Burial

by Graham Masterton

  The three of us stood facing each other and held hands. Almost immediately I could feel an electric tingle go through me, as Amelia closed the circuit. She was always conscious of the spirits around her, all the time. Some days they used to light up her brain cells like a telephone exchange. Personally, I would have hated to be that sensitive. It was irritating enough listening to other people’s Walkmans, let alone other people’s souls. I would have told them all to lie down and get some rest, but Amelia had once told me that many recently-dead people can’t even grasp the fact that they’re dead. They wander around Purgatory or whatever you call it, wondering what time’s lunch, and when are they going to get out of these pajamas.

  Amelia closed her eyes. I gave Karen a last reassuring wink and then closed mine too. I don’t know why I was trying to reassure her. I had stood in this same room less than twenty-four hours ago, and seen a woman reduced to a grisly parody of a rubber-glove. My mouth was dry and my heart was cantering like a yearling. Bom-bom, bom-bom, bom-bom, bom-bom. They say that the second ‘bom’ you hear is the echo of the first ‘bom’, bouncing off the inside of your skull. They also say that one person’s guts, properly dried and prepared, could be used to string every tennis racquet used in the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament; and let me tell you, they use literally hundreds of racquets every year.

  I was trying to think of some more ‘Believe-It-Or-Not’-type facts — just to keep my mind off malevolent spirits — when Amelia suddenly said, ‘George Hope and Andrew Dane tree, room two-twelve —’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Who?’

  I opened my eyes. Karen had opened her eyes, too; but Amelia’s were still closed. She looked extremely pale, as if all the blood had drained out of her cheeks.

  ‘Asked to meet me,’ said Amelia, quite clearly.

  ‘Who asked to meet you?’ I urged her.

  ‘George Hope. Andrew Danetree. Room two-twelve, Friday. Six o’clock.’

  ‘Amelia, who are George Hope and Andrew Danetree when they’re at home?’

  But although she was talking, Amelia didn’t seem to be able to hear me. ‘I never knew your father. I thought you knew mine.’

  I was about to say something else, when Amelia half-opened her eyes and looked at me. ‘Harry,’ she whispered. ‘They’re coming.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Quiet, Harry, they’re coming. They’re very distressed.’

  She closed her eyes again. I glanced across at Karen, but now Karen had closed her eyes again, too. Personally, I preferred to keep my eyes open. I’m not cowardly by nature. Cautious, maybe. Self-protective. But I could see shadows stirring on the wall. I could sense a cold, encroaching darkness. If Amelia was going to be possessed in the same way that Martin had been possessed, then I didn’t want to be standing there with my eyes tight shut while it happened. I had many desires, many hopes, many ambitions. Being turned inside-out by an ill-tempered spirit wasn’t one of them.

  The temperature in the dining room dropped even further. I could see Amelia’s breath fuming out of her nostrils. Her hands grew colder, too, and she clutched me so tightly that I didn’t think that I would be able to prize myself free.

  ‘I am calling on the spirits who are wandering in this place,’ said Amelia. ‘I am asking them to show themselves.’

  I heard a very faint sound like a cat yowling. The atmosphere began to feel as if it were charged with static electricity. Bright steely sparks crackled from Amelia’s hair; and Karen’s hair began to lift, too, the way it does when you comb it too much. I felt an electrical buzzing sensation in my teeth, and pins and needles in my wrists.

  Then — for some reason that I can’t really describe — I began to feel seriously frightened. I’m not talking apprehensive or vaguely worried. I’m talking about the bowels melting, and the feeling that death was standing in the room with us. It was just like the feeling you get when you’ve been wading in the shallows of a chilly lake, and suddenly the bottom shelves away beneath your feet, and leaves you shocked and gasping, out of your depth.

  The air in front of me seemed to bend and distort. Again, I heard that cat-yowling sound. Yarrrooowwwww.

  ‘Amelia?’ I said; but Amelia couldn’t hear me. Her eyes were tightly closed and there were sparks dripping from her hair like crystal-bright raindrops.

