The Drowned Vault (21 page)

Dixie stood up and stretched in her long T-shirt. Then she stepped in front of her little mirror. Her mama’s picture was tucked into the frame at the top, taken on the day she’d married big Freddie Mist. Dixie had her mother’s deep-brown skin. She had the same wide-set eyes and loose hair. But she had her daddy’s ears, and her daddy’s square jaw that looked like it was made of brick. Of course, her square jaw was set on top of a long slender neck, not her daddy’s oak stump.

According to her daddy, she had a little trace of just about every kind of blood in her. When she’d finally beaten him at chess, he’d said she oughta be grateful for his Russian grandpappy. When she’d cooked him something that made him groan with hunger just from the smell, he thanked God for her mama’s French grandmammy. When she sang and when she smiled and sometimes when she was doing just about anything, he called her Dido, his Carthaginian queen. But mostly, he’d just called her Little Dixie, and sometimes Sweet Eve—mother of all.

Dixie didn’t know she was beautiful. All she knew was that she was alone.

“I’ll find him,” Dixie told her mother’s picture. “He’ll be back.” She glanced at the incompetent clock. Fifteen minutes to get where she needed to be and see what she needed to see. Plenty of time.

Five minutes later, wearing tight worn jeans tucked into her tall snakeproof boots, and a clean oversize black
T-shirt, she stepped out the screen door and closed it gently behind her. The house was tiny—one story with a front door and two windows—but it was tidy and crisply painted.

Moving along a beaten dirt path beneath big Louisiana trees, Dixie hurried through continents of moon shadow and seas of moon silver. While she went, she popped the last of her breakfast of orange slices into her cheek and threw a long corkscrewed peel into bushes. All around her, crickets sang to crickets, and frogs belched to frogs. She stepped over a beaten-down log and around the sprawling roots of an ancient cypress tree. Down the slope, smothered in moonlight, the Mississippi River slid slowly past on its belly. Tonight, with the moon being so social, it looked like a river of mercury.

Dixie dropped into a crouch and looked upstream. There it was—her father’s dream. What he’d sold everything to buy. In the daylight, the old cigar factory looked like the beached and forgotten carcass of some creature from another time. A place to play in and explore, though Dixie hadn’t managed to get inside since her father had gone. But at night, it looked like the place might still be alive. And, as she had discovered last week, at 4:50 a.m, well …

Keeping close to the shadowy tree line, Dixie began to jog. She only had half a mile to cover.

Moriah Cigars had mattered once. It had mattered
enough to build a factory on the banks of the Mississippi River—250 yards long and 75 yards deep. An army of old log pylons held its backside up over the ever-crawling water. Barges had brought in the tobacco leaf. Barges had brought in the workers. Barges had carried away boxes and boxes of cigars—enough boxes to build pyramids, to fill trains, to make men around the entire world feel wise and important, to make their mouths sour and their clothes stink.

Three stories balanced on top of beams on top of pylons. Paned windows and barn doors and pigeon roosts and brick smokestacks and forgetfulness. The river still rolled, kissing the pylons, willing to do its old work. But time had rolled further. No more barges. No more workers. Not for ninety-four years.

But Alfred Mist had made plans. Shops. A restaurant. The Big Muddy hotel. Swamp tours. River tours. Huckleberry Finn rafts for rent …

That factory had taken three more years from one more worker. It hadn’t yet given anything back.

Dixie slowed as she reached the near end of the structure. The dead factory behemoth stretched away from her, bent in the middle to match the course of the river. She could see beneath the building, into the forest of pylons anchored in the mud. The water threw moon glare up at her as she backed into the long grass beneath the trees.

Frogs. And a lot more frogs. She couldn’t even hear the crickets anymore. Something splashed. A small animal screamed in the darkness behind her, probably at a snake.

And then it happened. Lights. The old paned windows blazed, first at the near end, then marching down the length of the factory.

Dixie blinked, and her rib cage tightened. She could feel tears building—tears of fear, of worry, of anger.

With her eyes on the glowing windows, she began to jog along in front of the factory, toward the big new ramp her father had built in the middle. She could barely breathe, she could barely think, but she was absolutely-no-matter-what going to make herself look inside.

Smoke, or maybe steam, began to escape from the mouths of two of the tallest brick chimneys.

