You can say that again,Annja thought.

"After all, this is the land of the McDonald's coffee verdict and the holy tortilla, Ms. Creed."

"'Annja' is fine, Doctor."

"Annja, then. And call me Lauren."

Despite the gray streaking the professor of American folklore's long, straight, ash-blond hair, she looked little older to Annja than Annja herself did in the mirror most mornings. Perhaps it was the late-afternoon light filtering between the half-shut blinds of Dr. Perovich's little office tucked away in a corner of the University of New Mexico campus in central Albuquerque.

Or maybe I'm just getting old, Annja thought.

The folklorist was slim and youthful in her grayish turtleneck pullover and jeans. Her blue eyes danced behind round glasses. Annja thought her students lucky, hoped they appreciated the fact. The professor had graciously agreed to meet with Annja after her normal office hours, when afternoon classes were done for the day.

"If you don't mind my asking," Perovich said, "what's your professional interest in these Holy Child sightings, Annja?"

"Well, as an archaeologist I deal in people – societies – cultures that are dead and buried. It sounds awful when put that way, I suppose. But it's true. So I find it useful to, I guess, reconnect to the dynamic world of a living human culture, the interactions of living beings. So I keep touch with how people really work – to avoid embarrassing situations like thinking some artifact whose purpose I can't identify must have ritual significance, when it's, like, a pot scrubber or back scratcher or something else everyday."

The conversation she'd overheard in the diner that morning had actually suggested action to her.

She laughed and brushed away a strand of chestnut-brown hair that had drifted in to tickle her forehead. "Or maybe I'm just abusing professional courtesy to gratify simple curiosity."

Dr. Perovich sat rocking slightly in her swivel chair and nodding judiciously. Then she grinned impishly.

"I admit I'm just a bit disappointed," she said. "I had visions of seeing myself on Chasing History's Monsters,I suppose."

"The Holy Child doesn't exactly fit my definition of a monster. Or at least not my producer's. Now, if he had murdered eight or nine people..."

"But the show also deals with more general paranormal events," Perovich said.

"You seem awfully knowledgeable about it."

"I admit I'm a fan. Since I'm not a 'hard' scientist – " her fingers made quote signs in the air " – I don't have to pretend to some kind of reflex skepticism. Frankly, a lot of what passes for skepticism I can't tell from rather ingenuous faith in conventional explanations."

"Um," Annja said, feeling more than a bit uncomfortable. She liked to style herself a skeptic, too. "Well. I'll certainly keep you in mind for the future. You'd be a good talking-head expert. You're articulate and interesting. It doesn't hurt that you're photogenic."

"Not, I'm afraid, like that hostess – what's her name?"

"Kristie Chatham."

"That's the one. Just so long as it doesn't matter if your experts aren't quite so profoundly endowed."

"Not to me," Annja replied.

She was grateful for the banter. There weremonsters on the prowl, her instincts told her. Doug Morrell, her producer on the show, would, in the fullness of time, be all over the black anomaly of the night before – the more so since one of his own people was among the witnesses. An eagle,she told herself firmly.

That's all it was.

Perovich crossed her legs, laced her fingers over a knee and sat back. "So how can I help you?"

"You're keeping up with the recent rash of Santo Niño sightings, I take it?"

"Oh, yeah." Her eyes gleamed.

"What's your professional take on them?"

Perovich swung around in her chair. "Fascinating. Really, really. We're seeing a synthesis of truly ancient folk legends with modern urban myth. Although I suspect the vanishing hitchhiker first appeared to Egyptian chariot drivers, portraying himself as the god Horus. Falcon head and all."

"Can you tell me a bit more about the myth?" Annja asked.

"Yep. A staple of the Automotive Age. Really seemed to hit its stride back in the seventies – although I'm never sure whether that's just because people began to be aware of urban legends as such, and keep track of them, about that time. That's always a risk, with sociological or psychological disciplines, even medicine. How much of an increased volume of reports of something is due to actual increased occurrence, and how much to people simply being more aware of it, and even having someone to report it to? Also, I ran up against the legend myself in those days, as a blushing girl – not to date myself too much.

"The basics are a young man appears by the side of the road with his thumb out. Although he's long-haired and bearded and maybe a bit scruffy in appearance, a kindly motorist stops and picks him up. The young man is very polite and friendly. Then his manner turns grave. He warns of some impending disaster, usually global in scale. Then something distracts the motorist. He looks away. When he looks back the passenger is gone."

"And he figures it was Jesus?" Annja asked.

"Sometimes. Who else would be long-haired, benign and prophetic? Well, of course, a raft of personages, even from the New Testament, although who ever sees an apparition of John the Baptist? Sometimes the enigmatic passenger explicitly identifies himself as Christ, but that's rare."

She shrugged. "Actually, my personal encounter with the legend involved a friend telling me about a hitchhiker his uncle picked up who claimed to be a scientist. This scientist – a young, kind of scruffy, polite man – claimed he had learned that the Earth was going to run out of oxygen by 1980. After that he dropped out of school and decided to wander and see America, spread the warning, for what good it would do. Of course, both my friend and his uncle swore it was true. It wasn't strictly a vanishing-hitchhiker yarn in the classic sense, although, if memory serves, the uncle claimed he did lose track of the guy kind of mysteriously at the next truck stop. But not long after I heard that story, I ran into an aunt who said a friend of hers said a friend of hershad had an encounter with Jesus. When I heard that tale I instantly hooked it up in my mind with the dropout-scientist yarn. And I was hooked. That's the actual urban legend that gave me my vocation – that and the choking Doberman."

"Choking Doberman?" Annja laughed. "I seem to be turning into an urban-legend echo machine."

Perovich waved a slim hand. "Master finds dog choking – finds house broken into – learns when he calls the cops that a burglar was just picked up in an emergency room missing some fingers...no need for more details. If you've ever seen a slasher flick your imagination will fill them in more than well enough. Oh, yeah – and the lover's lane, with the escaped maniac killer with the hook. Anyway."

"So you actually set out to study urban legends?"

"They were what drew me to folklore in the first place. When I went to college – be a dear and let me slide as to exactly when – there wasn't anything like a discipline of urban-legend study, although the term had come into use and a couple of books had been published on the subject. I'm afraid I don't have the stuff of pioneers in me. I didn't feel capable of forcing urban legendology into legitimacy all by my lonesome. The up-and-coming study of folklore was the closest thing available – though tending to be overrun with annoying granola eaters. Not that I, um, haven't been known to munch on the occasional granola bar, you understand."