Burial

by Graham Masterton

‘I command you open!’ cried Amelia. ‘By salt, by fire, by mirror, by key!’

  I wrenched at the door again, but it stayed adamantly shut.

  ‘Open once! Open twice!’ Amelia screamed at it, ‘Open, demon! Open ghost! Nail this devil to the post!’

  Behind me, I heard an appalling rumbling noise, as if the entire building were collapsing. I looked around to see the monstrous shadow ripping Mr Rheiner’s scalp off, blood and hair and ragged skin. Then, almost as an afterthought, with all the casualness of true cruelty, it twisted off his arms and legs.

  There was a moment’s lull, and then we were scourged by a fierce, cold wind, full of blood and grit and pungent, eye-stinging smoke. Karen and Amelia were both screaming. Blood streaked Karen’s cheek and poured from her chin. Blood dripped from Amelia’s hair.

  ‘Open once! Open twice!’ Amelia was shrieking.

  Amelia may have been able to lock doors, but she sure as hell couldn’t open them: not when she was up against a spiritual force as violent as this. I kicked at the door and kicked again, and at last one of the lower panels began to split.

  ‘Harry, for God’s sake!’ Amelia urged me.

  I quickly looked over my shoulder. As I did so, I caught sight of my face in the mirror on the bedroom wall. I had seen Karen and Amelia smothered in Mr Rheiner’s blood, but I hadn’t realized that my face, too, had been turned into a scarlet and grisly mask. I shouted out loud in horror and surprise, and Amelia demanded, ‘What? What?’

  ‘Jesus,’ I started to say. ‘I thought I was — ’ But behind us the shadow was filling the room, darker and colder, looming over us like cruelty and menace made visible. I didn’t have time to think. I had to kick.

  I slammed my foot into the door again and again. The left-hand lower panel splintered and burst. Then I managed to kick out the centre rail. I could hear Karen screaming almost continuously, but there was nothing I could do but give the door two more kicks until it cracked into pieces.

  ‘Out!’ I shouted, catching hold of Amelia’s arm. Bloody-faced, dazed, Amelia stepped over the broken framework and scrambled into the corridor.

  I turned round to help Karen. But Karen had suddenly stopped screaming. She was standing with her arms by her sides, blood-smeared and bedraggled and rigid, staring at me with a peculiar expression — not so much an expression of alarm, but something much more frightening — an expression of hopelessness, as if she had already given up.

  ‘Karen? I said.

  The shadow was all around her. It seemed to pass across her face like a cloud passing over the sun. I looked up at it, swallowing in fear, and I swear I could see the shape of a huge distorted head, nodding slightly, as if it were too heavy and over-calcified for its owner to carry. I heard a low groaning sound, too, a vibration so low that it made my teeth buzz.

  ‘Karen, are you okay?’

  Karen didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if she could hear me or not.

  ‘Karen, all you have to do is walk towards me. One step at a time.’

  Beside the bed, Mr Rheiner’s bloodied torso rolled without warning, and disappeared into the empty hole. There was a slight flicker of light that reminded me of summer lightning out on the plains. Mr Rheiner’s scalp slithered into the hole, too, like an obedient rat, leaving a glistening maroon trail. Then part of his stomach twitched after it, some terrible scarlet part that I couldn’t even identify. Then his artificial leg. Another slight flicker of light.

  Karen stood beneath the shadow and her eyes were wide.

  ‘Karen,’ I said, reaching out my hand. ‘Just take it real easy, everything’s going to be fine.’

  Still she said nothing. I didn’t even know whether she could see me or not. Her eyes didn’t appear to be properly focused.

  ‘Karen, I want you to take hold of my hand. Everything’s fine. It’s only a shadow, right? It’s nothing. If it has any power to hurt you, that power comes from you, from inside your own head.’ I tapped my forehead, in case she didn’t understand. ‘All you have to do is say, “It can’t hurt me, it’s only a shadow,” and then take hold of my hand.’

  Karen’s eyes turned glazed and dreamy. One second she had been screaming-hysterical. Now she looked as if she were high on magic mushrooms. Slow, strange, otherworldly.

  ‘You took her away from me before …’ she whispered. ‘This time you will not be so lucky.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about? Karen — come on!’ I reached out and tried to snatch her hand from her side.

