“Did she really do this?” he asked me.
“You mean Lucy? I don’t know. Maybe not Lucy, but whatever’s taken control of her.”
“I’m going to die,” said Dr Vogel. “This hurts too much. I’m going to die.”
He didn’t say anything else. I stayed beside him until the paramedics arrived, and then I took one last look at him and left the office. Karen and Lucy were waiting for me in the reception area, talking to two police officers.
“You’re this lady’s husband?” asked one of them. “Can you tell us what exactly happened in there?”
“Dr Vogel caught fire,” I told him. “I don’t know how it happened. He just spontaneously combusted, right in front of us.”
“Do you have any idea how that could have happened?” the policeman asked me.
I shook my head. But Lucy took hold of my hand, and looked up at the officers, and said, “He was a yellow-hair.”
The officers grinned at each other. But if only they had understood the significance of what Lucy had told them, they wouldn’t have been grinning. They would have been putting as much distance between themselves and Lucy as they possibly could.
* * *
“You realize how dangerous this could be?” said Karen, as I drew the drapes and blocked out the daylight.
“I can’t think of any other way,” I told her. “Who’s going to believe that a four-year-old girl has been misbehaving at school because she’s possessed by an Indian medicine-man? Who’s going to believe that she can start fires just by pointing her finger?”
“Wouldn’t Amelia help?” she asked me. Amelia was the spirit medium who had first contacted Misquamacus. She and I had later become lovers, on and off, and usually more off than on. I hadn’t seen her in a long while and I couldn’t ask her to risk her life again.
“It has to be me,” I told her. “The whole reason this is happening is because of me. It’s like an unwritten law. If an enemy defeats you, you can’t just turn your back and go on to other things. You have to return to his lodge and seek to defeat him in return. There’s no way that Misquamacus can regain his honour until he’s had his revenge.”
“Why didn’t he try to possess you, or me, instead of Lucy?”
“Maybe he isn’t strong enough. Remember that the last time we beat him, he literally dispersed, like electrical energy. And what Lucy can do – pushing her schoolmates around, starting spontaneous fires – that might be frightening, but it isn’t exactly the stuff of great tribal magic, is it? In his heyday, this guy could literally move mountains.”
Karen pressed her hand against her forehead as if she had an incipient migraine. “I’m so frightened,” she said. “What if anything happens to Lucy? I couldn’t bear it, Harry. I think I’d die.”
“Karen,” I said, “we have to. Otherwise, who knows how many people are going to be hurt?”
I had moved a circular card-table right into the middle of the living-room, and covered it with a maroon blanket. There was a small bronze Japanese nightlight in the centre of the table, and I lit it. Then I went around and switched off all the table-lamps. The nightlight cast flickering shadows of Japanese ideograms on the walls all around.
“Why don’t you go get Lucy?” I asked Karen. “Tell her this is just a new game we’re going to play. Kind of like hide-and-seek.”
I sat down at the table. In front of me was a long bundle of old, uncured leather, tied with cords made of tightly-twisted hair. I hadn’t opened this bundle since it was first given to me, over twenty years ago, by the son of Singing Rock. It had been intended as nothing more than a sentimental reminder of a man who had given everything in order to prevent the forces of the past from destroying the equilibrium of the future. Singing Rock had sympathized in many ways with Misquamacus, but he hadn’t shared his thirst for revenge. Singing Rock had believed that what is past is past, and that all you can do is wipe away your tears so that you can look more clearly to the future.
I picked open the knots with my thumbnails and loosened the strings. Then I unrolled the bundle and revealed its contents: two human thigh-bones, decorated at each end with red and white beads and hanks of human hair, dyed blue. They had been taken from the body of White Bull, the medicine-man who had made a magical war-bonnet for the legendary chief Roman Nose. It was said that when they were beaten together, up and down, White Bull was running into the world of the spirits, and whoever was holding the bones would be carried into the world of the spirits behind him.
