bodies were all scalped, and their ears cut off.”
“What was odd about that?” asked Neil. “The Wappos were pretty fierce sometimes, weren’t they?”
“Oh, they could be. But what they didn’t do was take scalps, or ears, or genitalia, like some of the Indians did. It wasn’t their style. They were diggers, not fighters, and all they cared about was protecting their good agricultural land from the white men.
They weren’t interested in trophies.”
“You’re saying that Fenner took the scalps? A white man took white scalps?”
“You don’t have to look so shocked. It wasn’t unusual in them days. In fact, some of the old-tuners say it was white men who taught the Indians to take scalps in the first place.”
“That’s horrific,” said Neil.
Old Billy Ritchie shrugged, and swilled some bourbon down with a mouthful of beer.
Neil said, “Did you ever see a picture of Bloody Fenner? An engraving or anything like that?”
Billy Ritchie shook his head. “The only drawings I ever saw of Napa Valley in them days were landscapes. Mainly forests, it was. But I don’t think nobody ever took it into their heads to draw Bloody Fenner.”
“There’s something else,” said Neil. “Did you ever hear of a prophecy connected with Bloody Fenner? Something that was supposed to be written on a stone redwood tree?”
Billy Ritchie thought about that, and then shook his head again. “No, sir, I can’t say that I ever did.”
“Then how about the day of the dark stars?”
Billy Ritchie lifted his head slowly and stared at him. For the first time since Neil had walked into the house, he stopped stroking the cat, and his old hand lay on her black fur like a dead, dried leaf.
“Did I hear you right?” he said, in a soft, unsettling tone.
“The day of the dark stars,” repeated Neil. “That was all I said.”
The old man quivered in his chair, as if a cold wind had blown across the room. But the air was still, and growing stuffy, and outside it must have been close to 100
degrees.
“Where did you hear about the day of the dark stars?” he asked Neil. “I lay my life I didn’t believe I’d ever hear that phrase again.”
“I don’t know,” said Neil, reluctant to tell the old man about Toby until he knew what the “day of the dark stars” was, and why the mention of it seemed to be so unnerving. “I guess I just kind of picked it up.”
Billy Ritchie looked at Neil as if he knew that he was only telling him half of the truth, but then he piloted his wheel chair across the room, and silently poured himself another large shot of bourbon. As he screwed the cap back on the bottle, he looked up at Neil, and said: “The first and last time I heard of the day of the dark stars was from a trapper I met when I was a young man up in the Modoc Forest. This man was old and he was thin as a polecat, and he had scars on every spare inch of his body from fighting Indians and annuals. We spent two nights and two days together, and then we went our separate ways.”
“But what did he tell you?” asked Neil.
Billy Ritchie’s eyes were rheumy and distant. “He told me all about the old days in Modoc country, just so that I could pass his stories on, so they wouldn’t be lost. What he said was that once the Indians knew they couldn’t hold back the white man any longer, they kind of bowed their heads and accepted their fate after a fashion, because they always knew that their gods would give them revenge. It was a Wappo belief, for instance, that for every Indian who died from cholera or smallpox, or was shot down by scalp hunters, a white man would die in return. They said that it might not happen in a month, in a year, or even in twenty years, but that one day the stars would go dark because they would call down the most powerful and evil Indian demons there ever were, the demons they didn’t even dare to call down in their own lifetimes, like Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah, and that the demons would slaughter a man for a man, a woman for a woman, a child for a child.”
Billy Ritchie took another.swig from his glass, and then he said, “The way I heard it, Nashuna was the demon of darkness, and Pa-la-kai was the demon of blood, and Ossadagowah was a land of a beast-thing that nobody could even describe, a kind of a wild demon that scared everyone witless.”
“You sound as though you believe it,” said Neil, carefully.
