I fit my fingers over the Root. Harnett kneeled to lace his boots.
“We got him on this one,” he whispered to the floor. “We got him.”
Hours later he was proven correct. There was no picture pinned to the patchy remnants of Peter Eccles’s burial coat, but sewed into a hidden pocket beneath his left armpit was the spike. As Harnett funneled dirt that was no different from any other dirt, I fondled the two-of-a-kind artifact; it made white lines of the moonlight. In my hand it felt as lethal as Gottschalk’s pointer, as rigid as the faucets in the boys’ shower room. Even here, miles away and half buried in history, I could not escape Bloughton.
My father was still bursting with pride when we got back home. Without killing the engine, he ran inside with the spike and our bags of gear. I followed and heard him lock his safe. He emerged a couple of minutes later with some extra clothes stuffed into a garbage bag.
“Sensitive stuff.” He scratched at his beard and took a quick look around the room. “Requires a special buyer. Got a man in mind, but he’s a full day away. He’s just the right guy, though. Knows how to unload something like this, wash his hands so that it can’t be traced.” He paused and looked at me. “That okay? It could be Saturday until I’m back.”
He was abuzz with success, and little I said would stop him anyway. I shrugged. “You don’t want to take the spike?”
“No. No way. Terms first. Always terms first, get that through your head.”
He slapped his pockets and nodded.
“Okay, then,” he said, and left.
Five minutes later I had the spike out of the safe and was turning it in my hands. President Grant’s inscription, done by hand if the penmanship was any indication, was short and somehow ominous:
GOOD FEELING.
WITH GREAT RESPECT,
U. S. GRANT
Hundreds of Indian carcasses—I pulled my covers to my chin and pictured their brown and feathered bodies strewn across the desert before they were eviscerated by scavengers or buried by surviving kin—and all that was left in memorial was this block of gold no bigger than my forearm. Part of me was glad that it would soon rest beneath temperature-controlled glass for tourists to reckon with. Another part of me wondered if it had been better off where it had lain for over almost one hundred and fifty years.
When I awoke the spike was gone.
At first I didn’t believe it. I rolled over, patted the ground beside my bedding. I looked under my duffel-bag pillow, wondering if I had unconsciously stashed it there for safekeeping. I bunched my sheets and flapped them. I ran my hands between nearby stacks of Harnett’s archive, wondering if perhaps the spike’s golden hue was similar to yellowed newsprint. I stood up and the smell hit me.
Like a Digger, but dipped in the faint turpentine of insomnia.
I swiped a paring knife from the counter and backpedaled into the wall. My heart hammered. He was here. His stink was over everything: the sheets I had escaped from, the knife I wielded, the wall behind me, my clothes—my clothes.
Mixed in with his scent was a malignant sweetness. Harnett had been right when he had told Lionel that there was something unwell about Boggs. For the first time I wondered if Boggs was actually rotting, and if it was from the outside in or the inside out.
The bedroom and bathroom doors—both were just barely ajar. Boggs would emerge running, or perhaps sauntering with predatory sloth, and the ice of his blue eyes would freeze me in place as he did what he needed to do before he could photograph me. My body arrested and I began specifying wildly, senselessly—
—shadow shards black spider ribbons—
—glaze of floor smacking for fallen flesh—
—cricket hiccups snake rattle frog croak door hinge—
—downward upward downward twist gush gush gush—
—gleeful dust suckling for a bloody soak—
—and I had to grip my skull to stop it, the paring knife clattering to the floor and somersaulting perfectly in place before the bedroom doorway. Tiny fingers reached out and seized it. No, it did not happen, but nevertheless I witnessed it repeatedly, until its hundredth repetition transformed it to fiction. Boggs was gone. His smell was melting into the morning thaw. I pushed open Harnett’s door and then, braver, kicked open the bathroom. There were no signs anywhere.
Except for the missing spike. I threw open a window and let gusts from