Karen came back into the room, holding Lucy’s hand. It had been two days now since the burning incident in Dr Vogel’s office, and Lucy was beginning to get over the shock. Although she had been used to channel the power that had started the fires, she was still a little girl, she was still my little sugar plum fairy, and afterward she had been just as distressed about what had happened as we were.
Karen and Lucy sat at the table.
“Why is it so dark in here?” asked Lucy, looking around.
“It’s dark because we’re going to play a game.”
“What game?” she wanted to know. She peered at the two thighbones lying on the table in front of me. “Knick-knack-paddywhack-give-a-dog-a-bone?”
“Unh-hunh. We’re yoing to play a game of imaginary friends.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s when we call pretend people to come and play with us; and we see whether they really do.”
“That’s silly. There’s no pretend people.”
“What about Miss Ellie? She was pretend.” Miss Ellie had been Lucy’s invisible companion for over a year, and a goddamned nuisance she had been, too. She always had to have a place laid for her at the table, and we could never drive anywhere until Miss Ellie had buckled up.
“Miss Ellie’s gone now,” said Lucy. “She’s gone away and she’s never coming back.”
“Well, let’s see if we can find another pretend friend. If Miss Ellie’s gone, how about finding Miss Quamacus?”
Lucy put her hand to her mouth and gave an affected titter. “That’s a silly name!”
“All the same, let’s give it a try. What we have to do is think very, very hard, and keep on saying, Miss Quamacus, I want to see you. Miss Quamacus, I want to hear your voice, Miss Quamacus, I want to feel your hand. Do you think you can do that?”
Karen was staring at me in apprehension. I didn’t say anything, but I gave her a look which meant that we had to go through it. There was no other choice.
“Right,” I said. “We tap these bones together and we think very hard and then we start chanting. Miss Quamacus, I want to see you. Miss Quamacus, I want to hear your voice.”
I held the thighbones, one in each hand, and began to tap them rhythmically together as if they belonged to a man who was walking across a prairie. Imagine the grass, Singing Rock had told me, as deep as your knees. Imagine the tiny white flowers. Then imagine the prairie growing darker and darker as evening falls, and the shadow of Aktunowihio falling across the land, Aktunowihio the spirit of the night. Imagine that the tiny white flowers have become stars, sparkling in the heavens, and that you are walking through the world of the spirits now, accompanied on all sides by tasooms, the souls of the dead who are rising into the sky like the smoke from the lodges in which they once lived.”
I closed my eyes, I kept on knocking the bones together at a slow walking pace. The three of us kept on reciting the words that Singing Rock had taught me. “Misquamacus, I want to see you. Misquamacus, I want to hear your voice. Misquamacus, I want to touch your hand.
We went on like this for almost five minutes, and I began to think that it wasn’t going to work. I might have White Bull’s thighbones, and I might be reciting the right words, but I was a white man, out of touch with the spirits of the earth and the sky, the manitous of rocks and trees and running water. Singing Rock, I thought, help me. I’m not getting anywhere here, I just cant do what you used to do.
I was still crossing that grassy, flower-speckl
ed prairie, to the clacking rhythm of White Bull’s bones. But I distinctly felt a shiver in the grass, as if a cold wind had blown across it. In my mind’s eye I felt a stormcloud moving in, as dark as slate, and the feeling that somebody was walking close beside me. I could hear the rustling of his feet, and the closeness of his breathing. It wasn’t frightening. It was a good feeling: a feeling of companionship.
“Misquamacus, I want to see you” I chanted, and this time I could hear another voice joining in; a deeper voice; a voice right inside of my head. “Misquamacus I want to touch your hand.”
In my mind’s eye, I turned my head, and for one instant I saw Singing Rock walking close beside me, dressed in all the feathers and beads and finery of a fully-fledged wonder-worker. But the second I looked, he vanished; and when I turned back, I wasn’t walking through the prairie grass any longer, I was walking knee-deep in stars – high in the sky, in the Hanging Road, where the spirits walked beside me.
