Burial

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I’m not talking about your mother, I’m talking about you. I don’t even know if I feel this way about you.’

  Karen grasped my cock in her hand and gave it three arousing rubs. ‘It looks as if you do.’

  ‘Karen —’

  ‘Ssh, this is the difficult bit.’

  She stretched the rubber over my swollen glans, and then carefully unrolled it down the shaft I was disconcerted to see when she’d finished that my cock had turned bright emerald.

  ‘They come in colours,’ she said. ‘Green was all I had left.’

  She climbed over me and kissed me again. Her small breasts brushed against my bare chest, and her nipples crinkled. They were pointed and pale-pink, with just a hint of brown, like dying rose-petals.

  We kissed deep and long. I brushed back her hair, and looked into her eyes. She was so close that I could see every crinkle of her irises; every stray fleck of colour.

  ‘I never thought of you this way,’ I told her.

  She smiled. ‘I never thought of you any other way. Besides — what choice do we have?’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘After what happened, how could any of us possibly form any kind of relationship with anybody else? We’re the only ones who know, the only ones who really saw. When I was standing at the altar with Jim I was promising to love him in the name of God, but all the time I was wearing this pendant around my neck to protect me from the spirits that I really believed in.’

  ‘Karen —’

  She kissed my eyelids, kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Harry, I’m not Karen Tandy any more. I’m not that innocent young girl who first came to you for help. I’ve grown up, I’ve married, I’ve learned what’s what I’m Karen van Hooven who fancies your body; if only for once.’

  With that, she lifted herself over me, took hold of my cock in her right hand, and positioned it up between her legs. She excited me. I can’t say that she didn’t She was very slim and very small, and whatever she said she was still a child-woman. I reached up and touched her breast, and gently rolled her nipple between finger and thumb, and kissed her chin and her neck and anywhere else I could reach.

  When she sat down on me, she felt very tight and very slippery and very warm. She threw back her head and closed her eyes and rode up and down as if she were crossing the prairies on a slow and faithful horse. I kept thinking to myself, you shouldn’t be doing this … this girl believes in you, this girl has faith in you, you‘re supposed to take care of her, not screw her. What would her aunt think?

  But I looked down and saw her lean hips rising and falling over mine; and the neatly-clipped triangular bush of her pubic hair; and my shiny emerald-green cock sliding in and out of her swollen pink lips. And I was turned on, I admit it Green cock, pink flesh, it turned me on.

  I reared up and turned her over onto her back. I kissed her and snuzzled her neck. I squeezed her breasts and tugged her nipples between my fingers. Then I pushed myself deep inside her, and deeper, until she lifted both her legs in the air and gasped and cried out, and made other noises like suddenly-disturbed doves.

  She cupped my balls in her hand and I could feel how scrunched-up they were: all ready to shoot. I wished to God that condoms hadn’t been invented, or better still, that communicable diseases hadn’t made them necessary. But that was the last complicated thought that I had before I filled the condom in three bulging bursts, and Karen dug her nails into my back and held me tight.

  At last I dropped back onto my side of the bed. I kissed her. I was sweating so much that my hair stuck to my forehead like Julius Caesar. All I needed was a laurel wreath. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She kissed me back, licked my sweat. ‘What are you sorry for?’

  ‘Well, I could have lasted longer. It’s been a while, that’s all. Gives a man an itchy trigger.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I came.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Just because I didn’t scream and throw myself around.’

  ‘You actually had a climax?’

  ‘Of course I did. I wouldn’t lie about it.’

  I stared at her. I couldn’t believe it. All of the ladies with whom I usually consorted made such a song-and-dance about climaxing that you would have thought that their sexual responses were choreographed by Leo Karibian — you know, the guy who did West Side Story. Maybe they were trying to give me value for money. Maybe they were faking it.

  But Karen simply smiled and kissed me again and said, ‘I came, okay? I really did. As soon as you got on top of me.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling pleased.

  ‘It was gorgeous,’ she said, and snuggled under my armpit.

