Burial

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Where was this?’

  ‘Someplace near Phoenix, Arizona.’

  ‘What possible connection could there be between a mass murder in Phoenix, and what happened to the Greenbergs?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but it’s this business about things being dragged along that makes me wonder.’

  Two pages later, my attention was caught again; and this time I could sense that I was onto something. TWISTERS FLATTEN TWO COLORADO TOWNS. It was obvious that this had probably been the paper’s intended front-page story until Chicago started to collapse. It had been patchily edited and cut down, and jammed in next to an advertisement for J.C. Penney’s Summer Picnic Sale.

  ‘Freak tornadoes hit two small towns on opposite sides of Colorado today, wrecking homes and leaving “hundreds” killed or missing.

  ‘State emergency services were called to Pritchard in the south-east and Maybelline in the north-west after unexpected storms raged through both communities. The extent of the damage is reported to be “severe to very severe” and all utilities are cut off.

  ‘Early eye-witness accounts say that the tornadoes pulled whole buildings for hundreds of feet, along with vehicles, fencing, animals and human beings. In Maybelline, where there were only a handful of survivors, rescue crews talked of houses being dragged into the ground.

  ‘They said that, at one point during the storm, the sky turned dark red “like something out of the Old Testament”’

  I put down the paper. They are clearing the sacred grounds. First Mrs Greenberg’s apartment; then a used-car dealership in Arizona; then two Colorado townships; then Chicago. And the same characteristics every time. Darkness, and dragging down. Buildings not collapsing, but vanishing into the ground. Even people vanishing into the ground, like Karen had vanished into the floor.

  I had a terrible feeling that America was no longer safe beneath our feet — that we were all standing on a huge darkness that was threatening to swallow us up.

  I stood up, and switched off the television. Amelia was looking very tired.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ she asked.

  ‘Because we’re not helping by watching.’

  She reached for her cigarettes, but I caught hold of her wrist and said, gently, ‘Don’t Maybe it was me who started you smoking. In which case I think I have a right to wean you off it.’

  ‘Harry Erskine, you have no rights as far as I’m concerned. Your rights were all used up a very long time ago.’

  ‘MacArthur once told me that you were the most beautiful woman he had ever met.’

  Amelia said nothing, but lowered her eyes.

  ‘MacArthur once told me that you threw linguine at him.’

  ‘He was lying, it was fettucine.’

  I kissed her awkwardly, half on the left temple and half on the frame of her spectacles. Middle age, it makes adolescents out of us all over again.

  ‘Look at these news stories,’ I said. ‘Arizona, Colorado, and now Chicago.’

  She did me the courtesy of looking at them and I waited patiently while she read. Then she took off her glasses and said, ‘You really believe they’re all connected?’

  ‘The same dragging, the same disappearing,’ I pointed out. ‘When has that ever happened before? Have you ever heard about that happening before?’

  ‘It may be happening all the time, for all I know. I don’t usually read the newspapers.’

  ‘Well, I think there’s a connection here and I think that connection is Misquamacus.’

  ‘You seriously think that Misquamacus is bringing down the whole of Chicago?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell to think. But what a coincidence, all these similar-type disasters, all within a matter of days.’

  ‘Perhaps we need some expert advice,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Oh, for sure. But the only expert I ever knew was Singing Rock.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. What about Dr what’s-his-name, up at Albany? The one who first found Singing Rock for us.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Dr Snow. I don’t know. He’s probably dead by now. It’s been nearly twenty years.’

  ‘You can try, can’t you?’

  We drove up to Albany early in the morning when the Hudson Valley was gilded with haze. I borrowed a newish midnight-blue Electra from an old friend of mine who ran a guide-book publishing company, on pain of returning it in pristine condition with the ashtrays licked clean. Personally I was always pretty careless about what I drove, and it made me nervous to take charge of an automobile that smelled of leather and gleamed so much.