I heard a sharp electrical crackling. I opened my eyes. Both Karen and Lucy had their eyes closed now, and they were still chanting, soft and monotonous, as if they were hypnotized. The shadows from the Japanese nightlight dipped and flickered like dancing ghosts. I heard the crackling again, louder this time, and I smelled the raw ozone aroma of a powerful electrical short-circuit. The area around Lucy began to ripple and distort, the way that heat ripples on a midsummer sidewalk.
Karen’s eyes suddenly opened. She looked toward Lucy and saw what I could see, too. A huge, hunched shape, formed of shadows and refracted light, almost invisible to the naked eye, shifting and changing, but so intense in its presence that neither of us could mistake it for what it was.
It was a man, wearing an immense head-dress that appeared to have feathers and beads and even small skulls dangling from it. It was impossible to make out his face. It shifted and changed like the surface of a shallow pool. I was sure that I could see clouds reflected in it, and smoke, and fog that hung heavy over winter reservations.
The crackling of static grew louder, sparks jumped around Lucy’s head in a crown of electrical thorns. Karen half stood up, and reached out toward her, but I shouted, “No! Don’t touch her! He’s all around her!”
The crackling was suddenly filled out with a heavy rushing noise, like a badly-tuned radio turned up to full volume. Through the noise, I could just hear somebody speaking – a slow, cold, emotionless voice – a voice that should have been silenced for ever more than three hundred years ago.
“The spirits … will bring me justice … my weak white brother … the spirits … will reward me for what I have done … and will fill you with … all the arrows of sacrifice…”
“Misquamacus,” I said. I was trying to sound challenging, but my voice was wobbling all over the place. “What kind of a warrior are you, that you have to take the spirit of a four-year-old child; and a girl-child, at that? I thought you were brave! I thought you could work amazing wonders!”
“ You speak to me of bravery … you that used nothing but cunning and trickery? Now you shall know what cunning and trickery are.”
“Leave my daughter alone,” I told him. “I don’t care what you do to me. But you leave my daughter alone.”
“Don’t you remember … your daughter was mine? I possessed your woman when she was conceived. This child is heiress to my heritage, not yours. She is my way back … into your world … and when I am returned … she will be my princess, and a worker of wonders, too … and her name will be Nepauz-had, which means Moon Goddess.”
“You won’t have her!” Karen screamed at him. “She’s our daughter, not yours! You couldn’t have me and you’re not having her, either!”
The shifting shape turned toward her, with a harsh spitting of static. I could almost make out Misquamacus’ flint-like profile. I could almost see the folds of his deerskin robes. But then the vision melted and changed again, and all I could see were thin red flickers of electricity, like graveworms crawling over a body that had already been devoured.
“Remember that fate chose you to be my vessel,” Misquamacus told Karen. “When I was nothing but the smallest spark of life, carried over three thousand moons to find justice for my people, you were waiting for me. When I lost all physical existence, you and this man created a new way for me to walk once again in the world of men. I was reborn in your daughter; and now that I am strong enough, I shall take human shape, and finish the task that the gods appointed me to do.”
“Bullshit,” I told him. “If you so much as pluck one hair out of my daughter’s head, I’ll take your medicine bundle and shove it so far up your ass you won’t be able to sit down until the drying-grass moon.”
“You were always a man of no respect,” said Misquamacus. “But now is your chance to be the greatest living wonder worker. I will leave this child alone if you allow me to take your substance … if you surrender your flesh and your blood and your bones so that I may once again live not only as a spirit but as a man.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I snarled at him; although I had mostly got the picture already. He had used Lucy’s spirit as a way of returning to the material world, but now he needed real sinew and real muscle. In other word, I may have been thinning on top and seriously unfit, but he needed me.
As Misquamacus spoke, Lucy’s eyes glowed an eerie phosphorescent blue, and her skin turned as white as plaster. I felt like snatching her away, but I knew enough about Misquamacus to realize how dangerous that could be. He was only able to make himself visible by externalizing some of Lucy’s spirit, and to try to tear her away could easily kill her.