  ‘Amelia?’ I repeated. This time my voice sounded slow and blurred. ‘Ahhhmmmeeeellliaaaahhhhh …’ But she kept her eyes closed; and she gripped my hand as tightly as before, if not tighter, and I knew that there was no disturbing her. She was closely in touch with the spirits, and even if it wasn’t dangerous to wake her, it was damned difficult. The spirits demand so much attention. In their sad, frightening way, they’re worse than children. They want everything, and they want it now. They seem to forget that they have all of eternity.

  As I’ve said before, I’m not particularly sensitive myself. Psychically sensitive, that is — although you can show me a movie with kids in it, and I’ll get all choked up before you can say ‘Boys’ Town.’ But Amelia was arousing something and I could feel it coming. I could feel it coming. It was tortured and cold and very strange and it was in pain. It was in pain.

  It was writhing the way that a worm writhes when you crush it on a concrete path. Wagging, rather than writhing, so that I felt horror and disgust as well as sympathy.

  It was a man. No, it wasn’t. It was men — two men, butchered and grisly and eyeless. I could scarcely see them. It was like watching a broken-up image on a dying TV. There was blood and bone and I could see a stump-like arm waving. And those eyeless eyes, begging for sight, or begging for extinction. But then the image wavered and disintegrated, and all I could see was a vague outline of that waggling motion, that hideous waggling, and hear those anguished voices. ‘Yaaaooowwwwwww, yarrrooowww — so agonized that they didn’t even sound human.

  In the summer of 1957, on the Sawmill River Parkway, I saw a station wagon burning, with a family inside. Father and mother and three kids. They were screaming for help, but the fire was so fierce that nobody could get close. All that anybody could do was stand around and watch the windows blacken, and the smoke roll up, and hope that the screaming would stop. My father had stopped the car and rolled down the window and stared for almost a minute without saying a word. Then he had driven on to Katonah, where my aunt lived, with tears in his eyes.

  This was the same. This was real people, suffering more than people were ever meant to suffer. You can read about pain in the papers but when you see it and hear it it’s something else.

  Amelia quivered. Karen grasped my hand even more tightly. Amelia said, in the strangest of voices, ‘Who are you? What did they do to you?’

  But then there was the highest of high-pitched shrieks, and for a split-second we saw a face hovering bright and foggy right in front of us, a man’s face, just about to turn, just about to speak. He looked like a man in young middle-age, with a broad forehead and deep-set eyes, and maybe a moustache — although this could have been a shadow.

  ‘Killing us,’ he blurted. ‘Killing us.’ Then, ‘Never knew … Hope and Danetree … never ever knew …’

  The head began to shrink, smaller and smaller, until it was only the size of a puppet’s head. Yet it continued to cry out, continued to plead for mercy. It shrank so small that it was not much bigger than a point of light.

  There was a moment of charged silence. I could feel through her clutching fingers just how tense Amelia was. Every fibre in her body was tightened to the point of squeaking, like sisal cords tightened in a tourniquet. Then suddenly she shrieked out, ‘Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!’ and the point of light exploded in front of us and we were sprayed with pints of warm, half-congealed blood.

  Drenched, disgusted, we broke the circle. Amelia, wiping her face, said, ‘Quick — I want you out of here — please.’

  ‘This is blood,’ said Karen, in disbelief, looking down at her black-sprayed blouse. ‘Amelia, this is blood.’

  Amelia closed the dining-room
door behind us and made a sign in the air that I didn’t understand.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked her.

  ‘Clidomancy,’ she said, tight-lipped.

  ‘Clidomancy? What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘God, this is revolting,’ she said, smearing the blood on her cheek. She went through to the kitchen and came back with towels so that we could wipe ourselves clean. I wiped blobs of jellyish blood onto a view of Niagara Falls. Next to me Karen was sickly silent.

  When Amelia had finished cleaning herself up, she dropped her towel and then went back to the dining room and vigorously shook the handle. It was obviously locked.

