleminded.

The game was straight poker, and it was clear that St. Ives’s fellow players were becoming disgruntled and a little suspicious about his run of luck. After he swept another pot, several unkind remarks were made, to which the maimed man replied, “Gentlemen, please. Good and bad fortune finds us all in its own time.” He then raised his shining left mitt with a flourish and, one by one, the other men at the table grunted their acceptance and chipped in their money.

Another hand was dealt and then another, both won by St. Ives. By this time, one of the men had suffered such losses that the presentation of the artificial appendage and its suggestion of some past catastrophe was no longer sufficient to ease the tension. The man, a plump horse doctor named Fundy, lurched up, almost capsizing the table, and shouted, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but I know a cheat when I see one!”

St. Ives remained impassive, save for a lightning wink at little Lloyd.

“Good sir. Here you’ve been allowed to play at the gentlemen’s table, which, given your level of skill, is a gift. Now sit down and wager or make a dignified retreat.”

A roped vein in the accuser’s forehead began to throb and his skin reddened. “Retreat?”

The blustering quack then drew from his coat a tendon scalpel, which he carried for protection. The lethal nakedness of it gleamed for all to see.

St. Ives’s face did not blanch, but his silver hand came alive. With a click like the lock in a drawer, from out of the index finger snapped a dagger that doubled the length of the digit-and then, with a flick of the wrist, as if he were flipping a card into a hat, St. Ives doubled the length of the blade yet again, so that he was able to slice the ribbon that held the man’s pocket watch in place without stirring from his chair.

Flabbergasted, Fundy clutched his paunch as if to make sure his entrails had not spilled out across the table. St. Ives laid his cards facedown and nudged the severed timepiece forward.

“Now, my friends, if any of you feel similarly discomfited I am prepared to meet you man to man on the afterdeck to settle this affair with honor. Alternatively,” he rasped-and the silver hand clicked and expanded again to reveal a set of razor-sharp claws, one from each finger-“you can learn what justice comes from molesting a helpless cripple. It’s your call, gentlemen. I am at your pleasure.”

This last remark was uttered through an unwholesome smile that the pudgy accuser would never forget. Faced with such an unexpected display of weaponry, the poker players decided in unison to yield the table, and when their chairs were empty the claw blades retracted and the gambler eyed the young boy.

“You think I cheated? You think me a scoundrel?”

Lloyd shook his head. “You count the cards. You calculate in your head. You have a method. It merely gives you an advantage.”

“Hah! Do you know how to play the gentlemen’s game, then?”

“I think I do now,” the boy replied.

“How do you mean?” St. Ives puzzled.

“I watched. I listened.”

“That you did, lad. I could feel your glance penetrating me like one of my own fingers. But have you ever played? Do you know the rules?”

“You just taught me. All of you… by how you played,” Lloyd answered.

“Posh!” declared the gambler.

“Would you care to bet your winnings to find out?”

St. Ives smiled. There was something about this child, preternatural and unnerving-and yet engaging, too. “I like your manner, lad. Always up the ante.”

At this point a burly steward with great muttonchop sideburns barged into the drawing room and jabbed a muscular digit into the gambler’s chest.

“See here, charlatan. And don’t think of taking a swipe at me with that fancy stump. I don’t like your kind. Gambling is only allowed when it’s honest and aboveboard.”

With that the steward reached out and seized a wad of the notes that still remained on the table.

“Is that your commission for overseeing the play?” St. Ives jibed.

“That’s the price a cheater pays.”

“He didn’t cheat,” Lloyd piped up behind the man. “I was watching.”

The steward withdrew his finger from St. Ives’s chest and whirled around.

“What are you?” he demanded, noticing the boy for the first time. “His hired monkey? A poker table is no place for young’uns. Get along with you! Or I’ll throw you to the bilge rats, you little shit.”

“I don’t know if the captain would be pleased to know you’re taking that money,” Lloyd returned without moving. “He might want some of it himself.”

A spark of anger and resentment flared across the steward’s face, mingled with a flush of surprise that someone so young could be both so astute and so matter-of-fact. But the boat’s whistle blew just then and some other passengers waltzed by, so that he became flustered and chucked the money back on the table and stomped out.

“Well, Monkey,” St. Ives said, grinning. “What a good team we make, eh? Here. Here’s your share. Rightfully earned and, from the look of you, rather needed.”

St. Ives swiped the notes the steward had returned to the table and stuffed them into the boy’s eager hands.

“If you are the savant you appear to be, who knows what we could achieve?” the gambler mused. “As partners.”

“Equal partners?” Lloyd inquired. “That’s the only kind of partnership I think works.”

“Right you are.” St. Ives smiled. “There’s wisdom in you, too.”

And so their little conspiracy began.

There was a sign in the dining saloon that St. Ives enjoyed. It read, IF YOU NEED TO CARRY LARGE SUMS OF MONEY, WEAR A MONEY BELT. AVOID GAMES OF CHANCE ON RIVERBOATS. Thanks to the gambler, Lloyd made a new friend and had something to look forward to other than reading his uncle’s letter yet again. He also made some much needed money. His parents were glad to have a little privacy, as their intimate life had suffered in recent times, and so let the boy wander the boat at will. Lloyd, meanwhile, was careful to keep the banknotes he accumulated for helping St. Ives hidden from his parents.

The Sitturds’ stateroom was in a sorry state, six feet square with crimson moth-eaten curtains, a narrow slat bed, and a mothball-scented dresser, but it was considerably more luxurious than the bales and boxes the deck passengers were forced to share with animals ranging from horses to chickens, all sheltering among the walls of crates they arranged, and all scrambling for space as cargo and passengers came and went and the manure was scooped.

A blasted and recently repaired boiler (which had scalded a billy goat and one of the crew members) required continuous adjustments and seemed to inhale fuel, so that there were regular and lengthy interruptions to the journey to allow for wooding parties to scour the shoreline. One of the passengers, who volunteered to assist with such an expedition in order to reduce his fare, was stricken with heart failure and had to be buried in a tea chest, while another was bitten by a snake. Then a cow leaped off the deck and tried to swim home to the Illinois side, only to have the bucktoothed lad whose family owned it make the mistake of trying to swim after it. Neither the hefty milk cow nor the overbite boy was seen again.

The fine packet boats operating between St. Paul and New Orleans were famous for their excellent cuisine. This was not one of those. Salt pork, mutton, and boiled potatoes and beans were the usual fare, although wine, stout, porter, and brandy could be found in abundance. Like stage drivers, steamboat captains tried to make the most of the daylight, pulling in toward shore when darkness fell. Dead trees, snags, and sandbars, not to mention smaller craft without illumination, posed a constant threat to travel at night, although most captains would run at reduced steam if the moon or starlight allowed. The crew was a blind barrel mix of Irish, German, blacks, and those St. Ives referred to as “pure muddy.” Fleets of rafts, with their cook shanties puffing out greasy odors of fried fish, could be seen en route to the sawmills. Not infrequently, what appeared to be the body of a man or a gassy inflated horse drifted by and, once, a dollhouse with a ginger cat aboard.

Travelers flowed back and forth on the gangplanks in chimney hats or swishing skirts. One afternoon the men had a shooting competition on the top deck, blasting at buzzards circling the remains of a runaway slave who had washed up on a sandbar. The weather was growing warmer and the bugs thicker, sultry nights becoming humid with whiskey and cigar smoke, perfume dabbed to wrists and crotches.

St. Ives was well acquainted with the ship’s chief entertainer, a singer named Viola Mercy, a tall buxom brunette whose lavender-scented pantaloons filled Lloyd’s mind with notions and cravings of a new and exquisitely painful kind. Thrice a day she performed in the dining saloon of the Fidèle, which was laid out around a dance-hall stage with a heavy velvet aubergine curtain. And thrice a day she would sing a song that the boy grew to love.

There’s a place I know

Where I always go

There to dream of you

And hope that you’ll be true

And someday I pray

That you’ll find your way

Back to the secret place

Within my heart.

He became obsessed with the songstress and her exotic apparel: ostrich feathers, silk stockings, lace brassieres. How he wanted to infiltrate her private domain and experience the majesty of this dark beauty. (In truth, she kept a flask of rye in her garter belt and had done as much singing on her back as she had onstage.)

Meanwhile, St. Ives opened the boy’s eyes to the larger world, relating to him the news of the day, with its cults of gangsterism becoming political forces-Tammany Hall warring with the Bowery Boys in New York, angry hordes descending on Mormons, Protestant secret societies with names like the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner murdering Catholics, abolitionists dragged through the streets, slave families broken, the women raped, the men castrated and lynched. St. Ives had dire warnings about what lay ahead, although he himself took no sides and indeed was chiefly concerned about how such turmoil might be turned to personal advantage. “In confusion there is profit, my young friend,” he told Lloyd.

More to the boy’s liking, however, the gambler let him examine the metal hand. The plates that formed the exterior were made of polished steel, but so well forged that they provided exceptional strength without the corresponding weight. Inside lurked the potential for a fantastic array of implements, from the throat-cutting blades that had appeared at the poker table to a choice of such accessories as cigar scissors, a lock pick, and a sewing kit-not to mention that the miniature compartments could also be used to hold coins or keys, vials of various potions (such as chloral hydrate), snuff, ink, even poison. However, St. Ives was not forthcoming with any intelligence about how he had come by it, until one evening.

It was a close night and a full moon shone down on the river, so the captain had the boiler fired. Lloyd had been encouraged out of the family’s cabin to allow his parents some time alone, a practice he was growing more and more curious about. Only the thump of the paddle blades stirred the quiet, so that the occasional sounds of a baying dog or the crashing of a caving bank reached the deck, where he found the gambler smoking a cigar, staring down at the wake.

“You wonder about it, don’t you, boy?” St. Ives asked, and tapped a bright ash into the water. “How I came by the hand-and how I came to lose my own.”

“I do,” Lloyd agreed. “There’s no hiding there’s a story behind it.”

“Well put, lad,” the gambler said, nodding. “And well spoken. Like a gentleman. I will reward your discretion. After all, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Partners,” Lloyd responded.

“Indeed. Gentlemanly put again. Well. Some people would say I asked to have this done to me.”

“You asked for it?”

“I said some people would say that,” the gambler answered, and his face went glassy, as if he were now looking at something long ago. Then some hatred surged up within him, like a dead log that had been submerged in the river.

“Ten years ago, I used to be the secretary to a very rich man in the East. He valued my memory and my head for calculations. He was a fellow of extreme cleverness and cruelty-Junius Rutherford, or so he called himself then, but that was not his real name, I am sure. Owner of the Behemoth Formulary and Gun Works in Delaware. For himself he made the hand-and others like it. Said he’d lost his own in a foreign war-or with the Injuns or in a sword fight. His stories changed with his audience.”

“So do yours,” Lloyd pointed out.

“W-ell… yes…” stammered St. Ives. “A man must be flexible, given the unkindness of fate. But I am inclined to think that he was the cause of his own misfortune. He had the marking of an acid burn on his face as well. My belief is that one of his experiments backfired on him. He was always fiddling with new combinations of chemicals-schemes for weaponry. And other things. Weirder things. ‘Better to be the head of a louse than the tail of a lion’ was his motto, and if ever there were a fellow to plant the head of one creature upon another he was the one. His estate was like nothing you can imagine.”

“How so?” Lloyd asked, certain that he could imagine much more than St. Ives.

“He called it the Villa of the Mysteries, and the name was apt. There were lightning rods all about, and he had hung up effigies around the grounds to keep the meddlesome townsfolk from spying. That and his dogs, a breed I had never seen before and hope never to see again. Gruesome beasts.”

“Go on,” Lloyd said.

“Well… I know this will sound like flapdoodle, but he carried a seashell around with him. Like a polished black conch. He listened to it-as people sometimes do with shells, thinking they can hear the sea. But he did it often and, stranger still, he spoke into his.”

“What did he say?” Lloyd asked. “Who was he talking to?”

