Harry asked him, “Are you finished in there?”
Singing Rock shrugged. “As finished as I’ll ever be.”
“I never knew Indians were such pessimists,” retorted Harry. “No wonder you lost the West.”
“We were pessimists because we’d already lost the East,” Singing Rock reminded him.
Harry lit another cigarette and coughed. “I sometimes wonder whether you’re fighting on the right side. With an attitude like yours, you and Misquamacus would make a fine pair.”
Singing Rock raised his head a little, and looked across at Harry with eyes that were bright and penetrating.
“One day, in one of my lives, I hope to be far greater than Misquamacus,” he said.
Harry raised an eyebrow. “You’re trying to tell me that you've lived before, too?”
Singing Rock smiled. “It always used to amuse the Indians, before they began to understand how callous the white men.actually were, how much the white men knew about living, and how little they understood about life.”
“You’re in a very philosophical mood.”
Singing Rock pulled across a weather-bleached chair and sat down, resting one booted foot on the veranda railing. “Maybe I am,” he said quietly. “But I believe we’ll be facing Misquamacus again tonight, and this time he’ll be ready for us.”
Harry walked to the edge of the veranda and rested his hands on the railing. He felt unpleasantly sticky and hot, and the afternoon seemed completely airless. Even out here, it was like being shut in a cupboard. The smoke from the cigarette drifted lazily away in blue puffs.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose it’s a great honor to be first on the zapping list of the greatest Indian medicine man who ever lived. Just think, I may never have to eat at the Chock full o’ Nuts again.”
Neil said, “Have you worked out who most of the medicine men are?”
“Yes,” said Singing Rock. “They come from the times before the white men arrived on our shores, in those ancient days when Indian magic was at its height. In those days, the gods themselves were supposed to have walked America, and these medicine men worked out their apprenticeships as shamans and wonderworkers with the gods themselves to guide them. Their power is inestimable. Together, under the direction of Misquamacus, they will be devastating.”
“Do you have a plan?” asked Neil.
“Sure,” put in Harry. “We promise them beads and firewater, just like we used to do in the old days. Then, when they’re trying on their beads and drinking their firewater, we steal their sacred medicine circle and build a downtown shopping mall on it.”
Singing Rock took out a pack of chewing tobacco and grinned. “I’m sorry, Harry. It won’t work a second time.”
Neil bit his lip. “Listen,” he said, “that’s my son out there. My son and all my son’s friends. Wheat’s going to happen to them?”
With a measured bite, Singing Rock took a mouthful of tobacco and chewed it steadily for a moment. Then he spat out onto the dust.
“That’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” he said, in his deep, serious voice. “You have to understand that if Misquamacus successfully emerges out of Toby’s mind and takes on physical shape, then the drain on energy which Toby suffers will almost certainly be fatal.”
Neil felt as if someone had hit him from behind. “What?” he said weakly.
Singing Rock lifted both his hands. “I am telling you that because you must be prepared for the very worst. There is very little chance that once the medicine men have used those children to reincarnate themselves, they will allow them to live.”
“Then what’s the use?” asked Neil. His face was very white. “What’s the use of trying to save them at all?”
“It’s not just the children,” said Harry. “We’re trying to prevent this whole state from being torn apart. But there’s something else, too, isn’t there, Singing Rock?”
Singing Rock hesitated, then nodded. “I guess you have a right to know the best as well as the worst. If by any slim chance we do manage to defeat these medicine men, and send them back to the outside, then the children will be restored unharmed. It is hard to explain to a white man why this should happen, but there is an eternal natural principle in Red Indian magic of balance and redress. A sort of occult Newton’s Law.”
Neil turned away and walked to the end of the veranda. Harry glanced at Singing Rock with an expression that suggested he might go after him and try to reassure him, but Singing Rock shook his head.
“Leave him. If he’s going to help us, he has to face up to the truth.”
