I could almost smell him, he was so close. He had been there when Lucy was conceived, with his black, glittering headdress of living beetles, and his hard-hewn face, and his eyes that were filled with all the rage and malevolence of a man whose people had been systematically wiped out, and whose world of natural magic had been overwhelmed by money and guns and the principle of manifest destiny.
“Have you had your breakfast?” I asked Lucy.
She nodded. “Lucky Charms.”
“Oh, sure. And I bet you ate all the mallow bits and left all the plain bits.”
She laughed. She seemed perfectly normal now. But Misquamacus had always proved himself to be fiercely unpredictable, and there was no telling how or when he would choose to make his presence felt. I closed Lucy’s door and went back to the living-room, where Karen was reading Architectural Digest and drinking espresso.
“I’m going to call Norman Vogel,” I told her. “Maybe he could see Lucy this afternoon.”
“Harry, you know that there’s nothing wrong with her, not psychiatrically.”
“Of course. But she’s still going to need a clean bill of health from a psychiatrist before they’ll let her back into school. And if I can take her today, she’ll get one. She’s calm, she’s rested. She’s going to be fine.”
“And what if she goes back to school and the same thing happens again?”
“It won’t. I’m going to find out if it was Misquamacus who made her behave like that; and if it was, I’m going to make sure that he leaves her alone. And leaves her alone permanent.”
“-ly,” added Karen. She was always correcting me.
I poured myself a cup of coffee, sat back on the sofa and picked up the phone. However, I had hardly finished dialing Dr Vogel’s number when we heard a piercing screaming coming from Lucy’s room. I banged down the phone, jumped up, and knocked espresso all over the lemon-yellow carpet. Together, Karen and I ran along the corridor and opened Lucy’s door.
Lucy’s dolls house was in flames. Its roof was alight and already the sides were burning. Lucy had her hand caught in one of the windows, and was screaming wildly as she tried to pull it out. Without a second’s hesitation I pulled out the whole plastic window-frame and freed her, but all the same I burned the back of my hand. I said, “Here!” and handed her to Karen, while I went over to Lucy’s bed, pulled off the quilt, and dropped it over the dolls house to smother the flames.
It was all over in seconds, but the bedroom was filled with smoke and Lucy was totally hysterical, screaming and coughing and kicking her legs. Karen carried her over to the washbasin and we ran cold water over her fingers. They didn’t look too badly burned, but I thought we ought to call the doctor to make sure they were bandaged properly, and to give Lucy something for shock. After we had kept her hands under running water for a while, she began to calm down, but she was deathly pale and she was shivering all over.
While Karen wrapped her up in a blanket and carried her into the living-room, I cautiously lifted the quilt off the dolls house to make sure that the fire was out. The plastic roof had been reduced to stringy, rancid loops, and the wooden sides were badly charred. Inside, Barbie had half melted. Her hair was nothing but a blackened brush and one side of her face was distorted. What made her look even more grotesque was the way she was still smiling at me, as if she had enjoyed her immolation.
I carried the dolls house out of the apartment and into the elevator. Mick the doorman opened the door to the back yard for me. He peered inside at Barbie’s remains, and said, “That’ll teach her for smoking in bed.”
Dr Van Steen came around a half-hour later. He didn’t usually make housecalls, but he had known the Tandys even before Karen was born, and he was a close family friend as well as a physician. He was white-haired, immaculately dressed in black and grey, with shining steel-rimmed spectacles and shining patent-leather shoes.
“Well, now,” he said, sitting next to Lucy on the sofa. “I understand your dolls house burned down. How did that happen?”
Lucy said nothing, and turned away.
“There were no matches anyplace around,” I said. “I can’t understand how it happened.”
“Let’s take a look at those fingers,” said Dr Van Steen, and took hold of Lucy’s hands. “They’re a little blistered, aren’t they, but they’ll heal up all right. Little girls of your age, they heal so quick they’re usually better before I can get around to see them.”
