“No?”
“No. You’d be a dead man already.”
Chapter Sixteen
Harry swallowed, suddenly wishing he could be anywhere else, that the discussion with John could be wiped from his memory. But he also felt like he was on the verge of finally learning the truth, and with that in mind, he pushed on.
“Let’s get right to the meat of this,” he said. He leaned forward and looked straight at John. “This morning you asked me if I’d ever heard of some certain legend. That’s what all of this is about, isn’t it?”
John nodded, returning to the couch. “That’s exactly what it’s about. The legend I asked you about was the legend of Wyh-heah Qui Waq. It’s a story that has been passed from generation to generation among my people. Nobody really knows how far back it goes. In my studies, I’ve found references going back over three hundred and fifty years. There’s even a possibility it predates Columbus’s discovery of America, but no one has any conclusive evidence to support that yet.”
“How come I’ve never heard of it?”
“It’s not something that was openly discussed or documented, even among my ancestors. In fact, it was only the shaman from any given village that possessed the entire knowledge of the legend. The villagers themselves would only be told bits and pieces, enough to warn them, or to prepare them if the legend was ever to come to pass. It took me years to put all the pieces together, years of studying and cross-references, but, truthfully, many of our old beliefs are like that. It wasn’t as though I made this particular myth my specialty. It’s just that it was hidden much more effectively than any of the others I’ve ever had to research.
“The first reference to it I found was in an old library book called ‘Treasures of the Northlands’, and it featured the artistic creativity of several Indian and Eskimo tribes. There was a small picture on one of the pages, I remember it vividly because it was so striking. It was a wooden mask, carved about three hundred years ago by an Aleut Eskimo man who had become separated from his village and had spent two and a half weeks lost in the wilderness. The text didn’t mention the legend by name, but it referred to the man’s belief that he’d encountered the demon of the wind and that he’d carved the mask to warn others of the spirit’s existence.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was hideous. A long, narrow face, a mouth filled with fangs, empty holes for eyes. Barely human, that’s what was so frightening about it. I can still picture it exactly the way I saw it that first day.
“After that, it was another six months before I came across anything else to do with the legend. But then I found another reference to the same Aleut’s story, the one who’d carved the mask in the first place. This one made a correlation between his tale of the demon of the wind and the legend of Wyh-heah Qui Waq. It went on to suggest that it was the man’s own sense of isolation and his delirious frame of mind at the time of his disappearance that caused him to hallucinate the entire episode. It claimed that his own upbringing—his own belief in the spirits—was to blame. But when he returned with his tale, and then carved the wooden mask as testimony to it, he contributed to the legend itself. From that point in time, references to Wyh-heah Qui Waq became much more frequent, and some historians believe it was this man’s story that started it all.”
“So what is this legend?” Laurie asked. “What is Wyh-heah Qui Waq?”
John chewed his lip. “According to the beliefs of my people, there is a spirit for anything one might encounter in nature. The spirit of the sun brings warmth and light; the spirit of the moon guards over the earth in the darkness; the spirit of the land provides both food and shelter for all the earth’s children. It’s a very common mythology, actually. I can site you two dozen examples in Native American and Middle Eastern history alone.”
Harry grinned. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“Anyway, it is believed that these spirits—gods, if you will—exist in a constant state of balance; for every god there is a demon, for every spirit of good, there is a spirit of evil. They are in eternal combat, these good and evil forces, and everything that happens can be attributed to a victory or a defeat on either side. A particularly savage winter, for example, one in which many villagers are lost to starvation or to the elements, would be blamed on a victory of one of the evil spirits that roam the land and command the forces of nature.”
“So this Wyh-heah Qui Waq is an evil spirit?”
“Something like that, but not exactly,” John said slowly. “There’s another legend I have to tell you about first. It’ll help you to understand. It’s more commonly known among the many different Eskimo tribes and villages. These days, most of my people consider it to be little more than a superstition, but I’ve met others, mostly among the elderly, who still believe in it. And I’ve heard stories . . .”
He broke off, as if suddenly aware that he was beginning to stray from the point. He took a moment to reel his thoughts back in before going on, squaring his shoulders before picking up the trail of the story once again.
“Have you ever heard of a tupilaq?”
Harry shook his head.
“That doesn’t surprise me, actually. I wouldn’t have expected any outsider to know that one. A tupilaq is a sort of small carving, a figurine. The village shaman would fashion it by hand, usually out of wood or rock, sometimes even out of bone. When the carving was complete, he would then perform a ritual of summoning upon it, and attempt to bring it to life.”
“What for?”
“Once in a while to frighten an enemy, but usually for revenge. Sometimes even to kill a man.”
“I’m not sure I follow you. What is it, some kind of curse?”
“Not a curse, no. It’s the tupilaq itself that would carry out the instructions of the shaman. You see, once the ritual of summoning was over, at least as the story goes, the shaman would instill within the tupilaq the soul of a dead man, stolen from the spirit world before it could pass on to the other side. The spirit would remain trapped, imprisoned inside of the tupilaq, until its duties were carried out. When its purpose was served, the soul would be rewarded, returned to the spirit world in a state of perfection. That would allow it to cross over forever to the other side.”
