There is a very tiny chink in the chain link fence, or rather in the ground beneath it, for the ninjas have dug a little hole to squeak through. It begins some yards away from the fence and goes under it and, I guess, comes up some yards from the fence on the inside.
“Trick is,” says my guide, “you gotta not touch the fence. In fact, you gotta stay away from the fence altogether, so don’t double back toward the perimeter, okay? Once you get inside, stay low — I mean flat on your belly low — until you’ve gone at least 20 feet toward the middle of the compound. You got that?”
“How do you know all this?“ I ask.
“I’m just a curious guy, I guess.”
Something I can’t quite wrap my mind around pokes at me. “You’ll be right here, when I come out?”
“Near here. I don’t want the ninjas to see me. Halfway down the block toward 17th there’s an alley. On the right. I’ll be there. We’ll be there.”
I quiver inside as I prepare to go. “Remember,” I tell him, “I know your name. And remember, Hector, that I am a powerful merlin.”
Yeah, right.
He chuckles. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
I say good-bye to Doug, surprised all over again that he’s being so calm about this, and prayerfully remove a six inch length of fir sprig. Then I tell myself I’m ready to go. I head for the broken earth, half-hidden by an ancient, twisted lilac.
As I prepare to descend into the hole, I am struck by a certain terrible thought. “If I don’t come out,“ I say, “please take the Fabled Tree to Bags. He’s the old man who — “
“I know,” he tells me. “And you will come out. I got a feeling, ni dong?”
“Yeah? Your feelings any good?”
“Pretty good...for a non-merlin.”
I accept that and dive under the bush. The hole is close and cold and damp. I hold the Doug sprig in my mouth so I can smell it. It’s the only thing that keeps me from screaming as I scrape through the endless, black tube. Well, that and the smell of wet earth. It’s one of my favorite smells and it calms me. I suspect I’m a closet claustrophobic.
You can probably imagine my relief when I finally come out at the end of the line. The urge to yahoo is almost overwhelming. But I manage.
The Mission end of the tunnel comes up under a fallen statue that's over-hung by the limb of a big old cedar. I squeeze out from under and crawl with my belly flat to the ground for another twenty feet or so, then I go to my hands and knees through low shabu, until I just about collide with something. It turns out to be one of the alien winnebagoes and its nose is pointing right where I want to go — the Mission graveyard.
Once my heart has ceased to hammer at my ribs, I roll underneath and begin moving forward till I am near the nose of the thing. That’s when I realize there are voices coming from above me. One of them, I’m pretty sure, is John Makepeace’s.
I’m not above a little eavesdropping. I am, in fact, beneath it, and therefore cannot help but fill my ears. Most of what I hear is about supplies and movements, although there is some talk about the ninjas and how nervous they make the fellow who is not John Makepeace. I think it must be Gino — his voice tends to get louder and louder when it seems John Makepeace is not taking him seriously, and right now John Makepeace is laughing.
That’s when the conversation turns in a direction that makes my blood ice over.
“I think it’s this damn boneyard we’re sitting on. Just the thought of that mass grave makes me want to levitate. Jeez-us, John, we’re walking on dead people. I don’t know how you can be so sanguine about it.”
“I’m not afraid of a few dead people,” John Makepeace says, “but I can see that there are those who are. Now, now, Gino, I’m not ribbing you. I’ve been giving this some serious thought. And I’ve talked to a few of our backers about it. It’s their considered opinion that tourists will not be excited by the knowledge that they are treading on the bones of someone’s ancestors. In fact, indications are they’ll find it quite disturbing.”
“So, what are we supposed to do?”
“Lose the bones.”
There is a moment of silence and I have the feeling that both Gino and I are scrambling to “get it.”
Lose the bones? I think, and Gino says, “Lose the bones? What the hell does that mean — lose the bones?”
“Dig them up. Dump them in the Bay. The memorial plaques, too.”
“And rewrite the history of the Mission?”
“Romance sells,” says John Makepeace.
“You can’t do that!”
For a moment, as I ride a sickening wave of absolute, heart-banging terror, I think I’ve spoken aloud, ‘cause it’s a safe bet Gino wouldn’t have said that. But it isn’t my voice, or Gino’s. Someone else is in the winnebago — someone who’s remained silent up till now.
“What do you mean — I can’t do it? You see a problem?”
“A problem? John, that’s sacred ground.”