  But the hand I touched wasn’t Karen’s hand. It surely didn’t feel like Karen’s hand. It felt cold and dry and wrinkled, like a man’s hand, a man with rings and beads around his fingers. I felt something else, too. The spidery tickling of something hairy that must have been invisibly dangling round this man’s wrist.

  I jerked my hand away and stared at Karen, bewildered.

  ‘You can do nothing, white devil — nothing at all. You have no power over me now. I have learned my warcraft well.’

  ‘Harry!’ called Amelia, from the corridor outside. ‘Are you all right in there? Where’s Karen?’

  ‘Just wait up!’ I called back. ‘Please, Amelia — stay where you are! I’ll be out in a minute!’

  I tried to sound confident. I tried to sound as if I was in control. But in actual fact my heart was thumping slowly and painfully, and my mouth was filled with the sharp penny-dreadful taste of fear.

  Karen said,’ Once I travelled like the shadow of the eagle over many thousands of moons to reclaim what truly belonged to my people.’ Her voice was extraordinary, as if five or six people were all speaking at once, in chorus. Her face was still veiled in shadow. ‘I was reborn, and I sought my just revenge. But I did not understand how much you had changed our world. I did not understand that you had destroyed not only our lodges and our hunting-grounds, but our sacred places, too. The lakes and rivers in which our water-spirits once thrived are now as dead as your souls. The air in which our wind-spirits once flew is poisoned as your hearts are poisoned. Even the grasses and the trees have been suffocated, like unwanted children.’

  Karen paused, and then she said, ‘In such a world, I had no power. So I called on more of my kind; and more of my spirits; but still we had no power. You had done more than murder my people; you had murdered a cosmos. You had murdered spirits which will never walk this earth again — fragile spirits, subtle spirits — spirits which can tell a hunter where a deer is concealed, or how a stream will flow. You had murdered spirits of lightning and rain.

  ‘The sadness is that you destroyed all of these things before you ever had a chance to encounter them. You laid waste an entire world — and you were not even aware that it was there.’

  I looked Karen directly in the eyes. Her pupils were darkly dilated, and I knew that he was there. He was using her to speak in the way that he had used her to speak before. Those without substance have to speak through those who have.

  ‘Misquamacus,’ I said, my voice shaking with emotion and rage. ‘Misquamacus the greatest of all Algonquin wonder-workers. Misquamacus to whom time and space mean absolutely zilch. Misquamacus who kills innocent people without any guilt whatsoever; and who hides himself like a jackrabbit in the souls of children and defenceless women.’

  Karen’s eyes flared. ‘Do you want me to take this woman’s scalp, right in front of your eyes?’

  ‘Are you brave enough?’ I challenged him. Thinking — please God, don’t let him be brave enough. Please God, make him proud and arrogant, rather than cruel.

  And please God, shoehorn him out of her, would You, please, and then connect him up to all of the lightning-bolts in heaven above, and cremate him for good and all.

  ‘Harry!’ called Amelia, in high anxiety. ‘What’s happening?’

  I held out my hand yet again. ‘Misquamacus, this woman has no quarrel with you. None of us do. Please, let her go.’

  Karen raised both hands, and covered her face so that only her eyes looked out. ‘I
have need of her. She was once my host and my protector. She will be so again. She will speak for me; and she will be my hostage, too, until my work among the shadows is all done, and the sacred lands are sacred again, and my people can ride in the wind.’

  ‘Misquamacus!’ I shouted at him. ‘You can’t take Karen, not again! It’ll kill her!’

  ‘When you speak of one woman’s death, think of Sand Creek. Think of Wounded Knee.’

  ‘Don’t take her, please,’ I begged him. Thinking: come on, God, come on, God. For Christ’s sake, come on, God. Lightning-bolts, earthquakes, anything!’ Listen — don’t take her, take me.’ Shades of Father Karras!

  But Misquamacus had lived and died and travelled through long shadowy centuries to avenge and protect his people. He had suffered agonies of body and agonies of spirit. Even if there was anything left in him that was still human, there was nothing left in him that was at all forgiving. Not towards the white devils, who sat in automobiles all across his hunting-grounds, polluting the air so that the wind-spirits fell out of the sky like suffocated doves. Not towards the white devils, who had poisoned the very last ghost in his sacred lakes, and turned water into his enemy rather than his friend.