Laurie seemed appalled by this. “Even after committing an act of revenge? Or murder?”
“Apparently, in service to the shaman, it was the tupilaq itself that would absorb the burden of sin, not the soul used to animate it. When the tupilaq was given life, it was said to grow to the size of a man, to become a living being, but one retaining the characteristics of the shaman’s original carving. Most of them were intentionally hideous, carved to instill fear into the heart of the shaman’s enemy.”
John stood and crossed the room to his duffel bag. He returned with a thick text book and began to leaf through it as he lowered himself back onto the couch. A small, self-conscious frown spread over his face as he flipped through the pages; he seemed painfully aware of how ridiculous some of the legends and beliefs of his people must seem in the light of today’s modern technology.
Harry hid his skepticism, hoping to ease some of John’s anxiety. He tried to remember that John had grown up with these beliefs; they were a part of his character, and a part of his heritage.
“Here it is,” John said. He laid the open book on the table between them and turned it towards Harry. “Look at these two pictures. They’re photographs of actual Eskimo carvings, made by an unknown shaman almost three hundred years ago. Take a good look at the amount of detail.”
Harry examined the pictures, each depicting the image of a small wooden figure.
“Are these in a museum somewhere?” he asked.
John nodded. “They’re both part of an exhibit of Aleut Eskimo artifacts at the Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.”
The carving in the first photograph had been fashioned into what was basically the shape of a man, although some of the proportions had been greatly miscalculate
d. Its head was twice the size of any normal man’s, and its face was horribly disfigured, clearly illustrating its creator’s intentions. Its eyes were slanted, peering out from under heavy, angry brows, and two pairs of jagged fangs forced its mouth into a perpetual snarl. Its features had certainly been created to inspire fear, and Harry tried to imagine how horrible a full-size, animated version of the carving would be.
The second figure was even more disturbing, bearing little resemblance to anything even remotely human. It was tall and slender, its emaciated form hunched over into a deformed stoop, the way a dying animal might look standing on its hind legs. The figure had been given four long arms, each ending in a hand with three claw-like fingers. Its face was twisted into an expression of terrible fury, eyes open and mouth agape, a maw that was impossibly wide, covering the entire lower half of the head.
“Jesus,” Harry said, pushing the book back across the table. “Have you ever seen evidence to support these stories?”
“No. Just the stories themselves. But I’ve heard dozens of them, from several different sources. It seems like there’s not an Eskimo tribe in the entire North American continent that doesn’t have similar references in their mythology. Most of them have different names for it, but when you get right down to it, they’re all referring to the same thing: the tupilaq.”
Harry took a moment to process the sudden flood of information. “Okay,” he said at last, “so the shaman carves the tupilaq, brings it to life with a dead man’s soul, and sends it out to kill. His very own killing machine. But how is all this related to your story?”
“More than two hundred years ago, in what is now called New Brunswick, a war broke out between the Abenaki Indians and a group of several different Eskimo villages that had come together and settled there. The winter that year was devastating, and the Eskimo villages had joined together as an act of survival. They settled in the Tesmacha Forest, a kind of natural notch that provided shelter from the extreme conditions. There was food there as well, and they came to rely on the forest to survive.
“The Abenaki took great offense to this. They’d also claimed the forest as their own and wouldn’t tolerate the intrusion of the Eskimos upon their land. They went to war. The attacks went on for weeks, always in the dead of night, always when the Eskimos were least prepared to defend themselves. Finally it seemed clear that the Eskimos couldn’t survive much longer; the chances were good that the Abenaki would completely destroy them with their next attack.”
John paused, lowered his voice. “So . . . desperate times breed desperate measures. This became a war for survival, nothing more. And so the shamans from each village joined together and raised a tupilaq of their own to set loose against their enemy. They carved it from wood and bone, and gave it features that the legend says could freeze a man’s blood in his veins. When it came time to bring the tupilaq to life, to summon a soul from the spirit world to instill within it, the most powerful of the shaman, Jha-Laman, decided a single man’s soul would not be powerful enough to animate their tupilaq. Their creation was meant to be without mercy, and must destroy their enemy completely. The six of them discussed it, and then began a ritual which, to their teachings, was considered a forbidden act.
“They called upon a demon, the evil spirit of the wind, to possess their tupilaq, and the legend says that they were successful. They brought the tupilaq to life through the power of the demon of the wind, Wyh-heah Qui Waq, and then sent it after the Indians that had become their enemy.”
A knot of wood popped in the fireplace, and Harry couldn’t keep his head from jerking to the side. John’s story was beginning to get under his skin, and he felt oddly nervous, as if something might reach out of the darkness and touch him at any moment.
“You tell a great ghost story, John,” Laurie said, only half-smiling. “I’ll bet you were popular in the Cub Scouts.”