Neil heard Singing Rock’s words, but he didn’t turn around. He looked out over the small yard that, until last week, had been his plain but happy home. With a feeling that brought tears to his eyes, he noticed that Toby had left his Tonka bulldozer out by the woodshed. He would have been annoyed normally, in case it rained and the bulldozer got rusty. But now it didn’t matter. Toby was never going to play with it again. It might as well stay there.
Inside the house, the telephone was ringing. He guessed it was probably Mr.
Saperstein, but somehow he couldn’t summon the energy to move from where he was. He heard Harry go inside and bang the kitchen door. His senses seemed to be dulled, and all he wanted to do was find a bed someplace and go to sleep.
Out of the corner of his eye, though, he was sure he could see something wavering in the grass beyond the fence. He peered more intently, and shaded his face against the dull, coarse light that filtered through the heavy clouds. There was something out there that was shifting and flapping like a pale transparent flag. Then it began to grow clearer, an instant photograph developing on plain paper. It was the figure of Dunbar, in his wide-brimmed hat and his coat, and with his gun belt slung low around his hips.
“Singing Rock!” said Neil, breathlessly.
Singing Rock raised his eyes, and then quickly looked to the place where Neil was pointing.
“It’s Dunbar!” said Neil. “That’s him-the man in the long white duster coat!”
The Indian medicine man rose to his feet. As he did so, Dunbar lifted his hat from his head and waved once. Then, gradually, like the morning mist from the ocean, he faded away again.
“Did you see him?” asked Neil, almost frantic. “Did you see him out there?”
Singing Rock said, “Yes, I saw him.”
“Thank God. Thank God for that. I was beginning to think I was imagining him.”
“I don’t know that his warnings can do anything to help us,” said Singing Rock. “It looks to me as though he’s just some disturbed spirit, vaguely manifesting himself around the fringe of all this astral activity.”
Neil didn’t take his eyes away from the grassy slope where Dunbar had vanished.
‘I’m not so sure,” he said softly. “I believe he helped me when the wooden man was after me, and I believe he’s going to try to help me now. Whenever he appears, I have this feeling of reassurance.”
Singing Rock looked briefly over at the hills beyond the fence. “Don’t rely too much on spirits,” he said. “Some of them are very treacherous. We have stories in South Dakota of demons who would take the shape of friendly dogs, and lead hunters into rivers and over the edge of cliffs.”
“Dunbar isn’t like that,” Neil said.
The kitchen door opened and Harry came out, holding a torn piece of brown envelope in his hand.
“Have they found them?” asked Neil. “Have they told you if Toby’s all right?”
Harry squinted at his scribbled notes. “They’ve found them. The bus is up at Lake Berryessa, where it was supposed to be. A Highway Patrol car spotted it parked on the bridge over Pope Creek.”
“Parked on the bridge? What was it doing there?” asked Neil. “Did they say where the children were?”
Harry nodded. “The children are inside the bus. When the Highway Patrol officers tried to drive up close to see what was wrong, their patrol car caught fire and explo
ded. One of the officers is suffering from serious burns.”
“Oh God,” said Neil. “It’s started.” “You’re damn right it’s started,” said Harry. “That must have been Master Andy Beaver at work. The automotive arsonist.”
Singing Rock said, “The boy called Andy Beaver is harboring the Paiute medicine man Broken Fire. I think so, anyway. He was the only child who referred to the day of the dark stars as the day of the mouth coming from the sky, which is an expression that only the Paiutes ever used. And, of course, he has Broken Fire’s talent for setting things ablaze at a distance.” “Broken Fire?” asked Harry. “Was he strong?”
Singing Rock laid a hand on his shoulder. “One of the strongest, I’m afraid. The only possible weaknesses he had were an inability to appease the demons of cholera and disease, and no talent for slaving the souls of his people who had been sent to the great outside by drinking too much whiskey, or by falling under iron horses. In other words, he was a master of every occult event except those which stemmed from things the white men had done-like spreading diseases, and building railroads, and distilling alcohol.”
Neil said, ‘Tor Christ’s sake don’t let’s stand here discussing the situation. Let’s get out there.”
