Fortune Favors (25 page)

“It’s okay,” he said. “I think we’re safe for the moment.”

“Safe?” gasped Annie. She seemed to be fighting to get the words out, as if in the grip of an asthma attack. “We're trapped. Buried alive.”

“We’re not trapped,” Kismet insisted. “This is a tunnel. King dug it, it must lead somewhere.”

“I can't breathe.”

“That's just in your head. There's plenty of air down here.” Despite his assurance, Kismet was suddenly very conscious of the close quarters and the fact that the air did seem to be getting a little stale. He shook his head to clear away the rising paranoia. “Look Annie. The tunnel does end, but we have to get moving if we're ever going to get out.”

That seemed to motivate her. Annie looked up, a single mote of hope floating in her pool of misery. He offered her a sip from his flask, and she gratefully downed it.

“Did you dig this tunnel?” Kismet asked when they caught up to Joe and Candace.

Joe shook his head, his eyes, and perhaps his thoughts, unfocused. “The tunnel was dug back before the War...the Civil War, that is.”

Then the young man straightened perceptibly. “Actually, it was Fontaneda that dug it, way back when. He was an Abolitionist. He’d give runaway slaves a place to hide until they could catch a ride on the Underground Railroad. Dug this tunnel so they could come and go.”

The idea of the Spanish Conquistador as a Southern gentleman in the years before the Civil War, and an Abolitionist no less, was mind-boggling. If everything he thought he knew about the man was true—including the claim that he had discovered the Fountain of Youth—then Fontaneda would have been about three hundred and fifty years old at the time of the Civil War. It was difficult to conceive of how four or five lifetimes of experience might have changed the man. Had his decision to support the anti-slavery movement been a way of atoning for past misdeeds...like the slaughter of the native village that had protected the Fountain in the first place?

Kismet thought about the dead fall that had blocked the entrance and wondered if that had been Fontaneda’s doing as well.

The tunnel followed a straight line for at least fifty yards before coming to an abrupt and unexpected end. The walls were hidden behind stacks of mildewed cardboard boxes and old splintered wooden crates. If not for the secret entrance under the hearth and the long separating distance, it might have seemed like nothing more than a storage cellar, but in light of those two details, Kismet was inclined to believe that boxes were nothing more than window dressing. His suspicion was confirmed when Joe started shifting some of the boxes out of the way to reveal an eight-foot folding ladder, resting on its side.

Joe wrestled the ladder out of its hiding place and then propped it up in the center of the tunnel. Kismet realized that the ceiling was higher here, and as Joe extended the legs of the ladder, Kismet saw a dark opening directly above where the ladder had been positioned. Joe rocked the ladder a couple times to ensure that it was stable, then retrieved his lantern and climbed up until his upper body was above the top step and mostly inside the opening. After a few moments of fumbling with something overhead, he resumed his ascent and disappeared completely through the hole in the ceiling. Kismet approached the ladder, and saw Joe staring down out of a well-lit open space high overhead.

“It’s a little cramped up here. Mister...Kismet, was it? I think you should come up first. There’s something I want to show you.”

 Kismet glanced at the others. Annie was still on the verge of hysteria. Higgins offering his daughter what comfort he could, simply shrugged. The old woman, Candace, gave him an encouraging nod and gestured for him to go up the ladder. He did.

The overhead space was much smaller than the confines of the tunnel; it was about the size of a walk in closet, but part of the space was dominated by what looked like an enormous chest. It was a crypt, he realized, and the chest was a sealed casket.

Joe gestured to the funerary container. “There it is. What you came for is in there.”

It took Kismet a moment to realize what Joe was saying. “This is Fontaneda’s tomb?”

“He built an empty vault to hide the tunnel exit. When he died, it seemed like the best place to lay him to rest. No one else was using it.” Joe laid his palms flat on the top of the casket, staring at the smooth surface with an almost wistful expression. “So, you want me to open it?”

Kismet swallowed. “How do you even know what’s in there?”

“I know,” Joe said, as if that was the final word on the subject. “He took his secret to the grave. That’s what Joseph King told you in the letter, right?”