"Jesus Christ, Ty. What kind of superstitious gibberish is that? Of course, it’s not sacred ground. What’s gotten into you? Have you been fraternizing with that little wizard again?”
“John, they were people. You can’t just dig them up and dump them like they were last week’s garbage.”
“They’re 400 year old bones, Ty. They haven’t been people for centuries. Calm down. Think about this logically.”
I can’t think about this logically. And I gotta leave Ty to his own decision about whether he can. I’m outta there and on my way to the graveyard, packing a charge of adrenaline that just about turns me into a rocket. I gotta calm down, I know, ‘cause when I’m like this, I’m deaf, dumb and blind, and I gotta find a grave. It will be apart from the other Ohlone, I know, because it was made after the Americans took over this place.
In the shabu, I dare to bring out a tiny light — a foglite of deep yellow, which is the best color for seeing in a true wu. It looks almost like an ember in the deepening, darkening mist. I begin at the statue of the saint, which is the stand-out landmark in all the wildy green and broken stone.
Adrenaline aside, I wax philosophical as I look up toward the stony face. I can only see as far as his little stone-rope belt. The shabu has got hold of his head. Father Junipero Serra. I wonder how one guy’s saint can be another guy’s Satan. Somehow, the thought brings to mind John Makepeace.
I work my way from the so-called saint to the pile of rocks, and circumambulate, checking each gravestone. I hope he isn’t in the crypt. If he’s in the crypt, I could be in deep trouble, ‘cause I never been there and I’m not even sure the aliens got it all dug out. And besides, the crypt is...well, it’s underground. As I quiver in the dusky shabu with only my foglite and a sprig o’ Doug for protection, I see (or almost see, or almost not see) a flash of more or less solid black at the gate of the graveyard — ninjas, scurrying to and fro, here and there. They are just like Ty said, little, dark, darting figures.
One of them pauses not so many feet away and I somehow know his (or her) eyes are turned on me — eye of the Eye, little watcher to the Big Watcher. I also know all he, she, or it can see is a faint amber pinprick of light quivering like mad in the shabu wu.
On a wild hare, I raise the light way up, then wave it around in swoopy, wiggly circles. The ninja vanishes. Poof.
Neon. I guess I make a good ghost. I go back to my task. It is completely and truly dark when I finally find what I’m looking for — a lone grave set apart under buckling flagstones. The grave of Pedro Alcantara.
First, I kneel on it, as if I were in a church, then I sit cross-legged as if I were in a temple. I clear my mind, but it seems there’s as much fog in there as there is just lying around in general.
“I gotta talk to you,” I whisper.
Nada happens.
“I need to warn you guys about John Makepeace. He wants to dump all you guys in the Bay ‘cause the tourists won’t like walking on you.”
More nada. This is not good. Time to call in the heavy artillery. I get out my Doug talisman. I feel a tingle immediately. This is good. I clear my mind. I offer prayers. I incant. I plead. I intone (very quietly). But though the fog seems charged with electrical simmers, nothing real happens at all. It feels as if the place is about to sneeze. But it doesn’t.
I don’t know how long I hang there in the cold, tingly shabu when I decide nothing is going to happen. I don’t understand this. For my whole adult life, the Dolores have talked to me, and now, when I really need them to talk to me, they’re silent as a damn graveyard.
I give. I lay the little Doug sprig on Pedro’s grave and try to orient myself in the fog. The moon has risen by now and is pouring its silvery self all over and into the shabu. Doug’s sprig is a little dark slash on the white of Pedro Alcantara’s grave.
Then the shabu begins to misbehave. I rub my eyes. Really hard. ‘Cause mist and moonlight don’t usually do this. It’s a little silver tornado at first, and then it’s a million tiny little stars all swirling above Doug’s little sprig, and then it’s a man-shape made of a million tiny little stars, then it’s a whole man, and he’s looking at me like he’s been watching me for a long time.
Then he speaks, and his voice is nothing like moonlight or mist. It’s like the creaking of dry branches. It’s the Voice I hear in my dreams, the Voice that belongs to the man of the smoky dream lodge.
“I know you,” he tells me.
“I am Taco Del,” I say and try not to let my voice wiggle, “merlin to Hismajesty, King of Embarcadero.”
“I know you. You are the shaman. And you know me — we have spoken many times.”
This is not really news to me by now. I get that Pedro is my main Whisperer. My spirit guide.
“You are much like my son,” he informs me. “His name is Pedro, like me. Pedro Delmar Alcantara.”