“I wish I knew.” St. Ives sighed. “He spoke in a language I could never understand. To whom, I have no idea. I assumed he was touched in the head. And I had good reason to think so. The estate had an artificial lake, and on the water he had a fleet of automatic model ships that reenacted the British defeat of the Spanish Armada. And there was a greenhouse full of orchids that looked like they were made of glass, but they were alive and grew. God’s truth. He loved books and fine things, but most of all he prized unexplainable things.”

“How do you mean, unexplainable?” Lloyd asked. There were not many things you could actually perceive that could not be explained, he felt. Even the way the fancy woman with the medicine show had seemed able to be in two places at once back in Zanesville. It was the things that went unnoticed that were mysterious.

“There was a collection of paintings. Flemish, I think,” the gambler continued, puffing. “Milky, watery landscapes without much obvious interest-except that over time they changed.”

“You mean with the light?”

“No!” the gambler exclaimed. “I mean changed. One day a peasant in the picture would be pitching hay, the next day a hay cart would be seen departing-a cart that had not been there before!”

Interesting, Lloyd thought.

“And Rutherford had a huge aquarium that he would swim in himself. He had a kind of vessel built-it looked like a diamond coffin-in which he could stay submerged for long periods of time. He used it to study his electric eels and those jellyfish creatures we call the Portuguese man-of-war.”

Lloyd gave a low whistle. He would have liked some eels himself.

“Yes!” St. Ives shook his head. “You see, I would not have been in his service had I not found something in him to admire-and there was much to hold my interest. The trouble was I found too much to admire and ended up taking too much interest in his wife, an auburn-haired beauty with eyes like sapphires.”

“You fell in love-with his wife?” Lloyd blurted, but when he spoke an image of Miss Viola rose up in his mind. A glimpse he had had of one of her corsets. It had become confused in his mind with his mystic twin.

“And she with me!” St. Ives replied. “My beautiful Celeste. Never will I experience such bliss in this life again!”

A storm of rage passed through the gambler’s eyes.

“Rutherford was cruel to Celeste and ignored her-spent too much time with his compounds and machines. He was also addicted to a narcotic that he manufactured himself. A transparent liquid, tinted a faint blue-like damson plums. He called it Mantike. Every night he would inject some of the foul stuff and slip off into a meditative stupor in his library. But there were other eyes and ears about the place, and when that bastard found out about our sin he drugged me with something-whether it was the Blue Evil I do not know. I woke to find myself secured to a table in one of his infernal laboratories. And I remained awake. No drugs or sedatives after that. There he conducted a little piece of theater involving surgical instruments.”

At these words the gambler’s body seemed to quiver in the warm air, while Lloyd’s thoughts flashed back to his rabbit Phineas. His father was wrong about him never thinking of Phineas. St. Ives spat into the river.

“But then why did he give you this?” Lloyd asked, pointing to the hand.

“Another of his hideous experiments.” St. Ives chuckled. “How the nerve connections work I have no idea. But this is not the metal addition that it may appear. I feel the hand. It is a part of me, or I a part of it. There are other extensions and accessories that I carry, but the hand itself I cannot remove. I will die with it attached to me. Yet it will not die. And that is perhaps why he enabled me so-as an expression of his power and ingenuity. The rest he did to me was not enough. He wanted a constant, visible, and necessary reminder always before me. To make me forever dependent on his technics. Who knows? Perhaps, for all the agony he inflicted, I may have been lucky not to have been turned more fully into one of his gadgets. I might well be a mannequin whole, and not just in hand.”

“I don’t understand,” Lloyd murmured.

“He was far, far ahead of his time, was Mr. Rutherford. His toy caravels were ingenious, but he was capable of many other feats. Oh, yes! He had designed and built a mechanical manservant. A sort of butler named Zadoc. What it was powered by I do not know, he would not reveal it-but it was not steam. A very handsome but ghastly porcelain face. Gave Celeste nightmares. But he was working on much more complex contraptions still.”

“And what… happened… to him?” the boy whispered.

“I set a booby trap in his laboratory,” the gambler replied with a vengeful, melancholy laugh.

“His body was never found. But pieces of another’s were. My sweet Celeste. I believe she thought that I was trapped in the fire and was trying… to save me.”

St. Ives’s silver prosthesis flashed in the moonlight.

“I was questioned by the authorities, but I knew enough of his ways to make it look like an accident. And what an accident!”

“But what… became of Rutherford?” Lloyd asked.

“Ah! That is the question,” the gambler said, nodding. “Well, you see, he was not a well-liked man. Almost everything he did he did in secret. He was a hard employer and a recluse who rarely ventured off the estate, and he seemed to have no close friends or immediate kin-other than my poor darling. The neighbor folk all feared him. There were stories about children in the vicinity who had gone missing. Who can say? But the members of the local constabulary were willing to take the path of least resistance. They came to believe that perhaps he had perished in the explosion, too-blown to bits, as I had hoped he would be.”

“But you think differently?” Lloyd asked.

“I am certain in my soul that he is still alive!” St. Ives ejaculated. “His will left his estate to some distant relative in Louisiana-probably himself under another name. His business interests were absorbed by a consortium called the Behemoth Innovation Company, and the estate was systematically denuded of all its objets and apparatus.”

“Did you investigate?” Lloyd asked meekly.

“Can you imagine me not doing so?” the gambler exclaimed, and then he drew his voice back down low. “The so-called relative now lives abroad, and I have not been able to find a trace of any news about him in any of the foreign papers-I even hired a London detective. Not a skerrick of a clue. As to the consortium, they have offices registered in several cities but there is no information about any of their directors. They are but shadows, as near as I can tell. And that is why I ride the riverboats, or one of the reasons-to one day learn something of his whereabouts. He would have a new name, and perhaps a new-looking face. But he is not dead! The hidden may be seeking and the missing may return. Remember that, my young friend. Beware, if you should ever cross paths with a man a few years older than I-with a hand like this, or some such invention. He would have found a way to make a better one by now, devil take him. Who knows what he has learned how to do in the years that have passed since what he did to me?”

With a vehemence Lloyd had not seen before, the gambler heaved his cigar into the river and spun on his heel, heading to his stateroom. Nothing more was said about the mutilation or the vanished designer of the mechanical hand, but the creatures and contrivances of the lost Villa exerted a pronounced fascination for Lloyd that was outweighed only by his ripening interest in Viola Mercy.

She said that she came from Maryland but, like the gambler, she seemed a child of the river and the road. Bawdy and quicktempered, in the boy’s presence she became demure. When she drank, however, in between performances, her voice deepened and her eyes burned with a lecherous yearning. One afternoon he found himself sneaking into her cabin. He had meant to steal but a glimpse, then he was sniffing her pillow-when there came the sound of hushed, lewd voices at the door!

Mortified, he leaped under the bed. The door opened and Miss Viola entered with the gambler. They drank at first, absinthe, the green liquor with the bittersweet licorice scent that St. Ives favored, preparing it with the long ornamental perforated spoon that reminded Lloyd of a decorative trowel, ceremoniously straining water poured from a carafe through a crystal chunk of sugar and then waiting and watching, and finally stirring the mix of liquor, water, and sugar until it reached a cloudy green shade he deemed right. They took a few sips, and Miss Viola shed her long dress with the plunging neckline and her bodice and something else that Lloyd couldn’t see. They tumbled onto the bed and lay there together, sipping their drinks for what seemed a long time. Then they came together and started to thrash about-until St. Ives muttered something and began to fiddle with his prosthesis.

Miss Viola’s cabin had once been one of the more opulent staterooms, but times had not been kind to the owners of the Fidèle and the chamber’s former glamour had faded, so that it now possessed a peeling gaudiness along with a noisy excuse for a brass bed (which William Henry Harrison had once slept in before becoming president). It was the audible complaint of the bedsprings that allowed the boy to wriggle into a position on the floor where he could catch sight of the looking glass, in which the figures of the two adults were partially visible. There he lay, trying hard to hold his breath.

Viola Mercy’s bosom was exposed, her hips arched, providing a tantalizing hint of that taboo passage that led to the secret place within her heart. The gambler still had on his once dapper but now worn britches, and his bull’s blood Spanish leather boots. The sleeve of his frilled shirt drooped down from a chair. His silver hand, however, was hard at work. The dagger that had been projected from the index finger had been replaced by a device of equal length, significantly greater girth, and arguably far more ingenious utility, which St. Ives referred to as the tickler.

The “tickling” went on for a long time, with Miss Viola’s rough whisper rising into what sounded like an asthmatic crisis. The boy had heard a similar sound coming from his mother from time to time, but nothing as both feral and restrained as this. Another scent filled the room, distinct but confused-like wild onions and fish eggs. Then there was a shudder that shook the bed, and Lloyd was sure that he was going to be found out. Instead, St. Ives rolled off and began dismantling his mechanical finger piece.

“Don’t you fret, honey,” Miss Viola said. “Most men can’t do as well.”

The gambler started to say something but choked on his words and reached for his clothes after draining his glass. Not long after he’d left the room, Miss Viola rose, poured water from a jug into a bowl, and bathed, humming to herself. Powder and perfume were added, and then came the slow, measured ritual of dressing. It was a delicious agony for Lloyd, who could more hear and smell than see her, and he was forced to wait, with his heart pounding, until she was at last prepared for another performance. The door clicked behind her when she departed, and still he waited until he was sure she was not about to return to make his escape.

That night, when Lloyd closed his eyes and tried to imagine his dead sister, all he could see was Miss Viola.

The next day he sneaked into the entertainer’s cabin again. He couldn’t help himself. This time he chose as his vantage place her steamer trunk, a great battered box that reminded him of a coffin but had the consolation of facing directly toward the bed and of being filled with costumes and underthings, all permeated by her woman scent. There, snuggled tight, he waited and watched through a tiny crack that he made by balancing the lid on his head, counting the terrible wonderful minutes. Finally, she returned-without the gambler. Slowly-oh, so slowly-she disrobed, poured herself a drink from a flask, then water for bathing from the jug. It was excruciating. Then she reclined on the bed-without a stitch on. She began to sing to herself, stroking her breasts and thighs with her right hand. And that was when it happened. He let the lid slip with a thump! Everything went so silent he could hear the piston rods driving in the distant engine room. He waited, then cracked the lid.

“Don’t you know not to come into a lady’s room without an invitation,” Miss Viola scolded, and then let out a trill of confusing laughter.

“I-I’m s-sorry…” Lloyd stuttered.

“No, you’re not,” the dark lady replied. “Come. Here.”

He rose from the trunk as if from the dead, stiff, and yet intensely alert.

“Take off your clothes,” she commanded, and with fumbling sweaty fingers he obeyed.

Perhaps the chanteuse first intended merely to teach him a lesson about spying. But as soon as she saw the boy, naked and aroused beside her bed, something happened in a secret place inside her, and she knew that for herself as much for him this was an opportunity that would never come again.

“You must never speak a word of this to anyone,” she said. “Anyone.”

Lloyd was not sure if he would ever be able to speak again at all.

CHAPTER 5. The Ambassadors from Mars

HEPHAESTUS AND RAPTURE WERE QUICK TO NOTE THE CHANGE IN the boy but were unable to guess the true nature of the cause. For the first time since leaving Zanesville, Lloyd seemed to have regained his inner light and his parents wondered if he might have reestablished his connection with Lodema. Not surprisingly, Lloyd declined to provide details, choosing both for his own sake and for the honor of Miss Viola to keep the matter secret.

St. Ives, in his shrewd read of personality and mood, knew that something was different about the boy, but for reasons of his own did not inquire further. Instead, he slipped back inside his armor of pseudoaristocratic condescension, yielding only upon his farewell.

“Remember our lessons, Monkey,” he said with a world-weary smile.

The boy had been quick to learn the art of card counting and odds estimation, as well as many of the psychological subtleties of gambling.

“I will,” promised Lloyd, and for a moment he longed to disappear with his damaged friend-off into the teeming world in search of money and risk, dark fragrant women, and the grotesque riddles of Junius Rutherford.

Miss Viola gave him a quick, chaste kiss on the cheek in public, and a very long, slow kiss somewhere else in the privacy of her cabin before whisking off to find another drinking partner, lover, audience-whatever it was that she was searching for.