Dixie wasn’t jogging anymore. She was running. It wouldn’t be her father. It couldn’t be. What could he say that would make sense?

The ramp was just ahead. At the top, a big barn door began to slide.

Dixie froze. A yellow slice of light. And then a little more. And suddenly, all at once, the door rattled open, banging against the end of its tracks.

A man limped out onto the ramp. Not Dixie’s father. A white man. In a white coat. With one arm missing at the elbow. He leaned on a cane. Behind him, a
tall, strong shadow stood beside the open door, ready to throw it shut again.

Dixie’s eyes strained to capture anything, any promise, any hint that he might be … and then he moved. Not her father. He was shirtless—pale and blond.

Dr. Phoenix, once known as Edwin Laughlin, known as Mr. Ashes on his worse-than-bad days, let his weight rest on his bamboo cane. It bent beneath him. His burnt-off stump arm itched badly, and he ground it against his side. It always itched. His remaining hand gripped and regripped the silver knob at the top of his cane as he stared out into the bayou forest. His boat was late, but he didn’t mind. It was worth the wait.

His lower eyelid spasmed and twitched. It did that now. Thirteen months, that’s how long it had been. Far more difficult months than he had expected when he’d ripped the tooth out of that Smith brat’s hand. But finally, he was making progress again. Rupert Greeves had sniffed out his buildings in Miami, but no matter. The factory was working well. Soon it wouldn’t matter who sniffed him out, or how many men came with them.

He glanced back at the tall, blond body that stood at the door. The puckered bullet holes were still visible in its chest. The skin was white and blue, but of course it would be. He’d been dead for three years and kept in
a freezer along with all the other sons and daughters of Brendan that Phoenix had managed to collect.

The man—of course, it wasn’t really a man anymore, just the shell a man had once worn—was still on his feet. And he had been for almost four minutes. That was a huge improvement. He’d walked where he was told and opened the door when he was told, and all with his frozen eyes firmly closed.

Phoenix rolled his head slowly and stared at the face that had once belonged to Lawrence Smith—peaceful, handsome, undecayed. He wasn’t really alive, and it was infuriating. He was supposed to be. That was the whole point of the tooth—power over life and death, even among the transmortals. The power was there; Phoenix could feel it. Always … feeling it … around him. In him. But handling it? The handles were slippery and hard to find. And now his eyes twitched, and his fingers never stopped moving.

Phoenix brushed his tangled and unwashed black hair back over his shoulders as he hobbled toward Lawrence. Not Lawrence. Puppet Lawrence manipulated into walking around—he might as well be hooked to strings. There was no soul in there, no human spirit, just the borrowed life force of a sleeping wild pig two walls away. And if the pig woke up in its pen, there would be problems. The man shape in front of Phoenix would collapse right where it stood. And if Phoenix kept playing with
his puppet for much longer, the pig would never wake up at all. Which would be a shame. The pig was the most useful battery Phoenix had found. It had already outlasted three stray dogs and two big gators.

Phoenix stepped even closer to Lawrence, studying the man’s gently closed bluish eyelids. He should walk him back into the freezer now, while he was still on his feet. But maybe the time had come for another risk.

Inhaling sharply through his teeth, Phoenix flipped open the silver knob on the top of his cane, revealing the extreme tip of a tooth that had once been as long as a sword. It was black, blacker than night’s night, a light-empty triangle. He pressed the tip of the tooth to the lips of the body that had belonged to Lawrence Smith.

“Puppet,” said Phoenix. “Open your eyes.”

The eyelids didn’t even flutter. Instead, all at once, the body went limp, collapsing to the ground in a tangled pile of limbs.

Through two walls, a pig squealed. Out in the darkness, a girl screamed.

Phoenix wheeled around, eyeing the black. Nothing. He stepped onto the ramp.

“Who’s there, now?” he drawled loudly. He tapped his cane on the planks. “Ain’t polite to spy, darling.”

“Is it polite to kill people?” The young voice floated out of the darkness.

Phoenix laughed. “Oh, you’ve clearly misunderstood
the circumstances—not that I blame you, mind.” He looked at the body. “These circumstances aren’t the easiest to grab at a glance. For myself, sometimes I wish I had a little instruction manual.”

