Revenge of the Manitou tm-2

by Graham Masterton

  Singing Rock smiled. “You’d be sorry if I did. The Seventh Cavalry was a great deal more vicious than the Indians most of the time.”

  Neil looked over Singing Rock’s shoulder at the school paintings. “Do these words mean anything to you?” he asked. “I couldn’t make them out at all.”

  Singing Rock picked up one or two. of the paintings. “They’re in different dialects,” he said, “but they all seem to refer to the day of the dark stars in one way or another.

  Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si was the name the Patwin Indians used for Napa Valley. It simply means ‘beautiful land.’ Kaimus was the Wappo name for the town of Yountville, which is halfway up the valley, as you obviously know. These words here, though, sokwet and oweaoo and pados are all Algonquian.”

  “What’s a ‘sokwet’ when it’s at home?” asked Harry. “It sounds like the first requirement for double pneumonia.”

  “Sokwet is the Alqonquian word for ‘eclipse.’ It seems to be tied in here with the word wata, which means ‘star.’ So I think we can safely assume that one of these children was talking about the day of the dark stars itself. The word oweaoo means ‘circle,’

  and pados means ‘boat,’ but since they’re written here in isolation, they’re not particularly helpful. I suspect we’ll discover what they mean, though.”

  “Sure,” said Harry. “The hard way.”

  Singing Rock said, “These paintings themselves are very interesting. When you first look at them, you’d think they were painted by children.”

  “Of course you would,” said Neil. “They were painted by children.”

  Singing Rock shook his head. “This style is primitive in some respects, but it isn’t childish. Look at this one. You can find carvings and drawings in this style among the WabanaM and the Etchemis. This one shows the Indians dressed in the costumes of Arapahos. And this one here looks distinctly Iroquois.”

  Neil shuffled through the paintings with a frown. “You mean the medicine men inside the children created these paintings? Not the children themselves?”

  “Not fully,” said Singing Rock. “These were done a few days ago, at a time when the medicine men wouldn’t have taken hold of the children’s minds completely. But their tribal characterstics have certainly shown through. I can identify Sioux, Micmac, Hopi, Apache, Shoshoni, and Modoc, as well as the ones you’ve got in your hand.”

  “Does that help?” asked Neil.

  “It helps a great deal. It means that I can tell who some of the medicine men are.

  Each tribe has its own mythical medicine heroes. The Wabanaki, for instance, had Neem, the bringer of thunder. The Apaches used to revere a medicine man called No Name, who was said to wear a live rattlesnake as a headdress. Misquamacus will almost certainly have called on the best medicine man from each tribe, and so it won’t be too difficult to make a list of the team we’re going to be up against.”

  “Singing Rock sees the eternal struggle between red men and white men as a kind of occult football game,” remarked Harry.

  Neil sat down. “What I don’t quite understand is, what are these demons like, these things they’re going to call down to destroy us? I mean, what are they actually likeT

  At that moment, as if prompted by fate, the telephone in the front room began to ring.

  Neil said, “Excuse me,” and went to answer it.

  Singing Rock and Harry waited while Neil talked. Harry crushed out his cigarette and swilled down the last of his beer. Then Neil came back into the room, and his face was flushed with anxiety.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Harry. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “It was Mr. Saperstein, from the school,” said Neil. “He heard you talking to Mrs.

  Novato in the school yard, and he guessed you’d want to know.”

  “Know? Know what?”

  Neil looked at him, and Harry could see that he was very close to collapse. Singing Rock advised, “You’d better sit down.”

  Neil shook his head. “Mr. Saperstein wants us to come down there right away. He took some photographs of Toby and the rest of the class last week, when they were dancing in the playground. He’s just had the pictures developed, and he says that something’s shown up on them that’s almost driven him mad.”

  SEVEN

  Mr. Saperstein met them in his office overlooking the back of the school. It was a cramped, converted storeroom, and it was heaped with music scores and books on composers and cellos with broken strings. Harry and Neil and Singing Rock could hardly crowd themselves inside, and Mr. Saperstein had to move a battered trumpet case and a bust of Beethoven with a chipped nose before Harry could sit down.

