Burial

by Graham Masterton

  ‘It is no more real than a reflection is real. But it is undeniably there, just as a reflection is there. It is the world of Indian understanding, Indian belief, Indian superstition, Indian fear, Indian happiness. It is what the Indians understand their natural world to be.

  ‘In 1869, in Nevada, a Paviotso Indian called Tavibo began to preach the doctrine that all white people would fall into holes in the ground and be swallowed up, while the dead Indians would return to earth. He said he could talk to the dead in trances, and he encouraged the Indians of the Great Basin to dance their traditional circle dance and sing songs which had been revealed to him by the dead.

  ‘The doctrine was called the Ghost Dance because it preached the return of the dead. It spread through California, Oregon, and other parts of Nevada. It only died out when Tavibo’s prophesies failed to come to pass.

  ‘The Ghost Dance was preached again by another Paviotso messiah, Wovoka, who died as recently as 1932. Wovoka was stricken by a severe fever when he was thirty-three years old, and almost immediately there was an eclipse of the sun. During the eclipse he was taken by ghosts to the Great Outside and shown the world of the future.

  ‘The Plains Indians had recently suffered terrible defeats in battle, the destruction of the buffalo-herds, the introduction of new and often fatal diseases, and confinement on reservations. Wovoka promised that if they danced and chanted, the white men would vanish into the ground, the dead would come back to life, and the buffalo would return to their grasslands. You can see the attraction of such a doctrine to a people who were totally demoralized.

  ‘The Ghost Dance cult was eagerly adopted by the Sioux, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Assinboin and the Shoshoni. Only the Navajo refused to join in, because the Navajo were afraid of ghosts.

  ‘There have been plenty of learned books about the Ghost Dance. Anthony Wallace interpreted it as a “revitalization movement,” that aimed to restore the vitality of a culture under attack. Weston LeBarre preferred to call it a “crisis cult,” and saw ghost dancing as an adaptive response to misery and despair.’

  ‘What about you, Dr Snow?’ I asked him. ‘What do you think?’

  Dr Snow jabbed his finger towards the floor. ‘Beneath our feet, Mr Erskine, there lies a continent of shadows — the Great Outside — in which the Indian notion of America still survives. A continent without highways, a continent without buildings or railroads or ships or automobiles. A continent teeming with game and bison and running with unpolluted rivers. America as she once was, before a single white man set foot on her. The Great Outside.’

  ‘You believe it actually exists?’ I asked him.

  ‘Haven’t you seen enough evidence of it yourself? Where do you think your unfortunate friend Miss Tandy is now? Where do you think the Sears Tower has disappeared to? The day prophesied by Tavibo and Wovoka has finally arrived. The Indians are killing, they’re looting, and they’re taking prisoners — and they’re taking everything back to the Great Outside.

  ‘From what you say, I expect they’re planning to leave it there. In fact — from what you say — I expect they’re attempting to turn back the clock.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Amelia. She was twitchy, and I expected she was beginning to feel like a cigarette. ‘How can anybody turn back the clock?’

  ‘My dear, you’re a very clever spiritualist, aren’t you? You know that it’s perfectly possible to send simple material things from the real world to the spirit world and vice versa. You can send a real hat, for instance, to the other side. You can accidentally send a glove, or a pen, or a cufflink. That’s how certain small items become irrevocably lost. Very frustrating indeed, sometimes, but that’s where they’ve gone! They’ve dropped through the surface of our imaginary lake into the world of shadows beneath our feet.

  ‘In the same way, a skilful medium can draw shadows from the Great Outside into the real world. Some people call them “ectoplasm” but I personally prefer “shadows” or “reflections” because that’s what they really are.’

  ‘I still don’t see what you’re driving at,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it’s not that difficult to grasp! Your Indians appear to have developed enough supernatural power to be able to drag down very much larger objects — and very selectively, too.

  ‘Your Indians appear to be intent on purging America of everything that the white man ever brought here or built here. They are punishing the direct descendants of everybody who killed or hurt them. They are taking just revenge for acts of massacre and treachery. Lives for lives, lodges for lodges. And eventually, I suspect, they will leave nothing at all but prairies and mountains and deserts and swamps.’

