Burial

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked. But she didn’t answer. Instead, she piloted the head of my cock in between her legs, and massaged it for a while, and then slowly sat on me.

  ‘Who are you?’ I repeated, but she shook her head, to show me that she wouldn’t answer, and lifted her finger to her lips. She started to ride up and down on me, faster and faster, deeper and deeper, until with each downstroke my balls were crammed into the crevice of her bottom.

  I tried to sit up, but Karen slapped me yet again, slapped me, with both hands at once, and I could feel my nose spring blood. Then she tilted herself forward, and squashed her breasts against my chest, and reached down with both hands and seized my buttocks, digging her nails in deep. She thrust and plunged and thrust with her hips, and then she raked her nails across my bare, unprotected flesh, and clawed at my scrotum, and I climaxed. A thick, pumping ejaculation.

  ‘Ak !Ak! Ak!’ she shrieked, throwing her head back, and even before I had finished, I felt a surge of shame and disgust and fright I slapped at her, and tried to struggle out from underneath her, but then she hit me with her clenched fist, right on the bridge of my nose, and I dropped back onto the pillow with tears bursting out of my eyes.

  She leaned over me and I could see that she was no longer Karen. I saw angular cheeks and a hard-chiselled nose, and eyes as blank as coulee-washed pebbles.

  ‘White devil,’ he said, so softly that I could scarcely hear him. ‘At last you have given me what I want An heir, white devil. A son that I can call my own.’

  He leaned back, and whooped, a high soul-chilling whoop that reminded me of all the cowboy-and-Indian movies I had ever seen. Then he looked down at me again, and he was Karen.

  I stayed where I was, flat on my back on the bed, while she slowly climbed off me. ‘See,’ she said, as she stood up. ‘The greatest act of contrition that you ever could have made. ‘And with that, she parted her vagina with her fingers so that I could see the sperm that had filled it. A drop of it slid shining and hesitant down her thigh, but I knew as well as she did that Karen was pregnant again, with another wonder-worker, the unnaturally conceived heir of Misquamacus.

  ‘Now what?’ I said, and my voice was no more than a croak.

  She dragged one of the blankets off the bed and wrapped herself in it. ‘Now you have paid for your treachery,’ she said. Her eyes slowly rolled upward, until she was staring at me with solid whites. ‘Now you must die.’

  I edged crabwise across the bed, still on my back. Karen was already changing, already altering. She grew taller, and darker. I had to remember that she and Misquamacus were sharing the same body and the same soul, and so sometimes (if he let her) she could predominate, just like she had on the bed, but sometimes he could predominate, and that meant serious violence, such as being turned inside-out, or being ripped into pieces, or having your soul torn up like confetti.

  I had seen what had happened to George Hope and Andrew Danetree, and I never wanted that to happen to me. I would rather have died, instantly. I would rather have shot myself directly in the head, like the desperate troopers at the Little Big Horn.

  Karen said, ‘It’s a good day to die.’ She circled the end of the bed, and she didn’t take her eyes off me once.

  I retreated toward the opposite side of the room. Karen came after me, but I noticed that the further away from the wall she went, the slower she became, in the same way that Martin had slowed down at the Greenbergs’. The shadow on the wall was all-important. It obviously gave Misquamacus strength — and the further he retreated from it, the weaker he became. Comparatively, that is. Misquamacus’s weak was still devastatingly strong. He was probably capable of tearing out my lungs with his bare hands; and he probably wouldn’t hesitate to do it. Not for an instant.

  ‘Karen,’ I said, ‘try to be strong. Try to be yourself. Don’t let this sucker take you over completely. Come on, Karen, fight!’

  Karen took one step toward me, then another, her eyes still blinded white.

  ‘Aye-aye-aye-nayew,’ she chanted. ‘Aye-aye-aye-aye-wejoo-suk.’

  I hit the armchair and reached behind me to steady myself. I felt the drops of water that David had left on the vinyl. I circled around the back of the chair, never once taking my eyes away from Karen, never once lowering my guard. But then I felt that wetness, those few drops of water, and I suddenly remembered what Martin Vaizey had told me, and how I had chased off the shadow at the Greenbergs’ apartment.

  Water. White man’s water. Dead water, as far as the Indians were concerned, because it was filtered and chlorinated and cleaned, and given added aluminum for brightness. But it was our water, the water of white civilization, and it was always on tap if we needed it. Like now.

  Karen took another step closer. ‘You will grow to like the darkness,’ she told me. ‘You will grow to like the pain, too, in the end, after many years. You will wonder how you ever managed without it.’