  We lay like that for almost an hour. We both dozed. I had more intermittent dreams about the Greenbergs’ apartment, and I was sure that I could see a snake gliding transparently beneath the bed, with just the faintest hint of a rattle. I opened my eyes and the sun was still shining through the drapes, and the telephone was warbling.

  ‘You want me to answer it?’ asked Karen, in a blurry voice. But I said, ‘No, I’ll answer it. You stay where you are.’

  It was Sergeant Friendly, from the 13th Precinct He sounded tired. ‘You asked me to call when your friend had seen his lawyer.’

  ‘Oh, sure, thanks. I owe you.’

  Karen was sitting up in bed, bare-breasted. I didn’t know whether I had known her long enough to be permitted an eyeful or not. Sometimes even long-term ladies get upset if you stare too open-mouthed at their gazongas. Not that Karen’s were gazongas, more like modest-sized meringues with cherries on top.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  I tugged on my pants. ‘The police. I can talk to Martin.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Ten after eleven.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  I thought about it; but then I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t want you to get mixed up in this for a second time.’

  She looked at me with eyes like dark smudges. ‘You’re still so sure that it’s him?’

  I nodded. ‘It all fits. I didn’t want it to fit. I tried to think of a hundred possible ways in which it wouldn’t. But it does; and I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do next. That’s why I want to talk to Martin.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, with determination, and her little breasts jiggled.

  Martin was waiting for me in a stuffy interview room with windows that were covered in dented steel mesh. Outside I could see rooftops and warehouses and water-towers, and a thin stratum of idle clouds. There was a hot, glazed look to the lower east side that for some reason reminded me of that poem ‘By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.’ You’d never believe it, but I first came across that poem in an old Pogo strip, and it wasn’t until fifteen years later that I realized that it wasn’t Walt Kelly who had written it, but Rudyard Kipling. Goes to show, doesn’t it. I’ve got all the style, but none of the education.

  A bored Hispanic police officer with Elvis Presley side-burns (Las Vegas era) leaned against the flaking green wall and tried to beat the world chewing-gum noise record. Martin sat at the cheap sun-faded table looking diminished and grey. They had given him a clean denim shirt and jeans, and allowed him to shave, but he still looked haunted and strange, as if his face was a half-assembled jigsaw.

  The chair made a scraping noise as I pulled it out. Martin looked up. ‘Harry,’ he said.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘As well as can be expected. My lawyer’s already started to make lateral noises about pleading insanity. He was my father’s attorney, yet there he was screaming at me. ‘You pulled her muff out of her mouth, and you want to plead what?’

  I drummed the table with my fingertips. By the old Moulmein Pagoda. ‘How are you going to plead?’

  ‘You know how. You know what happened. I was possessed. I was taken over completely.’

  There was no point in being ridicu
lous about it. I said, ‘Yes, I know you were. If I had any way of proving it, they’d let you out of here in three minutes flat.’

  ‘It’s never happened to me before. Usually, I can control any spirit from any age … the older the better. They’re usually so gentle, so sympathetic. But this one — my God, you have no idea. This one hit me like a locomotive. It was big, it was dark, it was powerful — and it was so vengeful, I’ve never felt anything like it. It wanted to tear my heart out, and everybody else’s heart out, too.’

  ‘How did you reach it?’ I asked him. ‘Through Singing Rock?’

  ‘Unh-hunh. He shook his head. ‘I felt Singing Rock … Singing Rock passed me by, like a wind. Singing Rock didn’t want me to go any further. But of course I knew better. Don’t the living always know better than the dead?’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  Martin wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. His eyes shifted quickly and furtively from side to side, as if he were afraid of being overheard. ‘I didn’t have to do anything at all — which is very unusual. I was approached. A man in a blue cavalry uniform came up to me. His head was all bone and scabs, like he’d been scalped. I’ve never been approached by a spirit like that before. He was angry; calm but angry. He had a moustache and his moustache was all stringy with blood. He couldn’t look at me directly. It was very unusual. He said that I should have stayed away; but since I hadn’t, he’d show me the cause of all the trouble.’