Lucy turned back and stared at him. “I wanted Barbie to die,” she said, very clearly, and with great emphasis on the word ‘die’.
Dr Van Steen looked over at me with his eyebrows lifted. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to do, was it? Why did you want her to die?”
“Because she’s a yellow-hair.”
“A yellow-hair? Don’t you like yellow-hairs?”
“All yellow-hairs have to die. And all white faces.” At that, she covered her face with her bandaged hands, so that only her eyes looked out.
“Just a little joke of hers,” I put in. I didn’t want Dr Van Steen to push her any further.
“Oh, I see,” said Dr Van Steen. “Well… no accounting for humour, is there?”
After he was finished bandaging Lucy’s fingers, however, I took him into the hallway and closed the living-room door behind us.
“Between you and me, doctor, Lucy’s been acting real strange. She had a fight in the schoolyard today and hurt some of her classmates. The school won’t let her back until she’s undergone a psychiatric evaluation. Now this.”
“Is there anything worrying her?”
“Not that I know of. What does a four-year-old have to worry about? Too many repeats of Sesame Street? The rising price of M&Ms?”
“You’ll forgive my being personal, but are you and Karen getting along okay? There aren’t any domestic upsets?”
“Well, Karen’s been working pretty hard lately, and we’ve had one or two contretemps about that. But nothing else.”
“She’s not being teased or bullied at her nursery-school?”
“No … no indication of that.”
Dr Van Steen said, “What’s all this about yellow-hair? Do you know what that means?”
“Yellow-hair used to be the Native American name for a blonde. Like General Custer, for example.”
“Why should a four-year-old Caucasian child say that all yellow-hairs must die?”
I shrugged, I had my own theory about that, but I wasn’t going to tell Dr Van Steen. Before I stirred up any old and unwelcome influences, I wanted to make absolutely sure that Lucy wasn’t simply suffering from some conventional psychiatric glitch.
“I’m taking her to see Dr Vogel,” I said. “Maybe he can work out what’s wrong.”
“Let me know how things go,” said Dr Van Steen. “And – oh – if you find out, let me know how Lucy could start a fire without matches.”
He gave me an odd, knowing look, as if he suspected that I was holding something back. I was; but even if I had told him what it was, he wouldn’t have believed me. I didn’t want to believe it myself.
The following afternoon we took Lucy to Dr Vogel’s clinic on Park Avenue. The city was covered in low, grey cloud, and it was raining. Lucy wore her red hooded raincoat and her little red rubbers, and carried her favourite doll with her, a grubby, floppy thing with the highly original name of Doll.
Inside Dr Vogel’s office it was all dark oak paneling and gloom. Dr Vogel looked more like a bear hunter than a psychiatrist. He was broad-shouldered, with a huge brown beard and bright blue eyes, and hands as big as snow-shovels. He wore a blue-checkered backwoods shirt and stonewashed jeans, and he laughed a lot. He had been recommended to me by Dr Hughes, the tumour specialist who had helped Karen during the days when Misquamacus had attempted his first reincarnation. Dr Hughes had lost part of his hand to the ancient demon that Misquamacus had summoned to help him, the Lizard-of-the-Trees, and it had taken him years of surgery and years of psychiatric counseling before he h
ad recovered. Even so, he had lost all of his hair and all of his spirit; and I had never seen a man so broken.
“Well, then, little lady,” said Dr Vogel. “It sounds like you’ve been having some pretty good fun at school.”
Lucy clutched Doll, and swung her head from side to side.
“So … not so much fun, huh?” asked Dr Vogel.
“Muldrews and Cullens kill babies,” she said.
“They kill babies? What babies?”
“All the babies at Sand Creek. All the babies at Washita River.”
Dr Vogel looked at me in perplexity. “Sand Creek? Washita River?”
“Indian massacres,” I told him. “Worse than Wounded Knee.”
“Indian massacres? What the hell have you been teaching her, Harry? She’s four.”
“I never taught her that. They’ve been teaching her all about Native Americans at nursery school … but not about Sand Creek, for Christ’s sake. Leastways, they’d better not.”
