The Golem Part 11

"Are those-"

"Barrels, it looks like," Seth observed, because that's what was stacked there.

Nearly a dozen old wooden barrels.

Before Seth and Judy even had time to walk down, a group of hardy workmen were rolling the barrels down ramps off the truck and setting them up in the yard.

Hovis waved and came over, bearing his clipboard. "Good afternoon, folks. Just wanted to let you know that the steamboat, the Wegener, has been fully excavated."

"What-what-what-" Seth pointed to the barrels being placed in his yard. "What's all that?"

Hovis seemed as though nothing was out of the ordinary. "That, Mr. Kohn, is the entire contents of the cargo hold of the Wegener. Shipping barrels. Ten of them."

"Why-why-why...are you leaving them in my yard?"

Hovis was scribbling on his clipboard. "Because it's technically your property. My superior's explained the details, and based on the common laws of lost property, any such private property not reclaimed by the original owner, if said property is lost or abandoned on privately owned land, transfers ownership to the owner of the land."

Judy, intrigued, approached the increasing congestion of barrels. Seth, though, was less intrigued. "Ten barrels? I don't want them, Mr. Hovis."

"Well, they're legally yours. The state is obliged only to deliver them to you, since they were found in the hold of a state-owned vessel. So..." Hovis offered a look that said, Oh, well, then continued, "If you want the barrels disposed of, you'll have to hire a private hauler yourself."

Seth remained dumbfounded at the sight of workmen quickly milling back and forth and propping the barrels up in his yard.

"The boat itself is a different story," Hovis went on with little interest. "It was owned by the state, by what was, in 1880, the Baltimore Harbor Authority. And that means it's still owned by the state. The Mary land Historical Commission wants the boat for its artifacts, mainly the nautical instruments in the wheel house, the anchors, and the furnace. But the material inside the boat"-Hovis extended his hands to the ten stained and moldy barrels-"is yours."

Thanks a lot, Seth thought.

Judy rushed back over, br.i.m.m.i.n.g. "They're all ours, Seth! This is so cool!"

"I'm glad you think so," Seth sputtered. "We've got ten friggin' barrels in our front yard. It'll be a major pain in the a.s.s getting rid of them."

"Get rid of them? Are you nuts?"

"We don't know what's in the barrels, Mr. Kohn," Hovis stepped in. "Could be nothing of value, or it could be-"

"Stuff worth a fortune to museums or collectors!" Judy exclaimed. "That's not a bunch of junk in the yard, Seth. It's a bunch of history."

Hovis smiled. "I wouldn't count on gold bullion or long-lost jewels, but you never know."

Seth winced. The workmen were already packing up to leave. "The barrels are probably full of rotten flour, rotten wheat, and rotten foodstuffs."

"Probably," Judy said, then tugged his arm. "But maybe not!"

I can't leave this pile of s.h.i.t in my yard! Seth railed to himself.

"How about the bas.e.m.e.nt?" Judy suggested. "We'll put the barrels in the bas.e.m.e.nt and go through them one by one."

Seth stalked to the closest barrel. He gave it a nudge but it didn't move. "I'm a game designer, not a forklift. These things weigh a ton!"

"They're standardized shipping barrels," Hovis informed him. "Around three hundred pounds apiece for wet volume. Dry volume? Depends on what's inside."

Seth's shoulders slumped. He gave Hovis a helpless look. "I don't suppose your men could move these things down into our bas.e.m.e.nt ..."

"Oh, my men could do it easily, Mr. Kohn, but they're state employees on the state time clock." Then he raised his brows at Seth.

"How about you take them off the state clock for a few minutes?" Seth proposed, "and I pay a hundred bucks per man?"

"Hmm..."

"It took your guys ten minutes to unload them; it wouldn't take them another fifteen to roll them all down into my bas.e.m.e.nt."

"A hundred a man, you say?"

"Plus a hundred for you, of course."

Hovis turned, and whistled. "Fellas! We're not quite done for the day..."

Seth, Judy, and Hovis stood aside and watched the workmen hand-truck the barrels across the yard to the bas.e.m.e.nt. The bas.e.m.e.nt doors were a double trapdoor style, as was the fashion in the old days. Some of the men began lowering the barrels down the stairs. At least Judy's excited about all this, Seth reasoned, and I guess it'll give her something to do for the next week. As little as he cared himself, though, he was becoming mildly curious as to the barrels' contents.

Judy knocked on a barrel, surprised by its solidity. "It's amazing how well they held up. They must've been wet for a long time."

"Actually, no," Hovis said. "Believe it or not the cargo house was intact. The doors held against the silt, and most of the windows even held. The expert I talked to said the bend of the river probably drained immediately after the quake, so instead of being submerged it went down to the river bottom as the water level lowered."

Seth couldn't figure it. "Then how did the boat get buried at all?"

"Seismic shift," Judy said, half listening. "It happens sometimes. The earthquake severs the natural flow of the river, the bend in the river that the boat happens to be in drains, then the afterquake hits and sort of folds both sh.o.r.elines of the river in on itself. The boat's in the middle, and after the shift it's buried in silt and mud."

Hovis nodded. "That's pretty much what our experts said. So you're an expert on earthquake phenomenon, I take it."

"No, I just dated some guy who taught seismology..." Seth rolled his eyes.

"But anyway..." Judy ran her hand over a barrel's lid. "It is conceivable that the barrels wouldn't deteriorate very much since they'd been sitting in a relatively dry compartment all these decades."

Hovis remembered something. "Oh, but there was one barrel that seemed to be damaged, and I don't think my men have taken it down yet." He looked around. "This one right here."

