Faces of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  “I’m sorry. I seem to be out of the loop here. Don’t you tell I’ve forgotten what?”

  “The one thing you ought to remember about computers.”

  I stood up, and brushed chicken burger crumbs from the chair. We seemed to be having one of those conversations that goes around and around in circles until it disappears up its own medicine-case holder.

  The girl said, “Computers are your friends.” She emphasized ‘your’ as if to imply that they weren’t her friends.

  I still didn’t understand it. I shrugged and said, “Well … sure, it’s all technology these days. Even reading a book.” But as I turned to leave she sat down, and lifted her left arm so that the sleeve of her duffel coat dropped back a little way. Around her wrist was a bracelet of bones and beads, entwined with hair. An Alqonquin charm bracelet.

  She had already started to work, so I didn’t disturb her. Besides, I now had some inkling of what she had been trying to tell me. Computers are your friends. Meaning you, as a white man; because she was obviously Native American. As my old friend Singing Rock told me, everything in the natural world has its own spirit, its manitou, from the humblest stone by the side of the road to the greatest redwood in the north-western forests. In the great days before the white invasion of North America, Indian wonder-workers were able to summon almost every spirit, living, inanimate or dead, and use it to make their own magic. Water, fire, wind and earth, they all had tumultuous natural power – and this power could be harnessed to strange and devastating effect.

  But the white men had brought their own brand of magic with them; and what Singing Rock had taught me was that every object made by whites had a spirit, too: a manitou of its own. A clock has a manitou, a typewriter has a manitou. And computers have manitous too. We had used a computer to beat Misquamacus when he had first appeared – not its calculating-power, but its spirit, the essential meaning of what it was, and the creativity of the men who had made it.

  In his oblique way, Singing Rock had found a way of reminding me that I was a white man living in a white man’s world, and that I was surrounded by influences and artefacts that could help me.

  I arrived back home a little after five. Karen was looking drawn and worried, but Lucy was playing quite contentedly in her bedroom.

  “Well?” said Karen.

  “Well, I’ve found out where we’re supposed to go.”

  “You have?” She touched my sleeve. It was obvious that she didn’t know whether to sound pleased or sad.

  “I checked it with an old map. It couldn’t be more convenient, believe me. Right on the Conrail tracks at East 96th.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Unless some seventeenth-century Dutch mapmaker called Pieter van Huiven didn’t know his ass from his astrolabe, that’s exactly where Natukko was located. Didn’t I always say that Misquamacus was born on the wrong side of the tracks?”

  “Harry, do you have to make a joke of it?”

  “Goddamn it, Karen, I’m as scared as you are. Scareder. But I think there’s a chance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told her about the girl in the library; and the feeling that she had given me that she was passing on a message from Singing Rock.

  “So what do you have to do?” Karen wanted to know.

  “I have to use my head, that’s what I have to do. I have to remember who I am, and who my people are; the same way that Misquamacus is always aware of what he is. I have to have a sense of tribe. I have to have a sense of belonging, Karen, that’s all. It’s something that most of us white people have long forgotten.”

  I went into the small, cluttered room that I liked to call my study. There was some pretty nostalgic stuff in there, from the days when I was still the Incredible Erskine, Fortunes Foretold, Futures Fixed, Destinies Dealt Out. Astrological charts, Tarot cards, mah-jongg tiles. A crystal ball that I had bought from an exquisitely beautiful hippie girl in the Cafe Reggio, in the Village, longer ago than I cared to recall (and was she so beautiful now?) On the top shelf of the bookcase, however, were more than a dozen well-thumbed books on Native American magic and mythology. I took down Spirit Transference And Soul Stealing by Louis Sola. It was book I had turned to more than once. The last time I had put it back on the shelf, I had hoped that I would never have to turn to it, ever again.

  I sat down and started to read through it. Karen brought me a cup of coffee and stood beside me for a while, her hand on my shoulder.

  “How long before the moon comes up?” she asked me.

  I checked my watch. “Two-and-a-half hours.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure. Anything that could give me an edge.”