The old man gave a wry smile. “I’d believe it before I believed some of the words I read in the Bible,” he said, quietly. “Them Indians knew their lands, you see, and they knew their skies and their waters, and they knew all about the spirits and the demons that dwelled in those lands and those skies and those waters. The way that trapper told me, the day of the dark stars was going to happen before the twentieth century turned-he wasn’t sure when, but that was what he was told.”
Neil raised his eyebrows. “Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But who’s going to call these demons down? I’ve been to powwows at a couple of Indian reservations, and there’s an Indian who comes down to Bodega Bay to fish, and it seems to me that there isn’t much magic left in any of today’s red people.”
“It’s not today’s red people you’ve got to worry about,” said Billy Ritchie. “It’s the spirits of the red people from out of the past. What this trapper told me was that the greatest of all the medicine men, the twenty-two most powerful wonder-workers from all the main tribes, all of their spirits would come together, God knows how, and they’d call down the worstest demons they could, and get their revenge.”
“You mean the ghosts of twenty-two old-time medicine men are supposed to be getting together to punish us? Come on, Billy. That’s a tall story and you know it.”
Billy Ritchie didn’t look offended. ‘People have said that before,” he said, philosophically. “But let me show you something, before you make up your mind that all those old Indian legends were nonsense.”
He propelled himself across to a small bureau which stood in the far corner of the room and opened the top drawer. He shuffled through a heap of untidy papers and news clippings while Neil watched him silently and drank his beer.
“Here we are,” said Billy Ritchie, after a while, and wheeled himself over. He gave Neil two black-and-white photographs, full plate size, and told him, ‘Take a close look at those.”
One of the photographs showed a street scene in Calistoga. It was hard to tell when it was, because the town had hardly changed in fifty years. There were horses and buggies, and men in wide-brimmed hats, but it could have been taken any time between 1890 and 1920.
In the foreground of the picture stood a group of men with drooping mustaches, and just to their left, sitting on the edge of the boardwalk, was an Indian, in a dusty, black business suit. He was handsome and well-built, and around his neck he wore strings of necklaces and beads, which indicated that he was a medicine man.
The other photograph was taken in the woods someplace. Neil didn’t recognize the scenery at all. A group of Indians were standing by a fallen tree, squinting at the camera as if they mistrusted it. Among them was the same medicine man, in a woollen robe this time, but wearing the same necklaces and beads.
“All right,” said Neil, “it’s two pictures of the same Indian. What’s that supposed to prove?”
“Look at the dates on the back,” suggested Billy Ritchie.
Neil turned the photographs over. One, the street scene in Calistoga, was marked 8/1/15. The woodland scene was marked August 5th, 1915.
“I don’t get it,” persisted Neil. “These were taken three days apart. What’s so strange about that?”
Billy Ritchie cackled. “What’s so strange about it is that the picture in the woods was taken by a photographer called Lewis Clifton, of Massachusetts, up by the Wampanoag settlement on the Miskatonic River in New England. These photographs were taken three days apart, sure. But they were also taken three thousand miles apart.”
“That’s impossible,” said Neil. “In 1915, it would have taken almost a week to get from New Engl
and to the Napa Valley.”
“That’s right,” nodded Billy Ritchie. “And yet both of these photographs are authenticated, and their dates are plumb correct.”
Neil peered closer at the calm, amused face of the Wampanaug medicine man. Even though the pictures were almost seventy years old, they had a curious freshness about them, as if they had been taken only a few weeks ago. He said, “That’s strange, that’s really strange.”
“Not strange at all when you know who that is,” said Billy Ritchie. “That’s the best-known of all the Indian men, the most powerful Indian sorcerer who ever lived. That’s Misquamacus.”
“Misquamacus?”
“That was what they called him, among a whole lot of other names. But the reason I spent some time finding those photographs is because of what that trapper told me, up in the Modoc Forest. He said that when the day of the dark stars came around, this man Misquamacus would be the fellow to bring all the twenty-two wonderworkers together. This man Misquamacus, he said, was obsessed with taking his revenge on the white folks, and that his whole aim in life was to see white people die in the cruelest way possible.”