  She said, ‘Clidomancy is key-magic. My mother taught me how to do it. Lock, unlock. It’s very easy. You see all these movies where people can’t get out of the house because the doors have suddenly and mysteriously locked themselves … that’s what it is, clidomancy, although of course not many movie-makers have the slightest clue that it is.

  ‘Keys are iron and iron is the metal of the gods. Iron protects you from demonic possession. Iron protects you from disease, too. And if you place a key on the Fiftieth Psalm, and close the Bible tight, and bind it with a virgin’s hair, and then hang it by a hook, the Bible will turn and twist whenever you mention the name of somebody who has hurt you or stolen something from you.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you really believe that,’ I said.

  She stared back at me without flinching. ‘Do you want to try opening that door?’ she challenged me.

  I hesitated. Then I said, ‘No, I guess not.’

  Karen was drying her hands. ‘What happened in there?’ she asked. ‘I was so scared!’

  ‘I’m not totally sure,’ said Amelia.’ But the moment I tried to make contact, I could feel a spirit reaching out for me. I felt as if it had actually been waiting for me to make contact.’

  ‘Do you know who it was?’

  ‘Unh-hunh. It didn’t identify itself. It was strangely weak … but at the same time it wanted very much to help me. How can I put it? It felt like a guide. It felt like somebody who belonged here — somebody who knew this land and its history very well.’

  ‘An Indian spirit?’

  ‘More than likely.’

  ‘Could it have been Singing Rock?’

  ‘I’m not sure. You saw him here before so it’s highly probable. I had the feeling that it knew who I was, and why I was here. On the other hand he was very weak, very vague and indistinct.’

  She paused. ‘How did Singing Rock die? You never told me.’

  ‘I made a throat-cutting gesture with my finger. ‘Misquamacus — ah — took his head off.’ I hadn’t meant my voice to sound choked up. I hadn’t realized that it would. But sometimes your emotions can ambush you when you’re least expecting it.

  ‘Oh, Harry, I’m sorry,’ said Amelia. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘It’s okay, forget it. What’s a little decapitation between friends?’

  Amelia said, ‘The point is, if he died that way, that might account for how weak his spirit seems to be. When a person suffers a traumatic death that often makes them very restless and erratic spirits.’

  ‘He was always so damned pragmatic,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine that? A pragmatic medicine-man?’ I tried to make a joke of it, but I was already worried that all of those nightmares that had plagued me after Singing Rock’s death would come creeping out from under my pillow again. I hadn’t thought about the way in which Singing Rock had died for a very long time; and I didn’t want to start thinking about it again. I had a sharp mental picture of it that never faded and never grew any less horrifying. To watch somebody’s face flying away from you with an expression of total fear on it … to see them still looking at you when their head is ten feet away from their body — well, that’s more than some of us can happily live with.

  Amelia said, ‘I don’t usually like to make uninformed guesses, but I’m almost sure that we’re dealing with some kind of Indian magic here. Either Indian or early Spanish. It has a completely different feel to white and European magic. It’s very pictorial, if you know what I mean; and it’s very much concerned with elemental things like fire and water, darkness and light, wind and rain.

  ‘Indian magic is the magic of life and death — whereas white man’s magic is usually all about things like money and revenge on your employer and making people love you. “O Great Satan, I want to be irresistible to men.” Indians are much more concerned with basic survival.’

  ‘The noble savage strikes again,’ I remarked.

  ‘Not so noble in this case,’ said Amelia. ‘Those two men we saw in there were the victims of a recent murder. It wasn’t any ordinary murder, either. They were killed in such a way that neither their bodies nor their souls will ever be able to rest. They will suffer that torture for ever. Even if we manage to find out what’s going on, and what commands they were given, we will never be able to release them. To be released, you need either a whole body or a whole spirit They don’t have either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Karen, in bewilderment.

  ‘I mean that whoever killed them didn’t just take their bodies to pieces. It took their souls to pieces, too.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so not until now. But I don’t know yet what kind of force this is. You mentioned a shadow.’

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘But this time I didn’t sense the shadow so strongly. It was there, hovering in the background, but that was all.’

