The Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  “Now,” said Singing Rock gently. “What did you see, my friend, through your camera?”

  The cameraman shuddered, and there were bubbles of saliva at the corners of his mouth. He looked like a man dying from rabies, or in the terminal stages of syphilis. Something so terrible was imprinted on his mind that there was nothing he could do to exorcise it from his memory. He couldn’t even die.

  "It’s—it’s—" he stuttered.

  “Come on, my friend,” said Singing Rock. “I bid you to speak. It will not get thee. Gitche Manitou will protect thee.”

  The cameraman closed his eyes. I thought for a moment that he had dropped back into unconsciousness. But after a few seconds, he began to speak—very quickly and almost unintelligibly—in a wordy rush.

  "It swam, it was swimming, it came swimming across the room and through the room at the same time and I caught a glimpse of just the edge of it like a sort of squid, like a squid, with waving arms, all waving, but it was big as well, I can’t say how big it was, I was so frightened there was something inside my head like my whole brain was stolen. Only a glimpse, though, just a glimpse."

  Singing Rock listened for a while longer, but the cameraman said nothing more. He carefully removed the beads from the man’s head, and said: “Well, that seems to be it.”

  “Is he okay?” I asked. “I mean, he’s not—”

  “No,” said Singing Rock. “He’s not dead. I don’t think he’ll ever be the same again, but he’s not dead.”

  “The squid,” I said. “Do you know what that was?”

  Singing Rock said: “Yes. This man was privileged to see something that has been banished from the earth for centuries. He didn’t see all of it, which is probably just as well. The Great Old One is among us again.”

  Chapter Ten

  Into the Light

  I followed Singing Rock out of the first-aid room and into the corridor. His black eyes were glittering again with some of the zeal that I had slowly seen extinguished by our long and harrowing night. He said: “This is it, Harry. Are you coming to help me?”

  “This is what? What the hell’s going to happen?”

  Singing Rock licked his lips. His voice was breathless, and he looked as if he were feverishly ill. “The Great Old One is here. To wrestle with the Great Old One himself—don’t you understand what that means to a medicine man? It’s like a Christian having the chance to fight with Satan in person.”

  “Singing Rock—”

  “We have to do it,” said Singing Rock. “We have no time left at all. We have to go down there and do it.”

  “Go down there? You mean—back to the tenth floor?”

  Singing Rock appeared to grow in size, as if some magical wind was inflating him. He was trembling with fear and anticipation, and the ultimate lust of risking his life against the greatest evil being of mythical America. When I said nothing more, he simply turned away and began to walk quickly toward the stairs, so fast I could hardly keep up with him.

  I snatched his sleeve, and he turned around.

  “Singing Rock,” I said. “For Christ’s sake—eleven armed men were killed down there. You saw what happened.”

  “It’s too late,” said Singing Rock. “The Great Old One is here, and what happens now will be worse.”

  “Singing Rock—”

  He pulled himself away. He opened the door that led to the darkened stairway and said: “Are you coming? Or are you staying behind?”

  Echoing up the stairwell, I heard the loathsome moaning of that windless wind, and the hairs prickled on the back of my neck. The fetid stench of the Great Old One filled the air, and I could hear noises from down below that reminded me of Doré’s engravings of hell. Demons and beasts and nameless things that walked by night. Things that drove men mad. Things that hopped and crawled and dragged themselves across the darkness of terrified imagination.

  I swallowed hard. No matter how frightened I felt, I couldn’t let Singing Rock go down there on his own. I said: “I’m coming,” and pushed past him on to the concrete landing. If I didn’t go now, I never would.

  Once the door swung closed behind us, we were plunged into suffocating gloom. We held on to the handrail, and groped our way downward stair by stair. Each shadow filled me with creeping fear, and every shuffle and echo made my heart tense up. I could have sworn I heard footsteps descending the stairs just out of sight below us, but there was no time to stop and listen.

  “Singing Rock,” I whispered. “What are we going to do?”

  “I’m trying to think,” said Singing Rock quietly. “But I can’t judge the situation until I see it for myself. I just hope that I can invoke Unitrak’s spirit at the right time, and in the right way. I just hope, too, that Unitrak isn’t as hostile to us as it is to the Great Old One. There’s always that risk.”