His eyes stray to the hills which can’t be seen because of the walls and the church and the city. I can see his gravestone through him, and the rest of the graveyard, a tumble of stones like broken teeth in the dark, overgrown earth, and the grotto of rocks that are his people’s only memorial. He seems to notice this.
“He’s not there, you know. He’s not in their sacred ground. He ran away from here. They said they would find him, kill him, as they did others. But I never heard, so I think he got away from here. He would have gone to our sacred ground, to The Mountain.”
“I hope he made it,” I say sincerely.
He nods, still looking out at the invisible hills. “He did. ....Do you know the story? The story of how the Mountain got its name?”
My turn to nod. “The Spaniards met an Ohlone shaman when they climbed the mountain — ”
He smiles. “They thought he was their Devil, that shaman. But they were wrong. They were our devil. I told him I was the last one. That I was alone.”
I know he means the Indian agent the American government sent to see how many Ohlone the Spaniards and their bugs had left alive.
“I was wrong. We are still here. We are all still here, except the ones that fled to The Mountain.”
He looks right at me then, and I feel cold.
“This demon,” he says. “This demon would have us driven away. He would imprison the spirits of the Ohlone. He would turn our magics and spirits to his own purpose.”
He is silent for a little bit and I wonder if he can see through me as easy as I can see through him.
“You must stop him, Taco Del, merlin. You must save the world from Wiwe.”
Whoa. Suddenly I realize that Pedro and I aren’t in the same book. He’s talking real demons, and I’m just thinking your average, garden-variety human demons.
“You...you mean Chen?” I ask. “What about John Makepeace? He’s gonna dig up your bones and dump them into the Bay. Doesn’t this concern you just a little bit?
“Makepeace is a man. The one who calls himself Chen wishes to be more than a man. He wishes to be Wiwe, beyond-man. He is a hungry soul. He devours magics hoping to spit them out again with power. He pulls at the spirits of things and seeks to own them.”
I think of Chen’s gallery of artifacts and the idea begins to dawn in my chickpea brain that I have seriously underestimated the competition. I’ve been thinking Chen is just a greedy materialist out to build up treasures here on earth. If Pedro’s right, he’s got a far more serious agenda.
“Makepeace is a threat to your homes and your families and your lives,” Pedro tells me, as if he can see the thoughts ooze out of my head. “Wiwe is a threat to your souls. So, you must stop him. You must keep him from devouring all the magic and owning the spirits. It is through the spirits of things that he enslaves souls.”
“W-what souls?” I ask this, but I think I already know the answer. I think I’ve seen them — priests and ninjas.
“You have seen them,” Pedro tells me.
Ooga-booga.
Naturally, the next thing would be for me to ask how I might do anything about a Red Dragon who enslaves souls. But, also naturally, I’m a little loathe to ask this auspicious question. I think I already have half a clue, anyway.
“It’s the shaman stuff, isn’t it? That’s what will help save the world from Wiwe.”
Pedro says, “When the last great shaman of my people came to this place to stay, he converted to the ways of our captors and took up their religion. He laid aside his magics, powers and vestments. A great show was made of this, Taco Del, merlin. The leaders among the tribes were brought to see how their priest, their holy man, bowed before the icons of the Spanish priests. The monks took from him his vestments, his symbols of power, and put them into a casket, and sealed them away beneath the altar in their sanctuary. This, so that all would see that our ways, our magics, were buried, and that the Christian magics had triumphed over them. It is these things that have kept us bound to this place. It is these things that Wiwe wishes to own.”
“He has the headdress,” I say. “But there’s still a beaded shirt, a pipe and a-a-”
“Spirit rattle,” Pedro says.
“Yeah, one of those. But if this stuff was all buried together, how come the ninjas only found the one thing?”
He shakes his starry head. “We do not know, our memories say they are in the altar. Perhaps they are not. But they are still here, in your Gam Saan, or we would be gone.”
“But you guys are spirits. Shouldn’t you know this stuff?”
“It’s been a long four hundred years,” he says.
Under any other circumstances, I’d think he was joking with me, but there’s nothing very funny about any of this.
“We are our memories,” he adds after a moment. “The world you live in is...mist and shadow to us.”
The feeling is mutual.
“What about Makepeace? He’s planning to take over the place and chase us all out — including you.”
“We can do nothing, Taco Del, merlin. John Makepeace’s presence is disturbing to us, but it is Wiwe who stops our voices from speaking to you...to each other.”