  ‘Is that possible?’ I asked him, in disbelief.

  Dr Snow took off his spectacles. ‘Looking back at the environmental and mystical history of our planet, Mr Erskine, I would say that it isn’t just possible but highly probable. The Indians want their lands back, just the way they were.’

  Eleven

  He wheeled himself across the library and pointed to the top shelf. ‘Fetch me down that old black book, will you, the one that looks like a Bible?’

  I reached up and tugged the book off the shelf. It smelled sour and musty and very old. Inside the black leather cover thick deckle-cut pages had been hand-sewn to make a new book altogether.

  Dr Snow leafed through it slowly, and sneezed. ‘It must be thirty years since I looked at this. It was written in 1863, by Bishop Henry Whipple, the Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota. See — An Account of the Recruitment by U.S. Military Forces Of Spiritualists & Mediums In Their Conflicts Against the Santee Indians 1862.

  ‘It’s quite fascinating,’ he said. ‘The Commissioner of Indian Affairs was aware that the Indians had strong magic powers and took them extremely seriously. In fact, I’d say that the only reason the Indians were eventually defeated was not so much because the white men overwhelmed them but because they lost faith in their own supernatural skills.

  ‘In Minnesota, when he was leading troops and local militia against the Santee, Colonel Henry Sibley employed the services of a celebrated medium called William Hood.

  ‘There are several accounts of William Hood’s career in the Old West, but regrettably no pictures of him. Some stories say that he was originally a Serbian vampire-hunter named Milan Protic, and that he had been shipped over to America by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in secret.

  ‘In O.L. Ward’s Gunslingers, I discovered a verified report that William Hood lived for some time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and that he was involved in several gunfights. They nicknamed him the Shadow Boy, because none of his opponents ever succeeded in hitting him.

  ‘He was called in to help Colonel Sibley after the Minnesota Massacre in August 1862, when Santee Indians killed four hundred and fifty white settlers. William Hood went to the scene of the very first killing — the cottage of a settler called Robinson Jones — and carried out days of “spiritual investigations”.

  ‘Here, Bishop Whipple writes, “Mr Hood turned out to be a very taciturn young man, with the wildest hair, and dressed in curious leathers and rags. He carried about his belt numerous bells and bones and several pear-shaped bottles, which he called ‘shadow-bottles’. His only explanation for the use of these bottles was that warring Indians would often be possessed by a shadow or darkness from the Great Outside, which I took to mean the Indian equivalent of Purgatory. If he could capture any traces of this shadow — even the slightest fragment of it — the shadow would lose its spiritual integrity. It would be wounded … it would hemorrhage darkness. If it didn’t return at once to the Great Outside it would literally bleed to death.

  ‘“The Indian would be exorcized; and would no longer have the power or the magical abilities which the spirit had lent him.

  ‘“I was sceptical of Mr Hood’s abilities, I must confess, but equally I had never seriously believed that the Indian medicine-men were capable of any genuine acts of supernatural power. Mr Hood on the
other hand was utterly convinced that they could work real and dangerous magic. He said that he had once been captured by the Cheyenne, and that his soul had been tortured by a Cheyenne shaman. This experience had taught him about shadows from the Great Outside and also how to become so skilful with weapons that nobody would ever be able to best him.

  ‘“He said that he had learned from the Cheyenne how to momentarily become a mistai, a shadow-man, so that bullets would fly right through his body without injuring him. But he never volunteered to demonstrate this skill, saying that magic was for serious purposes, not for exhibition.

  ‘“Later, Colonel Sibley also recruited a negro man from somewhere in Louisiana. This person was always dressed as if for the opera, and carried a cane with a silver skull for a knob. Sometimes he called himself Sawtooth and sometimes he called himself Jonas DuPaul; but most of the time he referred to himself as Dr Hambone.