Billy Ritchie began to stroke his cat again. “I’d say that the cruelest way possible would be to call down Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah, and let them loose. Now, that would be cruel.”
FOUR
They talked until mid-afternoon. Billy Ritchie, as the Old Crow loosened his tongue, began to ramble about his childhood, and the old days in Calistoga and the hot springs country, and the girls he’d known and chased. Neil began to feel claustrophobic in the small, airless house, but he stayed because he wanted to know more about Bloody Fenner, and about the day of the dark stars.
He said to Billy Ritchie, “Do you think that Bloody Fenner could have done anything to irritate the Wappos, or any of the tribes? Something they might have wanted revenge for?”
Billy Ritchie shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. I never heard tell of him falling out with the Indians. The way I heard it, they was always the best of friends, and that’s what made him so treacherous to whites.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“Who does? All that happened one hundred and forty years ago, and there wasn’t more than a dozen men in the whole of the Napa Valley who could read or write, so they didn’t keep no diaries. They were dark days, for sure. Mighty dark days.”
Neil took out his handkerchief and wiped sweat from the back of his neck. “Well, tell me this,” he said. “If Bloody Fenner had done something to upset the Indians, way back in the 1830s, how would an Indian medicine man go about taking his revenge?”
“You mean today? Here and now?”
“That’s right”
Billy Ritchie puffed out his cheeks. “I can only tell you what I know from stories, and from what that trapper told me. A lot of those real mystical Indian rituals, well, they’re so secret that half the Indians don’t know them. But what you have to understand is that a medicine man’s spirit-what the Indians call bis manitou- that never dies. It’s reborn, lifetime after lifetime, for seven lifetimes in all, until the medicine man has performed enough magic on earth to earn himself a place up in the stars, alongside of the great spirits.
“The point is, the manitou can only take on flesh if it finds itself a suitable human being to lodge itself in. It can take on plenty of other shapes, sure. The Narragansets, for instance, used to have stories about medicine men who came back to life by using rocks for flesh, or water, or even wood. There’s some pretty hair-rising stories about the stone men of the Narragansets who used to walk at night. But a man made of rock or wood is just as vulnerable as rock or wood, and so the medicine man wouldn’t take on that kind of flesh unless he had nothing else.”
Neil, even though he was trying hard to control it, was shaking. He saw, as vividly as he had the night before, the wooden arm reaching out from the wardrobe, the fierce face glaring from the polished walnut. He said, hoarsely, “Go on.”
Billy Ritchie shrugged. “I don’t know much more about it. It’s not the kind of stuff a white man gets to hear about easily.”
Neil opened another can of Coors. His throat was dry, and he felt as if he’d been hung up all afternoon in a tobacco-curing barn. He swallowed lukewarm beer, and then he said, “What would happen on the day of the dark stars? Would the medicine men need to find human beings to lodge themselves in? Would they need to use ordinary people’s bodies to get themselves reborn?”
“Sure they would,” nodded Billy Ritchie. “They’d pick themselves a bunch of folks, probably the land of folks who wouldn’t put up too much of a mental fight, if you get what I mean, and they’d use their living bodies, their flesh and their blood and all, to come back to life.”
Neil whispered, “The children. My God, the children.”
Billy Ritchie said, “What did you say? You’ll have to speak up. I bust an eardrum when I fell off of that horse.”
Neil stood up. If what Billy Ritchie said about Indian medicine men was even half-true, it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever heard in his life. Everything fitted the random and scary events of the past few days, and made sense out of them. The day of the dark stars was going to happen soon, just the way Toby had said. Toby couldn’t have possibly known about it unless he was really being possessed for real.
And the wooden man from the wardrobe convinced him.
It seemed insane, but nothing else explained what was going on. The children of Mrs. Novato’s class were being gradually infiltrated, mind and body, by the most powerful gathering of Indian medicine men that had ever taken place, at any time in America’s history. Toby, his own son, was among them.