“So how does she know about Sand Creek and Washita River?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have any idea. I just want to know if she’s sane.”
Dr Vogel was silent for a moment. I liked him; I trusted him; but I didn’t have any alternative. I had to lie to him because I wanted him to tell me that Lucy was suffering from juvenile depression or playschool psychosis or neurotic aversion to the alphabet.
I wanted him to tell me anything except that Lucy was possessed.
Karen and I sat in the waiting-room pretending to read last month’s copies of The New Yorker and Schizophrenic News while Dr Vogel ran a series of tests on Lucy’s intelligence, sensitivity, audio-visual responses, and what she thought an ink-blot in the shape of Cookie Monster looked like (Cookie Monster.) On the wall of the waiting-room was a brass plaque which read ‘Anybody who goes to see a psychiatrist needs their head examined.’
Eventually we were called back in. Dr Vogel unwrapped a strawberry sucker and gave it to Lucy, and then sat back with his legs crossed, looking serious. “I have to tell you, Harry, I never came across anything like this before. Lucy appears to be highly intelligent, highly motivated, with perceptual and analytical skills that are way above her age group. She also has extraordinary gifts of intuition.”
“But?” I asked him.
“But she persists in this aggressive delusion that her classmates were responsible for killing babies, and that they not only deserved the whupping she gave them, they actually deserve to die. And she’s full of all this Native American mumbo-jumbo. For instance—” he frowned down at his notepad “—do you have any idea what a mistai is?”
“Sure. It’s an Indian ghost. It frightens people by tugging at their blankets at night. It’s kind of a messenger, too, and it whispers in people’s ears and tells them what the spirits want them to do.”
“Lucy said that the mistai told her to kill her classmates.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“She also said that the mistai told her to kill any yellow-hairs … though why she should have started by burning her Barbie doll, I really couldn’t say.”
“The Indians set great store by doll-figures,” I said. “The Crow used to have a sun-dance doll made of beads and animal skin. If you danced with it, and stared it in the face, it would tell you where to find your enemy, so that you could kill him. To an Indian mystic, a doll-figure like Barbie wouldn’t be a toy … it would represent everything that white people had done to destroy his culture and his religion.”
“You’re something of an expert, then?” said Dr Vogel.
“There was a time when I had to be.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that Karen and I have had encounters with Native American mysticism a couple of times in the past.”
“And you think that Lucy’s present condition might have something to do with these encounters?”
Karen nodded. “Since you say that she’s sane and intelligent, we can’t think of anything else that could be making her behave this way.”
“I see,” said Dr Vogel, although he looked deeply troubled. “You don’t think that Lucy’s behaviour could have been affected by your talking about this Native American mysticism in front of her, or when you might have thought that she couldn’t hear you?”
“We never talk about it,” said Karen, emphatically.
“Well… I wouldn’t mind running some more detailed tests,” said Dr Vogel. “Maybe you could see how Lucy gets along and then bring her back in a couple of days.”
“If you think it’ll do any good.”
“I don’t know … do you have any better ideas?”
“Not really. Except that I’m going to try to find out what it is that’s making Lucy behave this way, and once I know what it is, I might have a chance of getting rid of it.”
“Well, be careful,” Dr Vogel warned me. “Lucy’s very impressionable. Whatever you do, you shouldn’t give her the impression that you believe in any of this mysticism. You’ll run the risk of reinforcing her delusion, and make it doubly difficult for me to readjust her.”
I didn’t say anything. I was used to scepticism. Before Misquamacus first reared his head, I used to be a card-carrying member of the National Society of Sceptics myself. I used to pay the rent by telling fortunes to rich old ladies, under the name of the Incredible Erskine, and you need to be a sceptic to make a living like that. If you really believed what the Tarot cards foretold, you’d go right out, put bricks in your pockets, and drown yourself in the East River. You really want to know when you’re going to lose your loved ones, and how? You really want to know when you’re going to die? Not for me, gracias. Since Karen had come into money, I had hung up my spangled cloak and put the Tarot out to grass, which was just as well, because I had seen things that still gave me nightmares, and I believed in ‘Native American mumbo-jumbo’ because it was just as real as I was.