  “I’m sorry I eavesdropped on your conversation with Mrs. Novato,” Mr. Saperstein said apologetically. “It was just that I was passing, and I really couldn’t help myself.

  I’m afraid I’ve always been a bit of a busybody.”

  “Good thing you were,” said Singing Rock flatly. “This is a desperate time.”

  Mr. Saperstein unlocked his desk drawer and took out a paper folder.

  “I should explain that I’m pretty keen on photography,” he said. “I take my camera around most of the time. It was quite natural for me to shoot a picture of the children in the school yard. I had a little exhibition of school photographs at Sonoma last year, and it was really quite successful.”

  Harry put in impatiently, “Do you think we could just take a look at the shots?”

  Mr. Saperstein raised one hand. “What you have to realize is that I came into Mrs.

  Novato’s classroom, and she said she could see her children dancing in a strange way. I looked out of the window, too, and she was right. They were kind of shuffling around in a circle, with their arms on each other’s shoulders. I thought it could have been a Greek dance, you know, like in Zorba the Greek?”

  Harry sighed. “The pictures, Mr. Saperstein?”

  “Of course,” said the music teacher, opening the folder. “But before you look at them you must realize that all I saw in that school yard was children. Nothing else at all.”

  One by one, Mr. Saperstein passed around the large black-and-white prints. There were five of them, each showing the school yard from Mrs. Novato’s classroom window, and the children shuffling around in a circle. In the first picture, Neil could pick out Toby and Andy and Daniel Soscol and Debbie Spun. But there was something else besides. Out of the center of the circle of children, mostly obscured by their bodies, a sort of whitish haze seemed to be forming, like a twisting column of smoke.

  In the next picture, the haze was widening, and rising even higher above the children’s heads. It was beginning to form into tentacular coils, which in the third picture were writhing almost up to the lower branches of the maple tree at the edge of the school yard.

  The fourth and the fifth photographs were the most alarming. They showed a towering beast, draped with scores of curling arms, like a kind of gaseous squid, high above the children. Although it was faceless and formless, it possessed a terrible and evil aspect, as if it was formed out of the essence of ancient malevolence. It seemed verminous and unhealthy, and riddled with diseases of the mind and the spirit.

  “What is that thing?” asked Neil. “Is that some kind of photographic illusion?”

  Mr. Saperstein replied, “No trick, Mr. Fenner. They were developed for me by Charlie Keynes down at the newspaper office. He does all my prints. He swears blind that this is the way they came out.”

  “Maybe the light got into the film, you know, and fogged it,” suggested Neil.

  Mr. Saperstein shook his head. “That’s not fogging, Mr. Fenner. Any amateur could tell you that.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Saperstein,” concurred Singing Rock, quietly. “These pictures are not fake.”

  “But how can you tell?” asked Neil. “It must be easy to take an airbrush or something and-”

  Singing Rock smiled, and benignly silenced him. “No amount of airbrushing could ever por
tray what’s on this photograph, Neil, because no artist knows what this creature looks like or what it is. This creature is one of the shapeless ones who guard the threshold between this world and outside. They are messengers of the ethos in which the great old ones have dwelled for more centuries than I could count.

  “This thing is a herald, if you can call it that, for Pa-la-kai the demon of blood, and Nashuna the demon of darkness, and for Quul the demon of insanity. Those three, in their turn, are servants of Rhenauz the demon of evil, and Coyote the demon of corruption. Above all these, though, and guarded by a pack of creatures called the Eye Killers, is Ossadagowah, the son of Sado-gowah, the demon who can be conjured up but can never be returned, except of his own free will.”

  “Then what’s this thing?” asked Harry. “Just a minor-league stooge?”

  “In comparison, yes,” said Singing Rock. “Its name is Sak, which simply means ‘the past.’ It is a beast that has existed on this planet for countless millions of years, or so the Algonquian say. Its chosen duty has always been to encourage humans to summon the elder gods, so that the elder gods may devour them as sacrificial gifts, and reward Sak with whatever a beast like that might want as a reward.”

