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“Did you dig this tunnel?” Kismet asked when they caught up to Joe and Candace.

Joe shook his head, his eyes, and perhaps his thoughts, unfocused. “The tunnel was dug back before the War…the Civil War, that is.”

Then the young man straightened perceptibly. “Actually, it was Fontaneda that dug it, way back when. He was an Abolitionist. He’d give runaway slaves a place to hide until they could catch a ride on the Underground Railroad. Dug this tunnel so they could come and go.”

The idea of the Spanish Conquistador as a Southern gentleman in the years before the Civil War, and an Abolitionist no less, was mind-boggling. If everything he thought he knew about the man was true — including the claim that he had discovered the Fountain of Youth — then Fontaneda would have been about three hundred and fifty years old at the time of the Civil War. It was difficult to conceive of how four or five lifetimes of experience might have changed the man. Had his decision to support the anti-slavery movement been a way of atoning for past misdeeds…like the slaughter of the native village that had protected the Fountain in the first place?

Kismet thought about the dead fall that had blocked the entrance and wondered if that had been Fontaneda’s doing as well.

The tunnel followed a straight line for at least fifty yards before coming to an abrupt and unexpected end. The walls were hidden behind stacks of mildewed cardboard boxes and old splintered wooden crates. If not for the secret entrance under the hearth and the long separating distance, it might have seemed like nothing more than a storage cellar, but in light of those two details, Kismet was inclined to believe that boxes were nothing more than window dressing. His suspicion was confirmed when Joe started shifting some of the boxes out of the way to reveal an eight-foot folding ladder, resting on its side.

Joe wrestled the ladder out of its hiding place and then propped it up in the center of the tunnel. Kismet realized that the ceiling was higher here, and as Joe extended the legs of the ladder, Kismet saw a dark opening directly above where the ladder had been positioned. Joe rocked the ladder a couple times to ensure that it was stable, then retrieved his lantern and climbed up until his upper body was above the top step and mostly inside the opening. After a few moments of fumbling with something overhead, he resumed his ascent and disappeared completely through the hole in the ceiling. Kismet approached the ladder, and saw Joe staring down out of a well-lit open space high overhead.

“It’s a little cramped up here. Mister…Kismet, was it? I think you should come up first. There’s something I want to show you.”

Kismet glanced at the others. Annie was still on the verge of hysteria. Higgins offering his daughter what comfort he could, simply shrugged. The old woman, Candace, gave him an encouraging nod and gestured for him to go up the ladder. He did.

The overhead space was much smaller than the confines of the tunnel; it was about the size of a walk in closet, but part of the space was dominated by what looked like an enormous chest. It was a crypt, he realized, and the chest was a sealed casket.

Joe gestured to the funerary container. “There it is. What you came for is in there.”

It took Kismet a moment to realize what Joe was saying. “This is Fontaneda’s tomb?”

“He built an empty vault to hide the tunnel exit. When he died, it seemed like the best place to lay him to rest. No one else was using it.” Joe laid his palms flat on the top of the casket, staring at the smooth surface with an almost wistful expression. “So, you want me to open it?”

Kismet swallowed. “How do you even know what’s in there?”

“I know,” Joe said, as if that was the final word on the subject. “He took his secret to the grave. That’s what Joseph King told you in the letter, right?”

Shoving aside a final hesitant attack of conscience, Kismet nodded. There was a faint hiss as Joe broke the seal. Kismet felt a stir of expectation and dread as the cover was thrown back. A mixture of strange smells wafted from the casket; some kind of perfume fragrance — sandalwood, perhaps — that couldn’t quite mask the odor of embalming fluid. But there was no smell of rot or decay; if there was a body in the casket then it had remained perfectly preserved. Kismet picked up Joe’s lantern and held it above the shrouded figure that lay in repose within.

There was indeed a body, a man, with a thick unkempt mane of black hair and a bushy beard that could not quite hide his youthful features. His skin had the pallor of death, but looked firm, with no hint of decomposition. The motionless figure in the casket could have merely been sleeping, or just recently deceased, instead of having been dead and buried for more than fifty years. In fact, he looked a little too good.

If the Spaniard’s youthful features were a testament to the power of the Fountain, if his life and health and vigor had been preserved for nearly four hundred years beyond its normal span, then what had happened at the end? He clearly had not died of old age.

Kismet saw Joe staring at the face of the cadaver with a mystified expression. “What’s the matter?”

“The hair. And the beard? I don’t…” He took a breath. “I can’t believe Joseph King would have laid him to rest in such a state.”

Kismet looked more closely, studying not only Fontaneda’s face, but also his hands. The fingernails were long, unnaturally so, like the talons of a raptor. It was a popular misconception that hair and fingernails continued to grow after death; what actually happened was that, as the skin gradually became desiccated, it shrank and pulled back, which created the illusion of longer hair and nails. But nothing like that could account for what he was looking at. The dead man's beard and fingernails would have had to be growing for several months, years perhaps, to achieve the length and density it now possessed.

“He really found it,” Kismet said, almost in a whisper. “The Fountain of Youth. Maybe whatever kept him young, kept these cells alive long after the rest of him died…”

Morbid curiosity prompted him to check the lid of the casket. He half-expected to discover claw marks, but the silk headliner was intact. Fontaneda had evidently been very dead when his body had been placed inside. What had actually killed him was anyone’s guess.

“You said there was a map?”

Joe took a deep breath, then leaned over the cadaver and tore open the dead man’s shirt. The action took Kismet by surprise, and it took a moment for him to realize what he was seeing. Etched into the pale skin, partially obscured by a tangle of chest hair, was an intaglio of lines and symbols. Fontaneda’s map to the Fountain of Youth was tattooed on his chest.

It was not a map in the traditional sense. It more closely resembled a childishly drawn landscape, with triangles that might have been mountains and rounded, irregular shapes that Kismet took to be lakes. There were other markings as well, animals shapes, similar in form to petroglyphs found all across the Americans, and perhaps most distinctive, a small Christian cross. The image was marred by what looked like a jagged white scar, almost directly over the Spaniard’s sternum, but the blemish didn’t significantly alter the picture. There were no names or orienting marks, but vertical lines stretched various points — the centers of the “lakes,” the heads of the animal shapes, the peaks of the “mountains,” all at very deliberate angles, like the rays of a web, to converged on the head of another animal shape, a long squirming snake outline that almost completely bisected the image. The tip of its tail was in the center of the man’s chest, a few inches above the scar, and its head was just above his navel.