St. Louis had come a long way since the French fur trappers drifted by in birchbark canoes to barter with the Peoria Indians. And it had come a long way even faster since the first steamboat arrived from Louisville on July 27, 1817. Many Negroes still spoke French and signs of the Spanish colonial period were everywhere to be found, but the city’s aura of European empire had been transformed into the energy and friction of a thriving outpost of western expansion. This was a border town now, a crossroads dividing North and South, East and West. Fifty steamboats provided packet service to exotic destinations such as Keokuk, Galena, and Davenport to the north, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh to the east, and Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans, and Mobile to the south-while the passage along the Missouri (where the Sitturds hoped to go) opened the way west to Independence, Westport, St. Joseph, Omaha, Council Bluffs, and beyond.

The city had boomed from a bluff-town harborside of around seventeen thousand people to almost four times that number, although the German Revolution and the Irish Potato Famine would soon swell the ranks to make it the largest center west of Pittsburgh.

Rapture had never imagined so many “parrysawls.” Hephaestus counted the number of taverns and public houses. Lloyd took in the grim, overburdened Negroes and the quizzical Indians, the street Arabs, imbeciles, and ringworm hillbillies-offset by lily-white gentlemen and ladies rattling around in lacquer-black carriages with shining wheels.

It was here that the infamous Dred Scott lawsuit would soon begin, igniting the Civil War, many would say, while still burning torturously in the collective memory was the case of Francis McIntosh, a free mulatto steamboat steward who had been chained to a tree and roasted alive in a slow fire in retaliation for stabbing a sheriff’s deputy-as well as that of the antislavery newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was shot to death and trampled in nearby Alton, Illinois, a year later (still later to be the birthplace of a boy named Miles Davis).

While Lloyd had been busy learning his bold new lessons from St. Ives and Miss Viola, Hephaestus and Rapture had been engrossed in Micah’s map and in planning the next stage of their journey to Texas. Their decision was to take a boat up the Missouri River to Independence, the southernmost of the supply towns on the route to the Pacific Coast. From there it looked like a long, strange trip across Kansas and what was then the Indian Territory-and would later become the state of Oklahoma-to reach what they hoped they would find in Texas: a new home.

Unfortunately, the riverboats for the Missouri journey were crowded-always crowded now-with such a miscellany of humanity that could scarcely be believed. One would have thought that America was coming apart at the seams, or mutating to form some crazed new creature.

Once again, money was tight. What provisions they’d been able to salvage from their earlier adventures were running low. “Life is a casting off,” Hephaestus reminded his family (which prompted a jab in the ribs from Rapture). Young Lloyd took this opportunity to introduce the money he had made with St. Ives, pretending that he had found it along one of the bustling streets. His parents were too overjoyed to ask any questions.

Hephaestus reckoned that with this windfall they were able to afford passage on the Spirit of Independence, newly overhauled and freshly painted. But they had to wait for three days. Ever worried about conserving money and knowing that they now had a stateroom to look forward to, the family sought temporary shelter in the loft of a mice-infested stable behind a glue renderer’s.

It was in a thronging market square below on their second day that they were surprised to see a wagon decorated with rajas and angels-and who should be beside it but Professor Umberto, the traveling medicine showman and magician who had passed through Zanesville. The spruiker was now calling himself Lemuel Z. Bricklin, “Master of Teratology, Clairvoyance, and Prestidigitation.”

Lloyd wanted to say hello, his parents believing that the sight of the colorful wagon had brought back a fond memory of Zanesville. The truth was that their old town held but one happy recollection for the boy, and that had to do with his ghost sister’s memorial. The reason he was interested in the professor was that he wanted to catch sight of the man’s fine-figured assistant, Anastasia. His experience with Miss Viola had opened up a new kind of precocious craving within him. And the earlier magic had intrigued him.

Rapture, still miffed about the downturn in business she had experienced owing to the professor’s arrival in Ohio, found herself “haa’dly ’kin” to say howdy to him in St. Louis and went off to round up ingredients to conjure a little “tas’e ’e mout” for the family’s supper, reminding Hephaestus to keep an eye on the boy and for them both to stay out of trouble. Of course, Lloyd gave his father the slip.

The square was jammed with people buying fresh pig snouts or honeycomb tripe, and Hephaestus became so absorbed that he did not feel a passing thief’s practiced hand snake into his pocket and dexterously extract the money that was intended for their boat fare.

Lloyd, meanwhile, made a beeline for the medicine-show wagon, which had a tent set up behind it. The professor, a springy man with a waxed mustache and a receding hairline hidden under a leghorn hat, had just produced a fat Red Eagle cigar from a pocket in his coat when Lloyd strode up.

“What happened to your monkey?” the boy wanted to know.

“Why?” queried the professor, lighting the cigar with a crack of his fingers. “Would you like to apply for the position?”

“That was good.” Lloyd grinned, mimicking the finger snap.

“Prestidigitation, my boy. Legerdemain. I do three shows a day and you’re welcome to see one, if you would be so kind as to bring along your parents or guardians as paying customers. The Bible says blessed are they who pay in cash.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Lloyd objected.

“Mine does,” the showman replied, tipping his hat to a woman with a rustling bustle who shuffled by. “But never fear, the instance of instantaneous combustion you have just witnessed was a complimentary sample-gratis, without obligation; in other words, free of charge. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“You didn’t say what happened to the monkey,” Lloyd pointed out, reaching for the man’s coat sleeve as he tried to turn away toward the tent.

“No,” agreed the professor, wheeling back and chomping on his cigar. “I have neglected to fulfill your request for further intelligence and so have left you in a state of sustained bewonderment and speculation. And there you shall remain. I have work to do.” Once again he made a move toward the tent pitched beside the wagon, nodding at a man with a thimble hat who ambled past with a frown of suspicion on his face.

“Is he dead?” Lloyd asked, refusing to budge.

“As a matter of fact, poor little Vladimir was consumed by some sort of cave lion during our recent sojourn in Kentucky,” the professor announced, glaring down at the boy. “Most distressing. Now, if you’ll excuse me!”

“Did you shoot the cave lion?” Lloyd inquired.

“Go home, young lad!” The professor waved. “I must prepare. Magic doesn’t just happen!”

“I thought that was exactly what it did,” Lloyd replied. “That’s why it’s magic.”

“Touché,” the showman retorted, appearing to bow, but really examining the boy’s sorry excuse for footwear, which confirmed his initial impression. “But if I were truly a master of the art,” he continued, “then I would wave the wand of this cigar and you would disappear-back to wherever it was you came from.”

“Zanesville,” Lloyd supplied. “Ohio. I saw you there.”

“Aha,” the professor returned, his eyes following a blooming lass with a rose-hips complexion, who giggled behind a handkerchief as she passed. “Where on earth did you say your parents were?”

“I have neglected to fulfill your request for further intelligence regarding that,” Lloyd answered.

“Touché again, my effervescent little friend. But circumstances beyond my control, otherwise known as life, require that I spin gold from straw, separate wheat from chaff-in a word, earn my daily bread. Now please, leave me to my fate as I bid you goodbye and good luck with your own.” He gave the boy a hearty pat on the head, the universal sign of condescension in adults toward children-and one that he felt certain this particular child could not fail to comprehend.

“And what about the pretty lady?” the boy asked. “Did a cave lion get her, too?”

“Boy! I am going to perform some magic on you yet if you don’t move on!” This time the showman took a decisive step away, prepared to fend off the lad with an elbow if necessary.

“Do you still sell the powder made from tiger penis?” Lloyd asked.

This inquiry caught the professor by surprise, and was made at too loud a volume for his liking. He glanced around, thinking, Damn this boy. What he said aloud was “Shush, please! Here, my friend. Come now. Take this delightful toy as a token of my exasperation and carry on.”

The medicine man produced from inside his coat a sheet of heavy paper neatly folded into the shape of a bird, which he un-creased, and adjusted, and then lofted into the air. The flat wings carried the construction several feet toward a scowling lady who was hawking carrots.

“Now, go and collect that novelty and it is yours to have, without payment or condition, save that you leave me to the tasks at hand!”

Lloyd scoffed at this offer but went and retrieved the paper bird-and then whistled at the showman, who, in spite of himself, spun around.

Lloyd then tilted both wings upward and sent it soaring over the head of the carrot woman, where it caught an updraft and sailed well out of the market.

“Inclined wings produce more lift and also more stability,” he called out to the showman, whose eyebrows had arched in surprise. “Now, what about the tiger powder?”

“Please, my young friend!” the showman entreated with nervous gesticulations, buffaloed at last. “Just come in here and let me give you something to take your mind off all these questions.”

Lloyd’s eyes adjusted to the change in light. The tent was much larger than it had looked from outside, and set out like a room in a house, except that over in one corner was another tentlike structure, like the sort of cloth-screened cubicle one might find in a doctor’s surgery. Worn Turkish carpets had been laid down, with satiny pillows strewn about, creating an ambience that was both cozy and exotic, although a distinct mix of odors permeated the enclosure: a chamber pot, perspiration, lice soap. Lloyd felt at home.

This impression was strengthened by the presence of two women. The first Lloyd recognized as the beautiful Anastasia he had been wondering about (who in truth was as worn as the carpets, but still richly patterned). She was seated on a camp meeting chair mending clothes, dressed in a forget-me-not blue frock that showed off her figure in a manner that he found quite compelling. His enthusiasm intensified when his eyes took in the other woman, who was standing a few feet off to the left-on her head. She was dressed in tight-fitting mannish garb that accentuated her curved shape. Lloyd was soon unable to hide the prominence of his enthusiasm.

Amazed but sympathetic to his condition, the professor gestured broadly. “Ladies, meet a persistent new friend. Your name, young sir…?”

“L-loyd,” the boy stammered, transfixed by the gymnastic calm of the other woman, who in his mind’s eye he had transposed into a conventional standing position and realized that she was the spitting image of Anastasia. So that was how the trick was done, Lloyd thought.

“Young Lloyd hails from Zanesville, where he made something of our acquaintance during one of our past peregrinations,” the showman explained, and took more notice of the boy’s fatigued clothing and unscrubbed state. Here was another child of misfortune trying to find his way. Rather like the son the professor had lost long ago, only more touched by the sun. Anastasia looked up from her sewing and smiled. The woman, whom Lloyd took to be her twin, or at least her sister, waved one of her feet.

“Hello,” Lloyd tried, but the two women just repeated these gestures as before.

“Ah,” the Professor said, shaking his head. “Don’t be offended. I’m saddened to say that both my lovely ladies have been deprived of speech, a diabolical punishment that was conferred upon them as children by a mad father.”

“Anastasia can’t talk?” Lloyd asked.

“Mrs. Mulrooney,” the professor corrected. “Or Lady Mulrooney, as I prefer to think of her. For Mulrooney is the surname I was born with. The other monikers and personae I use are but stage machinations to heighten and enhance the mystique necessary to build confidence and create an atmosphere of possibility, credibility, and awe.”

“And she… is your wife?” Lloyd asked, digging his right hand into the pocket of his dirty knee pants.

“Yes, son. In a word, we are matrimonially united, conjoined, and conspicuously complementary.”

“And who is the other woman?”

“Technically speaking, she is my wife’s sister-twin sister-and how beneficent and expeditious it has proven to have two female assistants who look virtually identical! I mean from a stage-magic point of view. But privately, confidentially, and just between you and us, she too, is a partner in the adventure of my life that combines entertainment and enlightenment to provide illumination and enjoyment for all those who experience it!”

“You mean you have two wives?” the boy asked. Now, there was a goal worth aspiring to, Lloyd thought.

Mulrooney blinked at this, for he realized that he had just let his staunch guard completely down and offered far more detail regarding his personal affairs than he had ever intended to with anyone, let alone a strange boy.

I must be slipping, the showman mused. Apart from the somewhat darker skin tone and the green eyes, the lad did remind him very much of his lost son-perhaps that was why.

“Well, now, sonny boy,” he humbugged, trying to regain mastery of the situation. “Let’s not put delicate matters quite so baldly, eh? I think if we are discoursing privately and confidentially, in a manner of speaking, one could answer in the affirmative, while conceding that the arrangement is not to everyone’s taste. In some regrettable cases it is not at all celebrated with the level of tolerance and understanding we would like, so we do not normally make a habit of announcing the status of our little family outside our little family. Coming from a place like Zanesville, I’m sure you understand. I would therefore appreciate your respecting that fact and this rare confidence-and, for reasons inexplicable, I have sufficient faith in my assessment of your character to believe you will.”