  I almost wished I could sympathize with him. But I was me and he was him, and tepees and buffalo-hunting were a little behind the times as far as world economics went. We couldn’t fight the Japanese electronics industry with wind-spirits and ethnic sentiment and a few hundred Navajo blankets.

  Karen kept her hands over her face. Her eyes glittered like other eyes. ‘I have learned much, white devil. Now it is your turn to learn. You have your Day of Judgment — we have ours. Soon you will discover what it is like to live, as we have, in the Great Outside, without light or hope.’

  ‘Misquamacus, let her go.’

  I tried to grab her. I caught the sleeve of her blouse. But then the shadow collapsed on top of me like five sackfuls of coal, and I was buried in blackness. I heard Karen cry out. Not so much a scream, but a heart-rending cry for help. Not again, not again, not that hideous nightmare again!

  I managed to raise my head just in time to see the shadow funneling back into the empty hole in the floor, and Karen sliding in with it.

  ‘Karen!’ I snatched her hand, and for a long, strained moment I managed to keep a tenuous, three-fingered hold on her. ‘Karen, fight back!’

  I tried to adjust my grip, get a better hold. Karen was being dragged away from me with almost irresistible force, as if she were being sucked into a giant vacuum-cleaner. She wasn’t crying; she wasn’t screaming. She was concentrating every last ounce of strength on holding onto my hand.

  I felt myself being dragged along the floor, too. I managed to hook my left foot around the leg of the left-hand bed, and that slowed us down a little. Karen had actually disappeared into the hole, right up to her waist, and she was twisting her body from side to side. I didn’t know whether this hole bore any resemblance to quicksand — whether you sank more quickly if you struggled — but I shouted, ‘Keep still! Keep still! Just pull!’

  Right behind me, Amelia came back into the room, and without a word she took hold of my belt in one hand and seized hold of the bed with the other.

  For a few seconds, I believed that we were winning. Karen managed to lift one knee onto the brink of the hole, and I reached out with my other hand and caught hold of the shoulder of her blouse.

  ‘Pull!’ I told Amelia ‘One big effort and we should get her out!’

  I grunted and strained and we gained an inch; and then another inch.

  ‘Give me your other hand!’ I told Karen. ‘Here — give me your other hand!’

  I offered her my right hand. She reached out for it.

  ‘That’s it, you’ve almost done it!’

  But then she looked at me with wild piggy-eyed triumph, and harshly laughed in my face. Her hand was cold and hard as a claw, a man’s hand, and she twisted my fingers around until I heard the cartilage crunch.

  I roared at her, ‘Stop, Karen, don’t let him do it!’ But she twisted my left hand, too, almost crushing my fingers. The pain was incredible. I had to let her go.

  ‘Karen!’ I yelled. But with a sharp ffwwooossshhh! she slid across the rug and into the empty hole. Immediately, the rug closed up around her, and the last I saw of her was an upraised hand, clutching, clutching, like the hand of a swimmer going down for the third time.

  I hammered on the floor with my fist but it was solid; and I knew that I had lost her.

  Amelia touched my shoulder. ‘Harry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Harry. I wish I could have helped more. I wish I hadn’t helped at all.’

  I knew what she meant. I slowly stood up and looked around the smoky, blood-spattered room.

  ‘Misquamacus,’ I repeated. ‘I really hoped and prayed that I’d seen the last of him. The great Indian crusader. The great Red hope.’

  ‘Harry, there’s nothing more you can do.’

  ‘Jesus!’ I shouted. I punched the wall in anger and grief and blinding frustration. ‘Doesn’t he understand that it’s all over? The buffalo-hunts and the war-parties and the goddamned pow-wows? It’s all over — gone! — whether we’re sorry about it or not!’

  Amelia put her arms around me and held me very close. ‘Come on, Harry, let’s just get ourselves out of here before somebody calls the police. We’ve got enough trouble on our plates, without the law.’

  I turned back and stared at the place where the hole had been.

  ‘That Misquamacus is damned to hell,’ I said, in a voice like mashed-up glass. ‘That Misquamacus is damned to hell. Even if I have to take him there myself.’

