Burial

by Graham Masterton

  She laughed, although she couldn’t have found it all that funny, because she stopped laughing abruptly, and said, ‘All those who came to this land from other lands shall be swallowed up and die; and all their descendants shall be swallowed up and die; and every artefact they ever made shall be swallowed up. And the soil will cover them, and grass will cover the soil, and one day I will stand in this land and I will see tall trees and clear rivers and the lodges of many thousands of Red men, stretching from one sky to the other sky. And beneath our feet, in darkness, you will be running from Aktunowihio, who will want your souls the way that he has always wanted souls.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ I said. ‘If you want me to take a message to my people, I’ll try. But don’t get disappointed if they think I’m two cans short of a six-pack.’

  ‘There’s something else that I need,’ said Karen.

  ‘You’d better tell me what it is.’

  ‘I need your seed. That is why I came here.’

  ‘I beg your pardon? You need my seed?’

  Karen nodded. In a voice that was half hers and half that of Misquamacus, she said, ‘I want your child.’

  ‘You want my child? You mean you, Karen, want my child; or you, Misquamacus, want my child?’

  Karen didn’t answer me directly, but she soon told me what I wanted to know. ‘I had two sons. When I left the time in which I was naturally born, so that I could be reborn in your time, I left my sons behind. They were caught by the Dutchmen who were searching for me. They were tortured and beaten. One died of a sickness and the other was hanged. Through all these centuries I have had no heirs. But now, through you, I can.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Whosoever I possess, their body is mine as well as their spirit When this woman gives birth to your child, that child shall be my descendant, not hers.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘You’re trying to tell me that if I make Karen pregnant, she’s going to give birth to Misquamacus Junior?’

  Karen’s eyes suddenly blazed. ‘Don’t mock me! The time of your ripping-apart is almost here!’

  There was a low, soft thundering noise. I felt the air shake and I smelled the sharp grassy smell of burning prairie.

  I backed away. I could sense that something very frightening was about to happen, and I thought I could guess what it was.

  Through the wall behind Karen’s back, straight out of the corner next to the door, stepped a huge tall figure in a black glistening headdress. I could see him distinctly, although he seemed to have less substance than Karen. It was like seeing somebody through three layers of black chiffon, or somebody standing on the opposite side of a heavily-smoking bonfire.

  ‘Oh, holy shit,’ I said. It was all I could think of. It was Misquamacus.

  He walked around Karen or he may have partly walked through her. He approached me and stood over me and he looked more threatening than I had ever seen him before. In his first manifestation at the Sisters of Jerusalem, he had been damaged by X-rays before his rebirth, and so he had been shrunken and dwarfish. Now he had regained his full height, and he was a dark greasy cliff of muscle and bone, with a face that would have looked at home on Mount Rushmore. His cheeks were smeared with magical designs in red and white, and his headdress was crawling with grave-beetles.

  What horrified me more than anything else, however, was the way in which his shoulders appeared to have partially transmuted into insect-flesh, hairy and lumpy and clustered with scabs. And all down his sides, he was growing white tentacles that reminded me of potato-roots, pale and semi-translucent.

  He wore no loincloth, but his genitals were tied up tightly, almost cruelly tightly, with an elaborate cat’s-cradle arrangement of beads and twine. His shins were wrapped in filthy grease-matted leggings of buffalo fur.

  ‘You and this woman are one,’ said Misquamacus, although it was still Karen who was talking. ‘But this woman and I are one, also. All three of us are joined by fate and by bodily closeness. Three has become one.’

  He paused. He may have been a spirit, he may have been nothing but a dim stirring-together of fear and memory and half-developed ectoplasm, but I could feel his breath on my face and it was colder than the air-conditioning, and I could hear his disgusting creepy bugs literally dripping from his headdress onto the carpet.

  ‘Twice you have been my nemesis,’ he said. ‘Twice you have hurt me. But this time you shall be my saviour; and the bringer of an heir; and this time you shall pay for what you have done to me a thousand times over.’