He took them over, and Seth noticed the one lidless barrel. It didn't seem to have been a crowbar that had un-seated the lid; instead, a wedge had been cut into the barrel's rim, some of its slaves split, yet nothing of its contents seemed to have spilled out.

"That looks like an ax mark," Seth said at once.

"We think that's what it is, too," Hovis remarked. "Yeah, but what's in it?" Judy slid her opened palm against the top of what ever it was that filled the barrel.

"Maybe lime," Seth offered, "but it turned to cement from the moisture?" He looked at it himself. "Or mud. That must be it. With no lid, the mud from the riverbed poured in and filled it."

Hovis shook his head. "The cargo house stood up to the pressure, Mr. Kohn. Very little mud ever got inside. If the barrel had been covered with mud, then all the barrels would've been covered. We never found an intact freight manifest and there's no known record of what the ship was hauling. But there are departure records from the Baltimore Harbor Museum that were accessible. All we know is that the Wegener was traveling to Lowensport when the earthquake hit, and we also know that the barrels came from Prague."

"The Czech Republic," Seth muttered. "Honey, what do you think that stuff is?"

Judy suddenly sucked a breath into her lungs, then put her hands over her eyes. "I'm having a psychic vision! I know what's in the barrel! It's-it's-it's...clay!"

"Clay?" Seth said.

Hovis looked atilt. "You didn't really have a psychic vision, did you?"

Judy laughed. "No. I merely read the label on the barrel." She pointed to paint-stenciled letters across the barrel's darkened middle bulge.

Hovis looked, then mouthed the strange word, "Hilna?"

What a joker, Seth thought. "Judy happens to speak Czech, along with several other languages."

"And hilna, Mr. Hovis, is Czech for clay," she beamed.

Hovis seemed impressed, but Seth was more fuddled than anything. "I can't imagine why somebody in Lowen-sport would be having clay shipped to them by steamboat."

"Kilning, pottery, brick-making," Judy said.

"Oh."

"And here-" She rubbed at the side of one of another barrel. "Marmorovy," she p.r.o.nounced the hard-to-see word on the marking label.

"I have a feeling that word doesn't mean gold bricks," Seth said.

"It means marbles," Judy said, then pointed to another barrel. The label read nadobi. "Nadobi means dinner plates." She scanned the rest. "More of these are clay, but a few of the labels I can't make out." She grinned at Seth. "I can't wait to open them and find out what's inside."

Good, Seth thought, 'cos you're doing it, not me. I've got work to do! He wrote checks for all the men as the last of the barrels was taken down to the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Hovis took the checks. "Mr. Kohn, thank you very much. It you don't mind, I'll give you a call sometime. I'd like to know what's in them myself."

"No problem."

"Oh, Mr. Hovis," Judy said, "I wanted to ask you." She pointed across the road, to the opening of the path they'd noticed from the bedroom window. "What exactly is that there? A walkway of some kind?"

"It's a ser viceway," Hovis said. "Every square mile of the switchgra.s.s fields are gridded with these serviceways-if you flew a plane over the area, you'd be able to see the lines of each square mile very easily. They're all ten feet wide, so men and equipment have access to the irrigation valves and can check crop quality in different areas."

"Sure, that makes perfect sense," she agreed. "We thought it was something like that. But we also noticed a circular clearing about a half a mile east of here-"

"And then a square one even farther out."

Hovis nodded. "Oh, there are a number of clearings like that, and most of them are graveyards."

"Graveyards," Seth repeated.

"How wonderfully creepy!" Judy enthused.

"Some of them are very old," Hovis went on. "And if you want to go look at them, be very careful. There aren't any ser viceways leading to most of them, just barely visible footpaths. And if you ever do that, or if you ever walk along any of the serivceways, it's a good idea to wear boots."

"Ticks?" Judy figured.

"Tick and snakes."

"We won't be doing any of that, Mr. Hovis," Seth a.s.sured.

"Copperheads are fairly abundant in Mary land," the man continued, "and we've even got some rattlers, but they all stay mainly in woodlands. But out there in the switch-gra.s.s, there's a lot of hognose and black snakes."

"Not poisonous," Judy knew, "but they can still bite the h.e.l.l out of you and give you teta.n.u.s."

"Exactly."

"Like I said," Seth repeated. "We won't be taking any nature walks through the switchgra.s.s."

"Oh, you can, just be careful."

The workmen had finished and were heading back to their vehicles. "Have a good day, both of you," Hovis told them.

"You, too," Judy said.

Just then something obvious occurred to Seth. "Oh, wait. Mr. Hovis? I never even thought to ask you. What happened to the crew of the steamboat?"

Hovis's face set with something unpleasant. "I didn't think it necessary to include the grim detail, Mr. Kohn, but during the excavation, we found the Wegener 's crew-or, I should say, their skeletons."

Seth and Judy looked at each other.

"The captain of the boat was an Irishman named Michael McQuinn, and he had two deckhands, Czech immigrants."

"That's too bad," Seth said. "They never got off the ship."

Hovis seemed reluctant to continue. "From what we could see, at least two of them died before the earthquake."

"How could you know that?" Judy asked.

"Because they appear to have both been killed with an ax...probably the same ax that was used to hack the lid off that barrel of clay," Hovis went on. "And the third skeleton was found inside the door of the cargo house, both of its hands gripping an ax..."

CHAPTER FOUR.

July 1880 I.

Henry Bozman's head thunked in pain as he regained consciousness. What the d.a.m.n hail? He blinked dizziness from his eyes, looked around.

Where in blazes am I? I ain't never seen this room.

No, he hadn't, for he'd never been in the home of the founder of Lowensport, Rabbi Gavriel Lowen.

The night before he'd set fire to one of the docks near the mill, and to night he'd meant to do the same to another, but- They musta caught me, he realized.