The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [32]
Hoffner ran a finger over the perforations. "I do not know what to say."
"An apology to Mr. Stern might be a prudent beginning. And the next time one of your passengers approaches you with concerns for their personal security, regardless of their religious or cultural persuasion, one hopes you will respond with a generosity more befitting your position."
Hoffner's face turned crimson; he grabbed the hammer and crowbar from Doyle; three minutes and four more open empty coffins later, a winded, chastened Hoffner laid down the tools.
"Mr. Stern," he said, standing tall. "Please accept my deepest and most sincere apologies."
Stern nodded, avoiding the Captain's eyes.
"You have five stowaways on board. Captain. There are dozens of places to hide on a ship this size. I don't need to suggest that you take all appropriate actions."
"No. Yes, of course. We shall conduct a search of the entire ship at once," said Hoffner, wiping his brow, mind racing. He considered himself a man of reason, above all, and second-most, a man of action.
"A concerted effort to find the Irish priest Father Devine would also be in order," said Doyle.
"Why is that?"
"Because this man is not a priest. He is their leader."
That's when the lights went out.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
To call this place the Devil's Kitchen does not do it justice, thought Kanazuchi, watching a rat chase a cockroach. He lay on a lice-infested blanket covering a wooden pallet he had secured the use of for the princely sum of two pennies a night. The beds of twenty other vagrants crowded the fifteen-square-foot room, one of four equally congested flops on the third floor of a five-story tenement in the middle of Tangrenbu, the twelve-square-block area of downtown San Francisco that the whites called Chinatown.
An opium den occupied the basement, and rumors circulated among these poor and illiterate peasants, many of them migrant farm workers who flooded the city each autumn when the central valley's harvest ended, that a demon roamed the hallways at night, tracking down souls to devour. The bodies of three men had been discovered recently in the alley behind the tenement; throats slashed, hearts ripped from their bodies.
Offerings left in shrines outside their doorways, what little money these Chinese could scrape together collectively, appeared to placate the monster. Each night they heard it prowling outside their doors and each morning the offerings were gone. But no one else had been killed in the week since the offerings began.
Of the four hundred men living in this building, only one had seen the demon and lived to tell about it: the building's trustee—a pockmarked, thick-necked bully in charge of gathering each day's rent and, more recently, the money for the offerings. This demon had the head of a dragon, a thousand eyes, and ten ravenous mouths, he testified, a first-rank demon, one of the ten thousand that figured in their complex belief system. He had watched it use its hideous talons to rip open the chests of the men found in the alley, as easily, he said, as if it were peeling an orange.
Each room was now locked by the trustee at night, but even if they had been able to, none of these men would dare venture into the halls after dark, which left personal sanitation a concern to be attended to locally. There were times when Kanazuchi wished his senses were not honed as sharply as the Grass Cutter that lay beside him in his bundle; the ripe stink of these unwashed provincials occasioned one of those moments.
Amid such fear, squalor, and destitution, Kanazuchi knew that since his arrival the day before no one had taken notice of him, but not being able to move freely at night was unacceptable. Sighs, guttural snoring, the whimper of a troubled dreamer, underscored the darkness around him. He did not want to leave the room until its occupants were sound asleep,