“We must go to the sacred place where I was born; and on that spot I must invoke the spirit of Ka-tua-la-hu. You will become nothing more than a spirit, a tasoom, as I am now, while I will regain the form in which I was in the great and magical days before the white devils came.”
“You’re going to kill him?” asked Karen, desperately.
“I am going to send his spirit on a journey to the Hanging Road.”
“You can’t do that!” Karen insisted.
“Then I will have to take the child; and bring her up as Nepauz-had; and teach her the ways of magic, until she has the power to release me.”
When he said that, Lucy’s eyes blazed like two blowtorches, and she stretched open her mouth in a terrible grimace. Misquamacus was showing us that he could do anything he wanted with her.
I’m not a brave person, never was. I dodged the draft and I would always rather conciliate than start slugging. But I knew then that I had to do something brave. If the price of Lucy’s survival was for me to take an early journey along the Hanging Road; then that was the price that I would have to pay. I was her father, it was my responsibility.
I took hold of Karen’s hand and I felt calmer than I ever had before. “Okay, then,” I said. “Where’s this sacred place of yours?”
“You will have to search for it in your maps and writings. Its name was Natukko, and it was here on this island.”
“But supposing I can’t find it?”
“You will have to find it; and you will have to be there tomorrow, when the moon rises. Otherwise, I will take Nepauz-had and you will never see her again.”
Karen’s cheeks were stained with tears. “That’s impossible!” she shouted. “That’s impossible!”
But there was a deep, sucking sound like an ocean breaker sliding back over a pebbled shore; and then the tiniest sparkle of static, and Misquamacus had vanished. The air in the room was cold that our breath smoked.
Karen and I looked at each other; and then at Lucy. At that moment, Lucy’s eyes rolled up into her head and she collapsed onto the floor like a broken doll.
I spent a bad night, and I was already standing on the steps of the New York Public Library when it opened at ten. I hurried directly to the Main Reading Room, and logged myself onto a computer. I needn’t have rushed. By mid-afternoon I was still frowning and tapping away at the keyboard, while the fall sun mov
ed around the room and lit up one section of grandiose paneling after another.
I was almost ready to give up when I located a book entitled Native Locations by Professor Harvey Fischer, from the Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was an extensive list of Native American place names in New York and New England, what they meant, and where they used to be. I surreptitiously ate torn-off pieces of a KFC chicken burger which I had smuggled into the library in my pocket, and searched with finger-lickin’ greasy keypads for Natukko.
I found Pontanipo (meaning ‘cold water’); and Cowissewaschook (‘proud peak’); as well as Ammanoosuc (‘small fishing river’); and Uncanoonucks (‘hills that look like a woman’s breasts’). At last I located Natukko. It meant ‘clearing’ or ‘cleared ground’. A few more punches on the keyboard, and I found its exact location, from a map of Manhattan Island dating from 1624, when it was owned by the Dutch West India Company. The map was signed ‘Pieter van Huiven fecit’. I superimposed a modern streetmap of Manhattan on top of the old map, and apart from some minor distortions along the coastline, they matched surprisingly closely. There was only one problem that I could see. The clearing called Natukko was positioned on the Conrail tracks just where they came out of the tunnels at 96th Street.
I sat back and stared at the screen in total despondency. When would the gods ever give me an even break? Here I was, trying to make the ultimate sacrifice to save Lucy’s life, and they couldn’t even give me a nice piece of lawn to be sacrificed on. I had to make my grand gesture on a goddamned railroad track.
I was still sitting there with my chin in my hands when a pretty girl student came up to me. Her hair was long and braided, and she wore a navy-blue duffel coat.
“Are you through with that terminal yet?” she asked me. “I have some really important work to do.”
“Oh, sure. Sorry.”
“There’s one thing you ought to remember about computers,” she said, putting down her bag of books.
“What’s that?”
She smiled. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
Faces of Fear Page 25