“He’s not dead? You didn’t kill him?”

Phoenix grinned slowly. “Now, I can’t lie to a sweet little thing like you, Dixie Mist-from-down-the-way. Wouldn’t be neighborly. This man
is
dead, God rest him, but I didn’t kill him. Leastways, I didn’t do it myself. Some rough men did it for me, but that was just about three years ago now, and in another state.”

Phoenix waited, smiling at the shadows that surrounded the base of the ramp. The girl, he knew, would be confused by every single thing he’d just said. And she wouldn’t like that he knew who she was. How could he not notice such a close little neighbor? He’d been saving her for later, and she hadn’t caused any trouble to speak of.

In the distance, he could hear a boat—his boat.

“Dixie,” he said, “why don’t you come on in and we can talk about all sorts of things. Behave yourself, and I might even let you see your daddy.” He sighed. “But if you run … I’m afraid there’ll be dogs on your heels. Dogs like you ain’t never seen and never hope to see.”

One second of silence. Two. Three. The boat was growing closer. And on that boat … Phoenix’s smile became genuine, the smile of a child ready to open the only present he really wants, a present he’s already peeked inside.
The boat was bringing him his handles, an instruction manual of sorts. In a few days, he would truly know how to use the tooth, he was sure of it.

No more puppets. Soldiers would be better.

At the bottom of the ramp, Dixie Mist stepped into view. “You’re a liar,” she said.

“Sometimes,” Phoenix said, nodding. He inhaled the muggy river air slowly, savoring the smell. He was listening to the boat. “But not tonight. Tonight I become the Truth.”

He turned and walked back inside, stepping around the body of Lawrence Smith. He’d have him lugged back into the freezer soon enough.

Dixie Mist chewed her lower lip. Her father? He was inside? It couldn’t be true. Not if he was okay. And that poor man up there was dead. But he couldn’t have been dead for three years—he’d been walking around. She’d seen him. He’d opened the big door.

She inched up the ramp and then paused. Was it a trap? But what would that crazy Mr. One Hand in the dirty white coat want with her? He wasn’t paying her any mind at all.

There were men’s voices inside. And she could see the lights on a boat flashing through the pylons beneath the factory. A long rattling echo told her that another big door had been thrown open somewhere.

Two laughing men in shirtsleeves suddenly stepped into view, and Dixie caught her breath. One had a tightly shaved head. The other wore a cap. Both had tattoos of their own bones traced onto their bare arms. Both were barefoot. And they moved strangely—fluidly, like bored cats. They were clearly aware that she was watching them, but they also clearly didn’t care.

One of them jerked the body up off the ground and slung it easily over his shoulder. Still laughing, the two walked away.

Dixie exhaled. No one was paying any attention. She could hear someone shouting about unloading the boat and someone else complaining about the time.

She couldn’t walk away. Not without looking inside. One Hand had talked about her father. And he had known who she was. He had to know where she lived.

Dixie Mist walked slowly up the ramp, into brighter and brighter light, into her father’s old factory.

When she stepped inside, she saw three men working an old timber crane, hauling something up through a hatch in the floor. One Hand was with them, his straggly black hair dangling in his face, the silver knob on his cane pressed against his lips.

The room was cluttered. There were bookshelves everywhere. Near the middle of the room was a large table covered with papers. Worn couches and deep chairs were scattered around without design. Her father’s old work
radio hung from a hook. She saw the old familiar ladders and tight spiral stairs her father had let her climb up through the holes in the ceiling. A regiment of oversize clear lightbulbs—each as big as a pumpkin—dangled in tight rows from the beamed ceiling. The timber walls and plank floors glistened in the light—the long, hard work of Dixie’s father. She’d watched him sand these timbers, and she’d watched him lacquer them over and over again until they’d been sufficiently reborn.

Dixie’s heart was pounding, but she wasn’t afraid. Not anymore. Her ringing ears, her grinding molars—this was anger. These men had stolen everything.

“Where is he?” Her voice was louder than she’d expected it to be, but the men didn’t flinch. They kept hauling on their rope. A large crate was rising through the floor. Tattooed arms shone beneath sweat.

“Hey!” Dixie yelled. “Where’s my father? This place is ours!”

The men swung the wooden boom away from the hole as the crate banged onto the floor.