“And neither of them can talk?”

“No,” Mulrooney assented, concerned about how much harm he had done. “But their wits are as sharp as any, and I could not ask for better companionship. Besides…” He grinned. “There is something to be said for women who can’t answer back.”

This attempt at levity drew an immediate response from the two mute sisters. Mrs. Mulrooney the seamstress launched a ball of woolen socks, while Mrs. Mulrooney the gymnast whipped off a shoe. Both missiles struck their target full in the face.

“Bah! Ladies!” the professor complained. “You see what I mean? You have no reason to feel any pity for these two, young lad. They are more than able to look out for themselves! It is I who am outnumbered.”

Mrs. Mulrooney No. 1 licked an end of thread and darted it through a needle with a grin of vindication, while Mrs. Mulrooney No. 2 clapped her feet.

“And now,” said the professor. “Won’t you repay our candor and tell us your story? It’s plain you have one. Else you would not be so far from Zanesville.”

Just then a sound came from behind the cloth partition in the corner. The showman and his two wives showed no sign of acknowledgment. Perhaps a child was sick behind there, Lloyd thought, although the idea of having two wives still occupied him. Two wives this side of the curtain seemed to increase the possibilities of what lay behind. He tried to focus on the professor’s query.

Ordinarily he would not have satisfied such a request with much detail, but as a result of his time with St. Ives he was growing more secure in his ability to gauge people’s character and, as the professor had trusted him with a confidence, so he related as best he could his family’s trek from Ohio and their hopes of beginning a new life in Texas (save for the mystery that his uncle had referred to in his letter and the nature of his relationship with Miss Viola).

The professor and his two mute wives were both entertained and reassured by the boy’s account. “We are all strangers and pilgrims,” the showman summed up when Lloyd was done. “I wish you well on your journey to Texas. We are headed north for the heat of summer and then back south when autumn comes.”

It was at this point, just as Lloyd was thinking that it was time for him to get back to his father and how he hoped the professor would give him a bottle of the tiger powder, that another sound came from behind the screen partition-a very odd sound that was soon followed by odder noises still.

“What was that?” Lloyd asked when he could no longer resist.

“What?” answered the showman coyly.

“That. That!”

“Hmm. Yes…” the showman was forced to acknowledge now as the sounds grew odder and louder. “They’re awake.”

“They?” the boy repeated. “Who are they?”

Mulrooney’s face fell as if he had put his foot in his mouth again.

“The Ambassadors from Mars. The strangest strangers and pilgrims you will ever see,” he said at last. “But, my boy, you must swear not to tell a soul, because it’s not my intention to exhibit them yet.”

“Exhibit them?”

“Well, my commitment is not to exploit them but to help them maximize those features that offer such singular advantages if understood properly and positioned effectively. As their sponsor, I am obliged to insure that such an arrangement is practicable and sustainable-in a word, sufficiently profitable to cover the costs of their maintenance.”

“May I see… them?”

Knowing that the child, with curiosity now aroused, would not be likely to give in and go, the professor reluctantly motioned for him to approach the cubicle. This boy has got under my skin in the damnedest way, Mulrooney thought to himself, as he pulled back the swath of drape to reveal a sight that made even Lloyd’s mouth drop open.

The figures were dressed in clothes that conjured up images of Washington and Jefferson at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

“I call ’em Urim and Thummim,” the professor announced. “Or the Ambassadors from Mars. Don’t know what they call themselves.”

The creatures who now stood before Lloyd were remarkable individuals by anyone’s standards. Short but not exactly dwarfs, they were obviously brothers-both microcephalics, or pinheads. They were Negroid, perhaps, but pale-skinned, with highly distorted features and an animalish clicking-grunting type of language.

“Why do you call them the Ambassadors from Mars?” Lloyd asked.

“I don’t plan to outside the smaller burgs,” replied the professor. “Wouldn’t do a’tall to get the tar bubbling.”

“You mean to fool folks,” the boy chided.

“My young friend, let me say this about that. As a rule, people like to be fooled. If you mean inspired, surprised, delighted-made to wonder and to wish for things. If I can make the world bigger and brighter for a moment for some boot stone or put even a tintype star in the eye of some leather-skinned lass, where’s the crime in that? But when you say fool, you not only make it sound cheap, you make it sound easy-and t’aint always so. You can’t fool or enlighten all the people all the time, son. That’s why it’s so very important to be clear about who you are trying to fool or enlighten at any given time.”

“But they’re not from Mars, are they?” the boy continued (which stirred the Ambassadors into a fit of clicking and grunting).

“No,” agreed the professor, twisting his mustache. “They’re from Indiana, far as I know. That’s where I found ’em, at any rate. But their story is just as hard to swallow, in its own way. The free niggers looking after them swore on the Bible that these two were dropped out of a tornado.”

“A tornado?” Lloyd puzzled.

Mulrooney held his hand over his heart. “Urim and Thummim came down out of the storm unharmed about two years ago, they said. No hint of where they started from or who their real family was. The niggers took it as a sign from the Almighty and took ’em in, but they kept ’em hidden in their barn for fear of someone doing ’em harm.”

“So you bought them?” Lloyd asked, thinking back to how he had been hidden away in the family barn.

“The nigger and his wife were damn grateful when I proposed taking the boys off their hands. But now, when you see the lads in the sumptuous duds designed by the Ladies Mulrooney, prognosticating and pontificating in their mumbo-jumbo, who can but conclude that they are emissaries and apostles from some distant kingdom of celestial grandeur far beyond our ken?”

This assertion prompted more clicking and grunting from the Ambassadors, and the showman observed how closely the boy was listening.

“You look like you understand them.”

“I think I could, with a little time,” Lloyd replied.

“Balderdash! You can’t tell me there’s anything to their doggerel. Or if there is, only they know it!”

“No,” Lloyd answered. “I think it’s a real language-a spoken one, anyway.”

“Oh, they write, too-if you can call it that,” the professor remarked.

“Could I see?” Lloyd cried, unable to hide his interest.

“My boy, you’re as curious a specimen as they are in your own way,” the professor replied. He went to a trunk, which made Lloyd wince with the recollection of Miss Viola, and produced a large handful of paper scraps all covered with a tiny but precise cuneiform-like writing. Holding the dense lines of unknown symbols together was a repeated icon that resembled the spiral shape of a tornado.

“Now don’t be telling me you can read this!” the professor scoffed.

“Well, not yet,” Lloyd agreed. “But maybe…”

“Son, all the clever men in the world would be a long while in unraveling the secret of this doodling. And it may well be that there is no secret-that they’ve just scribbled and scrawled to please themselves and what looks good is good enough.”

Lloyd noticed a wooden matchbox, or what he first thought was a wooden matchbox, edging out from under the Ambassadors’ bed. It was in fact triangular in shape, rather like a hand-size metronome, and when he picked it up he was surprised by the almost total lack of weight. Its surface, which had the smoothness and hardness of metal, not wood, had been covered, but here the writing had been engraved. The weird ciphers flowed in their swimming lines, but the lines took on a larger shape of the cyclonic spiral.

“Could I have this?” the boy asked. “I want to study it.”

Urim and Thummim exchanged determined clicks and grunts.

Lloyd nodded at them, and they seemed to nod back.

“I take it they approve,” the professor said. “That’s how I’ll take it, anyway. You may keep the box, young Lloyd, as a souvenir to reward your sagacity and a memento of the amazements you have seen. Learn its secret if you can.”

The boy tucked the talismanic object into his shirt. Then he said goodbye to the professor and his unexpected family, not knowing how much trouble lay ahead for his own.

“What an unusual lad,” the professor said when Lloyd had departed. He was unable to recall what he had intended to lure the boy’s thoughts away from the tiger powder with when he invited him inside the tent.

The Ambassadors clicked and burbled.

CHAPTER 6. A Lust for Learning

LLOYD WAS A LONG TIME TRACKING DOWN HIS FATHER AND mother, because Hephaestus, when he discovered that he had lost the money, began combing the market, hoping against hope that it might just have fallen out of his pocket. Beside himself with anger about the loss, the reformed inventor limped out of the square and into a district of warehouses and then down a brickbat alley where he was waylaid by some toughs and might well have been beaten to a pulp had not one of them had a gimpy foot himself, and so called off the assault out of sympathy.

Meanwhile, Rapture found that haggling for bargains amid the produce merchants was exhausting work (and they sometimes found that talking to her was not so easy, either, even though she put on her whitest accent).

When Hephaestus and Lloyd were not at the agreed meeting point, she too went searching the adjacent streets and, following the commotion of a carriage accident, got lost for a time amid the dust heaps and sale yards, where it was lucky she did not get jumped. Or worse. While she could pass for white most of the time in Ohio, St. Louis was a more sensitive, volatile environment. She sensed that, but concerns about her menfolk made her bolder than she should have been.

So it was well after the professor had gathered a crowd and performed his magic show with the help of Mrs. Mulrooneys 1 and 2 (who were, of course, thought by the spectators to be the same woman) that the Sitturd family was finally reunited. And the mood was not pleasant when Hephaestus confessed what had happened to the money-or, rather, what he did not know had happened.

“How could you?” snapped Lloyd, thinking back to how hard he had to work and scheme to make it and, even worse, how honorably the rogue St. Ives had treated him, always dividing the money on equal terms. He was so put out and let down, in a way, he wished the gambler had been his father. However wounded he might have been, he was at least a man with backbone and cunning-and style-and knowledge of the world. Lloyd knew from having prowled the market himself just what had happened-and he knew that it would have been a very sorry sneak thief to have attempted such with St. Ives.

“I-I’m sorry,” Hephaestus whimpered. For the first time, Lloyd felt a cold and pure disdain for his father, which was made even worse, for it brought with it a premonitory fear of further dissolution and foolishness. I am too young to be made to lead this family, Lloyd thought. But what other choice is there if this is to happen?

They took shelter in the rodent-busy stable, with the smell of the glue boiler mingling with the smoky red grease lamps down in the street, and the collard greens and charred pigs’ feet rising up from the shacks and shantyboats.

It was a miserable night despite the butter beans and cinnamon that Rapture managed to serve, along with a slice of smoked fatback, a loaf of day-old flatiron bread, followed by a variation on apple pandowdy and quick mud coffee.

The mice were so insistent-and when they weren’t running wild across the rafters and the floor the rats in the walls and the birds in the roof sounded even louder-and Hephaestus was so disgusted with himself for losing Lloyd’s money that no one much enjoyed their food. Rapture tried to console her husband by reminding him that Lloyd had found the wad of notes, which meant it had been lost by someone else and so was “bad luck ’n’ kemin home.” Lloyd kept his mouth shut at this, although a part of him longed to tell them both the truth. He wanted the praise he was due for his resourcefulness and knack. There was more Zanesville in his parents than he liked.

But the important fact was that they could no longer afford their stateroom on the Spirit of Independence. A new life with Micah seemed farther away than when they were in Ohio. They were stranded and disheartened, and just before they tried to go to sleep Hephaestus started blubbering. It was not an easily stomached sight, and filled Rapture with fear. Lloyd felt his disdain turning to shame. Suddenly, the family was outright foundering-and a long way from home.

“Listen, Hephaestus,” he said in a dark, calm voice, the first time he had ever called his father by his first name. “You have to pull yourself together. Tomorrow I will go out and bring some more money in. I don’t know how yet, but I will. But you can’t be a machine that breaks down now. You’re supposed to be the father in this family.”

There was an almost chilling sobriety to the boy’s words that shook both parents-perhaps because they each suspected that the money that had been lost had not been found. In any case, the next morning while the sun was still low, at the tender age of six, Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd went to seek employment with the one person he knew in the river city.

“A job?” Mulrooney sighed. “My boy, you overestimate the financial fertility of my little enterprise. I regret to disinform you of this misconception, but last night, despite significant audience attention, the like of which any entertainer in any city of substance would be pleased to inspire, I ate fish-head soup. This morning I dined on oatmeal and brine. Please accept my apology for having to deny your request.”

