Burial

by Graham Masterton

  I waited and waited and waited and prayed that there was nobody in the bathroom. Please God or Gitche Manitou please may there be nobody in the bathroom. But then I knew that I had to push open the door and switch on the light and take a look. There was no escaping it. After all, I couldn’t go back to bed and peacefully sleep for the rest of the night without knowing for sure that there was nobody there.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Is anybody there?’ I asked, manfully.

  Oh, for sure. About a hundred loopy Disney voices are going to shout out, ‘Nobody here but us ghosts!’

  I pushed open the door. It made a light juddering noise, banged against the tiled wall. The bathroom was slightly lighter than the bedroom, because a streetlight was shining through the window. I could make out the tub, the toilet and the washbasin. The light gleamed on the chrome-plated taps. The mirror gleamed dark. A good suicide mirror, that. The kind of mirror which disillusioned husbands stand in front of, and watch themselves cutting their own throats. What better place to finish a nondescript life, than the Thunderbird Motel?

  I frowned at the frosted-glass shower cubicle. It looked empty. I hoped it was empty. But there was some kind of shadow in it, some kind of shape, which didn’t seem to correspond with the tiling.

  I felt as if the floor had dropped away beneath my feet.

  There was somebody standing in the shower. Oh, God. There was somebody in it. This was Psycho all over. Wheeep, wheep, wheep, wheep!

  I swallowed a dry, sour swallow. My heartbeat, slow and deep, accelerated into a furious, erratic drumming. There was no question about it. Somebody was standing in the shower, somebody white-skinned and naked, with no water running. Somebody silent, somebody still. It looked like a woman. I could just about make out her eyes, two dark smudges that looked like the blood-clots on the yolk of a fertilized egg; and the darkness of her hair.

  I approached the shower very slowly, and raised my hand towards the door-catch.

  The white figure didn’t move, but she must have been watching me closely.

  ‘Karen?’ I whispered.

  There was a long-drawn-out moment of utter silence. No cars, no radios, no passing planes. I was about to take the catch in my hand, ready to pull the shower door open, and the white figure was obviously waiting for me.

  ‘Karen?’ I repeated. ‘Is that you?’

  Before I could touch it, the shower door unlatched itself, and swung silently open. Karen was standing naked in front of me, so white that she could have been dead and bled. She stood with her arms straight down by her sides, her dark eyes staring directly at me as if she were willing me to move, willing me to speak.

  The light from the bathroom window made her shoulders and her breasts gleam white, but left the lower part of her face in shadow. It was impossible to tell if she were smiling or not, or whether she was simply standing there, expressionless, waiting for me to say something.

  ‘Karen?’ (My heart going crazy now, one of those drum solos in which the sweat flies and the audience scream and the drummer eventually collapses.) ‘Karen, how did you get in here?’

  She slowly lifted one hand. ‘Aren’t you going to help me out of here?’

  ‘Karen … the door’s locked … the window’s too small. How did you get in here?’

  She stepped out of the shower cubicle and stood in front of me, small and frighteningly pale. She lifted her hand and I clasped it in mine. It felt like no hand that I had ever held before, like cold, half-stewed okra. No wonder that, in India, they called okra ‘Ladies’ Fingers.’ They must have had first-hand experience of touching the spirits of dead women, or reincarnated women, or women who were still alive and who had been possessed by terrible spirits.

  I wasn’t sure which of those women Karen now was. Or whether this was Karen at all.

  ‘Harry …’ she said. ‘It’s so good to see you.’

  ‘Whaha — ’ I began, and then I had to stop, because I couldn’t pronounce my words properly. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I had to go, Harry, that’s all.’

  I squeezed her hand more tightly. I think I was almost afraid that I would squeeze some kind of cold, clear juice out of her fingers. But she stepped up closer, until her chilly nipples were brushing against my bare stomach, and she lifted her head as if she wanted me to kiss her.

  Her face was so bloodless. Her eyes were so dark. If she hadn’t been moving and breathing and talking, I would have sworn that she had just been disinterred from the local cemetery.