  “A gold ball-point pen?” asked Harry. “Who knows what demons want?”

  Neil couldn’t even find it in himself to laugh. He kept looking at the pictures of Toby, and the face of Misquamacus was sharply clear in every one of them.

  Singing Rock stood up. “Sak will want more than that and, unfortunately for us, he’s going to get it pretty soon. When I talked to the elders of my tribe about this matter, they said that before the day of the dark stars could dawn, several essential rituals had to be completed. The penultimate ritual was the summoning of Sak, who would make the way ready for Ossadagowah. After that, ah1 the twenty-two medicine men have to do is join their strength together in the name of whatever spirits they choose-tree spirits or water spirits or rock spirits. Knowing what little we do about Misquamacus, I’d say they probably chose tree spirits.”

  Harry said, “You think they’re already done that?”

  Singing Rock nodded. “Almost certainly. If you want me to hazard a guess, I’d say they probably did it on Friday, before they all had to go home for the weekend. When they went out on that school trip this morning, they were ready for the day to begin.

  The day of the dark stars, or the day when the mouth comes down from the sky.”

  “You mean it could be today?” asked Neil, frightened.

  Singing Rock checked his watch. “It’s almost noon. The day of the dark stars begins at noon and lasts through until the following noon. It’s supposed to be twenty-four hours of chaos and butchery and torture, * the day when the Indian people have their revenge for hundreds of years of treachery and slaughter and rape, all in one huge massacre.”

  Mr. Saperstein took his photographs back and looked at them in bewilderment. Then he said to Singing Rock, “Is this true, what you’re saying? Or is it simply fantasy?”

  Singing Rock pointed to the misty, wriggling shape of Sak. “Is that true?” he asked.

  “Or is that simply fantasy?”

  Mr. Saperstein took off his glasses. “It’s incredible. I don’t know why I didn’t even see it at the time. It’s enormous.”

  “That’s one thing we’ve learned, Mr. Saperstein,” said Harry. “Demons and spirits can be seen through some photographic lenses, even when they’re almost invisible to the naked eye. It’s happened before.”

  “I thought I was going crazy,” said Mr. Saperstein. “I took those pictures out and looked at them, and I was sure I was going crazy.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Neil softly. He held out his hand to Mr. Saperstein. “Join the club.”

  Singing Rock said, “We have much less tune than I thought. If the day of the dark stars begins at noon today, that means OssadagoWah and the rest of the demons will be summoned when Nepauz-had, the moon goddess, appears.”

  Mr. Saperstein opened another of his desk drawers, shuffled through it like a rat looking for eggs in a hayloft, and at last produced a battered maroon diary. He licked his thumb and turned the pages until he came to the one he wanted.

  “Moonrise tonight is 10:02,” he announced. “I presume that’s what you mean.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Saperstein, it is,” said Singing Rock. “And that means we have less than ten hours to prepare ourselves. Quite apart from that, we don’t even know where the children are.”

  “They went to Lake Berryessa,” said the music teacher. “It was their school outing.”

  “They were supposed to go to Lake Berryessa,” said Singing Rock. “But remember the legend speaks of twenty-two medicine men.”

  “So? What does that have to do with it?” asked Harry.

  “It could have everything to do with it,” said Singing Rock. “There are only twenty-one children in the class, and therefore the twenty-second medicine man must be emerging inside one of the adults aboard that bus.”

  “There’s only Mrs. Novato and the driver,” said Mr. Saperstein, aghast. “You don’t think that Mrs. Novato-?”

  Harry said, “I wouldn’t have thought so myself. She didn’t look like the type. Too homely, even for your average medicine man from 1830.”

  “Who’s the school bus driver?” asked Singing Rock.

  “Well, it’s usually Jack Billets, from Valley Ford,” said Mr. Saperstein. “But I think he’s been off sick lately. I don’t know who they used today. I didn’t see him.”

  Neil picked up Mr. Saperstein’s telephone and dialed the operator. When he was through, he said, “Amy? Is that you? Listen, this is very urgent. Do you have Jack Billets’s number, down at Valley Ford? Sure. Could you put me through?”