“Neil’s right,” put in Harry. “If the Highway Patrol starts getting upset, they’re going to bring their guns out, and that’s going to be no fun for anyone. Especially them.”
“Very well,” nodded Singing Rock. “Can you bring my suitcase, Harry? And Neil-if you have any beer or soft drinks, and any cookies or cold cuts, then bring them along. It’s going to be the hardest night you ever went through.”
“Let’s just hope it isn’t the hardest and the last,” said Harry, pushing open the kitchen door.
Inland, as they drove in Neil’s pickup through the Valley of the Moon, the afternoon was densely hazy and hot. They negotiated the curved, cultivated hills that rose between Sonoma and Napa counties, past hillside farms of tan-colored cattle and furrowed fields, and then they were sloping down Into the broad flats of the southern Napa Valley. Ahead of them, blue and forested against dim sky, was the rugged outline of the Vaca Mountains. It was up there, beyond those peaks, that Lake Berryessa lay. A long rectangular sheet of ruffled water, twelve miles long and two miles across.
Singing Rock, steadily chewing tobacco, said, “In certain parts of New England, the Indians called rounded mountains uncanoonucks, which simply translated means
‘women’s breasts.’”
Harry, joggling up and down comfortably in his seat as Neil sped the pickup along the blacktop, commented, “What name do they have for medicine men who try to keep you amused by telling you trivial oddities of Indian lore?”
His elbow resting casually on the pickup’s window ledge, Singing Rock turned to Harry and smiled. “The same name they have for irritable paleface mystics.”
Neil leaned over and turned on the pickup’s radio. He twiddled the dial through blurts of country-and-western music, snatches of evangelism, burbles of laughing. He said,
“Maybe there’s some news about the school bus. The story should have gotten out by now.”
Singing Rock asked, “How long is it going to take us to get up to the lake from here?”
“Maybe another twenty minutes at most,” Neil told him. They were speeding along the freeway through Napa now, and he was switching lanes to leave the main road and head east through the city and up to the mountains.
He added, “I hope to God we’re not too late. If anything happened to Toby now, I tell you-”
Harry said reassuringly, “You heard what Singing Rock said. Nothing’s going to break until the moon goddess appears. It’s-what-four o’clock now. We’ve got six hours to go.”
They drove through the outskirts of Napa, along Lincoln Avenue. The traffic was heavy and flowing at a slow, sedate twenty miles an hour. There was nothing that Neil could do except hold his speed down and wait until they were clear of the city.
At each red traffic signal, he sat biting his lip and drumming his ringers on the steering wheel.
“Come on, come on, you bastard,” he muttered under his breath, as they finally crossed the city limit behind a rusting Matador. He put his foot down, and they pulled ahead, roaring along the eucalyptus-shaded avenue that led to the mountains.
A couple of miles east of Napa, the road began to rise sharply, and twist and turn itself between scrub and rocks. The pickup’s tires howled and whinnied as Neil kept his foot flat on the floor and spun them around one tight curve after another. They passed by fields of dry grasses, fences, and dusty roadside pull-offs. They crossed bridges and culverts. And up above them, the sky grew heavier and darker, thick with inky clouds. A branch of lightning flickered momentarily in the distance, and dried leaves rushed across the road in the draft of the oncoming storm.
Harry said, “The goddamn sky’s threatening enough, let alone the situation.”
Singing Rock raised a hand to hush him. “We’re getting close now. Very close. I’m going to need all my concentration.”
They drove around a curving downward grade, and the lake at last appeared. Its waters were almost black, even darker than the lowering clouds up above it. A surface wind lifted the waves in plumes of white spray, like the scattered feathers of a fallen bird. They looked sinister and unsettled, impenetrable depths that were waiting for the dead and the drowned.
“The Pope Creek bridge is around here,” said Neil, driving them along the rocky shoreline. Hardin and Maxwell and Burton creeks all run in together with Pope and they make quite an inlet.”