  The question was, when does somebody you care for stop being somebody you care for? When they die, when they go cold, or when they appear in your shower in the middle of the night, white of skin and blank of eye, and demand that you kiss them?

  ‘Karen,’ I said, ‘you’re cold.’

  She smiled. ‘I don’t mind being cold. I don’t feel the cold.’

  ‘Karen, you have to see this from my point of view. You disappeared into a hole in a floor in New York; and now you’re here in Phoenix, with no clothes on, freezing cold — and there’s no possible way you could have gotten in here.’

  ‘You’re worried about me,’ she said.

  ‘Too damn right I’m worried about you. I’m worried about me.’

  She wrapped her cold arms around my shoulders. She was still elfin, still enticing. ‘Why are you worried?’ she wanted to know. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? I’m safe.’

  ‘Sure, you’re safe and you’re here, but are you you?’

  She pressed her fingertips to her mouth and gave a stylized, girlish giggle; and if there was anything that was guaranteed to give me a totally chilly shudder down my spine, that was it. ‘You’re so silly,’ she said. ‘Of course I’m me. Who else should I be?’

  I didn’t really know what to do next But Karen tugged my hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. She kept on tugging, and tugged me through to the bedroom. ‘Do you want me to prove that I’m me?’ she asked me.

  ‘Listen, Karen, we have to get a few things straight here. When you disappeared through that floor —’

  She pushed me back against the bed. ‘Don’t be silly, that was nothing. You don’t always have to leave by the door, any more than you have to come in by the door. The world is full of other ways of coming in and going out; not just doors.’

  ‘Well, yes, but —’

  She gave me a small, sharp shove so that I fell backward. Before I could get up again, she had climbed on top of me and straddled my chest

  ‘Karen,’ I protested. ‘I can’t just —’

  She leaned over me so that her face loomed over mine. ‘You can’t what? You’re so cautious, Harry! You can do anything you want!’ And with this, she started to lick my face all over, and her tongue was as chilly and slimy as pig’s liver. I tried to pull away from her, but she was gripping me firmly between her thighs, and her strength and weight were those of a man, not a lightly-boned young woman. She stopped licking and looked down at me, her mouth glistening with saliva, her eyes as dusty-dead as woodlice.

  ‘You can do anything you want,’ she repeated, and her voice was low and very harsh. It was then that I knew for certain that Karen was possessed. This wasn’t Karen talking to me. This was the manitou of Misquamacus. He had filled her mind and her body like black ink spreading across blotting-paper. He had filled her up with his spiritual essence and his tribal ferocity — and his malevolence, too, and his insatiable hunger for revenge.

  ‘Karen,’ I said, ‘you’d better —’

  But now she was unbuckling my belt, and tugging down my trousers. I tried to stop her, tried to thrash my legs, but suddenly she came back up the bed and slapped my face, hard enough to hurt. I tried to protest but she slapped me again — a cold, hard, stunning slap, and then another, and another, until my cheeks were stinging and my eyeballs were jolted in their sockets.

  ‘Now you’re going to do what I want to do,’ she told me.

  I gave one last wrestle, but she slapped me again. My head jerked back against
the pillow. I almost began to understand how battered wives must feel, when they’re faced with somebody who won’t listen and won’t compromise, and won’t do anything but lash out. But quite apart from that, she was still Karen, her body was still Karen, and I didn’t want to hurt her. She was so small that one hard punch could have broken her jaw, or worse.

  ‘Karen —’ I began again, but she shook her head and said, ‘Shussh … This time it’s my turn.’

  I lay back shivering, my cheeks still hot from all of her slapping. She shuffled her way up my body until she was straddling my throat, and her pubic hair was tickling my Adam’s apple. She looked down at me, and said, ‘I always wanted this. You know that, don’t you? Right from the moment we met?’

  ‘Karen,’ I complained, ‘this isn’t right. It just isn’t right.’