  I narrowed my eyes. ‘What kind of condition were you in then? I mean, were you dreaming, were you in a trance?’

  Martin hesitated. ‘It’s very hard to explain to somebody who’s never experienced it. I call it my ghost phase. It’s when I’m here in body but someplace else in mind. I was conscious of the room, conscious of you … but at the same time there’s this total darkness, this total singing emptiness, and the spirits come walking out of the emptiness like people coming off a plane.’

  ‘Were you scared?’

  ‘Is the Pope Polish?’

  I sat back in my hard folding chair. By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy, I was supposed to be reading Mrs Herbert Bugliosi’s tea-leaves in less than twenty minutes — what had involved me in all of this? Where had my peaceful existence suddenly disappeared to? The smiles, the flirtatious thigh-crossings, the fluttering eyelashes, the money, the idle afternoons? Today Mrs Herbert Bugliosi’s tea-leaves, tomorrow Aqueduct. Leastways, that had been the game-plan.

  ‘What was it like?’ I asked Martin, in a low voice.

  He pulled a face. ‘I don’t remember particularly well. It was dark. It was very dark. It was like a shadow and a magnet and a dead body. Cold, you know? Dark and cold. But alive, too, the same way that electricity’s alive. Plenty of lethal voltage; plenty of sparks; but no soul.’

  ‘Did you see it?’ I asked him.

  He stared at me. ‘See it? I was it! It took me over completely.’

  ‘When it took you over like that were you conscious? Were you aware of what it was doing to you?’

  Martin emphatically nodded. ‘You bet I was aware of what it was doing to me. That was part of its ploy, if you ask me. To kill, yes — as a grisly lesson that we shouldn’t interfere. But to show us, too, that it cared so little for any of our lives that it would turn us inside-out, without a moment’s hesitation. Rip, glug, splutch, Geronimo.’

  ‘Was it a Red Indian spirit?’

  ‘I don’t know … I wasn’t aware of it being Red Indian. Then again, I don’t know very much about Red Indians. I never met one, not in the flesh. I think the only Red Indians I ever saw were in Jeff Chandler movies.’

  ‘Just now, you said “Geronimo.”’

  He brushed his sleeve, crossed and re-crossed his legs. ‘People who jump off twenty-three-storey buildings say ‘Geronimo.’ It’s a figure of speech, that’s all.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I told you … he was dark and cold. A shadow, that’s all I saw. And felt, too, right inside my body, if you want to know the real preposterous truth.’

  ‘But you had no feeling that he might be an Indian?’

  Martin shook his head. ‘No. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t. You and I don’t normally go around thinking “oh, we’re Caucasians,” do we?’

  ‘I guess,’ I acknowledged. I sat back and looked at him. I had the oddest feeling that he wasn’t being straight with me. I couldn’t think why. He had already been charged with murder in the first degree, and it must have been worth his while to think of anything that could prove his innocence, no matter how unlikely it might be.

  ‘My lawyer isn’t exactly optimistic,’ he said. He gave a cynical, lopsided smile. ‘Proving demonic possession to twelve simple people and true is going to be uphill all the way, believe me.’

  ‘You’re really going to use that as a defence?’

  ‘What else can I do? I turned that poor woman inside-out. I slaughtered her husband in cold blood. If I plead insanity, they’ll send me to the maximum-security insane asylum and throw away the key.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt as if Martin’s plight was entirely my fault. Of course I was quite prepared to stand up in his defence and tell the court that he had been totally possessed by a vengeful, rampaging spirit, and that he hadn’t been responsible for anything that he had done. But what would that achieve? They would probably send me to the funny farm, too.

  I stood up. ‘I guess I’d better go,’ I told him. ‘If you think of anything — anything at all — then, please, don’t keep it to yourself. I know that it wasn’t you who killed the Greenbergs, and Karen knows that it wasn’t you. But we have to find a way of proving it.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Martin, without looking up. ‘If you’re thinking of trying another seance, don’t. That spirit is really very dangerous indeed — and what we saw last night … that’s just the tip of a very black iceberg.’