“Why don’t you exhibit the Ambassadors?” Lloyd asked.

“They are not yet ready,” came the answer.

“Then why don’t you let them go?”

“Where?” the showman countered, and Lloyd saw that beneath the apparent flabbiness of his character Mulrooney was a victim of his own soft heart.

“But I can do things!” Lloyd insisted. “Things that will stir the crowd.”

“Such as?” the showman queried.

“What about long division-in my head?” Lloyd demanded.

“Long division? All right.” The showman smiled sadly.

“What’s 648,065 divided by 17?”

The boy thought for a moment and then replied, “38,121.47.”

“That answer sounds as plausible as any,” Mulrooney admitted.

“It’s the right answer!” Lloyd cried. “You can check it!”

“Bravo. But this is a magic show. Bewonderment and mystification.”

“What about calculating the number of beans in a big jar?”

“My boy, the best place to hide a buffalo is in a buffalo herd, and the best way to figure the number of beans in a jar is to be the one who put them there. That’s what my business is all about. That’s why it’s vital to think there is only one woman and not twins. But these little tricks of the intellect lack the necessary appeal for public performance.”

“But I have to earn some money!” the boy cried.

The shrillness of this outburst unsettled Mulrooney. There were people trawling the riversides who would be very interested in a child his age. Despite his apparent self-sufficiency, if the boy became desperate enough he could fall prey to some very undesirable folk.

“All right,” Mulrooney consented, racking his brain. “Let me think. Does your family know about your intentions?”

“N-no,” Lloyd admitted. “Not yet.”

“And I assume they would not approve if they did. So we know where we stand. All right, then. What about this? I believe we could fabricate… a mentalist attraction. In a word, mind reading. Hmm? We will ask questions of the audience and have you secured in such a way as not to hear. Then I shall ask you questions and you will tell everyone what it was the person said.”

“How will I know that?” Lloyd inquired.

“Because of the order of the questions that I ask you and certain key words I will use. We will have a code. With your quick head, we will fool and enlighten many. The rest will be amused. Then you can do some calculating feats and we can sell some special mind-strengthening tonic, for sharper wits and clearer thoughts.”

“Do you have some of that?” the boy asked.

“My little friend, I have but three tonics to sell, and they all have the main ingredient in common. The secret to tonic is not how it’s made but how it’s sold and therefore what it’s called. I will pay you one-third the price of every bottle of tonic we sell. I’m afraid I can do no better than that.”

“Thank you!” Lloyd smiled, imagining, in his naïve enthusiasm, the residents of St. Louis lining up for miles.

“Come back this afternoon and I will have written some patter for you to memorize and we will rehearse the code. But be warned, young Lloyd, show business is a difficult business. So keep your mind clear and your wits about you, or we may both find ourselves in a situation that no tonic can cure.”

Lloyd ran back to the stables and the showman slipped into the tent, where his wives were debating in their personal sign language and the Ambassadors from Mars were clicking wildly. “Well,” Mulrooney told himself. “At least the boy will be safer with me than roaming the streets.”

Lloyd returned that afternoon as ordered. In but an hour he mastered the speech the showman had composed and a host of variations, all the intricacies of the mind-reading code, and some simple ways of integrating his calculating and spelling abilities-along with various musical improvisations on the mouth organ, squeezebox, and an old dimpled bugle that the showman had kept from his own boyhood. Lloyd had not had much direct exposure to music; he had been too busy with his inventions. But he quickly, intuitively grasped the system of music, and if his instrumental technique was raw that actually worked in his favor as far as performance theatrics went-or so Mulrooney thought. On the squeezebox, he became an imp of melody with astounding rapidity. “Damn me if that boy couldn’t be a musical genius if he turned his mind to it,” Mulrooney told his wives.

Then Lloyd had to decant a large cask of transparent liquid that gave off fumes that brought tears to his eyes into a series of little bottles with corks in the end. The magical-memory and mind-strengthening tonic was 140-proof alcohol laced with juniper and spearmint and could not have been more effective at clouding memory, although Mulrooney dubbed it LUCID! (He was particular about the exclamation mark.)

While working to fill the bottles, Lloyd listened to Urim and Thummim, and the more certain he became that, as freakish as they were, there was something about their language that was beautiful and subtle.

The showman retained his reservations about putting the boy “up on the stump,” and if Mabel Peanut, Lloyd’s sometime teacher back in Zanesville, could have seen him in St. Louis, performing on the medicine-show wagon, she would have felt confirmed in all her predictions about the family’s errant ways. But for Lloyd the experience of being THE MIRACLE MIND READER & MYSTIFYING CHILD OF VISION was as invigorating as a whiff of ozone or the taste of sarsaparilla-a brazen vindication of his special abilities, all the things, or at least some of them, that he had had to cloak or to be ashamed of back home. It chuffed his pride to be able to help his family, when he felt that, for all his singular gifts, he had caused them distress in the past.

Yet it also piqued his native rebelliousness and his no longer secret contempt for his parents, try to hide it deep down in his heart though he did. The stinking hobnailed boot was on the other foot now. They were of necessity grateful for his earnings, and gratitude is a double-minded emotion that can snake in many directions.

The Spirit of Independence may have departed without the Sitturds, and Texas may have slipped farther out of their grasp, but the youngest family member at least began traveling all around-from Spanish Lake and the Missouri Bottoms to the other side of the river on the smoking ferries, wherever Mulrooney thought they could draw a crowd.

From the self-named Professor of Teratology, Lloyd learned a plethora of new words (such as “plethora,” “pinguid,” “paludal,” and “uliginous”), not to mention the more utilitarian skills of how to make change, short change-upsell, distract, hoodwink, and hornswoggle a crowd into being an attentive audience. And a great success the arrangement was, at least at first. For a couple of golden weeks, the showman began to have Barnum-like aspirations. With a little luck, maybe he could get the boy to travel with them to Chicago. The Ambassadors would eventually be incorporated into the act, and with the proceeds he would begin to build himself an empire of novelties-a true touring odditorium featuring headhunters from lost islands and living skeletons, with scientific displays to delight and inspire all ages!

After the second successful performance, Lloyd invited his parents along to watch him work. He was proud of himself. Meanwhile, Rapture had humbled herself and found employment as a scrubwoman for a fetid old wharf doctor who sold laudanum and performed abortions on the sly. She was upset to learn of Lloyd’s exploits, but grateful that her son had risen to the occasion.

However, the boy’s new career did not sit at all well with Hephaestus. Lloyd’s dressing down of him had yanked him out of his blither for a day or so, but without any inventions to occupy his mind, with Micah and Texas now seemingly out of reach, and with a growing sense of impotence as the head of the household, and no house to hold, the former blacksmith soon began to wallow in drink, exaggerating his limp for the purposes of begging, so that he could afford a cheap charcoal-flavored mash that a freedman named Little Jack Redhorse made.

When not moping and sulking in the loft of the stable, where they were forced to remain, he took to panhandling near the main market-and if fortunate in his takings he went in search of companionship and diversion, which he ended up finding at a place called the Mississippi Rose, an apparent chop shop and taproom that was in fact a seedy house of blue lights (a favorite among the preachers and the civic leaders). In addition to five floury white floozies and a very popular quadroon named Black Cherry, the entertainments ranged from cards and billiards to wagers on rat-catching dogs or bouts of barefisted boxing if two Irishmen could be found.

The proprietor was known as Chicken Germain, a Melungeon woman built like a cart horse with straight black hair and steel-blue eyes. She loved fried food and men, especially well-endowed men-and especially well-endowed men who also had some physical deformity. The first night Hephaestus managed to sneak in the door, Chicken was about to have him evicted when she noticed his limp. An hour later she noticed that he was anything but limp, chicken bones and gaudy silk stockings strewn on the floor beside her carved oak bed upstairs.

Despite his age, Lloyd was in his own way tortured by the temptations of desire into which Miss Viola had initiated him. There were not many avenues for sexual fulfillment for a boy of his age-particularly one who was new to town and without spending money, because, unlike Hephaestus, all the money he made he turned over to his mother.

From a street waif named Scooper he heard about a teenage half-breed called Pawnee Mary, who would let you do her if you gave her chewing tobacco. There was also a beefy bucket head named Betty, who would get down on all fours behind the feedlot if you gave her a pig ear to chew on. But the Christian Union rode Betty out of town on a rail (which some local wags claimed she enjoyed), while Pawnee Mary was found floating facedown in the river. Young Lloyd grew ever more restless for company and release, and might well have wandered down a short, dark path himself had his yearning for female affection not found another outlet.

One night after he had fled the stable, where enough rancor was brewing between his parents to set the horses snorting in their stalls below, he happened upon a Lyceum-like institution that called itself the Illumination Society. The establishment was filled with horn-rimmed fusspots arguing about a magic-lantern lecture on the life history of the bee. Was it too bold? Too suggestive? The opinions were hot on both sides of the debate, and no one noticed Lloyd slip into the adjacent library. He was starving for intellectual stimulation in the same way that he craved sex.

In the hushed, stuffy book room he found copies of Shakespeare and Horace. But when he went to look beyond one of the rows, in the darker part of the room, he pulled out a heavy volume on the history of the Punic Wars and found on the shelf behind it another book tucked away, as if in secret. In the dim light, he strained his eyes to take in the contents. The pages were filled with illustrated pictures of men and women. Naked men and women posed in positions that he hadn’t even thought of! His heart leaped. Page by forbidden page, the pictures lubricated his imagination. Fortunately, the members of the Illumination Society were now immersed in an earnest discussion regarding dues and the privileges of officeholders. Oh, how he longed to steal that book-so crammed with fantasies and flesh! But it was too large for him to slip under his shirt. He noticed a small card glued inside the front cover. It read RARE BOOKS & MAPS, and was followed by a St. Louis address-on Fifth Street, not far away. His whole body quivered at the prospect! Perhaps there were more such books to be found there.

The next afternoon, following a show where sales of LUCID! hit a record high, Lloyd went searching for the shop (with the express intention of locating and stealing a forbidden text). The address in question was a very narrow shop front, not much wider than the single door, with just one small window. The pane was so caked with mud and crusted insects that it was impossible to gain any idea of what type of business was conducted inside, but the moment Lloyd was inside the door he knew that he had found what he had been searching for. The shop was much deeper than he expected, laid out in a series of small plaster-peeling rooms and alcoves built off one long hall lined by a tatty Oriental carpet. On the wall behind the door hung a Dutch map of some section of the coast of Africa, and on the floor below lay a transparent celestial sphere and a page from an illuminated manuscript depicting a sleeping peasant being inspected by a family of hedgehogs. The place was silent but for the buzzing of a bluebottle butting the inside of the clouded glass. As there was no one about, Lloyd peered into the first room. More maps covered the wall-or pieces of maps-some framed, some torn and decomposing. Piles of books lay everywhere.

He found amid the mouse dirt and cobwebs a fat vellum volume concerning the history of military fortifications. In the neighboring alcove he found the travels of Hakluyt and the Wildflowers of the Southern Alps, which had several blood-smeared mosquitoes smushed between its pages. At last, however, on top of a crooked chimney pile of texts, he came upon an edition of Nicolaus Steno’s famous anatomical work on the ovaries of sharks, which gave him hope that he might have hit on a heap of biological or medical texts. Perhaps somewhere near the bottom was hidden the documentation of some forensically vivid mating ritual or a diagram of the female organs. He became so engrossed in this possibility that he was not even aware of the hint of witch hazel insinuating itself through the haze of cracked book paste and Graeco-Latino-English terminology-until the man’s stealthy approach was announced with a phlegmy clearing of the throat. Lloyd tipped over a pillar of crumbling books and stared up in panic, choking on the dust.

The man who confronted him now was but a smidgen over five feet tall, with tufts of wild hair and bushy eyebrows giving way to a domed forehead. His hands were soft and effeminate-looking, yet there was about his frame a contrasting hint of martial energy and force of character, which was undermined by a noticeable hump on his back. The man’s attire consisted of a neat but worn dark twill suit with a faint powdering of dust, an expensive-looking white shirt and a silver pocket watch suspended from his waistcoat by an oily chain. On the thick hooked nose above a bristle of gray mustache propped a pair of round wire spectacles, and when he opened his mouth to speak Lloyd spotted a calcium stain on his front tooth.