  I backed away. The back of my leg bumped against the end of the bed. I was trying to work out whether I could vault over the bed and reach the door before Misquamacus could get to me. I thought that I probably could — and even if I couldn’t, Misquamacus looked as if he didn’t have enough physical substance to be able to stop me. The only unknown factor was Karen. Since Misquamacus had completely possessed her, it was quite possible that she would stop me, and I had already had a taste of how strong she was.

  Misquamacus said, ‘You must lie with this woman and give her your seed.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘I can’t make love to order. I need a candlelit supper to get me in the mood, if you know what I mean, although you probably don’t.’

  ‘I am not a fool, white devil. You will give this woman your seed.’

  He turned, and raised his arm, his headdress still showering cockroaches and black-beetles. Karen obediently moved away from the corner and climbed onto the bed, with her legs apart and her knees slightly raised. Her eyes were dreamy, as if she were high on crack. She was cupping her breasts in her hands. Small white breasts like cups of milk, with darkened nipples.

  ‘Listen — ‘I told Misquamacus. ‘I can’t just —’

  ‘You must,’ said Karen. ‘You have no magic. You have no power.’

  ‘But I can’t possibly —’

  ‘You must!’ Karen insisted.

  And then — ‘You must!’ screamed a high-pitched voice, directly behind me. ‘Oh, God, Harry, you must!’

  It was a voice that I hadn’t heard for thirty-seven years, but I recognized it instantly. I twisted around, every nerve in my body tingling with shock. Only inches away from me stood my younger brother David, grey-faced, green-faced. He was wearing his black funeral suit, the suit we had buried him in, but he was still dripping wet from drowning. Nine years old, and I hadn’t been able to save him.

  My mouth opened and closed. I knew this couldn’t be true. I had seen David lifted from the swimming-pool. I had seen a tearful life-guard closing David’s eyelids with his gentle thumb. I had stood in the rain at David’s funeral and watched as his droplet-beaded coffin was carried past.

  I knew what this was. This was what the Indian medicinemen called the soul-torture. This was when they went deep-sea fishing in your psyche and came up with all the agonies that affected you the most, and made you live them and live them until you couldn’t stand to live them any longer. Men went out of their minds after soul-torture. That was how Martin Vaizey had ox-felled Michael Greenberg back in New York, by dragging something out of his subconscious that Michael couldn’t bear to think about.

  ‘You must,’ chorused David and Karen.

  ‘David,’ I said. My throat was congested with emotion.

  ‘You must,’ David repeated.

  ‘You’re not even real,’ I told him. ‘You’re dead, David. You’ve been dead for thirty-seven years.’

  ‘You know that the dead can come back. You’ve seen it for yourself. How would you like it if I came back and kept on coming back and never left you in peace?’

  ‘You’re not real!’ I yelled at him. My fear and my grief and my terrible guilt were making me tremble with physical pain, the kind of pain that makes you plead inside of yourself, stop, stop, please for God’s sake stop. This was mental dentistry, drilling right on the nerve.

  ‘Do you want to touch me?’ grinned David. ‘You can touch me, if you
like.’

  I edged away from him, and skirted around the bed. The shadowy figure of Misquamacus remained where it was, in the corner, watching me. David was standing by the single armchair, on the opposite side. His fingers were lightly resting against the brown vinyl arm of the chair, just lightly. But what frightened and hurt me more than anything was that water was running out of the sleeve of his sodden black funeral suit, and dripping onto the floor. If he wasn’t real, if he was nothing but a figment of my guilty imagination, then I must have a pretty goddamned brilliant imagination.

  ‘I want your seed, white devil,’ Karen insisted.

  I looked at David and David, greenish-grey, his hair stuck wetly to his forehead, gave me a nod. Then, without another word, he faded — faded as if he were nothing more than fog — except that drops of water still remained on the arm of the chair.

  ‘David?’ I said. I hadn’t even had the time to tell him that I was sorry — that I would have saved him if I could.

  I turned back to Misquamacus. He was darker and less substantial than a shadow, but he was still there. ‘I need your seed,’ he demanded, through Karen’s lips. ‘Otherwise, your deepest shame and your deepest sorrow will revisit you every day for the rest of your life.’

  Karen lay naked on the bed, waiting for me.