Shoving aside a final hesitant attack of conscience, Kismet nodded. There was a faint hiss as Joe broke the seal. Kismet felt a stir of expectation and dread as the cover was thrown back. A mixture of strange smells wafted from the casket; some kind of perfume fragrance—sandalwood, perhaps—that couldn’t quite mask the odor of embalming fluid. But there was no smell of rot or decay; if there was a body in the casket then it had remained perfectly preserved. Kismet picked up Joe’s lantern and held it above the shrouded figure that lay in repose within.

There was indeed a body, a man, with a thick unkempt mane of black hair and a bushy beard that could not quite hide his youthful features. His skin had the pallor of death, but looked firm, with no hint of decomposition. The motionless figure in the casket could have merely been sleeping, or just recently deceased, instead of having been dead and buried for more than fifty years. In fact, he looked a little too good.

If the Spaniard’s youthful features were a testament to the power of the Fountain, if his life and health and vigor had been preserved for nearly four hundred years beyond its normal span, then what had happened at the end? He clearly had not died of old age.

Kismet saw Joe staring at the face of the cadaver with a mystified expression. “What’s the matter?”

“The hair. And the beard? I don’t...” He took a breath. “I can’t believe Joseph King would have laid him to rest in such a state.”

Kismet looked more closely, studying not only Fontaneda’s face, but also his hands. The fingernails were long, unnaturally so, like the talons of a raptor. It was a popular misconception that hair and fingernails continued to grow after death; what actually happened was that, as the skin gradually became desiccated, it shrank and pulled back, which created the illusion of longer hair and nails. But nothing like that could account for what he was looking at. The dead man's beard and fingernails would have had to be growing for several months, years perhaps, to achieve the length and density it now possessed.

“He really found it,” Kismet said, almost in a whisper. “The Fountain of Youth. Maybe whatever kept him young, kept these cells alive long after the rest of him died...”

Morbid curiosity prompted him to check the lid of the casket. He half-expected to discover claw marks, but the silk headliner was intact. Fontaneda had evidently been very dead when his body had been placed inside. What had actually killed him was anyone’s guess.

“You said there was a map?”

Joe took a deep breath, then leaned over the cadaver and tore open the dead man’s shirt. The action took Kismet by surprise, and it took a moment for him to realize what he was seeing. Etched into the pale skin, partially obscured by a tangle of chest hair, was an intaglio of lines and symbols. Fontaneda’s map to the Fountain of Youth was tattooed on his chest.

It was not a map in the traditional sense. It more closely resembled a childishly drawn landscape, with triangles that might have been mountains and rounded, irregular shapes that Kismet took to be lakes. There were other markings as well, animals shapes, similar in form to petroglyphs found all across the Americans, and perhaps most distinctive, a small Christian cross. The image was marred by what looked like a jagged white scar, almost directly over the Spaniard’s sternum, but the blemish didn’t significantly alter the picture. There were no names or orienting marks, but vertical lines stretched various points—the centers of the “lakes,” the heads of the animal shapes, the peaks of the “mountains,” all at very deliberate angles, like the rays of a web, to converged on the head of another animal shape, a long squirming snake outline that almost completely bisected the image. The tip of its tail was in the center of the man’s chest, a few inches above the scar, and its head was just above his navel.

“This is meaningless,” Kismet growled. “There aren't any mountains like that in Florida.”

 He drew his
kukri
and began scraping the edge of the long blade across the exposed skin, shaving away the hair to more completely reveal the image. The snake shape was unquestionably the focus of the reference lines, the requisite “x” to mark the spot. That suggested something, a landmark of some kind that would provide the final clue when they arrived there. He looked more closely at the mountains, and decided they were not mountains at all, but rather resembled squat pyramids.

“Pyramids in Florida?” he muttered. Something about that seemed familiar, too.

“That mean something to you?” Joe asked.

Kismet frowned. He wasn't sure he wanted to share this revelation. “I don’t know. I’ll have to do some more research. I need some paper to copy this.”

“I don’t have any,” Joe said. “I think there’s only one way to take this map with you.”

