… 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