  He waited a little while, and then they heard a faint voice at the other end of the telephone.

  “Jack?” asked Neil. “This Neil Fenner. Yes. Hi. Listen, I heard you were sick. That’s right. Well, I hope it improves. But listen, Jack, do you know who’s taking the bus up to Lake Berryessa today? It’s pretty important, you know?”

  The faint voice replied, and then Neil said, “Thanks, Jack. I’ll buy you a drink for that.

  Okay, fine. Thanks a whole lot.”

  He set the phone down, and then looked at Harry and Singing Rock and let out a long, controlled breath. “The driver is an old retired sailor who sits around the dock at Bodega Bay. A guy named Doughty. I met him on Friday, and he did everything he could to persuade me not to go on with all the fuss I was making about the children.

  He said Susan had told him to talk to me. Now I know it was a damn sight more than Susan. It was Misquamacus.”

  Neil tapped his finger against his head, and snapped, “It was Misquamacus, inside of here!”

  Neil went to the window and looked out over the back of the school, at the green, rounded hills beyond the fence, at the distant grayness of ocean mist. He said softly,

  “It all makes a lot more sense now. It was Doughty who suggested I go visit Billy Ritchie, and that was how I found out about Misquamacus in the first place. If I hadn’t have known about Misquamacus — if I hadn’t have believed in the day of the dark stars — then I wouldn’t have called you or Singing Rock to help me.”

  Singing Rock, from his chair in the comer of the office, smiled and nodded.

  “You’re beginning to understand the deviousness of Misquamacus, aren’t you? He wanted both of us here in California, Harry and me, so that he could take his revenge on us before any other white man or mercenary Indian. It would have used too much energy, too much magic, to bring us by any mystical means. So he simply had Doughty put you on to Billy Ritchie, who was the only person around who could tell you the truth.”

  Neil tiredly rested his head against the window. “And when it was all over, he made sure that Billy Ritchie was killed.”

  “Harry told me about that,” said Singing Rock. “It was a favorite method of quick death, the lightning-that-sees.
It strikes like an occult guided missile. Misquamacus once used it against two of Harry’s closest friends.”

  “All this accounts for something else, too,” said Neil “The appearance of Dunbar’s ghost in the bay. He was there because Doughty was there. He was warning me, just like he kept trying to warn me everyplace else.”

  Singing Rock looked at his watch again. “The first thing we have to do is find out where that school bus is. Then, before it gets dark, we have to get those children together somehow, so that I can arrange a medicine circle around them. One of the elders has given me a spell that was supposed to have kept Coyote away from the daughters of Roman Nose, and that should keep their activities confined for a little while. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than taking their first attack in the chest.”

  Mr. Saperstein said, “Is there anything I can do? I’d like to help. I don’t quite understand what’s going on, but H you don’t mind that, you’re welcome to whatever I can do.”

  Harry suggested, “Why don’t you call the Highway Patrol? Tell them that some of your kids went off on a day trip to Lake Berryessa, and that a mother just telephoned to say that her son took her Librium pills in his lunch box, thinking they were candies.”

  Singing Rock stood up. “That should do fine. If you want us, Mr. Saperstein, we’ll be over at Neil Fenner’s house. And thank you.”

  The teacher gave a nervous, self-deprecating grin. “It’s been a pleasure, I guess. It’s such a relief to find out you’re not going out of your mind.”

  “Mr. Saperstein,” said Singing Rock, resting a gnarled hand on the music teacher’s arm, “there may be times in the next twenty-four hours when you wish that you were.”

  Singing Rock worked over the kitchen table until midafternoon, the blinds drawn to keep the light from distracting him, and an angular desk lamp over his papers and magical artefacts. While Harry and Neil paced the veranda waiting for Mr. Saperstein to call with news from the Highway Patrol, the South Dakota medicine man laboriously prepared lists of the enemies they were about to face, and gathered together as many spells as he could to hinder and obstruct those enemies. Out of his suitcase came bones, hanks of hair, and earthenware jars of powder. Just after three o’clock, when the sky was low and heavy with metallic gray clouds, he came out of the kitchen door and stretched.