“I was wondering about that,” I say. “How come you’re speaking to me now?”
“Diablo,” he says, and his hand drifts downward toward his feet, beneath which the Doug sprig lies upon the stone. “You have brought with you a token of the spirit of our sacred Mountain — of my Mountain.”
Doug? Well, this is a surprise.
“But Doug was born on the Farm and grew up in a pot,” I explain. “How can he be a token of the sacred Mountain?”
Pedro seems to shrug in a misty, foggy sort of way. “These things happen.”
“Okay, so this ritual stuff — Chen needs the whole enchilada, right? And you want me to stop him, right?”
“You must find the shaman’s tools before he does.”
Sounds simple enough. I get a sudden clue.
“Wait...you said the shaman stuff held you here, right? So, if I were to find it and take it to the sacred Mountain, you’d be able go there, right? And then...would it matter about the bones?”
He’s silent for a moment and I know I’ve hit on something. But his next words aren’t what I think I’m gonna hear at all.
“Burn them.”
My mind does a neat somersault. “B-burn — ?”
“The implements — you must burn them. Destroy them. Then, they will be forever safe from Wiwe.”
“But-but, what’ll that do to you guys?”
“I don’t know.”
This honesty is not comforting. “I can’t do that. Not if you guys will....” I have a horrible image of 5,000 Ohlone spirits going poof! in a puff of holy smoke.
“My world is lost,” he tells me. “If you would not lose your own, you must do as I say. John Makepeace is not your worst enemy, shaman. Nor is he ours.”
I believe him. I do. But I can’t help myself; the thought of saving our bacon while the Dolores are at the bottom of the Bay makes my stomach hurt.
“Find the magics and destroy them,” he says again, as if he can read my thoughts. No surprise there. “If they remain in this City, all is at risk.”
I got my mouth open to continue the argument, but suddenly there’s no one to argue with. It’s like he’s been sucked up by a vacuum. I can’t believe how close I come to shouting out loud. Fortunately, I realize I’m hearing the voices of live folks and don’t do this. Instead, I hunker down low to the ground and get the hell out of there.
My first thought when I crawl out of the hole is Doug. I head right for the alley. The first thing I see when I turn the corner and squeeze past some crates is Doug sitting in his wagon in a spot of moonlight. This makes me realize the fog has lifted and thinned a lot. It’s a wu gao huichen — high and billowy. It’s as if the narrow alley has squeezed the frothy stuff up between its high walls. Ghostly puffs hang just over my head. The place is dead quiet except for the scuffle of critters.
I am immediately on my guard. In videos, this is where the music goes all creepy and you, the Watcher, are s’posed to be thinking, “It’s a trap, you ditz! Don’t go in there!” So, I am thinking this at myself, but since I am playing the role of the ditz, and as Doug does not seem alarmed, but only happy to see me, I do go in there.
Doug is downright chipper, considering, and I am wondering where the other merlin is, when I hear him somewhere above me along the wall.
“What’s up in there?” he asks and his voice echoes softly off everything.
I realize he is sitting up on a rusting fire escape almost behind me. Good thing it wasn’t a trap, I guess. I turn and squint up at him, but all I can see is a pair of scuffed up boots at about eye level, and a dark, hunkered shape above that. This boy sure loves his sense-o-mystery.
“It’s not good,” I say, and am swallowed by sudden despair. “I heard John Makepeace saying he was going to dig up the Dolores and dump their bones into the Bay. The Dolores,” I add, “are the Ohlone spirits that — ”
“I know,” he interrupts and shifts on the fire escape so it groans and clanks. The sounds bounce around dully under the blanket of gao huichen. “Why the hell’d this goony alien want to do shit like that?”
“Tourism. Survey says his folks won’t want to walk on dead folks, and there’s a regular carpet-o-corpses under that place.”
“So, for that, he’s gonna feed them to the whales?”
“Whales aren’t carnivores,” I point out, “or scavengers either, for that. I guess tourism is big on the outside.”
Now the fire escape shrieks. “So, we got us a quest then, eh?”
This stops my brain in its tracks. We? So, now I got a sidekick? I sit myself down on the end of Doug’s wagon and focus my eyes on the other merlin’s boots.
“More to it than that. He don’t want us to save the bones.”
“He who?”
“Pedro. Pedro Alcantara. He’s sort of the head Whisperer — a shaman...sort of. He says we got bigger problems than that.”