  ‘Back off,’ I said. ‘I’m warning you.’

  Karen laughed, a deep, multi-layered laugh. ‘You are warning me?’

  I stepped sideways into the bathroom doorway. Karen came after me, one slow movement at a time. Then — as quickly as I could — I slammed the bathroom door, and scrambled into the shower, and spun the faucet to full. I was drenched at once by an explosion of freezing-cold water, and I shouted out in shock.

  Karen slammed open the bathroom door. She was still Karen, still naked and skinny, but her muscles had started up that knotty convulsion again, and her head seemed to have grown larger, so that it was more like a mask than a head.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ I shouted at her. ‘You got what you wanted! Now get the hell out of here and leave me alone!’

  ‘You have to die! she roared at me. ‘For everything you’ve done, you have to die!’

  I thought: water, for God’s sake, turn into a rattlesnake. Turn into anything that Misquamacus is afraid of.

  Karen approached me slowly, her eyeballs white, her head swaying from side to side, her teeth exposed in a maniac grin.

  I thought of rattlers and water-moccasins and cobras and every goddamned snake in the book, my eyes squeezed shut. I tried to imagine that the bathroom was full of them, hissing and writhing and twisting and tangling.

  I felt a chilly sliding movement across my foot, and I opened my eyes, and it had happened. The whole shower basin was filled with snakes — shining and transparent, all swarming over my bare feet — and the more water that gushed out of the shower-head, the more snakes there were. They poured out over the bathroom floor, and slid towards Karen with loathsome enthusiasm.

  Karen took only one more step forward, but a water-moccasion lunged at her toes, and she shuddered, and quickly retreated. She lowered her head, and I sensed in her posture the same sudden defeat that I had sensed in Martin Vaizey, when I had created that rattlesnake, back on East 17th Street.

  Karen’s head was lowered, but the shadowy head of Misquamacus rose above it, his face stony with rage, his headdress teeming with black, excited bugs.

  ‘You will pay with your soul, white devil,’ he told me, through Karen’s lips.

  He turned, and Karen turned with him, casting one dark resentful look at me from under her tousled fringe.

  ‘No!’ I ordered. ‘No! You can’t take her with you!’

  But Misquamacus thundered out of the room, dragging Karen behind him, and I heard the door wrenched open and the door slammed shut. I looked down at the bathroom floor. It was awash with water, and I was drenched, but there were no snakes anywhere. I paddled my way out, crossed the bedroom and opened the front door. I thought I glimpsed a tall dark shadow and a fleeting figure in white, just turning the corner by the Thunderbird’s office. But it was impossible to tell for sure. The streetlights were out. The sky was as dark as congealing blood. And the wind was whipping up a blizzard of sand and dust and stray fragments of fencing and trash and broken siding.

  I stood on the balcony and looked around me. I knew there was no point
in trying to run after Misquamacus. He was gone, and Karen was gone, too. They could have been anywhere at all between here and hell and Pennsylvania. But something was happening here in Phoenix. I could hear windows breaking and sirens whooping in the distance, and as I stood on the balcony I felt a distinct pulling sensation, as if some magnetic force were trying to tug me right through the frosted-glass panelling and down to the courtyard and along the street and — where?

  This was it. This was what had happened in Colorado and Chicago and Las Vegas. This was the Ghost Dance, the dragging-down, the day of all shadows. And now it was happening here.

  I went back inside, and dressed and packed as quickly as I could. Outside, I heard a crunching, scraping noise, and when I looked out of die window I saw a Dodge van being pulled on its side all the way down Indian School Road, and a man in a baseball cap desperately and unsuccessfully trying to stop it. In the Thunderbird Motel’s parking-lot, a Winnebago suddenly crashed onto its side, and a brand-new red Allante rolled onto its roof.

  My television swung around on its castors and knocked against the wall. My bed began to slide towards the door. I heard shouting from almost every room in the whole motel, and a woman screaming; and then there were people running down the steps and across the courtyard, and a devastating crack of thunder that seemed to break the sky in half from Paradise Valley to the Manzanita Race Track.

  In a jumbled way, I began to understand what Misquamacus was doing.

  First, he was calling together the direct descendants of all of those pioneers and troopers who had killed or murdered Indians, back to the very same places where the killings had taken place. How he was managing to call them, and why they felt compelled to come, I simply couldn’t say. Maybe he had plucked some chord in some sort of long-buried inherited memory, who knows? Misquamacus had very strong powers of suggestion.