Kismet immediately grasped what Joe was saying, and tried just as quickly to dismiss the idea. There had to be a better way to record this image. Maybe Higgins or Annie had a scrap of paper he could use...He could take a picture of it with his phone...

But if he took a reproduction of the map with him, he’d need to destroy the original in order to prevent Leeds finding it. As revolting as the idea was, given the circumstances and the very short list of alternatives, Joe’s suggestion had merit.

“All right,” he growled, not meeting the young man’s gaze. “Might as well get this over with.”

He laid a hand on Fontaneda’s chest, feeling the dead man’s skin for the first time. It was cool to the touch, but supple like the leather of his bomber jacket. Thinking about it in those terms helped him dissociate from what he was about to do. It was just a piece of hide, no different than the calf-skin used to make vellum parchment or driving gloves.

He placed the tip the
kukri
above his hand, and cut a straight line across the Spaniard’s torso.

The skin parted and immediately spread open to reveal purple-blue viscera beneath. There was no blood, but the cut did release an invisible cloud of formaldehyde vapor that stung Kismet’s eyes and nostrils. Blinking away the effect, he turned the blade for another cut, this time down Fontaneda’s right side. Two more such cuts outlined the map in a square. With each cut, the skin had spread apart as if under tension, and now the map—he tried to think of it only as such, ignoring the grisly reality of what he was doing—was outlined by a dark square.

 He inserted the tip the
kukri
underneath the epidermis, working at it until he succeeded in peeling a corner away from the underlying dermis. Then, gripping that corner between a thumb and forefinger, he began to pull, as if trying to peel a piece of wallpaper away from a wall without tearing it. The skin was tougher than he expected, and tearing it wasn’t a problem, but separating the layers of tissue was not as easy as he’d hoped. Finally, after several minutes of tugging at the corner of the map, worrying the blade further and further under the skin, he succeeded, and it came away with a hideous sucking sound.

He laid the map back on the cadaver’s chest and meticulously wiped the
kukri
clean before sheathing it. Only then did he inspect his handiwork.

The map was intact, but separated from its human frame, the canvas of skin had shrunk considerably, condensing the tattooed lines and pictures into a dark but still legible image. The obverse side was covered with a grotesque gray film, thankfully dry to the touch. Suppressing one last shudder of revulsion, Kismet rolled the map up and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Joe had watched the whole process without speaking, and now he simply nodded and lowered the lid of the casket, returning the Spaniard to his final rest. “Now you know what he knew,” he said simply, without a trace of judgment.

Kismet gestured to the door of the crypt. “That’s our way out?”

The young man nodded. “There’s a good chance they’re still out there.”

Kismet was sure of it. Leeds and his white robed goons were probably already digging up the cemetery trying to find the tunnel exit. Getting back to the rented Explorer didn’t seem like a viable option; what did that leave?

“You said this tunnel was used by runaway slaves? Where did they go from here?”

“There was a trail leading to Charleston harbor. It’s several miles, an all night walk. From there, they’d travel north in the holds of merchant ships owned by Northern Abolitionists. But that was a long time ago. Everything has changed. There’s a few acres of woods, but beyond that it’s mostly neighborhoods now.”

Change wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Kismet thought. They didn’t need to walk all the way to the port; they only needed to find a place where they could hide out and maybe call a taxi.

Of course, Leeds would know that. His new allies would be watching the roads.

“There’s a rail line about a mile to the east,” Joe continued. “You get to that, and you can follow it north into the city.”

The way Joe said “you” set off alarm bells. “You’re coming with us, right?”

A strange smile touched Joe’s lips. “I think Candace and I will just stay put. You’re gonna need to move fast if you want to get away, and Candace...well, her runnin’ days are long gone.”

“Will you be safe? What if Leeds discovers this crypt?”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Joe answered confidently. “An’ no offense, but the sooner you’re gone, the better off we’ll be.”

Kismet wasn’t so sure about that, and he didn’t relish the idea of abandoning the pair to such an uncertain fate, but the young man seemed to have made up his mind. “Then there’s something I need to know.”