“I’ll give you a call,” I told Dr Vogel, and stood up. “Thanks for taking a look at Lucy, anyhow.”
“There’s just one more thing I wanted to ask her,” said Dr Vogel. “How did she manage to set her dolls house alight? You said there was no sign that she was playing with matches.”
“I just burned it,” said Lucy.
Dr Vogel leaned forward and gave her an encouraging smile. “Yes, honey, we know you burned it. But how did you burn it?”
Lucy blinked at him as if he were totally stupid.
“I burned it,” she repeated. “Like this.”
She looked over at his desk, and pointed her finger at it. There was a moment’s pause, and then a wisp of smoke started to rise from the papers on the blotter. Then there was the softest of flaring noises, and every paper on the desk burst into flame.
Dr Vogel jumped up. “For God’s sake! What the hell are you doing? Harry – there’s a fire extinguisher in the waiting-room – quick!”
But flames were already leaping upward, and the desk’s leather top was beginning to shrivel like human skin. Dr Vogel picked up a folder and tried to beat the flames down, but all he succeeded in doing was fanning them even higher, and sending showers of sparks all over the carpets and the furniture.
I managed to wrestle the fire-extinguisher free from its bracket on the waiting-room wall. I hurried back in and sprayed powder all over Dr Vogel’s desk, and onto the seat of his leather chair, which was already starting to smolder.
Dr Vogel picked up a half-charred report. “What the hell have you done?” he bellowed at Lucy. “Do you know how long it took to – For God’s sake, Harry! What the hell has she done?”
Karen put her hands protectively on Lucy’s shoulders. “Dr Vogel – please don’t shout. It was just an accident.”
“Accident? That was no accident! She deliberately put out her finger and – and – look at this mess! This is going to take me days to sort out! Weeks!”
“Come on Michael, quiet down,” I told him. “There’s no way Lucy could have started it.”
“Then w
hat?” he shouted. “A cigarette? I don’t smoke. A short-circuit? All I have is a battery-operated calculator. An Act of God? Or a Goddamned act of vandalism? Get her out of here, go on. I don’t want to see her again. Think yourself lucky if I don’t sue your for criminal damage.”
I was trying to think of something to say that would calm Dr Vogel down when Lucy pointed her finger at his face. Again, there was a moment’s pause; but then Dr Vogel suddenly clamped his hands to his face and let out a terrible shout. His beard had burst into flame, hundreds of pinpricks of orange fire, like a burning brush. His hair suddenly caught fire, too, and then his shirt-collar and his cuffs. He screamed and beat at his face, stumbling from side to side in agony, but in only a few seconds he was blazing from the shoulders upward.
I stripped off my leather jacket, bundled it over his head, and pushed him heavily to the floor, jarring my knee against the side of his desk. He writhed and struggled and kept on screaming, and I turned to Karen and said, “Get Lucy out of here, fast! And call an ambulance!”
Dr Vogel stopped screaming and began to whimper and shiver, I carefully lifted up my leather jacket, and the smoke that rose from underneath it smelled as if somebody had accidently barbecued a cat. Dr Vogel’s face was unrecognizable – not just as Dr Vogel, but as a human being. His beard had burned down to fine black ash, his nose and his lips were swollen and raw, and as he breathed out, smoke poured out of his nostrils.
“Hurts,” he mumbled, quaking as if he were cold.
“Hold on,” I told him, I was shivering almost as much as he was. “The medics won’t be long.”
“Hurts, Harry,” he repeated. “Hurts like all hell.”
“Don’t worry, Michael, they’ll soon give you something for the pain.”
He tried to open his eyes, but the skin around his eyelids had fused together, so that his eyes looked like two roughly-peeled plums.
Faces of Fear Page 24