They rounded the corner toward the bridge, and they were confronted by a roadblock: half-a-dozen Highway Patrol cars, with their red lights flashing, a contingent of police from Napa, and a barricade of red-and-white sawhorses.
A cop in aviator sunglasses waved Neil to the side of the road.
“I’m sorry, fellow. You’re going to have to turn around and go back. The road’s going to be closed here for quite a white.”
Neil said, “My boy’s on that bus. I’m Neil Fenner. His name is Toby Fenner.”
The cop said, “You got some proof of that?”
Neil handed over his driver’s license. The cop scrutinized it, nodded, and gave it back. Then he pointed to the rough pull-off just before the bridge itself. “Park your vehicle there, please, off the highway. Then cross to the other side of the road and make yourself known to that officer with the bullhorn.” Neil said, “Are they okay so far? The kids?” The cop tugged at the peak of his cap. “As far as we know, sir. But nobody’s been able to get within fifty feet of the bus, and we can’t raise any answers with the bullhorn. A couple of officers got themselves hurt real bad.”
“I heard,” Neil told him.
Turning off the road, Neil parked the pickup where the cop had directed him. Then he and Harry and Singing Rock climbed out, and surveyed the place that Misquamacus had chosen for his battleground.
The creek was deep and wide here, and the bridge spanned almost three hundred feet. It was a straightforward, two-lane bridge, with a crisscross steel balustrade running along each side. A sign warned that it was forbidden to dive from the bridge into the creek, but Neil could remember seeing kids jumping off the railing into the water below just for the hell of it. It was a fifty-foot drop, but if the creek was flowing well, it was safe enough.
On the other side of the bridge was a wide dusty area which visiting tourists used as a motor-home park. The Highway Patrol had cleared it now and fenced it off. A police helicopter had landed there, and Neil could see a very senior police officer climbing out.
Halfway across the bridge stood the yellow school bus. It was parked diagonally across the highway, so that only a motorcyclist could have passed by on either side of it. It was still and silent, and its doors were closed. What was strangest of all, though, was that its windows were all blank white, and it was impossible to see what was going on inside it.
Neil said, “What’s t
hat stuff on the windows? I can’t see a damn thing.”
Singing Rock shaded his eyes, and then nodded. “As I thought. It’s ice.”
“Ice? In this heat?”
“Almost certainly. Within that bus, they have opened a gateway to the outside, and the outside is colder than anything you could possibly imagine.”
“If it’s colder than my apartment on a February night, then it’s cold,” said Harry.
Neil shaded his eyes, too, and examined the bus more carefully. Apart from the whorls of frost and ice on the windows, the ventilators on the roof were encrusted with ice, and even the highway itself sparkled with frozen crystals for ten or fifteen feet around.
“They must be dead,” he whispered. “No human being could survive in that kind of temperature.”
“No, they’re not dead,” Singing Rock told him. “They’re in a trance, of a kind, because they’re preparing the gateway for the arrival of their gods and demons. If you could look inside that bus now, you’d probably see them sitting quite still in their seats, and the whole place would be totally dark and cold. You’d think they were dead, but they’re not. This is what they have to do before Nepauz-had appears, in order to make it possible for Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah to manifest themselves.”
Neil said, “Hadn’t we better go talk to that officer in charge? Tell him what we know?”
Harry lit a cigarette and shrugged. “I don’t suppose he’ll believe us for one minute. I vote we do what we have to do without telling anybody.”
“But how can we? They may be planning to use weapons, and then what’s going to happen?”
Singing Rock rested his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “NeiFs right,” he said. “There could be terrible consequences if the police decide to use their weapons. At the moment, they don’t know what they’ve got on their hands. A mysterious busload of children with frozen windows, and a police car that’s blown up. They’re going to tread wary. But when the medicine men start bringing down the first of the demons, then it’s going to be all hell around here, and we could just as easily get ourselves killed as anybody else. Bullets, as a New York taxi driver once told me, ain’t got eyes.”
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