  We listened to the radio for a while, but the news from Chicago was overwhelming and unrelentingly painful to hear. The building collapses seemed to have abated; but thousands and thousands of people were killed or missing or injured and the emergency services were stretched to the limit The greatest feeling this morning was one of hurt and bewilderment — as if somebody had gripped the very heart of America and torn it out.

  The President would address the nation this afternoon. But what could he say, except tell us all how shocked and grief-stricken we already knew ourselves to be?

  Amelia lit a cigarette, then immediately tossed it out of the car window.

  ‘I’m not forcing you to give up,’ I told her.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ she replied. ‘You never forced me to do anything.’

  We arrived at Dr Snow’s house — the same brick-built house on the outskirts of Albany where we had first met him twenty years ago. Then, the house had been surrounded by tall mournful-looking cypresses, but all except one had been cut down, and the house now looked lighter but shabbier. The yellowed net curtains had been replaced by strong chintzes that looked as if they had been chosen from a mail-order catalogue.

  We were greeted at the door by a tall, plain woman with bobbed hair and large feet. She wore a poncho tied at the waist by a fraying silk cord. ‘I’m Hilda,’ she said, letting us into the hallway. ‘Daddy’s in the conservatory in back. You won’t overtire him, now, will you?’

  She led us past the rows of fierce Indian masks that I remembered from my first visit; and the stuffed birds in glass cases; and the dark long-case clock, the clock that had ticked twenty years ago as if it were very weary, and which now sounded wearier still.

  ‘Would you like some herbal tea?’ she asked us. I recalled that Dr Snow didn’t allow alcohol in the house.

  I said, ‘A cup of black coffee would be good.’ But she tightly smiled and shook her head.

  ‘Daddy doesn’t believe in artificial stimulants.’

  We walked through the musty living room into a large octagonal conservatory, far too warm and far too dry, in which a profusion of brown-and-yellow palms were gasping their last. The glass roof was emerald with algae, lending the whole conservatory a ghastly morgue-like greenness; and giving Dr Snow the appearance of death.

  He sat in a complicated modern wheelchair close to the windows, staring out at his drought-dried garden. He was very shrivelled now, with a fine dandelion mane of intensely white hair, and green-tinted glasses. He wore an off-white bathrobe which — for all its thickness — failed to conceal the skeletal emaciation of his body.

  ‘Dr Snow,’ I said, to his back.

  ‘Well, well, Mr Erskine,’ he replied, without turning around. ‘How is the shaman hunter today?’

  ‘You remember,’ I said.

  He rotated his wheelchair, and confronted me. ‘Of course I remember. You were the first and only person in the whole of my academic career who ever asked me for practical help.’

  ‘Do you remember Ms Crusoe?’ I asked him, nudging Amelia forward.

  ‘Mrs Wakeman,’ Amelia corrected me, and stepped forward and took hold of Dr Snow’s hand.

  ‘It’s been a very long time,’ said Dr Snow. He patted Amelia’s hand, and gave her a badly-arranged smile. ‘A very, very long time.’ Hmm, I thought. He doesn’t believe in artificial stimulants, but he’s not averse to so
me real live ones. But you know me. Eternally jealous, even of the women I don’t really want. Or kid myself I don’t really want.

  ‘Dr Snow,’ I said, ‘you’ve probably heard what’s happened in Chicago.’

  He nodded. ‘A great natural tragedy. Terrible. I have a good friend there, Dr Noble, at the Cook County Medical Center. Of course I’m very concerned for his welfare.’

  ‘I think —’ I began, and then I hesitated. The connections that I had worked out between the Greenbergs and Karen and the bodyshop homicides in Arizona and the two towns in Colorado and Chicago — well, quite frankly, they suddenly seemed a little tenuous, to say the least. I had forgotten how formidable Dr Snow had first appeared to me, how much of a stickler for logical thought and totally unvarnished argument. He was one of the country’s greatest experts on Indian lore and Indian magic, but he wasn’t at all romantic or superstitious or even politically correct.

  ‘You’re experiencing another problem with Indians,’ he said. His voice sounded as if he had a mouthful of that white gritty sand they heap in hotel ashtrays.