“This is not a lending library, young man. These books are for sale. Get along.”

He pivoted to leave, but Lloyd piped up.

“But it looks like there are a lot of books that no one wants to buy! Wouldn’t it be better if some were read?”

“You know nothing,” the man croaked. “I do a brisk trade with bibliophiles from all over the country and indeed the world. From here to Boston, London, and Antwerp. There is a buyer for every book under this roof. You do not look like a buyer to me. Please go.”

“Couldn’t I just sit in one of the rooms and read?” Lloyd begged. “I won’t disturb any of the… buyers.”

This plea grated on the humpy man’s nerves, for he slapped his hands together and stuttered, “H-how… how did you come to find me?”

Lloyd fidgeted again, not wanting to recount how he had learned of the shop and certainly not what he had hoped to find.

“I… I was just… walking past,” he muttered.

The man slapped his hands together again and said, “Then you may kindly just walk out. Books such as these are not for children.”

“Don’t you think that education is a good thing?” Lloyd asked stubbornly.

“Allein die Dosis macht dass ein Ding kein Gift ist,” the bookman said, sighing. “Good day.”

“I know what you said,” Lloyd replied.

“Yes, but you are not leaving as I asked. Will I have to call a constable?”

“No, I mean what you said in German.”

“Bully for you. And now I am addressing you in Latin. “Nemo me impune lacessit.”

“Why would I want to harm you?” Lloyd puzzled.

“What?” the dainty humped man started. “You know Latin, too?”

“Yes,” Lloyd answered. “Of course.”

The proprietor gave a sniff of disbelief and strode over to the nearest shelf and whisked out a volume of Catullus’s poetry. “All right,” he said, handing the open book to Lloyd and pointing. “Tell me what this says.”

Lloyd glanced down at the selected page and read, “Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. It means ‘I hate and love. You may ask why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it and am in torment.’ ”

“Hmm.” The man smiled, showing his calcium stain. “And what did I say before in German?”

“ ‘Only the dose insures the thing will not be a poison.’ ”

“Correct!” snapped the bookseller. “And in reference to education you may already have had too much-at least of a certain kind.”

“I hardly ever go to school,” Lloyd corrected. “But I am quick.”

“Perhaps,” the man said, flexing his hump. “But you are slow to leave. I believe you were sent by one of the local dilettantes to goad and annoy me.”

“I wasn’t sent by anyone!” Lloyd insisted. “I’m here on my own.”

There was something about the emphatic way the boy uttered this last remark, combined with his unexpected erudition, that made the bookseller change his attitude, for he brushed some of the dust from his suit and said, “All right, my learned young friend. Since you are so committed, you may remain here and read. I close at four, and you are not to wander outside this room. Understood?”

“Thank you!” Lloyd beamed. “Thank you. But… is there any key to how the books are organized?”

The humped man stroked his mustache.

“The key is right here,” he said, pointing to his shining forehead. “I know where every book is in the entire shop. Does my young sir have special interests?”

“I am interested in science. And magic,” Lloyd answered. “And… secrets.”

“I… see,” the bookseller said, arching his woolly eyebrows.

The humped man disappeared into the next room and Lloyd heard him foraging among the piles. He returned with an armload of Euclid’s Elements and a book concerning Hooke’s microscopy and an alchemical folio titled “Tract on the Tincture and Oil of Antimony,” by Roger Bacon.

“Feast your mind on these. But mark what I say about staying in this room.”

So saying, the man spun around and retreated back into the gloom of maps and tomes, taking the delicate astringency of the witch hazel with him. To the boy’s surprise, other people did enter the shop. Those that he glimpsed passing by in the hall did not look much like buyers to him, but as they did not take any notice of him he paid them little mind and burrowed deeper into his reading. Once he heard the bookseller speaking in French in low tones to someone in the back. At five minutes to four, the humped man reappeared carrying a heavy set of keys.

“What is your name, young scholar?” the man asked.

Lloyd told him his name and swallowed a clump of dust and phlegm.

“My name is Wolfgang Schelling,” the bookseller informed him. “I must say, you look more likely to pinch an apple than to go to the trouble of finding a book to read. But perhaps I don’t know very much about boys. I was never allowed to be one myself, and I have no children of my own. In any case, it’s time for you to go wherever you call home. Would you like to come back here again to study?”

“More than anything,” Lloyd cried, and this was almost true.

“All right,” Schelling purred. “Here are the rules. You are not to rummage about. Ever. I will select the books or find ones of interest for you. Do your parents or family know you came here? Does anyone know?”

“No,” Lloyd answered.

“Then let’s keep it that way. Trouble is easy to find these days, and I have no need of it. If I find that you have told anyone about your visits here, your privileges will be terminated. Always come in by the back door, which I will show you now, and you must always leave whenever I tell you to. And I do not want to hear anything about your life and problems-your family or the lack thereof. I will not tolerate either disrespect or private confidences. Understood?”

“Y-yes,” Lloyd answered.

“You may come tomorrow at either ten or one but not in between, and you must be punctual.”

“Yes, sir,” Lloyd said, nodding. “And may I bring my notebook?”

“You may. Buy you must not leave pencil shavings or do anything untidy,” Schelling replied-a remark that struck Lloyd as amusing, given the thick fur of dust that haunted the shop.

“And to resolve any unpleasant curiosity you may have, the hump on my back is a benign growth that is too close to my spine to be removed. No surgeon has the skill to remove it without endangering my life. So you need not stifle any impertinent questions on that score. Now follow me, and do not return except at the times I have indicated. Oh, and do consider bathing. You reek of fried catfish and the honey bucket.”

Lloyd flinched at this remark but picked himself up off the floor and followed the bookseller down the long hallway to the back door. Outside was an alleyway jammed with crates and excelsior, but he knew the way back to the stable and sprinted down the jagged cobblestones, leaving the humpbacked man watching him from the doorway. Once the boy was gone, Schelling returned to the room he had been reading in and took a mental inventory. The bookseller noticed that a treatise on the Greek Archytas of Tarentum’s mechanical pigeon, the first model airplane, was missing. Then, on the back of an old newspaper advertising a slave auction, he spotted something that made his bespectacled eyes bug out. Using but a hardened clump of street mud, the boy had managed to scrawl a rather fine imitation of one of Hooke’s microscopic drawings.

“I wonder…” Schelling murmured.

CHAPTER 7. Wild Science

THE SITTURDS’ MORALE COLLAPSED IN ST. LOUIS. THEIR WORLD always seemed to be ending. Rapture felt degraded and confused by the “w’ich en w’y talk” of the metropolis. She had lost her ability for “sperit voicen” and seemed fatigued at heart. Hephaestus teetered into the gutter. Where up to this point the trials of travel had brought them together in their quest to reach Texas and learn the secret of the “salvation” letter, now all the distractions and pressures of the city and their changing roles seemed to bring them undone. Each in a private way was homesick for their old life, as much as that had seemed a burden in the past. Each felt somehow to blame, especially Hephaestus.

The lame patriarch’s dalliance with Chicken Germain had been his first betrayal of marital fidelity and had been instantly apprehended by his wife the moment he staggered back to the stable. In Rapture’s mind there was an unbridgeable difference between chugalugging moonshine and doing the jellyroll with an “oagly” cathouse madam who consumed fried chicken by the plateful. The root witch in her was quick to take retaliatory action, concocting a noxious salve and applying it to Hephaestus’s manhood when he fell asleep. The next morning he experienced the kind of profound contrition that only a severe mix of pain and embarrassment can elicit. Since then his condition had improved but had not cleared, and his mood remained sullen and dejected. He was angry with himself for what he had done, angry with his wife for what she had done to him, and angry with Lloyd for keeping his head and becoming the family breadwinner. It was not right, and undermined what fragile dignity he had left.

Lloyd’s answer to this tension was to throw himself with full force into his work on the medicine show and into his secret studies at Wolfgang Schelling’s bookshop. While back in Zanesville Mabel Peanut and Irma Grimm battled to teach their students the multiplication tables, Lloyd considered the implications of a pendulum being perfectly isochronous when describing a cycloidal arc. In one sitting, he consumed and appeared to understand a complex dissertation on celestial mechanics. Even the densest algebraic equations were soon rendered in exact visual form on a graph. In Schelling’s experience, for sheer power of processing and retention the boy had no equal.

The book and map seller nourished the lad’s hunger for learning with the Poetics of Aristotle and the metaphysics of Kant, but Lloyd much preferred the researches of Gauss and Coulomb into magnetic induction and resistance. While other bright boys his age would have delved into the adventures of Sinbad or the Swamp Fox, Lloyd opted for the scientific treatises of Swedenborg. His weakness lay in the area of magic, and Schelling’s shop was more than able to accommodate these diversions with dusty grimoires, Books of the Dead, and volumes devoted to alchemy and divination.

Hour by hour Schelling imagined that he could see the boy’s mind changing shape to accommodate the new learning and, despite his best efforts to remain remote and uninvolved, when the usual look of forlorn acknowledgment swept across the prodigy’s face one afternoon at closing time the humped scholar found himself providing take-home reading-which Lloyd began to indulge in by candlelight when his feuding parents had finally dropped off to sleep.

The first work he devoured was on thaumaturgy, the engineering of ingenious machines for the purposes of theatrical or religious magic. It included the triumphant contrivances of Hero and Vitruvius, and John Dee’s panic-causing stage effect of a mechanical flying beetle in Aristophanes’ Peace. The second book was about Sir Joseph Banks, Captain Cook’s botanist and science officer, who smuggled into his cabin a woman, dressed as a boy, to be his “assistant.” It cheered Lloyd to learn that a man of science could also be a man of lust, and when the book described Banks as a “voyager, monster-hunter, and amoroso,” he decided that that was what he would dedicate his life to becoming.

Apart from a dog-eared Japanese pillow book, he did not find many books to titillate his erotic senses, but he did find descriptions and drawings of the mechanical iron hand designed by Götz von Berlichingen in 1505-the Little Writer, the ingenious automaton conceived by Pierre Jacquet-Droz and his son, in the 1760s, as well as Vaucanson’s miraculous mechanical digesting duck.

Lloyd rather felt his beaver was not altogether an inferior creation, but he resolved to become ever more ambitious. In response, he filched some items from a dustbin and a jeweler’s workshop and one afternoon presented his host and patron with a foot-high clockwork mannequin modeled on Andrew Jackson and armed with a whittled dowel flintlock that fired a mung bean. After that, the bookseller began showering the youngster with more than books. From the nether reaches of the dusty warren came horseshoe magnets, lengths of coiled copper and chemical solutions, lenses and grinding tools, professional carving implements, and a miscellany of objects to further entice the boy’s imagination. Lloyd responded with a dollhouse incorporating hidden passages and optical illusions, and a miniature paddle wheeler with a high-pressure steam engine that, in proportionate terms, produced twice the power using less than half the normal fuel. An ear trumpet attached to a night watchman’s knuckle-duster and some homemade gunpowder became a handheld cannon capable of projecting a load of ball bearings. (Lloyd field-tested it against the Rovers and the Mud Puppies, two warring gangs of urchins, who were less visible on the streets thereafter.)

When he set to work on improving the primary battery cell developed by J. F. Daniell, Schelling’s eyebrows stayed raised. Most significant of all, Lloyd proved that what the book merchant had taken to be a toy was at minimum a very sophisticated toy. It was a hand-size locomotive that appeared to be made of glass, which Schelling said had come from Austria. Lloyd recalled the story St. Ives had told him about the crystal orchids of Junius Rutherford, and performed a series of experiments. He revealed that the object responded to the energy of the sun and posited that the glass was really some form of disguised plant material. Schelling was careful to put the locomotive under lock and key after that, and he began to consider that it might be wise to do the same with Lloyd. Such a development prompted the bookseller to relax his rule about private confidences, and he began soliciting information about Lloyd’s family and their plans. He was pleased that the boy was as forthcoming as he was.