  She looked down at me and smiled eerily. ‘Who says it isn’t right? It feels right to me. It feels wonderful to me.’

  In spite of my fear, in spite of my fear that it was Misquamacus who was making her behave the way she was, I still couldn’t stop myself from feeling aroused. It was like one of those sexual nightmares in which you’re turned on but terrified at the same time. I had once dreamed that a woman in black leather was trying to cut me with a straight-razor, and I had woken in a sweat of excitement and terror. In a peculiar way, the fear made it all the more stimulating. Was this actually Karen, or was it some kind of ghost?

  She lifted herself up a little more, so that her sex was only about two or three inches above my mouth. The insides of her thighs were smooth and cold against my slapped cheeks. Although it was so gloomy, I could make out her dark silky fur and the glistening petal-shaped curves of her vulva.

  I tensed, waiting for the moment when I could roll out from under her. But she must have sensed what I was intending to do, because she said, in the softest of voices, ‘Don’t, Harry … whatever you think, I need you.’

  ‘Karen?’ I said.

  ‘It’s me, Harry, it’s really me. Now, ssh.’

  She reached down between her legs and opened her vaginal lips wide with her fingers, really stretched them wide. Then she lowered herself slowly onto my mouth, so that I was offered a kiss of moist wet flesh. At first I kept my lips tightly closed, and tried to turn my head away. But then Karen slowly began to rotate her hips, so that my mouth was smeared around and around with her juices, and I began to think to myself I was wrong, dead wrong. This isn’t Misquamacus. This can’t be Misquamacus. This is Karen letting herself go. This is Karen doing just what she always wanted to do, and didn’t have the nerve.

  She laughed, and her laugh sounded high and sweet and just like Karen’s. I reached up with both hands and clasped her thighs and pressed her even more forcefully against my mouth. I opened my lips and slid my tongue up inside her, licking every fold of her sex, probing as deep as my tongue would allow. I heard her cry out, a thin penetrating falsetto. Her vagina was flushed with even more copious juices, and they ran out of the sides of my mouth.

  After a few moments, she climbed off my face, and kissed me. She kissed my hair, she kissed my eyes, she kissed my cheeks, she kissed my mouth. Then she gradually worked her way around my shoulders, and nibbled at my nipples. I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes in total pleasure as she kissed and bit her way all the way down my sides.

  ‘Karen …’ I heard somebody say, and it was probably me. I tangled my fingers in her hair as she took hold of my cock and firmly and slowly began to massage it up and down. She kissed and sucked at the glans, the tip of her tongue circling and circling. My cock felt so hard and swollen that I thought it was going to burst She licked the crevice, teasingly and persistentiy. Then she took it into her mouth, and I felt it slowly slide in, between her teeth, and her tongue swirling around it, and for the first time in a long time I didn’t care about Misquamacus, and I didn’t care about shadows that ran along like buffalos, and I didn’t care about anything at all except Karen Tandy. I thought to myself, This young lady and me, we were always meant to get together. Maybe we met through pain and tragedy and rampant evil, but this was always meant to be.

  The feelings that Karen was arousing in me were totally sensational. She had swallowed the whole length of my cock, all the way down to my pubic hair, and she was rhythmically sucking on it, without once pausing to take a breath. What was more, her tongue was actually licking around and around the shaft of my cock, all the way around, with the most incredible swirling motion, almost as if —

  Almost as if her head was going around and around.

  I had an instant petrifying vision of old man Rheiner at the Belford Hotel, with his head going round and round. But then I opened my eyes and it was worse. Karen was floating vertically in the air, her bare toes nearly touching the ceiling, slowly spinning around and around. Her hair gently flew out as she spun, but her eyes were wide open, and each time she came around to face me, she stared at me upside-down, with an uncanny expression of mock-submission, as if she were only sucking my cock to show me how weak and vulnerable I was, and how much like other men. Ready to throw my common-sense and my principles out of the window, as soon as I was offered sex. Even ready to throw out my instinct for self-preservation.