  ‘“I found Dr Hambone to be extremely intimidating and avoided him whenever possible. Colonel Sibley said that he could make the dead speak and took him to question all of the corpses of murdered settlers in order that they could identify their assailants. I never ventured with him, being opposed to this activity, and thus I never heard any of the dead answer him, as he claimed they always did.

  ‘“One day Dr Hambone ventured out on his own and was apparently captured by Killing Ghost and Runs Against Something When Crawling, two of the most warlike of the Santee braves.

  ‘“William Hood was dispatched by Colonel Sibley to find Dr Hambone by natural or supernatural means, which he did, although he never told anybody how. He brought him back to the militia’s encampment in a condition of trance. Dr Hambone eventually said that he had met a Santee shaman and that he had been shown a future world in which all of the white man’s works would be enveloped in darkness, and that white men would be massacred by shadows, and that none would escape.

  ‘“He then departed for good, saying that the red men and the black men would walk these plains and fish these rivers long after every white man had been buried. Colonel Sibley threatened to arrest him, but William Hood said that in his opinion it was not advisable. Dr Hambone had influences of which William Hood had no experience, and he would not be able to protect Colonel Sibley or any of his men if Dr Hambone should cut up ugly.”

  ‘There!’ said Dr Snow, carelessly throwing the book onto the desk, and causing a miniature avalanche of National Geographics. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘It’s fascinating,’ said Amelia. She picked up the book and slowly leafed through it. ‘I’ve heard of shadow-bottles, but I’ve never seen any historical reference to one before.’

  ‘Oh — here,’ said Dr Snow, in a very matter-of-fact way. He went across to one of his cupboards and rummaged around for a while. Eventually he produced a small bottle of thick plain glass, about the size and shape of a lightbulb, with a tarnished silver stopper.

  ‘You’ve actually got one!’ said Amelia, in astonishment.

  Dr Snow shrugged. ‘Found it in Baton Rouge. It doesn’t look very special, does it? Ghost-hunters in Serbia were supposed to use them when they went looking for vampires. So that gives some credence to the story that William Hood was Milan Protic.’

  I turned the bottle over and over, and then I returned it to Dr Snow. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ I asked him. ‘I mean — what the hell’s going to happen now? Are we just going to sit around and watch the rest of the country go under? Jesus!’

  Dr Snow shrugged. ‘Who knows? If your Indian friends are determined to wipe every trace of the white man from the face of America, then presumably they’ll carry on trying to do it. Wherever Indian blood has been spilled, they can use that place as an opening down to the Great Outside. And, believe me — apart from those few that they have used already, there are thousands more, all the way from Connecticut to Canyon de Chelly. Thousands!

  ‘In Connecticut, you know, in 1638, Captains Underhill and Mason supervised the torching of a Pequot encampment; and with it the burning alive of five hundred Pequot Indians, men, women and children. Think what an opening to the underworld that’s going to make! A tribe for a tribe! They’ll probably decimate the entire state!’

  He seemed almost elated. ‘They were such magicians! Such great magicians !’

  ‘I expect they’re glad that somebody appreciates them,’ I retorted. ‘But what the hell are we going to do to stop them?’

  ‘Stop them?’ he frowned, as if the very idea of it hadn’t occurred to him. ‘Stop them? I don’t think we can. I don’t think that anybody can.’

  ‘You’re talking about a national disaster that’s already killed thousands of innocent people and is going to have a more devastating effect than about a hundred nuclear bombs! You’re talking about the end of an entire civilization, on which most of the world depends! You’re talking about throwing the whole of America back into total savagery!’

  Dr Snow smiled slyly. ‘That’s not a very p.c. thing to say.’

  ‘Maybe it isn’t; I’m all for noble savages and Indian rights, but I’m damned if I’m going to live in a world where I have to go looking for lunch with a spear.’

  ‘You won’t have to,’ said Dr Snow. ‘They’ll probably kill us all. Either that or they’ll make our lives not worth living; just as we made their lives not worth living.’

  ‘Come on, Doctor, there has to some way of getting back at them. And some way of getting Karen back, too.’

  ‘You think that Misquamacus is behind all this?’ asked Dr Snow.