Toby, when he thought about it, may even have been the catalyst for the whole horrifying possession. Toby was a Fenner, a descendant of Bloody Fenner, and if Bloody Fenner had helped the Indians in the past against the white man, then maybe he was doing it again. The ghost or the spirit of Toby’s forefather was back in Sonoma County, after a hundred and forty years, and preparing for another massacre.
Neil thought about the man in the long white duster. The man who kept begging for help. Maybe he was a ghost, too-a kind of sad warning stirred up from the past.
From what he said, he may have been one of the twenty settlers who died up at Conn Creek. One of the innocent folks who had died at the hands of the Wappos while Bloody Fenner pretended to ride off for help.
Neil took Billy Ritchie’s hand and squeezed it
“You’ve been a lot of help,” he said softly.
“What did you say?” demanded Billy.
“I said, you’ve been a lot of help. I’m beginning to understand things that didn’t make any sense before.”
Billy Ritchie set down his bourbon glass. He stared up at Neil with a sharp, canny look in his eye.
“You’re worried, aren’t you?” he said.
“A little,” admitted Neil.
“You think it’s coming-the day of the dark stars?”
“I’ve seen some signs.”
“What kind of signs?”
“I’ve seen a wooden man. Least, I think I have. And I’ve heard voices from the people who were killed up at Las Posadas.”
Billy Ritchie rubbed his chin. “It doesn’t sound too good, does it?” he said. “It doesn’t sound too good at all.”
“I don’t know what to do,” said Neil. “If it’s really medicine men, then they’ve chosen the kids at my son’s school.”
“They would, if you’re a Fenner. They’d look for a spirit guide, you see. Someone to help them reincarnate themselves. Out there, out in what the Indians used to call the
‘outside,’ the spirits of those medicine men would look for the ghost of someone who once helped them when they were human. Bloody Fenner would be just their man.”
“But what can I do?” asked Neil. “Is there anything I can do about it? I mean, how can I stop it?”
Billy Ritchie brushed cat hairs off his fingers. “I w
ouldn’t like to say,” he confessed.
“That old trapper never got as far as telling me what to do if the day of the dark stars ever actually arrived.”
“But what about all those children? What about my son?”
“It’s going to be worse than that,” said Billy Ritchie. “Well-I know there isn’t nothing worse than your own son being hurt. But the day of the dark stars is when the Indians take an eye for an eye, and you just think about the thousands and thousands of Indians who died because of what the white man did to them. If these medicine men really do turn up, and if they really call down their demons, then we’re going to see death and horror like you can’t even imagine.”
Neil was silent for a few seconds, and then he squeezed Billy Ritchie’s hand again.
“I’m going to start fighting back,” he said determinedly. ‘I'm going straight to the cops, to begin with, and we’re going to have those children, protected.”
“Well,” said Billy Ritchie, “I just hope yqu can. Maybe it takes a Fenner to wipe out a Fenner’s wrong deeds. Don’t think it’s going to be easy, though. And keep on your guard. If your ancestor’s around, then you’ve got yourself some stiff competition.
Alien Fenner wasn’t called Bloody for nothing.”
“A lien Fenner? That was his name?”
“It sure was. Didn’t you know that?”
Neil shook his head. “Nobody ever told me before. Everybody just called him Bloody.”
Billy Ritchie tickled his black cat’s ears. “Bloody’s good enough,” he said simply.
“Bloody’s good enough.”
Sergeant Murray sat behind his desk with the same patient expression he used for people who complained about dogs fouling then- front lawns* or kids throwing stones at their windows. Outside, a breeze had sprung up from the ocean, and dust blew in gritty clouds across the police station parking lot. It was nearly five o’clock, and Sergeant Murray was due to go home at five. He was a big, chubby man, with a face as large as a pig’s, and he was feeling hungry.
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