  “Harry … are you sure this is the right way? Misquamacus can’t be all that strong. Maybe you should try talking to Amelia … anybody. Maybe Lucy could be exorcized.”

  “Believe me, Karen, he’s serious. If I don’t do what he tells me, he’ll take her away. You couldn’t bear that, any more than me.”

  I reached up and squeezed her hand. “Listen,” I said, “thanks for the coffee; thanks for all of your caring. I love you. But right now I have to find some way of beating this son-of-a-bitch.”

  She left me in peace, God bless her, and I went back to Spirit Transference And Soul Stealing. There were pages of dry discussion about the realities of Indian magic, and whether it was really possible for a spirit to return to the material world by possessing a live human being. ‘After a death that has been brought about by the breaking of a tribal taboo it may often be so weakened that it is unable to make its journey to the Happy Hunting Ground. This happened to the Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose at Beecher’s Island in Colorado in 1868, after he had unwittingly eaten food with a metal fork.’

  Aha. This sounded like it. The last time we had managed to dismiss Misquamacus we had literally grounded his spirit like a lightning strike, using two metal forks. He had escaped, but his spirit had been discharged into the sky. I thought then that his life-force had been dispersed for ever. It just goes to show you, doesn’t it, that even a genius can make mistakes.

  I read more about poor old Roman Nose. ‘For years afterward, his voice was heard in the dead of the night begging for his spirit to be made whole again. It wasn’t until 1924 that the wonder-worker George Eagle Claw was able to give Roman Nose the peace that he so desperately wanted, in a very obscure Cheyenne ceremony known as spirit-jumping.

  ‘In the ceremony of spirit-jumping a wonder-worker will invoke the spirit of the moon, which is the mistress of time. He can alter time so that his spirit can jump out of his body for a few brief minutes and into an animal such as buffalo or an elk or even an inanimate object such as a tree or a rock. This leaves his body empty of spirit – thus allowing the weakened spirit to occupy it, and to bring back together all of its different aspects – its voice, its memory, its sense of duty, its wisdom and its pride.

  ‘In the wonder-worker’s body, the newly-restored spirit atones for breaking a taboo by making offerings to the Great One. He makes offerings of sacred objects and he sings a song of remorse. He is then allowed to leave the wonder-worker’s body and make his journey to eternal peace.

  ‘After the spirit has left, the wonder-worker leaves his temporary host and returns to his own body.

  ‘However, if the weakened spirit is himself a wonder-worker, he may find his own way back into the material world by occupying the body of an animal or someone who is much weaker than himself, such as a newborn infant. This accounts for several interesting cases over the past century of very young children speaking in strange languages and exhibiting uncharacteristic behaviour patterns, such as sudden bouts of violence.

  ‘In May, 1915, Nathan Toomey, a five-year-old from Casper, Wyoming, killed his six-year-old playmate with a heavy stone. When restrained, he began to shout in a language that the local doctor recognized as Kiowa. He transcribed it, and translated it, and it turned out that the boy (or whoever was
possessing the boy) was promising to return to the world of men and seek his revenge on those who had murdered him.

  ‘He appeared to be possessed by the notorious Kiowa wonder-worker Black Crow, the chief magical adviser to the rebellious chief Satanta. Black Crow had been captured by the military and imprisoned in Texas. The military reported that he had committed suicide by leaping out of his cell window.

  ‘Once such spirits have possessed a human or an animal shape, they will attempt to increase their strength by ‘jumping’ to the body of an older and stronger person, until, in essence, they are ‘real’ again. They can only achieve this, however, by using the influence of the moon to force somebody’s spirit out of their body, leaving it free for occupation. There are only two known cases of this happening, although there are rumours of many more. In each case, it was claimed that the invading spirit forced the spirit of his victim to ‘jump’ into an inanimate object – in one case, a large rock; in another, a tree.

  ‘Some Native Americans say that this accounts for so-called ‘haunted trees’ and for poltergeist phenomena, such as chairs that move by themselves or gates that will never stay shut.’