  I coughed. “Supposing we simply surrender? Wouldn’t that save more lives? If we fight like this—God knows how many people are going to get hurt.”

  Singing Rock shook his head. “This is not a fight in the sense you think it is. This is an act of revenge by a Red Indian sorcerer in the name of all the pain and treachery and slaughter that his people suffered at the hands of the white man. You cannot surrender to someone who is seeking vengeance. Misquamacus will only be satisfied when we are all dead, and as for the Great Old One—”

  “What about the Great Old One?”

  Singing Rock shrugged. “I don’t know what bargain Misquamacus has made with him. But the Great Old One is known in Pueblo culture as the Great Devourer. The Paiute had another name—He-Who-Feeds-in-the-Pit. You can draw your own conclusions.”

  As we descended through the darkness, the mournful whining and moaning of the wind that wasn’t wind became even louder and even more depressing. I began to develop a pounding migraine, and I could hardly see straight. I felt itchy and uncomfortable, and I had the feeling that my clothes were riddled with lice. If I’d had any choice, I would have given up then, and let the Great Old One, He-Who-Feeds-in-the-Pit, do his worst.

  Singing Rock said: “We’re getting nearer. That’s why you feel so bad. Here—take this bead necklace. It isn’t much, but it should help to protect you against tricks and illusions.”

  Almost deafened by the shrieking wind, we reached the tenth floor. Singing Rock produced the piece of paper on which he had written the numbers from Unitrak, and peered at them closely through the gloom. Then he gave me the thumbs-up, and gently pushed open the door that led into the corridors where Misquamacus lurked, and where now the Great Old One, the terrible malevolent manitou of centuries past, was hideously coming to life.

  The stench was sickening. Even though the corridors were empty, there was a scuttling, rat-like noise everywhere—a noise that even the moaning of the wind could not drown. It was as if the whole place was alive with invisible rodents, swarming and clustering around the decaying smell of the Great Old One. Singing Rock turned around to reassure himself that I was still behind him, and then led the way toward Karen Tandy’s room—the room where Misquamacus had first made his obscene appearance.

  The drone of the Star Beast’s astral wind made me feel exhausted and irritable. As we came nearer to Karen Tandy’s room, the noise grew louder and louder, until it sawed through all my senses with the coarse pain of a rusty blade. All around us, as we walked, there was the scuttling of ghostly rat creatures, as if we had a loathsome escort of parasites wherever we went. Once, I felt as if one of them had jumped on my back, and I found myself tugging at my shirt in disgust and fear.

  Singing Rock had begun his incantations. He was calling on the spirits of the Sioux nation to protect us from the devouring evil of the Great Old One; on the manitous of the air, the rocks and the soil; on the demons of sickness and plague to strike Misquamacus down. I could hardly hear what he was saying above the shrieking of that unearthly wind, but I could feel that our rat escort was treating us with a certain amount of impatient respect.

  We turned a corner—a
nd suddenly, the corridor was laced with brilliant flashes of light, which crackled and spat all around us. Singing Rock raised his hands, palm outward, and the light poured against them and spent itself on the concrete floor. It was the lightning-that-sees—the first indication that Misquamacus knew we were here.

  We reached the stretch of corridor in which Karen Tandy’s room actually was. The lightning-that-sees seemed to have dispersed most of the phantom rat creatures, but the groaning wind continued, and now it was a real wind, that blew against our faces like grit. Singing Rock beckoned me onwards, and we fought our way nearer and nearer to our inevitable confrontation with Misquamacus and the Great Old One. The shrieking and howling of the wind made it impossible for us to speak, and out of the door of Karen’s room we saw sizzling flashes of astral light—the cold blue energy that had created the gateway for the greatest and most terrible of all legendary beings.

  Then—against a tearing hurricane—we reached the door itself. Singing Rock looked in first, and abruptly turned his head away in sheer terror, jerking his hand over his face like a man in the spasms of electrocution. I looked too, and I was stunned into such dread and fear that I felt as if I could never move from that doorway again.