The problem Schelling perceived was that the lad’s interests flitted from subject to subject-one minute daguerreotypes,the next ideas for an internal-combustion engine. Of far greater concern, however, was an incipient sadism that the book merchant found despicable.

Deciding that Lloyd’s education required something other than scientific literature and handbooks of magic, the humped man provided an illustrated volume on Greek mythology. On the way back to the stable after closing, Lloyd trapped a wharf rat, which he named Theseus. The next day he built a maze for the rat to explore, but when the rodent failed to extricate itself Lloyd attached one of his battery wires and proceeded to torture it with electricity. Schelling was left to perform a merciful extermination. The next day when the bookseller inquired what the child was clutching in a damp handkerchief, Lloyd replied, “A cat’s brain.”

Schelling was forced to admit that his protégé’s moral intelligence lagged far behind his mental aptitude. When he quizzed the boy to describe what his special field of interest was, Lloyd muttered, “Wild science.”

“What do you mean by that?” the bookman queried.

“The life of machines,” Lloyd said with a shrug. “The machinery of life.”

Schelling was taken aback to learn that a further inventory of the subjects that exuded fascination for the prodigy included ghosts, dreams, and the female anatomy. When asked what he would most like to accomplish, given his prodigious gifts, Lloyd replied, without a hint of irony or self-consciousness, “Design a female playmate who will remain forever young, communicate with the dead, formulate a detailed map of the mind, and perhaps travel to other worlds.”

Fortunately, Lloyd had to use the privy in the back lane, so Schelling was left to splutter to himself. Then he sneaked a peek at the boy’s notes. In the beleaguered two-penny Buffalo book, he found an amalgam of symbols, numbers, and marginalia-from mathematical calculations and sketches depicting various mechanical actions to a chain of hierograms that made him gawk. These emblems spiraled through a series of schematic drawings that merged existing and imaginary machines with animals and insects, along with humans and mythological beasts in graphic sexual poses. Lloyd returned and picked up his work just where he had left off without noticing the disturbed look on Schelling’s face.

While his education under the bookseller’s patronage progressed at the speed of thought, out on the medicine-show circuit the brisk sales of LUCID! were beginning to fall off. From long experience, Mulrooney sensed that the “hole was pretty well fished out” and the solution was to move on, upriver to Hannibal, Quincy, Rock Island, maybe even St. Paul. Of course, Lloyd could not go. The Sitturds’ way led west and south, yet the boy’s share of tonic sales was still nowhere near enough to pay for all three fares on the Missouri.

Mulrooney encouraged the prodigy to improvise more flamboyant expressions of his talents with an “enterprise point of view” in mind. Lloyd answered with theatrical exhibitions of magnetism, mirrors, and various volatile chemicals, which stimulated both consternation and raucous applause but did not lead to further sales. However, when he unveiled a flock of soaring toys and wind flyers public interest took a decided turn. These were simpler than the ones he had made in Zanesville but more elegant in their efficiency and less labor-intensive to produce. They had the added benefit of being disposable, which encouraged repeat purchases. They achieved an instant local vogue. Children and grown-ups alike were smitten by the sleek white arrows and bird-shaped creations. Prices varied, depending on the size and the materials, but the sudden popularity of the flying toys brought the Sitturds momentarily back together again, as Lloyd, Rapture, and the repentant Hephaestus were forced to work side by side in order to keep pace with demand as clubs and competitions sprouted wings. Yet even this success was not enough to satisfy Lloyd. His inclinations and impatience spurred him on to new heights.

The next phase started with a caged dove, a lamb, and a rooster. While gathering his things to leave Schelling’s bookshop one afternoon, Lloyd stumbled upon a volume on the history of ballooning, which began with the story of the Frenchman Pilâtre de Rozier launching the first animals in a balloon of paper and fabric, then making a solo ascent himself a few months after-followed later by a true free flight in a balloon designed by the famous Montgolfier brothers in 1783.

In the early hours of the next day, Lloyd launched his own straw fire-fueled balloon made of butcher paper and hat wire, sending aloft one of the stable mice he had nabbed. He watched with pride as it disappeared in the vicinity of the Nicholson grocery store. (Unbeknownst to the boy, the balloon bounded about in the framing of a rooftop water tank before crashing near the Wheaton drugstore, to the mystification of a clerk named Balthus Tubb, who would go to his grave puzzling over the singed vermin that fell from the sky and hit him in the head.)

Reading how kites had been used in ancient China to elevate fireworks for military purposes set off fireworks of its own inside the boy’s mind. With funding from Mulrooney, Lloyd began constructing, demonstrating, and selling kites as big as himself along the levee as part of the medicine show’s new program. The sight of the creations trembling on their tethers over the river brought whistles from the packet steamers and cheers from the freight-loaded flatboats. The size of the kites grew, and so did their efficiency. When the Fourth of July came, Lloyd incorporated his emerging capabilities into a pyrotechnic display along the riverbank. Mulrooney handled the ticket sales and was delighted at the takings. Schelling was circulating in the crowd that night, too, but he was far from delighted.

The next day at closing time, the humpbacked bibliophile buttonholed the wunderkind and said, “My boy, I have someone who would like to make your acquaintance. Someone I think it would be very strategic for you to meet. She is known as Mother Tongue. She is elderly and eccentric, but if favorably disposed toward you-and I believe she will be-she could become an invaluable… sponsor.”

“Why?” Lloyd asked.

“Because of your unique abilities. And because she is eccentric. I would like you to meet me at the old ferry landing at midnight tonight.”

“Midnight?” Lloyd cried. “What will I tell my mother and father?” Although he protested, he was beginning to think that he did not owe his parents any explanation for his actions anymore.

“You must not tell them. You must wait until they are asleep and slip out.”

“But why so late-and where does this Mother Tongue live?”

“I can only say that she is eccentric, as I have told you. But she is worth meeting. Trust me,” the bookseller replied, and the lump on his back twitched.

“All right,” Lloyd agreed, and turned to head home, thinking all the while that his own fortunes seemed to rise in proportion to the fall in his parents’. It stung him, though, how they were forever undermining his elation, flinging filaments if not cables of guilt and responsibility at him, needing him yet holding him back. But from what? Perhaps the answer to that question was about to take more than a dream’s shape.

CHAPTER 8. Midnight Is a Door

LLOYD ARRIVED AT THE OLD FERRY LANDING DEAD ON THE APPOINTED time. A full moon reflected off the wharf and the chimneys of the docked boats, giving the Mississippi a sickly silver sheen. Schelling was waiting for him. Two stevedore-muscled black men were on board a cramped, decrepit steam launch with him-one at the helm, one standing guard. Despite the warm summer night, the boy shivered.

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.

CHAPTER 9. The Hunger for Secrets

“DID I SCARE YOU, LLOYD?” MOTHER TONGUE 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.

“What else did he do?” Lloyd asked, thinking back to St. Ives’s story of Junius Rutherford.

“He grasped the most complex relationships between numbers, music, and the stars. He looked deep into the idiosyncrasies of other creatures, the chemistry of healing, and the nature of disease. Most important, his thought embraced the relationship of language to life and the shape of the mind. He was a geometer, dreamer, and diviner-a maker of medicines and occult machines. One legend says he could even raise and animate the dead.”

“That sounds like an awful lot for one man to know,” Lloyd said, whistling.

“Yes!” agreed Mother Tongue. “That was his most insightful idea of all. The necessity of camouflage to survive. The need to appear to be many men instead of one, and the need to become many men-and women, too-in order to make his ideas live.”

“How do you know that he was just one man?”

Mother Tongue stroked the cat. The coon dog never moved.

“The same has been asked of many,” she answered. “There is a view that all the great figures of inspiration-Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Zoroaster-do not represent individual historical figures but, rather, are code names for composite characters uniting the thoughts and visions of many people. There is no way to prove or disprove the actual life of Spiro now, for he chose always to hide in the shadows, and so his reputation and his achievements have been relegated to the shadows of history. But upon this skeleton of shadows most of what we know of as the modern world has developed.

“He traveled widely-to Rome and the deserts of Arabia. Jerusalem, Baghdad, Alexandria, and deep into Europe-India and China, too. His knowledge he passed on to carefully chosen pupils who were sworn to secrecy. Magicians, physicians, alchemists, philosophers, architects, engineers, and artists. To each of them he gave a piece of the master puzzle, one fragment of what he called the Great Enigma.”

“Why?”

“So no one individual or even generation ended up knowing the master goal-they only knew the pieces they had been entrusted with and the implications that flowed from them. This protected the Great Enigma, for if one person or school failed, for whatever reason, to pass on or build on their knowledge, there was always the hope that others would survive and continue the work.”

“What happened to him?” Lloyd asked, leaning forward. “When did he die?”

“In one sense, he never did,” Mother Tongue replied. “Because we are talking about him now and still coming to terms with his thought and deeds. But in the sense you mean, what happened to the one man is lost in the puzzle that he created. What happened to the many men and women that he became-that is much better known. Because, you see, it was inevitable that the pieces of the puzzle would seek each other out and try to form the Whole.”

“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked, and was surprised when the ancient woman gestured toward the wall of the cabin behind her. He could have sworn that the wall was bare before, but now it showed a map of the world that seemed to glow and swirl like the marvelous lights that had illuminated the crusted boat upon his arrival.

Mother Tongue cleared her throat, as if savoring the taste of her phlegm.

“From the sands of Egypt to what is now Italy and France, Holland, Germany, and the forests of Northern Europe, England and Ireland, all the way to the Orient, the lineage of the students of Spiro’s teachings coalesced to form a confederacy with the grand design of unifying magic, religion, and science to lead mankind to the fulfillment of the destiny he foresaw. Many of the greatest minds and prime movers of Western culture were later Spiro’s followers, bound to secrecy by the oath of the Order. Paracelsus, Nicholas of Cusa, Raleigh, Bacon, Van Leeuwenhoek, Pascal, Lavoisier-and countless others who remain unknown. The names and contributions are so entangled in history that it is impossible to separate the individuals and the strands. Cosmographers and mapmakers joined the Order. Noblemen and divines. Caliphs and rajas. The Spirosians infiltrated the Catholic Church, the Jewish merchant-finance networks, and the cabalistic enclaves-even the dynasties of distant China. They directed emperors and later formed the major craft guilds. They sponsored secret expeditions of discovery.

“Through oblique channels, it was Spiro’s thought that lit the fire that fueled the Renaissance and allowed the birth of science, and later inspired the Spirosians to take key steps that led to both the French and American revolutions. From the Great Pyramids to Trafalgar Square, Mecca to Monticello, his influence has been felt. But secrecy and subterfuge was of necessity always the rule. From the first fog-enshrouded moment of inception, the leaders followed Spiro’s practice of concealment and distraction, creating or sponsoring most of all the major secret societies that have ever been heard of, in order to cloak their own investigations and innovations. Many you might not have heard of yet. The Assassins, Knights Templar, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, and the Illuminati-all these had members who believed in the reality of their confederacies without ever knowing the true nature of their origins.”

“But why?” Lloyd queried, glancing again at the sleeping dog.

“To confuse enemies by creating figureheads and decoys,” the ancient answered. “The attraction and fear of cabals is so ingrained in human society, the Spirosians always sought to use this stratagem as the primary defense and principal tool of direction-misdirection. Spiro taught that it is through the study and practice of illusion that we learn the art and science of the truth, and this philosophy has proved immensely effective. Yet it was always a point of vulnerability, and through this point a splinter was driven that changed the history of the movement and, indeed, the world.”

“A splinter?” Lloyd asked. The curious map was now gone from the wall.

“A schism developed. Another sect or school of thought took shape and broke away. They called themselves the Vardogers, a Scandinavian term for a ‘psychic double,’ but their true name is the Order of the Claws & Candle, which comes from the practice of canny northern priests of old, who attached candles to the backs of crabs, releasing them in graveyards to simulate the spirits of the dead to impress the credulous.