  I read the passage on spirit-jumping a second time and then closed the book. It looked as if Misquamacus was going to evict my spirit out of my body and set up home there himself. And what would happen to me? I’d wind up as fence-post or a block of concrete, imprisoned for ever, with no hope of remission for good behaviour. It sounded ludicrous, but I had seen enough of Misquamacus’ magic to know that there was nothing amusing about it, and that he was capable of turning the most ordinary day in your life into a nightmare from which you would never wake up.

  At 96th Street, the tunnels underneath Park Avenue come to an end, and – as the ground-level falls away, the trains continue on elevated tracks all the way to the Bronx. When I was a snotty-nosed kid with holes in the seats of his jeans, my friends and I used to climb up onto the tracks and walk along them. We had a fantasy about making our way through the tunnels as far as Grand Central Station, fifty-four blocks underground, so that we could exit by way of the platforms.

  We tried twice, but we never managed to get any further than two or three hundred feet before we lost our nerve and made our way back again. The first time we were almost turned into puree of boy by a northbound commuter train and the second time we were caught by a railroad linesman, and we had to run for our lives, panting in panic as he came lumbering after us with a ten-pound hammer.

  We climbed out of the cab and crossed Park Avenue, each of us holding Lucy’s hand. The traffic booped and echoed all around us. Karen said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Harry. I really do.”

  I suppose I should have said “trust me”, but I didn’t even trust myself. I just gave her my famous seasick grin, and said, “So do I.”

  I found the place where – all of those years ago – I used to climb onto the tracks. There was still a narrow gap in the fencing. I checked my watch. There were only six or seven minutes to go before the moon came up. I knelt down beside Lucy and said, “Listen, sugar plum fairy, we have to climb through this gap and over this wall onto the railroad. I know it’s going to be frightening, but we have to do it.”

  She looked back at me with those big dark eyes and I thought for a moment she was going to say that she was too frightened, that she wouldn’t do it. But then she gave me a wide, eerie smile, and nodded; and I knew then that even if I failed, and Misquamacus took my body, I couldn’t let him take Lucy. She said something, but just then a train went rattling and clashing past, and I couldn’t hear what it was. Only the last two words, “– white face.”

  I checked around to see if there were any police in sight. Then I pushed myself through the gap, and started to climb over the barrier. It was filthy – thickly coated in soot and grime. But once I was at the top I reached down for Lucy’s hand and said, “Come on up, sweetheart, I’ve got you.”

  Lucy looked up at me, and she still had that creepy smile on her face. Somewhere inside of her, Misquamacus must have been relishing this moment – the night when he regained an earthly body, and the night when he finally revenged himself on Karen and me. Another train clattered past, and I ducked my head and kept myself low against the barrier, in case anybody was looking in my direction. The lighted windows passed me by like all the days in my life, one after the other, and then they were gone.

  I helped Lucy to climb up, and then Karen followed her, her trainers scuffling against the rusted steel. Then we dropped down onto the aggregate, and brushed ourselves down. Karen was shivering and her white cable-knit sweater was smudged with dirt. “Where to now?” she asked me.

  Lucy took hold of my hand. “I know the way,” she said. She stepped over the tracks and began to walk toward the tunnel, hopping from one greasy sleeper to the next.

  “Lucy, get off the track!” I shouted at her. But all she did was turn and laugh, and start to run. I went running after her, and caught hold of her hand.

  “Get off the track, Lucy. There’ll be trains coming.”

  Lucy kept on smiling at me. “We’re almost here,” she said; and suddenly her voice became overlaid with the harsh, echoing tones of Misquamacus. “This is my birthplace, Nakkro, where I first saw light of day.”

  I thought I heard a train approaching, and I quickly looked around, but all I could see was the blackness of the tunnel.

  “Come on,” said Lucy, and carried on walking toward the tunnel. As we entered it, I could hear the late rush hour bustling and beeping of traffic, and the faraway wailing of sirens. Normal, everyday noises. I kept hearing clattering sounds behind me, and glancing around, but they say that railroad workers never hear the train that hits them.