  I shrugged, smiled, and said, ‘I guess so. Yes. That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Of course it is. You wouldn’t have come to see me if you weren’t, would you? And the truth of the matter is that we shall all experience problems with Indians for ever and ever, amen. Not so much with Indians, perhaps, but the mystical forces in which the Indians believed.

  ‘We tend to dismiss every other religion apart from our own as invented, as make believe. We believe our own religion to the point where the words “Act of God” even have a legal meaning. But really, you know, in America, the God of the Jews has very little relevance. He’s a European fetish; a kindly but not-very-powerful deity from the Middle East.

  ‘We should be worshipping not the gods of Europe; not the gods of Europe’s pirates and Europe’s adventurers, but the real, ethnic gods of America, just as the Indians did. These gods are equally powerful, equally vengeful, equally just; equally concerned for our welfare. Even more relevant, they’re real, and they’re here.’

  ‘Dr Snow,’ I told him, ‘I believe that Red Indian wonder-workers brought down Chicago.’

  Dr Snow pushed himself closer. His knees were wrapped in a blue and green Buchanan-plaid blanket. He smelled of violet cachous and some indefinable medical rub. ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘You’ve seen the way the buildings collapsed. In fact they didn’t collapse, they vanished.’

  ‘That’s right. So what are your suspicions?’

  I told him all about the Greenbergs, and Martin Vaizey, and Karen, and then I showed him the newspaper clippings about Arizona and Colorado.

  ‘This is all most interesting,’ he said. ‘Would you care for a cup of herbal tea?’

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks. I just want to know if I’ve lost it or not.’

  Dr Snow studied the paper; studied my notes; and then took off his green-tinted eyeglasses and closed his eyes. ‘Greenwich Village … Apache Junction … Pritchard … Maybelline … Yes!’

  ‘Did you think of something?’ I asked him; but without hesitation he opened his eyes and propelled his wheelchair out of the conservatory and through the living room and out of sight. I looked blankly at Amelia and Amelia looked blankly at me.

  ‘Maybe it was those onion-rings we had for lunch,’ I suggested. I cupped my hand in front of my mouth and smelled my breath.

  It wasn’t long before Hilda Snow appeared. ‘Daddy wants you in his study, please,’ she announced with consummate gloom.

  We followed her into the world’s most cluttered library. Every shelf was crammed with books and pamphlets and files and letters; and then with pictures and postcards and letters; and then with extraordinary shrivelled-looking Indian artifacts, Apache headpieces and Navaho rattles and medicine-bundles stuffed with eagles’ claws and buffaloes’ tails.

  Dr Snow’s desk was heaped with layer upon layer of books and papers, a surprisingly state-of-the-art Japanese typewriter and a carved wooden Sundance doll with a tiny, malevolent-looking head. Dr Snow himself was sitting in his wheelchair by the leaded French windows with three large books open on his knees. Through the windows I could see sloping lawns and hedges and pink flowers fluttering. There was a strong smell of new typewriter-ribbons and dust and sweet peas.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dr Snow. ‘I believe that I’ve found your connection.’

  ‘Really?’ said Amelia, circling round the room.

  Dr Snow lifted his head and smiled at her. ‘Women are always so skeptical. I love it.’

  Dr Snow tapped the books with his finger, as if he were admonishing them. ‘All of the places you mentioned — although of course they were known to the Indians by very different names — were the locations of noted killings, Indians slaughtered by whites.

  ‘The location on East 17th Street in New York City is the most obscure but one of the most interesting. In the winter of 1691 two British officers raped and killed a Manhattan Indian girl at a place which the Indians called Man of Rock. It was probably no more than a brownstone outcropping, and of course it would have been levelled as Manhattan moved steadily northward.

  ‘The only reason that this incident was recorded was that both officers were court-martialled not for killing the Indian girl but for stealing the brandy on which they got drunk that night.’

  ‘Do you know what the officers’ names were?’ I asked Dr Snow.

  ‘Of course. It’s here, in the British colonial records. Captain William Stansmore Hope, of Derbyshire, and Lieutenant Andrew Danetry, of Norfolk.’