  I yelled out. I think I yelled out. Karen immediately disgorged my cock, and spun over and over in mid-air, like an astronaut tumbling over and over in a weightless space capsule. She landed spreadeagled against the wall in the far corner of the room, beside the dark-brown drapes, where she stood watching me, her face buried in shadow, breathing deeply and evenly, as if she had been running. I grabbed my pants and struggled into them, sweating and shaking in spite of the air-conditioned chill.

  ‘How did you do that?’ I asked her. ‘How the hell did you do that?’

  ‘I can do anything, white devil,’ said Karen, and this time her voice was even harsher and lower. ‘I can walk through time. I can walk through space. There is nothing that can hold me back now.’

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked her. I wished I didn’t sound so strangulated and high-pitched.

  ‘I want you to be my messenger.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I want you to take a message to your people. I want you to tell them that their cities are not being swallowed by earthquakes or storms, but by the power of Misquamacus the greatest of all wonder-workers.’

  ‘Taking a message to my people isn’t going to be quite as easy as it sounds,’ I replied. I was trying to be brave and challenging but it wasn’t very easy. My voice kept shaking and going off track. ‘Who am I going to take it to? I wanted to know. The President? The Office of Indian Affairs? The Washington Post? You don’t seriously think that anybody’s going to believe me?’

  ‘They must be told why they have to die,’ said Karen. ‘They must know why every single artefact that they ever brought or fashioned must be taken down to the Great Outside, and banished for ever. The years of the White Faces are over, for ever. It was foretold and now it has come to be.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering to tell us why we have to be swallowed up,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just swallow us up and leave it at that?’

  ‘You have to know? Karen retorted. ‘It is the turning of the moon, the season of darkness that follows the season of light. Just as you believed that it was your manifest destiny to kill us and steal our hunting-lands, we believe that it is your manifest destiny to be plunged into the ground, into the Great Outside, and there to meet the god of all shadows, who will be judge and bloody executioner of all.’

  ‘I still don’t see that it makes any difference whether or not we know why we’re going to be massacred,’ I blustered. ‘Being massacred is being massacred, no matter what the reason for it happens to be.’

  ‘It is justice. It is just revenge. They have to know that. Those who survive, those who carry the story to other countries and other continents, they must all know why we have done this thing. Otherwise white men will come again, and again, and again, and we
shall never know peace.’

  ‘Misquamacus,’ I said, ‘what you’re proposing to do, it’s impossible. It’s totally impossible! It’s way too late to turn back the clock. Supposing you get rid of New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and Denver and Pittsburgh and every place else, what are you going to be left with? A country that’s back in the goddamned Stone Age!

  ‘Maybe it was unfair that we took your land and killed all your buffalo and changed your life. Maybe it was unforgivable that we killed all your women and children, and destroyed your culture. But the world is kind of like that, and human beings are kind of like that, all over the world, not just here. And times change, and people change, and however much you might resent it, you can’t put it all back the way it was.’

  I paused for breath. ‘It was something we did and maybe it’s something we shouldn’t have done, or done it differ-ently. Now it’s too late. But maybe we’ve learned a little more humanity and a little more, I don’t know, tolerance, I guess.’

  There was a long silence. Karen stared at me with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. In his code, a man didn’t apologize for what his people had done. Outside the window it was gradually beginning to grow lighter, and I heard two or three heavy tractor-trailors rumbling past.

  At last, Karen repeated, ‘You will tell your people why they are going to die.’

  I shrugged. ‘All right. I guess I can only try. But, as I say, the days of the smoke-signal are long gone. I don’t suppose anybody will listen to me.’

  ‘They will listen when I have pulled down New York.’

  ‘You’re going to pull down New York?’

  ‘I have the strength; I can pull down New York. I can pull down any city, anywhere. New York is the place where I was first betrayed by the white devils. By the time I have finished with it, it will have been levelled back down to the rocks.’

  I stood up, and looked Karen directly in the eye. ‘Believe me, o mighty wonder-worker, I’m going to do everything I can to stop you.’