  Only a few feet into the tunnel entrance Lucy stopped, and pointed to the ground. “It’s here,” she announced triumphantly. “This is the sacred place where I was born.” She looked up to the sky. According to my watch, the moon must have risen, although it was impossible to see it behind all the buildings. “This is the place, and the time has come.”

  Together, Lucy and I stood between the tracks, facing each other.

  “What do we do now?” I asked her.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them they were glowing incandescent blue. Her shadow appeared to rise from the railroad tracks, like somebody climbing out of bed, and stand up right behind her, a dark and threatening outline of somebody tall, unnaturally tall, with a head-dress of skulls and tails.

  Lucy clapped her hands. “Let the spirit of the moon descend to help me! Let the moment be moved, let the night hold its breath! Spirit of the winds, blow away this man’s spirit out of his body and find a lodge for it in this woman’s body, along with hers, so they might live together for the rest of their days.”

  “What?” I demanded. “What the hell are you trying to do? You can’t lodge my spirit in Karen’s body!”

  “Would you rather be a cockroach, or a piece of wood? I am giving you what you always wanted. A closeness that other lovers can only dream of!”

  “Two spirits in one body? We’ll go insane in five minutes flat!”

  “It is my final act of mercy.”

  “You don’t have a merciful bone in your body. You’re going to take your revenge on all of us, that’s all. On me and Karen, by wrapping both of us up in the same body, and on Lucy, too, because Lucy won’t have a mommy and a daddy. Lucy will have nothing less than some screaming lunatic who has to be locked up.”

  Lucy closed her glowing blue eyes, as if to indicate that she wasn’t going to discuss it any more.

  “Spirit of moon, I worship you and serve you. Hold back the night for me, for the space of five long heartbeats. Spirit of wind, blow this man’s spirit out of his body, leave him empty. Find him a home in the woman’s body, two spirits in one earthly lodge”.

  Behind us, the night began to darken, and the wind began to rise. Scraps of newspaper and gum wrappers blew around the tracks, along with a fine sting
ing grit. I had to shield my eyes with my upraised arm. Above the blustering of the wind, Lucy was starting to scream – a harsh, high-pitched scream that was filled with unbridled fury.

  “Spirit of wind, blow this man’s spirit out of his body! Leave him empty! Spirit of moon! Command the night to hold its breath!”

  At first, I didn’t think that anything was going to happen. After all, Misquamacus was a seriously weakened spirit, and his only physical presence was that of a four-year-old girl. But then suddenly everything grew darker still. It was that darkness that closes in on you when you’re just about to faint – except that I didn’t faint. I was aware of everything that was going on.

  Lucy’s voice grew slow and slurred. “Spppirrriittt offff wiiiinnnndddd.” Soon it grew so slow that I couldn’t even understand it, and then it stopped In fact, everything stopped. There was total silence, and nobody moved. Newspapers that had been blown into mid-air over the railroad tracks remained where they were, in mid-air.

  Misquamacus had done it. For me, at least, he had temporarily arrested time.

  It was then that two things happened almost at once. I began to feel a tugging sensation inside of my head, almost as if somebody were trying to pull out my brain by the roots. I began to feel everything that I ever was being dragged out of me. My boyhood, my school days, my first pet dog. My mother, my father, my Uncle Jim, looning and laughing on my fifteenth birthday. Bicycle rides – baseball games – girls in starched petticoats and girls in pink-checkered swimsuits – trips to Coney Island and Brighton Beach – sunshine, cotton candy, electric storms – they were all being drawn out of me like brightly-coloured picture-cards being sucked into a Hoover. My soul was going; my spirit was going. Dear God, I was dying.

  But the other thing was: a train was approaching, its lights reflecting from the tracks. It was momentarily frozen in time, but in the next few seconds, when Misquamacus had taken over my body, it would come out of the tunnel and bear down on Lucy and that was going to be the bastard’s real revenge, to wrap us together in the same body, and to kill our daughter, too.