"All the way around," Annja said, laughing. "How do you see what's happening now?"

"As you may know, the Holy Child – the Santo Niño – first appears in Spain, during the resistance to the Moorish occupation, feeding Christian prisoners in a village called Atocha. The apparition was supposed to be the infant Jesus."

She shrugged. "You can see why the oppressed Christian minority would want to believe that, certainly. From there the legend makes its way to New Mexico along the same twisty, colonialist trail that most of the colonists and trade goods did. Through the Spanish holdings in the Philippines, then through Mexico and finally up into northern New Mexico, which was the nether end of nowhere in those days."

"I see," Annja said.

"Now, it strikes me there's a natural match here," Perovich said. She was clearly enjoying herself. She liked spinning yarns – which Annja could guess might be a useful asset in a folklore prof. "The Holy Child associated from the get-go with succor. And of course any spiritual manifestation worth its spiritual salt possesses the gift of prophecy.

"While sightings are reported all across the Southwest from about the eighteenth century, when the myth made it up here from Plateros in Mexico, the main local belief centers upon an image of the Holy Child kept in the Sanctuary de Chimayó, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe."

"We're doing a dig not far from there, on San Esequiel Pueblo land," Annja said. "Or were. It's kind of wound down for the season now."

"Winter comes early and hard to northern New Mexico. You know what 'Sangre de Cristo' means?"

"'Blood of Christ,'" Anna stated.

"Exactly!" The professor smacked the arm of her chair. "See why I love it here?" Perovich asked, eyes shining in the gloom. She hadn't turned on any interior light. The soft polychrome glow of her computer monitor lit the side of her face and struck the occasional rainbow accent off her long hair. Annja did not feel compelled to ask for more lights. If her subject was comfortable, so was she. "You don't get that sort of thing back in Ohio."

Perovich rocked back in her chair. "Then again, you don't get mountainsin Ohio, either. Not like around here. So, anyway, the image in the sanctuary is supposed to bust loose occasionally and wander the countryside doing good deeds. There's this really wonderful tradition of bringing children's shoes to the shrine, to replace the ones he wears out on his errands of mercy. And of course, he's spotted from time to time – and as mysteriously disappears."

Annja nodded. "I see where this is going."

"Wandering-saint yarns of pretty similar content are common to many cultures and religious traditions around the world. Like sightings of a benign and powerful feminine spirit. Before the Spanish got to the Valley of Mexico, they called her Tonantzin, a fertility goddess. Later they called her the Virgin of Guadalupe."

"Yes. You see her image everywhere around here," Annja said.

"Another reason to love the place. A lot of what I study isn't folklore to the people around here. It's real.Anyway, I'm researching my own paper on that very subject. How the Santo Niño may have engendered the vanishing hitchhiker. Would you like me to send you a draft?"

"I would, please. You've got my e-mail address."

"In any event, it's easy to see how the current concept of the vanishing hitchhiker might blend – or blend back – into the Holy Child myth. That's what I see happening now. It's like all those clichés we New Mexicans are so fond of. I laughingly call myself a New Mexican after living here ten years, when the real New Mexicans have roots here going back to the sixteenth century."

"Or the ice age," Annja said.

The professor laughed. "True, true. Please don't report me for having a Eurocentric moment, there. Could be fatal in my position."

"Your secret's safe with me."

"Anyway, we always like to tell ourselves about New Mexico being a land of contrasts – from ancient petroglyphs to the atom bomb. But like most clichés it's true in some important ways. And I think we see it in effect here."

The professor leaned close to Annja. Her eyes were big in the twilight. "I'm going to propound a theory that I'm sure would make your cultural-anthropologist friends hold their fingers up in crosses and hiss at me. I hope this doesn't ruin my shot at a gig on your show."

Annja laughed. "I'm not so good at political correctness myself."

"All right. You've been warned. The southwestern U.S. is basically uninhabitable. It's desert and mountain. Arid and uninviting. Even the river valley – well, you've seen our river, so-called?"

Annja nodded.

"There weren't such drains on its flow upstream back in the day, of course. But no one was ever going to mistake it for the Orinoco. So the people who settled here were the ones they wouldn't let settle anywhere else – anywhere, well, nice to live. The natives you got were human-sacrificing hardcases like the Anasazi, or Pueblos, who kept getting chased out of wherever they settled by mean people, or Athabascan raiders. Even the Aztecs – not a kind and gentle bunch – took one look and kept on moving. Right through the Jornada del Muerte.

"The Spanish settlers were largely converted Jews and Moors for whom Spain had become too hot. Literally – ba-bum!" She did a top-hat sting on the arm of her chair. "The Christians were mostly bandits – heavily weighted to Basques and Catalans, whom any good Castilian of the day would tell you were the same thing. The Anglos, well, you know what kind of sociopaths and escaped doorknobs our pioneering forebears were. Again, they pushed compulsively west because the decent, civilized east wouldn't hold 'em."

Annja nodded. "Okay. I may have to turn in my anthro card, but you haven't said anything I'd disagree with."

Perovich reared up, looked at her and pushed her glasses up her straight nose. "Well. You're a rare one."

"That's what the nuns said." To the blank look she expanded, "At the orphanage."

The professor nodded. "So what we get here is the confluence – no – the three-way, full-on, pedal-to-the-metal collisionof the most extreme elements of three pretty disparate cultures. The aftershocks reverberate into the present day – spend some time on the streets listening to people, just open your eyes and look around. You can see them – you can feel 'em."

"I already picked up on that," Annja said seriously.

Perovich sat back, unfolding her hands to her sides. "So there you have it! I was an Ohio suburban chick with a taste for the strange. Goth hadn't been invented yet, or hadn't reached Columbus. So what's a girl to do? First I got into the study of folklore, because it was the accepted discipline closest to my interest. Then I came here for grad work. And I've been here ever since."

Annja nodded. She wasn't sure if she'd discovered anything she could use. She was definitely getting a better feel for the place, though, as well as its innate weirdness. It helped her put in perspective some of the things she'd observed during the two weeks she'd spent with the dig. As well as the occasional sense of eeriness she'd experienced even before the incident the previous night.

"What do you think about the reality underlying the stories?" she asked. "Is there any?"

Perovich laughed. "That's a tricky question. But since I've already opened up to you, what the hey? First, I think it's fatuous to say that all legends or myths or other stories 'must have'or 'always have' some basis in reality. People lie. They make things up, to amuse themselves, to amuse others, to make themselves look important. You can twist the definition of 'based in reality'to fit anything, up to and including most horror movies – there are teenagers and they have nightmares. I've had some doozies myself, let me tell you. So, on that basis, you could say those movies are based on something factual.