  Chicago

  Behind the brightly-lit theatre of the Revlon cosmetics counter at Marshall Field, Nann Bryce waited with tightly stage-managed patience while the woman tried Caribbean Glow for the third time, pressing her lips tightly together, and then pouting at herself in the magnifying mirror. ‘I don’t know,’ the woman told her. ‘I still think it’s way too dark for me.’

  ‘Maybe you’d like to try the Tropical Kiss again,’ Nann suggested. It was seven after one, seven minutes into Nann’s lunchbreak, and she was anxious to meet Trixie to see if the results of Trixie’s test had come through. She was supposed to be meeting her at Orlowski’s Coffee Shop at a quarter past, and she didn’t want to be late. Trixie was volatile at the best of times. All this trouble with Nat had made her ten times more jumpy and irritable than usual.

  The woman turned her face from side to side. ‘I don’t know. Do you think it’s too dark?’

  Nann said, ‘It depends on how you want to present yourself. Do you want to have that sultry, exotic look; or do you want to look bright and outgoing?’

  ‘Well, exotic,’ the woman declared. ‘I mean mysterious, you know? I want my husband to think, “Here’s a woman with something more about her than I ever knew.”’

  Nann smiled. ‘In that case, Caribbean Glow’s the one for you, no question.’ Pause. ‘Is that cash or charge?’

  It was almost twenty-five past one by the time Nann dodged through the jammed-up traffic on Washington Street and hurried into Orlowski’s. The midday sun was brassy and uncomfortably hot, and the city was unusually airless. This morning’s weather forecast had predicted high humidity, smog pollution and electric storms. No wind off the lake.

  At least Orlowski’s was cool, mirrored and mosaic-floored, with palms nodding in the air-conditioned draft.

  Trixie was sitting in the far corner next to the wall-mirror, drinking coffee. She was nineteen years old, skinny and startlingly pretty — her hair back-combed and spritzed up. She wore black pedal-pushers and three layers of T-shirt and black cotton jacket. Nann thought that Janet Jackson had nothing on Trixie; but while Janet Jackson danced and sang and made millions, Trixie courted nothing but trouble. The latest trouble, of course, being Nat.

  ‘Oh, honey … I’m so sorry I’m late,’ Nann told her, parking her bag and sitting down next to her. ‘It was Caribbean
Glow or Tropical Kiss and she couldn’t make up her mind for hard cash. “I want my husband to think, ‘here’s a woman with something more about her than I ever knew.’”’

  Trixie gave her a slanted, humourless smile. She looked like her father when she did that. Her father had died four years ago in a stupid car accident on Dundee Avenue, by Santa’s Village. A huge delivery truck had charged out of a side-turning like a dinosaur. Oil, snow, and blood on the highway. Nann still missed him sorely; and still cried at Christmas. Some people died and the space they left in the world seemed to close and heal, but the space that Trixie’s father had left behind him was still vacant. In Nann’s heart, at least, and probably in Trixie’s, and Marshall’s, too. Marshall was Nann’s younger child and only son.

  ‘Coffee,’ Nann told the waitress. And then, to Trixie, ‘You eaten?’

  Trixie shook her head. Nann said,’What’s the special?’

  ‘Meatloaf.’

  ‘Bring me two turkey on rye.’

  ‘Momma,’ protested Trixie, ‘I don’t want anything.’

  The waitress hesitated. ‘You deaf?’ Nann demanded. ‘Two turkey on rye.’

  The waitress left. Trixie had tears sparkling in her eyes. ‘Momma,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘You’re pregnant,’ said Nann, taking a clean handkerchief out of her purse and unfolding it. Trixie still wasn’t old enough to unfold her own handkerchiefs: at least, not the way that Nann saw it. Trixie dabbed her eyes and looked distraught

  Nann said, ‘You’re sitting in the corner with nothing but coffee and a face like a funeral, and I can’t guess you’re pregnant?’

  ‘It’s due February fourteenth. St Valentine’s Day.’

  Nann sat back in exasperation. ‘How appropriate. The St Valentine’s Day Fiasco.’

  ‘Momma, we were so careful!’

  ‘Oh, sure you were careful. Careful to enjoy yourselves. Careful not to think about the consequences. Careful not to consider that poor baby you’re carrying, what its future is going to be, with Nat the Hat for a poppa, and Trixie the Airhead for a momma. Are you going to give birth to this child? If so, how are you going to take care of it? And what about your education? What about you? What about everything we planned?’