“They believed that mastering the Great Enigma was a task they alone could be trusted with. They retreated so far into their own secrecy that their ingenuity began to fester. They grew to love the interplay of hidden forces and came to believe that the masses must be manipulated like the figures in a vast marionette opera. They turned their composite mind to engines and methods of war and domination, strange new vessels of transport and division-and ever more ingenious techniques for influencing the will. Those of us alive today are just beginning to see how far back in time this labyrinthine campaign began to be waged.”

“Wait a minute,” Lloyd grunted, leaning back in the rocker. “From what you say-if you are to be believed-the Spirosians have been busybodying themselves all over for a very long time. What makes your view right?”

Mother Tongue’s green eyes gleamed.

“It is true that the movement has always sought to steer the secret course of world events-the dissemination of ideas and the prosperity that ensues. But the difference between the progress of humanity at large and the enrichment of a clandestine élite at the expense of whole peoples is as profound as they come.”

“But hasn’t the movement always been clandestine-and élite?”

“Yes!” snapped the old woman, and heaved the cat to the floor. “The means have been similar in some respects, but the end is entirely different! The candle of the Vardogers’ knowledge is very bright, but the crab of their might has very long claws. They are not averse to intimidation, betrayal, and murder. And now the key battlefield is here!”

“In St. Louis?” Lloyd squawked.

“In America-which has long been the jewel of contention in the holy war of dreams and ideas, yes! This nation was founded on just such conflict. But this area in particular has now become a cauldron. It is a focal point for the ravenous plans for expansion and development-the struggle over land and railroads, the erosion of the Indian’s ways-and for the spread of the hideous practice of slavery. You are well aware of the slave pens scattered throughout the city that are operated by the auctioneering companies. There is one on Olive Street, and another on Fifth Street that specializes in the sale of children. Children, Lloyd. Younger than you! Your own family walks a razor’s edge.”

The hairless cat leaped back into Mother Tongue’s lap. The coon dog never flinched. Lloyd set the pine ladder-back rocking like a clock pendulum.

“If this time and place is so important, then why is a woman in charge?”

Mother Tongue’s eyes flamed and then she smiled again, wrinkling every cleft and furrow in the pudding of her face.

“Spoken like a true little boy. The simple answer is that we are losing the war, Lloyd. I hold the position of authority that I do now out of desperation. We have recently lost a valuable colleague in the South, who was supposedly teaching slaves how to read the Bible. For that, he was ostracized. When it was discovered that he was really teaching them mathematics, he was hanged. Our leadership is embattled, our fund of knowledge is in tatters. The lights you saw-we know how to turn them on and off, but the man who was beginning to understand their secrets is dead. Others throughout the world who might understand them we dare not approach, because they are under close enemy surveillance or we are in doubt about their affiliation.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lloyd said, yawning. “But my family sleeps in a smelly stable. And I still don’t understand what this all has to do with me.”

“My boy”-Mother Tongue smiled, her bright green eyes flaring-“the great mission of the Spirosians has been subverted. Our work has been sabotaged and our membership has been preyed upon. Operatives in Europe and abroad have been deposed. Others have defected-won over by greed or fear. Or delusion. We know that deadly new weapons are being made in Germany-and right here in America, in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Mobile and Charleston. Meanwhile, marauders,slave speculators, and any number of professional rascals and rabble-rousers are pouring into Missouri daily. There is trouble brewing in Kansas and Texas. Impending war with Mexico. And still the monster of slavery grows. Our abolitionist agents are all under threat-those that have avoided outright assassination. One day soon, I will be gone. Wolfgang, too. The rest, scattered through the nation and overseas, will go the same way. We need new blood, Lloyd. We want you to join us-to become ordained. We want you to leave your family and the path you are pursuing to be given tuition in ways of thought worthy of your emerging genius. Your friend the showman talks of ‘marvels.’ I am offering you the chance to change America and the world!”

For an instant there was a mad glitter in the old woman’s green eyes that did scare Lloyd, but the words blurted out of his mouth anyway.

“You want me to… leave… my family?” As much as he had sometimes dreamed of this, it was something he could never do.

The cat uncoiled in the old woman’s lap and began to bathe itself with its tongue. The dog dozed on indifferently on the sofa.

“I know that in your heart you are still very young, Lloyd, even though you take much responsibility for earning the family money.” The old woman sighed, regaining her composure and evenness of tone. “Your loyalty is admirable. It takes desperate times and dark challenges to make the dissolution of yet another family acceptable. Believe me, I do not make the proposition lightly. But there are such things as casualties of war.”

“I’m not at war with anyone,” Lloyd responded, and then paused. “Unless, of course, you won’t let me go.”

“You will go back to your family tonight with my blessing, child-and under the best protection that I can provide. Wolfgang tells me you have plans to go to Texas, to meet your uncle. A very risky undertaking. Well, we can provide that money now,for your parents to depart-in as much style and safety as can be arranged. Or if they wish, but I do not advise this, they can remain here in St. Louis under guard. This, I believe, is much less safe. But we need your help, Lloyd.”

“My help?” he yelped. “I thought you were going to help me!”

“And so we will! We will help each other. For years we have been awaiting someone of true vision-a mind as bright as that of the first Enigmatist. We believe you are that person, Lloyd. Wolfgang has recounted to me your feats and abilities. With the education that we can provide you, who knows what you can achieve?”

“You would give me books… and instruments? Tools?” He thought back to the drafty barn in Zanesville-his yearning for resources worthy of his ambitions.

“And time, Lloyd. Everything you need. A personal key to a library the superior of any you will find in America. You will be given access to the notes and private papers of those of genius from the past. Letters of introduction, and arranged meetings with those living luminaries whom we can trust. You will be tutored in physics, mechanics, optics, acoustics, ballistics, magnetism, electricity, mathematics, chemistry, medicine-whatever you chose.”

The boy’s eyes brightened at this prospect, and then his face sagged.

“But my family needs me.”

“A bigger family needs you,” Mother Tongue retorted. “And you know in your heart you need the opportunities we can offer. I can see that you are starving, Lloyd. Not just for beefsteak and fresh vegetables, but for knowledge. For power.”

“But I can’t leave my parents. Not now!” he moaned. “If we can get to Texas, everything will be all right. I know it. We almost have enough money. Just a little more work. Just-”

“A few more days or weeks working as a talking monkey on a medicine-show wagon?”

“I do a lot more than that!”

“Indeed you do. As the showman knows too well. Are you remunerated in proportion?”

“He’s my friend!” Lloyd wailed, turning to see if he had woken the dog.

“I say again, your loyalty is admirable,” the elegant crone rejoined. “It gives us all confidence in our belief in you. But what of the other matter-your experience with women? Tell me, have you met any suitable females since arriving in St. Louis?”

“N-no,” Lloyd stammered.

“Would you like to?” Mother Tongue wheedled. “Sex and the cravings of the body are nothing to be ashamed of-even in one so very young.”

Lloyd squirmed in the rocker. He could not hide the fact that he liked what Mother Tongue was saying, but he did not like the way she spoke. There was something in her voice that made him think of a trapdoor.

“What you can learn of books and science you can also learn of love.” The old woman smiled. “Wouldn’t you like that? To one day become not only a master of ideas and technology but an adept in the erotic arts?”

Lloyd was aroused by this prospect but repulsed by the wrinkled old woman’s offer. It was not something anyone else would say to a boy his age, he knew. And the thought of leaving his parents to themselves at such a tense juncture filled him with guilt and despair. They had already lost his sister, their home, perhaps their happiness together-how could he leave them, too? He stared at the coon dog, which still had not stirred.

“It’s late,” Mother Tongue acknowledged. “And you must be getting back to your mother and father-at least for now. I did not intend for you to decide on such a weighty matter tonight. But I want you to consider one other reason that you would be well advised to accept our invitation.”

At this she lowered her voice and raised her withered hands.

“The Vardogers are able to project and cultivate fear. They are equally skilled at orchestrating a mob brawl, mining a bridge, or breaking a mind. They have many much more subtle arts, I am afraid. Investigations into forbidden realms. We know they have taken notice of you, Lloyd. One of their agents has been seen observing your performances with the showman. Do you not think that very soon they will seek you out with an offer of their own? But will it be an offer? Or will it be an edict? What if instead of asking you to leave your parents they take your parents from you? What will you do then? No one goes far who travels alone.”

The old woman’s voice had taken on such a dramatic tone that Lloyd instinctively slipped from the rocker onto the sofa. But when he went to pat the hound he found that it was as stiff as a statue, sculpted into a position of peaceful repose. He could have sworn he had heard it snoring, like his father.

“He… he’s dead!” Lloyd recoiled. “You’ve-”

“Old Lazarus is sleeping very soundly, but he keeps me company,” the old lady answered, and blew out the lamp. “Now reach out your hands to me. I have something to give you. A token of my faith in you. And a sign of our trust in your judgment and discretion.”

Lloyd clambered to his feet in the dark, unnerved by the stuffed dog.

“Take my hands, child,” Mother Tongue whispered.

He heard a sound that he guessed was the cat lighting on the floor as the old woman rose. Bracing himself for the feel of her soft white talons, he thrust his own hands forward. Into his moist palms plopped two warm spheres as his fists tightened. Polished jewels, he imagined-fabulous treasures from some far corner of the world.

“Good night, Lloyd,” Mother Tongue said. “For now.”

Lloyd stuffed the jewels into his pocket and stumbled toward the door. Blazon was waiting outside with a flickering lamp. Without comment or question, he led the boy back the way they had come, where Schelling greeted him with a brusque presentation of his calcium-stained tooth. The grotto and the passageways seemed to be much darker now. Why not turn on the marvelous lights? The humpback refused to be engaged on this or any point, and so the boy had to mind every step as they climbed back up to the cemetery. Once they were free of the tomb, the blindfold was reinstated and Lloyd was encouraged back into the dogcart. Their voyage was repeated in reverse without any words being exchanged, Lloyd’s head swirling with questions and worries-and hopes-until, lulled by the legato rhythm of the boat, he slipped into a hypnagogic drowse. When he came to himself again, the boat was docking back at the ferry landing and the air smelled very late-or very early. One of the powerful black men set him down on the pier, and Wolfgang Schelling removed the blindfold.

“All right, Lloyd,” he said. “Hurry home. I will see you in the afternoon. But be careful. Not everyone means you as well as we do.”

These words echoed in the boy’s mind as he raced back toward the stable, wondering if his parents would be awake and waiting for him-and what he was going to say if they were. The streets were dark but for the lights of a shuttered tavern. No one else appeared to be around. Still, there was a sinister sense of watchfulness about the lanes and it wasn’t until he was all the way back to the familiar smell of the glue renderer’s and the stable door that he felt calm again. Gratefully, his parents were both sound asleep-Hephaestus hog-breathing with drink, Rapture sighing low, sometimes saying something the boy could not understand (which was not that unusual at any time).

At the rear of the stable, Lloyd sneaked off with one of his father’s hoarded matches and scraped it hard to make enough light to examine the prize that Mother Tongue had entrusted him with. He expected gemstones plucked from some harvested diadem, but he gasped and almost dropped the match and set the rank-smelling barn on fire when he saw that what she had given him was two brilliant green glass eyes.

What did it mean?

Was the ancient woman really blind, or was this just some trick? After he recovered from his shock, Lloyd extinguished the match, but the two orbs seemed to continue glowing, as if his recognition had triggered some covert luminosity within them. Or is it in my mind? he wondered.

In either case, as he fondled them-and peered into them in the pale light of morning-they seemed to take on a deeper presence. One globe he imagined gazed back at the moments that had brought him and his family to this crossroads, each of the scenes and encounters since leaving their home suspended like prehistoric insects in amber. The other sphere was a lens that he fancied looked into the future, a lightning-lit horizon of messenger possibility and foreshadowings… frozen pictures melting alive… unknown faces beginning to form.

Cupping them in his palms, Lloyd sensed an occult quality of heat and energy about them. What if these really were Mother Tongue’s eyes? he pondered. Maybe she is blind-and yet through some arcane mechanism the spheres allowed her to see. A kind of sight, anyway, delivered by a spectral science he didn’t comprehend… but might… in time.

Something deep within him felt a magnetic summons toward these enigmas-via Mother Tongue and her minions or not. “The door of my destiny is opening,” he whispered to the slowly graying dawn.