  The room was thick with evil—smelling smoke, pouring ceaselessly from two fires which Misquamacus had lit in metal bowls, and placed on either side of his astral gateway. On the floor was marked out the most sinister and bizarre circle of figures that I had ever seen, all elaborately drawn and colored in what must have been the gore of Lieutenant Marino’s police officers. There were strange goats and hideous creatures like enormous slugs, and naked women with loathsome beasts emerging from their wombs. Presiding over this circle, hunched and deformed, his dark body blurry through the smoke, was Misquamacus. But it was not Misquamacus himself that struck the greatest terror in us—it was what we could dimly perceive through the densest clouds of smoke—a boiling turmoil of sinister shadow that seemed to grow and grow through the gloom like a squid or some raw and massive confusion of snakes and beasts and monsters.

  What was so terrifying was that I recognized the Great Old One—I recognized how close he had always been to me. He was the fright of strange shapes in wallpaper and drapes; the terror of faces that appear in the grain of wooden wardrobes; the fear of darkened stairs or curious and half-seen reflections in mirrors and windows. Here, in the writhing shape of the Great Old One, I discovered where all my long-buried fears and anxieties had come from. Every time you hear disembodied breathing in your bedroom at night; every time the clothes you have carelessly left on your chair seem to take the form of a sinister and monkish figure; every time you think you hear footsteps behind you as you climb the stairs—it is the evil presence of the Great Old One, straining malevolently at the locks and seals which keep him on the other side!

  Misquamacus raised his arms, and howled a chilling howl of triumph. His eyes seemed to be lighted from within, goat-like and satanic, and his body, on its stunted legs, was glistening with sweat. He had gloves of blood where he had torn bloodied bones out of Lieutenant Marino’s men and used them to draw on the floor. Behind him, almost invisible in the smoke, the hideously frightening shape of the Great Old One twisted and squirmed.

  "It’s now, Harry!" screamed Singing Rock. "Help me now—it’s now! It’s now!"

  He buried his face in his hands, and began to recite numbers and words, endless invocations to his own manitous and spirits, and the great spirit of white technology. I clung on to him, holding him tight, concentrating my terrified mind on Unitrak—Unitrak—Unitrak. The shrieking wind made it impossible for me to hear what Singing Rock was saying, but I pressed my mind into supporting him—into loving him—into keeping him safe while he tried to overwhelm Misquamacus and the murky presence of He-Who-Feeds-in-the-Pit.

  There was a moment when I thought Singing Rock would make it. He was talking breathlessly fast, reciting and chanting and nodding, faster and faster as if building up to the great summoning of Unitrak’s technological manitou. All this time, though, Misquamacus was chanting too, and sweeping his arm in our direction as if to encourage the Great Old One to consume us. I saw things move through the smoke that were frightening beyond belief—shapes more ghastly and dreadful than the worst nightmares I had ever had—and octopus-like coils of mist that began to unfold from the gloomy cloud of the Great Old One. I knew we only had seconds in which to survive. I was tensed up so tightly that my muscles were locked and I had bitten into my tongue.

  Abruptly, Singing Rock slumped. He sagged, and then fell to his knees. I knelt down beside him, brushing my hurricane-blown hair from my eyes, and yelled at him to carry on.

  He looked up at me, and there was nothing but fear on his face. "I can’t!" he shouted. "I can’t summon Unitrak! I can’t do it! It’s a white man’s manitou! It won’t come! It won’t obey me!"

  I couldn’t believe it. I looked over my shoulder and saw Misquamacus pointing toward us with both hands, and the dark snakes of the Great Old One unrolling over his head, and I knew that this was the end of it. I snatched the crumpled fragment of paper from Singing Rock’s hand, and held it up to the flickering astral light of the weird and horrifying gateway.

  "Unitrak, save me!" I shouted. "Unitrak, save me!" And I screamed out the numbers, again and again and again. “UNITRAAAKKK! FOR GOD’S SAKE—UNIIITRAAKKKK!!”