  ‘Hope and Danetree,’ I repeated. ‘Those were the names of the men who were killed at the Belford.’

  ‘Well, naturally,’ said Dr Snow, completely unsurprised.

  ‘What do you mean, “Naturally”?’

  ‘Let me just explain your connection,’ Dr Snow asked me, a little testily. ‘In 1865, seven of Geronimo’s braves were captured and tortured by white mercenaries at Apache Junction, Arizona — a place which the Indians called Under The Old One, because it lies just beneath the Superstition Mountain.

  ‘In the early fall of 1864 more than seventy-five Cheyenne Indians were massacred at Pritchard, Colorado, by cavalrymen of the Third Regiment, the so-called “Bloodless Thirdsters.” This happened a full six weeks before the notorious massacre of one hundred and twenty-three of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne people at Sand Creek, and if anything the scalpings and sexual mutilations were far worse. It was common practice for the cavalrymen to cut off the men’s private parts to use as tobacco-pouches, and to cut out the women’s privates, too, as souvenirs.

  The new commander of the Colorado military district, Colonel J.M. Chivington, managed somehow to keep the Pritchard massacre under wraps. It was said that he threatened to shoot any man who talked to the newspapers or the politicians about it. And him a Methodist minister, too.

  ‘In February of 1865, at Maybelline, Colorado, a place which the Cheyenne called Buffalo-Gathering-Place, ninety Indians were slaughtered by white ranchers in retaliation for raids on several of their settlements — which themselves had been carried out in retaliation for Pritchard and Sand Creek.

  ‘In 1870, the Sioux chief Red Cloud was invited to visit Chicago with five of the greatest medicine-men. Red Cloud had already been to Washington DC — where the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had made sure that he visited the Navy yards and the US Arsenal, so that he could see for himself how powerful the white men were. The medicinemen however had refused to accept his account of the white men’s weapons, and were still making warlike threats. So the Commissioner of Indian Affairs gave them a guided tour of the arsenal and the railroad yards and the docks, so that they could see for themselves just how futile it would be for them to carry on fighting.

  ‘Red Cloud was all for negotiating peace, but the medicine-men still believed that the white men were full of trickery and lies, which of course they were. One night when Red Cloud was giving a speech to the P
hilanthropic Institute of Chicago, there was a fire at the Palmer House, where the medicine-men were staying, and all five of them burned to death. It caused a terrific sensation because the Palmer House had just opened, and it was one of the most luxurious hotels in America. The Chicago fire department said that the men had tried to light a camp-fire in their room; and the Chicago papers said that this was proof that Indians were not much more than savages, and that they weren’t fit to live alongside white people, and never would be.

  ‘However that fire was kindled, it wiped out five of the most powerful and influential wonder-workers that the Indians had ever known. In a few minutes it weakened the Indian nations more dramatically than all the years of cholera and cavalry action put together.’

  I leaned over his shoulder and looked at the books that he was holding on his lap. ‘So the connection between all of these incidents is that Indians were killed there?’

  Dr Snow nodded. ‘Quite so. And the more Indians who were killed, the more devastating their revenge. A life for a life, so to speak. Except in Chicago, where they appear to be exacting a punishment for the loss of entire tribes.’

  ‘But how are they doing it?’ asked Amelia. ‘They’re dragging entire buildings right into the ground — people, too.’

  ‘Of course they are. They’re pulling them down to the underworld, to the Great Outside. What our Western storytellers mistakenly call the Happy Hunting Ground.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I told him.

  Dr Snow snapped his books shut and heaped them back on his desk. ‘It’s very simple. Imagine if you can that the continental United States is a lake, and that we are capable of standing on its surface. Above the surface of the lake is what we like to think of as the real world. But — if we look down — if we look below the soles of our shoes — we can see ourselves standing upside-down in another world. A negative, mirror-image world.

  ‘This negative, reflected world is the world beyond death, the Great Outside. It is the world where spirits live. It is the world where the Indians go when they die.