  I felt as if I had just suffered an electric shock. My brain felt totally out of kilter. I didn’t know what was real any more, what was shadow, what was spirit, what was hallucination.

  Karen whispered, ‘Come on, Harry, it’s the best way.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, shaking my head.

  She lifted the sheet, inviting me to lie inside it with her. ‘You’re not worried about Misquamacus? He won’t see … and what is he, after all? Only a spirit, only a ghost.’

  ‘Is that you talking?’ I jabbered. ‘Or is that him talking or is that both of you talking?’

  ‘Harry …’ she said, lifting the sheet a little higher.

  ‘I can’t …’ I told her. I was aching. ‘It’s out of the question.’

  ‘Harry,’ she warned me. ‘You must! Do you want David to follow you for ever?’

  Outside, in the motel courtyard, a lid fell off a trashcan, and rolled noisily across the concrete. I could hear something else, too. The sound of the wind rising, the scurry of leaves and newspapers. The drapes began to stir, and the cracks around the door set up a thin whistling sound.

  ‘Harry …’ said Karen, her voice deeper and harsher. Misquamacus lifted both of his arms, with beetles showering from his headdress.

  ‘Obey me!’ Karen roared at me. ‘Obey me, or I will rip your body into shreds, and then I will tear your soul into shreds, and you will never know anything for all eternity but pain and pain and pain!’

  Then she threw back her head so that her neck bulged and screamed out, ‘Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Akkkrraaaaaaaaaa!’

  ‘Stay away from me!’ I screamed back at her. I jostled my way round the bed and flung back the heavy brown drapes. The dawn was blood-red, and the sky was thunderous with clouds. The dried-up palms in the courtyard of the Thunderbird Motel were being lashed by a hectic gale, and dust was flying across Indian School Road. I saw a corrugated-iron fence collapse, and then slide across the street.

  But far more alarming than the storm outside was David, my dead brother David, who was standing on the balcony outside my room in his dripping wet funeral-suit, his wet hair stirred by the wind, staring at me with sad, accusing eyes.

  I turned back to Karen. She was sitting up on the bed now, with her arms stretched out toward me. Her lips were stretched back over her teeth in a canine snarl, and her eyeballs had rolled up into her head so that only the whites were exposed. She looked just like Naomi Greenberg had looked, in those last grisly moments of Naomi’s life. Every muscle in Karen’s naked body seemed to crawl with tension, as if it had a worm-like life of its own.

  ‘Nish-neip, nish-neip’ she growled at me. ‘Nepauz-had … nish-neip’ Then that blood-chilling war-cry again, ‘Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Akkkrraaaaaaaaa!’

  She climbed with a kind of stiff balletic movement off the end of the bed and made her way toward the shadowy overbearing outiine of Misquamacus. As she neared him, as she passed him by, his shadow seemed to superimpose itself on her. I kept on backing away, keeping my hands raised in front of me to protect myself, my mind jangling with fright and panic. I jumped across the bed and onto the seat of the armchair and stepped down on the other side of the room. But when I looked at Karen again I had to peer at her intently in the gloom to make out what had happened.

  Somehow, she and Misquamacus had become one, merged together. I could still distinguish the faint darkish outline of Misquamacus’s headdress of living beetles, and the clay-painted lightning-flashes on his cheeks. But now his headdress was Karen’s hair, too, and his cheeks were her cheeks, and their eyes seemed to double-focus together. The nearest way I can describe how they had intermingled is to say that they looked like two photographic negatives, placed one on top of the other, so that they matched. It was uncanny, and it was frightening, too, because it showed me just how much one person could enter the body and spirit of another. It showed me that I was no longer individual, no longer safe. Not even inside my own soul.

  Karen lifted her arms and Misquamacus lifted his arms, too, although his arms were so vague and shadowy that I could scarcely see them. Karen’s muscles continued to ripple, and with her arms uplifted her ribcage was as bony and prominent as a crucified martyr. ‘Aye! Paukunnawaw! Wajuk! Nish! Aye-aye-aye-aye-wejoo-suk!’