  I nodded. ‘Singing Rock tried to warn me about it, but he was being got at, and I never really understood the whole message.’

  ‘Misquamacus is by far the most likely suspect,’ Dr Snow agreed. ‘He always possessed such remarkable powers. He could change the wind, make rivers flow backwards, travel through time and appear in two or three different places simultaneously. The only trouble of course is how he managed to summon the power to draw down half of an entire city.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the spirits have helped him? The Great Old Ones?’

  ‘It’s possible that he could have summoned Tirawa, the great Pawnee god; or Heammawihio, the Cheyenne god of the skies. But all that darkness, you know, all that dragging-down!’

  He pulled down his fist two or three times as if he were trying to imagine how Misquamacus might have done it.

  ‘You know, there’s only one way I can think of,’ he said, at last. ‘He would have had to make some kind of bargain with Aktunowihio, the god of the underworld. But according to legend, Aktunowihio never makes bargains. Aktunowihio is something a little too frightful to contemplate, even for a wonder-worker like Misquamacus.’

  ‘Do you mean he’s some kind of devil, some kind of Satan?’

  ‘Oh, no, the Indians never thought that their gods represented good or evil. They simply had gods that were up above and gods that were down below. Heammawihio, in fact, is the Indian name for that primeval being that used to dominate earth in the very early days of pre-Columbian civilization. The Indians used to say that he came to earth down the Hanging Road, which was what they called the Milky Way. Several fanciful writers have called him Cthulhu. In fact he wasn’t a he, but very much an “it”, and was probably formed out of the collective consciousness of many different species from many different galaxies. If you can imagine a being that thinks like a man, a snake, an octopus, a wolf and a centipede, all at the same time, then you’re probably quite close to understanding what Heammawihio was really like.

  ‘But it was Aktunowihio, you know, who frightened the Indians the most. If you died a noble and natural death, you went to the Happy Hunting Grounds without fear. But if you broke a taboo, then Aktunowihio would claim you when you died.

  ‘Chief Roman Nose once broke a taboo by eating before battle with a metal fork. He was shot almost immediately and went to Aktunowihio. His followers had propped his body in the high branches of a tree in the hope that he would fly upward instead of downward; but o
n the second night the entire tree was dragged into the ground and Roman Nose’s body was never seen again.

  ‘Aktunowihio, quite frankly, is everything you never want to happen to you, all in one. He’s supposed to take many shapes — dogs, strange women, men without heads. Even Columbus went back to Spain with stories about men without heads.

  ‘But the most fearsome shape of all is that of the Shadow Buffalo. If an Indian thought he glimpsed the Shadow Buffalo when he was out hunting he would drop everything and gallop back to his lodge in a total frenzy of fear, and none of his fellow braves would think any the less of him for being frightened.

  ‘Aktunowihio is supposed to be able to appear in the real world by possessing the bodies of living men and women. Most of the time he can walk amongst us and we don’t even realize that he’s passed us by. But if you see anybody staring at you without reason; or if you feel someone touch or tug at you; then it could be Aktunowihio, or part of Aktunowihio — the Great Dead One walking the world of the living.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I sat back in my chair and gave a tight, repressed stretch. ‘If I hadn’t seen stuff like this for myself — if I’d never come across Misquamacus, well, I wouldn’t believe a single goddamned word of it. Would you?’

  ‘Oh, once you really know the Indians, you’ll believe anything,’ said Dr Snow. ‘The trouble is, not many people know much about Indians, and nor do they want to know much about Indians. I’ve been making Indian business forecasts and giving out Indian-style weather-warnings for years now. I’ve only been wrong with one weather prediction, ever. But will the media believe me? Of course not. Even though my forecasts are so accurate the poor fools prefer to rely on a multi-million dollar satellite which consistently gives them the wrong idea.’

  ‘What do you suggest we do?’ I asked Dr Snow, dully. Amelia reached across and held my hand.

  Dr Snow made a face, pushing himself backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. ‘You need friends, no doubt of it. You need somebody who understands Indian lore instinctively rather than academically. In other words, with Singing Rock gone, you need to find yourself another wonder-worker.’