  ‘Go on,’ I told him.

  He took a deep breath. ‘Something’s happening, Harry. Something major. I’ve never felt such spirit disturbance ever. I can feel it even now. It’s like the whole damned spirit world is in turmoil. You know when there’s an earthquake, the way people rush around in a panic? Well, that’s what it’s like in the spirit world.’

  ‘And what happened to you yesterday? That was part of it?’

  He didn’t answer. I stood looking at him but he wouldn’t raise his eyes and he wouldn’t speak. After a while I nodded to the cop with the Elvis Presley sideburns and he unlocked the door for me.

  ‘Harry,’ said Martin, as I was about to leave. ‘Thanks for coming. I don’t blame you for what happened. I was always aware of the risks.’

  ‘We’ll get you out of this,’ I assured him. ‘I guarantee it.’

  He smiled. ‘Nobody can make guarantees in our business, Harry.’

  I left the precinct. I felt worried and sweaty and disoriented. I particularly didn’t like what Martin had said about turmoil in the spirit world. I had seen turmoil in the spirit world before; and how it could spill over into the world of the living. The living and the dead exist side by side, cheek by jowl, and when something goes wrong in one world, it can have a catastrophic effect on the other world, too.

  People can die before their time has come. People whose time has already come can walk the streets. There’s only the thinnest of lines between dead and alive. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t good old-fashioned cynicism that made me the worst of fortune-tellers, but my fear of crossing that thinnest of lines and mingling with things that didn’t concern me. Like death. Like shadows. Like women turned inside-out.

  I hailed a taxi on Broadway and asked the driver to take me uptown. The day was varnished with heat, and the driver had a short-sleeved drip-dry shirt and some of the strongest body odour that I had smelled in years. He told me his son played bass in a heavy metal band. I fretted on the sticky back seat and kept dabbing my forehead with a balled-up Kleenex. ‘Sure,’ I kept saying
. ‘Oh, really?’

  Out of the cab windows, as we drove up Broadway, I kept catching people staring at me. Bagel-sellers, cops, shoppers with too many bags. It felt as if I was under surveillance. I knew that it was nothing more than my imagination, but all the same I found it disturbing. The cab driver’s eyes floated disembodied in his rear-view mirror, and he was watching me, too. By the old Moulmein Pagoda.

  The only feeling of pride and security I had was that Martin hadn’t said ‘my business’ but ‘our business.’ At least he considered that we were both mediums together, in the same wacky profession. At least it showed he had some confidence in me.

  I wished to God that I had half his confidence.

  Amelia listened to me gravely. The classroom was flooded with dusty golden light. A small boy with spiky hair and Coke-bottle eyeglasses stood a little way off, clutching a crayon drawing of bombers destroying a city. It looked a damn sight better than Picasso’s Guernica.

  Amelia said, ‘I can’t, Harry, I gave it all up.’

  ‘I know. I know you did. But who else can I turn to? If he’s lucky, Martin’s going to end up in Attica for ever. It’ll kill him.’

  ‘I heard about it on the news this morning,’ Amelia said. Her eyes were pale as agates. The sun turned her hair into filaments of gold: the kind of gold that Rumpelstiltskin used to spin, before they found out his name. And when they found out his name, he stamped his foot, and he plunged right through the floor to the world of shadows underneath, for ever. What did I tell you? Thin-skinned place, this planet.

  ‘Amelia,’ I said, ‘I could help him if I had half of your talent.’

  She looked at me acutely. ‘If the truth were known, Harry, you probably have more.’

  ‘Amelia … please.’

  The small boy with the spiky hair came anxiously forward and presented his drawing. Amelia took it and examined it carefully.

  ‘It’s very well drawn, Douglas. Don’t you think it’s kind of violent?’

  Douglas shook his head. ‘That’s not a town, with people or anything.’

  ‘Oh, no? But there are buildings here. Who lives in these buildings?’