  I kept on backing away. In the distance, I could hear a deep rumbling barrage of thunder. Storm rising, I thought. And what a storm. I reached out behind me and felt the handle of the bathroom door. If Karen had somehow managed to squeeze in through the bathroom window, maybe I could squeeze out of it. Or maybe wrap a towel around my fist and punch out the glass.

  I opened the bathroom door behind me, hesitated for just one moment, and then dodged inside, scratching my arm on the sharp tongue of the lock. My hands were juddering so much that I could barely manage to twist the lock. I doubted if a plywood cavity door could keep Misquamacus out for very long, but it might just give me the time I needed to escape. I pressed my forehead against the door and took three deep breaths, and told myself that I had fought against Misquamacus before, and beaten him, and that I was going to beat him again.

  The day after David drowned, my father said to me, very gravely, ‘Harry—you’re going to have to find more courage inside of you now than you ever knew you had.’ I said that to myself then, with my forehead pressed against that flimsy door.

  Courage, that’s what I said. Then I turned around and David was standing in the bathroom, his face pale and decaying, his funeral suit dripping onto the tiles.

  ‘You must,’ he whispered.

  Sixteen

  He walked past me, only a couple of inches away, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. Maybe I should have done, but I couldn’t. He unlocked the door with his white, water-swollen fingers, and pushed it open. Water dripped from his ears, and into his collar. ‘You must,’ he told me.

  Karen was standing by the bed, waiting for me. I stepped mechanically back into the bedroom. The wind was singing under the door, and outside I could hear clattering and banging and somebody shouting. I turned back to David and he was still there, still watching me, and this was soul-torture, believe me.

  Karen’s eyes were dark again, dark and introspective. Her muscles seemed to have stopped twitching, and apart from a strange shadowy look, she could have almost appeared normal, like the Karen I had known before Misquamacus possessed her. But how could I possibly make love to a woman whose soul was filled up with the soul of a man, a woman whose whole being belonged to some barbaric reeking savage?

  ‘You must, Harry,’ she echoed.

  I gave it one last shot. I strode to the front door, and grasped the handle, and snapped at Karen, ‘You want seed, you bastard, you go to a goddam
ned garden centre.’ Then I flung open the door, and there he was, standing in the wind, in his sodden funeral suit.

  ‘You must,’ he insisted.

  I looked back at Karen. I’m going, I thought. David may have upset me, but he’s only a kid. I’ll shove him out of the way now and worry about the spiritual implications later.

  But without any warning at all, Karen strode forward and seized my arm. Karen? It looked like Karen, it felt like Karen, but it was strong and quick and I didn’t stand a chance. She flung me onto the bed, and then she slapped my face and my forehead so hard that she gave me a nosebleed. When I tried to get up, she slapped me again, and then she slapped me again, just because she felt like it.

  Without a word, she tugged open my trousers and wrestled them down my legs. I tried to sit up again, but this time she seized hold of my hair and screwed it around, and slapped me once, twice, three times, and then pushed me back onto the bed. I shoved her away with the heels of my hands, but she double-slapped me across the face, so hard that my ears rang.

  ‘Get off me!’ I yelled at her. ‘Get the hell off me!’

  But now she seized my left ear in one powerful clawlike hand, so tight that I could hear the cartilage crunching. And with her other hand, she grasped my cock and began feverishly to rub and tug at it, her fingernails digging into the skin. In spite of the pain, in spite of my fear — or maybe because of them — my cock began to stiffen. Karen kissed me and bit me with a dreadful urgency, and her breath was cold, so that I didn’t know whether I was being raped by a young and lustful white woman, or a three-hundred-year-old medicine-man who wanted my heart and my soul and my only offspring, too.

  She lifted herself over me. At the same time her fingernails imprisoned my balls in a dangerous sharpened cage. I felt the skin of my scrotum crinkle. Fear, physical fear, but strangely masochistic excitement, too. I didn’t speak, I didn’t move. My heart pumped, my blood rushed, I could feel thunder shaking the whole motel. I looked into Karen’s eyes and I couldn’t have told you whether it was really Karen or not. They were bright eyes; twinkling and sharp. But whose eyes? And were they looking at my face, or staring into my soul?