  Singing Rock, still clutched in my arms, moaned in fear. Misquamacus, his face stretched in a wolfish grin, was actually floating in the air above me, his arms outstretched, and his deformed legs curled up underneath him. All around, the shifting and terrifying shapes of the Great Old One grew and grew.

  I was silent with fright for a moment. Then—because it was all I could think of to do—I raised my own arms, just like Misquamacus had raised his, and cast my own idea of a spell.

  "Unitrak, send your manitou to destroy this wonder-worker. Unitrak, protect me from harm. Unitrak, seal off the gateway to the great beyond, and dismiss this hideous spirit."

  Misquamacus, floating eerily close, began to invoke the Great Old One in retaliation. His words sounded heavy and foggy, blurring through the howl of the hurricane like a vengeful beast.

  "Unitrak!" I bellowed. “Come to me Unitrak! Come!”

  It was then that Misquamacus was almost upon me, and his devilish eyes glared luridly from his dark, sweat-glossed face. His mouth was drawn back in a snarl of pain and effort and revenge. He drew circles and invisible diagrams in the air around me, bringing down the evil tumult of the Great Old One, arranging through his sorcery the most hideous of deaths that he could devise.

  “Unitrak,” I whispered, unheard above the shriek of the gale. “Oh, God, Unitrak."

  It was so violent and sudden when it happened that I couldn’t understand it at first. I thought that Misquamacus had struck me down with the lightning-that-sees, or that the whole building had ripped apart around us. There was an ear-splitting sound that overwhelmed even the moan of the hurricane—an electrical crackling of millions upon millions of supercharged volts—a roar like a thousand short circuits. The room was blotted out by a dazzling array of incandescent grid shapes—tier after tier of brilliant circuitry—crawling with white and blue sparks and shimmering with its own blinding symmetry.

  Misquamacus fell from the air, charred and blackened and bloody. He dropped to the floor like a carcass of beef, his hands clutched up underneath him, his eyes tight shut.

  The grids, pulsing and glowing, formed a fence between me and the murky shape of the Great Old One. I could see the demonic being shrink and twist—as if confused and frustrated. The voltage from the grid was so enormous that I could only look at it with my eyes half-shut, and I could hardly see through it to the twitching, shadowy form of the Great Old One.

  There was no question in my mind what this blinding apparition was. It was the manitou, the spirit, the internal essence of the Unitrak computer. My spell—my white man’s invocation—had brought the blinding retaliation of
a white man’s demon.

  The Great Old One boiled and rolled in powerful coils of darkness. It let out a tortured groan that became an enraged bellow, louder and louder until I felt I was being swallowed by its deafening vibrant depths—a tunnel of screaming fury that made the walls shake and the floor tremble.

  The glowing grid of Unitrak’s manitou dimmed and flickered for a moment, but then it burned brighter still—a searing blast of technological power that blotted out all vision and all sound. I felt as if I had been plunged into a cauldron of molten steel, drowned in light and swamped in noise.

  I heard one thing more. It was a sound that I can never forget. It was like someone or something shrieking in intense agony, on and on for longer than I could bear it. It was the sound of nerves being stripped bare, sensitivities being slit apart, spirits being carved naked. It was the Great Old One. Its grip on the material world was being scorched away by Unitrak’s limitless and sophisticated power. It was being driven back by the holy fire of today’s technology to the dim and dismal haunts of the ancient astral planes.

  There was a rippling, bubbling, babbling noise, and the sides of the gateway that Misquamacus had marked on the floor began to draw in toward their center, sucking the shadowy shape of the Great Old One like a ventilation pipe sucking in smoke. There was one final extravagant burst of power that left me dazzled and temporarily blinded, and then the room was silent.

  I lay there, unable to move, unable to see, for five or ten minutes. When I was able to struggle up to my feet, there were still green grid shapes floating on my retina, and I had to shuffle around like an old man, bumping into walls and furniture.

  At last, my vision cleared. Not far away, Singing Rock lay on the floor amidst the debris of beds and broken furniture, his eyes flickering open as he gradually returned to consciousness. The body of Misquamacus lay where it had fallen, hunched and burnt. The walls of the room looked as if they had been seared by flame, and the plastic venetian blinds were melted into long drooping strings.