Lord E’s merlin makes a noise like a cat hocking up a fur ball. “And what might those be?”
“There’s this old Chinese shaman guy — ”
He moves further down the stairs, making them groan again. Now I can see his knees.
“Master Chen?”
Why, I wonder, does everybody else seem to know more than I do? I have this feeling that when I tell him about the weird shrine/art gallery and the religious artifacts, he’ll just say, “So what?” Then it occurs to me to wonder why I’m telling him anything at all.
I glance at Doug, whose branches drape across my shoulder. He’s comfy as a clam. I wriggle my butt down into the wagon and tell the other merlin everything I know about Chen.
He doesn’t say, “So what?” when I stop talking. He says, “Shit,” with much gusto. “And I thought he was just playin' at this shaman business.”
My Alice bone twinges. “How d’you know about Chen, if I might ask?”
“He’s been a visitor to the court of my lord,” he says. The tone of his voice adds he doesn’t think much of his lord. “Looking for objets d’arte, especially religious stuff. Lord E's had smeagols crawling through every church and temple in Potrero-Taraval along side those creepy ninjas. They came up with some stuff. I thought he was just a collector at first, then I got the drift that he was playing at being a wizard. My ...sources say he’s about trying to re-invent the Tong along the lines of the olden days. Wants to topple the current order — or lack thereof — and set himself up as Emperor.” He pauses for a moment, then adds, “It was him put the bug in Lord E’s brain about takin' the Wiz. I figure he was hoping our respective lords would take each other out or at least demolish each others’ forces pretty good. Which didn't happen, thanks to you.”
I am so staggered at this revelation, I can only woggle. I finally manage to fill my lungs with air.
“Are you...are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah.”
I am yet suspicious. “You said sources. What sources?”
He chuckles. “I got someone in the Tin Hau. A friend.”
I accept this for the moment. “I thought he was looking to sell our sacred stuff off to Makepeace for his tourists until I talked to Pedro,” I admit.
“So, what’s the quest?” he asks.
“I gotta get the Ohlone’s sacred stuff and...Pedro wants me to burn it.”
“Zhende? And that’s supposed to call off Chen? What about Makepeace? How does he get had?”
“He doesn’t.” Suddenly, I can’t sit down. “Don’t you get it? Makepeace isn’t the Big Demon, Chen is. According to Pedro, this guy can get our souls, not just the place they live. Pedro says the magic stuff's gotta be burned.”
“So...what, you wait till Chen gets ‘em and burn down the Tin Hau?”
Now the very idea of burning down a House of Worship, even to save souls, tastes like bad kim chee, but with all that sacred stuff inside....
“That...that’d be one way to do it.”
“But it won’t save the Gam Saan from Makepeace. And it won’t save the Dolores, either, will it?”
I shake my head.
“This sucks, Del.”
“This is not news,” I say.
“Isn’t there anything we can do about Makepeace?”
We again. Like we were Frodo and Samwise, Scully and Mulder, Dr. Who and the companion de jour. I am bewoggled by his willingness to fraternize with one-time enemies, but happy to have an ally. And I wonder if something I been thinking might just be worth something. I start pacing around the wagon.
“I had an idea,” I say. “But Pedro got real testy when I mentioned it.”
“Give over,” he says and the fire stair whines.
“Okay, it’s like this: Diablo is their sacred Mountain — the Dolores’, ni dong. It’s where the shaman met the first Spaniards. It’s where they’re from, spiritually speaking, it’s where the sacred things are from, too. If we can get the sacred stuff all together — or even some of it, I think — and get it to the Mountain, the Dolores’ spirits will be able to go there too.”
“You sure about this?”
“Pretty sure. Pedro said they were bound here because the shaman’s things are here. So I figure, if they’re on the Mountain, muy better, right, because then they got the power of the whole Mountain behind them, too. Then they’ll be in control of their own magics, or maybe the Mountain will, and Chen won’t be able to use them.”
The fire stair honks like a goose. “Wo dong! I get it! All the sacred energy sort of...lines up — the Mountain, the shaman stuff, the Dolores....”
I am equally excited by this prospect. “Only they won’t be Dolores any more. They’ll be free.”
“Still leaves us with Makepeace,” he observes. “But two out of three ain’t crap. What do we do?”
I am struck by two things, standing there in the dark, dirty, foggy alley. One is that there really is a We here, the other is that We haven’t got a clue.