  ‘In that case it was probably away someplace else, working out its temper on somebody else. Just as well, too.’

  Karen said, ‘What about the furniture? Do you have any idea why all the furniture slid across the room like that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Amelia. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. The last time I saw anything like that was in a house in Poughkeepsie, years and years ago when I first started contacting the spirits.

  ‘The owner of the house was a man called Grant. He was a real psycho. He killed one of his daughters by pressing her face onto an electric hotplate.’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t believe it,’ said Karen.

  ‘Oh, people do worse,’ said Amelia. ‘Mr Grant said he was only trying to teach his daughter a lesson because she was so vain about her looks. She thought she was God’s gift to men. He wanted to see how sassy she could be without a face.

  ‘Anyway, I was asked to go to the house to help clear it, because after Mr Grant had been sent up the river the new owners kept hearing terrible screams in the middle of the night, and smelling a strong smell like burning liver. Yes, I know, it’s disgusting, isn’t it? But it was true.’

  ‘What has this to do with our two friends in the dining room?’ I asked, glancing without too much confidence at Amelia’s magically locked door.

  ‘I’m not altogether sure. But when I visited the Grant house I found that dozens of small objects like books and hair-ribbons and bobby-pins were all crowded against the skirting-board in the girl’s bedroom. No matter how I tried to move them, I couldn’t. As fast as I took one book away another tumbled back in its place. It then occurred to me that all of the objects were in direct line with the place by the cooker where the girl had been killed. It was like they were being drawn towards it; as if they were being pulled by a magnet.

  ‘I couldn’t work out what to do about it, but a couple of months later I struck lucky. I met a professor from SUNY Utica Rome, Madron Vaudrey. One of his specialties was to see how many vital influences survived in the human mind and body after clinical death — such as the discharge of electrical impulses, the sending-out of viral codings, things like that Purely by accident, he had found that in scores of recorded cases, objects belonging to dead people — particularly objects that they had regularly worn during their lifetime — would measurably move towards the place where they had died.

  ‘He said that in his experience the more violent or painful the death, the furth
er the objects would move. In one case, an eighty-two-year-old man was murdered by his two sons. After his death, his spectacles moved across the floor towards him, nearly twelve feet, I think it was. It was all recorded on police video. I don’t know — it’s almost as if, when a soul goes, it leaves a vacuum, and sympathetic objects try to fill it. Or maybe they’re trying to follow their owners into the other world.’

  ‘But how about Naomi Greenberg’s furniture?’ I asked her. ‘It didn’t belong to either of those two murdered men — George Hope and Andrew what’s-his-face — not unless they were sent here from the finance company to repossess it, and that’s not what you call “sympathetic”. So why should it move when they were killed?’

  Amelia shrugged. ‘I really don’t know. But what I do know is that they probably died on the other side of Mrs Greenberg’s dining-room wall; and very violently. Maybe they were killed so brutally that enough negative force was set up to cause the furniture to move. After all, we’re not talking about any ordinary kind of killing here. Those men were taken to pieces, and their souls put into sokwet. That means “eclipse” in MicMac. Total darkness in any language.’

  ‘What’s on the other side of that wall?’ I asked Karen.

  ‘That’s a party wall,’ Karen told me. ‘They share it with the Belford Hotel.’

  ‘So that’s a hotel room, on the other side of there?’

  ‘I guess it must be.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, briskly chafing my hands together. ‘The best thing we can do is go take a look.’

  Amelia said, ‘Harry, you ought to understand how dangerous this is going to be. We’re not dealing with poltergeists or bad-mannered demons who make you puke custard. We’re dealing with some very strong and some very determined people who just happen to be dead.’

  ‘What about the shadow thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe we could get some expert advice on that.’

  ‘That shadow thing turned Martin into a psychopath.’

  ‘I know.’ Amelia looked tired. I was tempted to put my arm around her but then I thought about Karen and I decided that it probably wasn’t the best thing to do, not right now. It was difficult enough fighting the wrath of a murderous shadow thing, without fighting the wrath of two women.