John smiled, but it faded quickly as his story continued.
“The stories say that the tupilaq swept into the Indian encampments that same night, and attacked them without remorse. But the legend also becomes a little murky here. It doesn’t go into a lot of detail; it only says that the tupilaq’s vengeance upon the Indians was insanely violent, and that it left no survivors. Not one.”
“My God,” Laurie whispered.
“Anthropologists who have studied that area tell of a huge burial pit uncovered there in 1961, a pit filled with bones that date back to the time of the Indian/Eskimo wars. There were so many bones in the pit, and they were in such a state of dismemberment that an exact determination of how many bodies had been buried there was virtually impossible. There were hundreds of them, and later examinations of the bones revealed that a major percentage of them bore marks indicating violent death. It was concluded that most of the bodies in the pit had been torn limb from limb, many of them while they were still alive. But there was also evidence to suggest that some of them had been torn apart later, after they’d already been murdered.”
John rose to his feet. He appeared to be gathering his resolve, trying to conquer the fear his own story had brought to life inside of him. He paced to the fireplace and crouched there, staring into the flames as he went on.
“The group of village shaman . . . once they witnessed the total devastation that the tupilaq had caused—that they had caused—showed great remorse for what they had done. It was they, I believe, that went about burying all those bodies, out of pity, out of guilt . . . I don’t know. Maybe out of some strange sense of duty. But they decided that to raise a demon against anyone, no matter how terrible an enemy, was a crime beyond redemption. A crime against humanity, against nature itself. In time, they called the tupilaq back to the village and began a ritual to exorcise the demon from its body.”
“Something tells me things didn’t go as planned,” Harry said.
“Even their combined powers were no match for Wyh-heah Qui Waq. The demon turned against them and attacked their village. There were a handful of survivors this time, but not many. Just enough to flee the destruction, enough to witness the tupilaq’s escape into the Tesmacha Forest.
“Of the original shamans who’d first brought the tupilaq to life, only three survived its attack. They realized they had given flesh to the demon of the wind, they’d allowed it to escape in solid form. When the rest of the village survivors moved on to start a new life further west, the three stayed behind and began to track the demon, determined to banish it back to the spirit world and destroy the tupilaq.
“Jha-Laman was one of the three survivors, and it was he who led the hunt. It’s his account of that final journey that forms the rest of the legend. His tale has been passed down through the generations of his people, so that no one will ever make the same terrible mistakes he made.”
“Did they ever find it?” Laurie asked.
John nodded, but didn’t turn around. “It took months, but they finally tracked their creation down. It had already left the Tesmacha Forest by the time they began their search, and it started to make its way south from there. It traveled from village to village, from settlement to settlement, destroying everything in its path. Jha-Laman and the other two shamans followed its trail, further and further south, the days growing into weeks and then into months. But they couldn’t give up, not after having been responsible for freeing the demon in the first place.
“Finally, they managed to catch up with the tupilaq and trap it in a place that Jha-Laman’s own story describes as ‘a world beneath our own, where daylight has never dared to venture’. I’d always wondered what he meant by that. Now I think I know.
“Anyway, after trapping it, they began to exorcise the demon from its body. It turned on them again, attacked its own creators. All but Jha-Laman were killed, and in the end he was unable to drive the demon from its new solid form. But he outwitted it, as the legend goes, and eventually imprisoned it within the tupilaq’s body. Once it was bound there, he buried the tupilaq and restrained Wyh-heah Qui Waq there with a sp
ell. With the last of his strength, he somehow made the journey back to the Tesmacha Forest and then eventually to his people’s new settlement. The battle with Wyh-heah Qui Waq had weakened him terribly, and the long trip home left him close to death. In his final days, dying in the care of the survivors of his village, he recounted the entire tale to his one remaining son. Shortly after that, he died. And the legend was born.”
John fell silent, coming to his feet and crossing the room again. He came to a halt at the end of the couch, standing with his arms crossed over his chest. His eyes were far away, as if he was somehow reliving the experiences of the fabled shaman.
“There’s just one more thing,” John said, his gaze swinging back to Harry. “One more part of this, and it’s something I didn’t know until I talked with Mahuk a few days ago.”
“What is it?”
“The spell that Jha-Laman cast on the tupilaq, to keep Wyh-heah Qui Waq imprisoned there . . . it was meant to last forever. The legend says it will last as long as the greatest of bloodlines, in this case the one of the man who banished Wyh-heah Qui Waq. The shaman Jha-Laman. But the spell is about to be broken.”
Harry frowned. “Wait a minute. The old man in the hospital, this Mahuk—you said he was a direct descendant of Jha-Laman.”
“It’s true. He is. But—”
“Then the bloodline is still intact,” Laurie put in.
John shook his head slowly. Sadly. “Mahuk is the last of his bloodline. The very last. And he’s dying. It’s a miracle he’s still alive at all. He began the same journey that Jha-Laman made nine generations before, prepared to renew the spell before it could be broken. Before it was too late.”
Primal Fear Page 17