  He was calling together people like George Hope and Andrew Danetree — like the seven who had died in Papago Joe’s inspection pit. Once they were assembled, Misquamacus had been able to open up the door to the Great Outside and let Aktunowihio have his way with them. Aktunowihio, the Dark One, who had stormed up the hill at the Little Big Horn and massacred Custer and all of his men. Aktunowihio, whose smoke-like tentacles had forced their way into old man Rheiner’s body, and pulled him into hell.

  Misquamacus was travelling around America, summoning the guilty, and having them killed, and counting coup. And then, in all of those places where the white man had spilled Indian blood, he was opening up the very gates of the land of death, and dragging down everything that the white man had created — his buildings, his railroads, his television sets, his highways, his airports, everything.

  It was revenge on a scale that was almost unimaginable. You destroyed my culture, white devil, now I’m going to destroy yours.

  I felt the floors of the Thunderbird Motel shuddering beneath my feet. I decided it was time to leave. If only I knew where Karen had gone. I dressed, and then I quickly stuffed my shirts and my shorts into my overnight bag, and hurried along the balcony to the steps. The dead armadillo had gone, so I guessed it couldn’t have been dead after all. The steps were already cracking, and as I gingerly climbed down them I felt them tilt and the steel handrail dislodge itself from the concrete.

  My rental car had slid fifteen or twenty feet sideways across the parking lot, and was resting up against a low concrete retaining wall, with its nearside fender badly dented. It was quite a risk, driving in these conditions, but I needed to get after Karen as quickly as I possibly could and there wasn’t time to walk.

  Maybe I was wrong, but it was my guess that Misquamacus was taking Karen back with him to the Great Outside. If that was the case, I needed Papago Joe to guide me there, and I needed him now.

  I climbed into the car and started the engine. As I started to negotiate my way out of the parking-lot, a Cherokee truck came sliding past me sideways, its tires singing a deep rubbery protest song. It struck my car a glancing blow on the front bumper, which turned it round in a quarter-circle, but that allowed me to drive through a gap in the retaining wall without having to do one of my famous 103-point turns.

  I drove east on Indian School under low, hurrying clouds. The light — what there was of it — was a thick grainy red. To my left I could just make out the hump of Camelback Mountain. It was nearly six-thirty now, but it looked as if this was going to be the darkest morning that Phoenix had ever known.

  Trying to drive in that storm was like trying to drive in a strange dream. Even though my foot was pressed down hard on the gas the Lincoln was struggling to hit thirty miles per hour. The engine was straining and the transmission was whining like a lost dog. The dragging sensation from behind me was so strong that I felt as if I was driving up a very steep grade. I could manage to steer due east without much difficulty, but when I turned right on Alma School Road to head towards Mesa, the car was pulled so powerfully and consistently to the west that I had to keep the wheel twisted off to the left, and by the time I finally managed to reach Apache Boulevard, where I could turn due east again for Apache Junction, my hands were aching with the strain and the wheel was slippery with sweat.

  The sky grew darker and darker, particularly behind me, over downtown Phoenix. I saw hardly anybody else on the streets, although I came across rubbish and fencing and billboards and baby-buggies and God knows what else, all being dragged westward along the highway. Just as I reached the outskirts of Mesa, I saw a huge red gasoline truck sliding sideways along the highway towards me, and I had to steer onto the pavement to avoid it. In my rearview mirror I saw it roll over onto its side in a cascade of sparks and start to burn.

  More vehicles came rolling and tumbling along the highway, and my car was struck twice — once by a driverless van, and once by a station wagon. I wasn’t sure if there was anybody alive inside the wagon, the windows were blanked out with blood.

  Outside of Mesa, I saw sheds and houses being slowly dragged across the landscape. I saw groups of people, too, trying to escape to the east. They were plodding along the side of the highway, their backs bent, as if they were trying to climb a mountain. I felt like stopping to give three or four of them a ride, but if I had a full load of passengers I doubted if the car was powerful enough to keep going. As it was, it was beginning to smell of hot rubber, and the transmission was whining even more loudly.

  The wind blurted and howled against my windshield, and the combined rumbling of houses and cars and tumbling rubbish was deafening. I tried the car radio, but all I got was a blurt of static and — for a moment, very faintly — a blue-grass station from somewhere far away. It sounded like a song from another world.

  I met her when the rains began to fall …

  I met her and I loved her from the first sweet kiss …

  Four miles out of Mesa, a red flashing light on the instrument panel warned me that the car was overheating. It faltered and shuddered, and I began to worry that I wouldn’t make it. The engine ground slower and slower and the warning alarm started up, a high-pitched penetrating noise and a red light that demanded STOP ENGINE NOW.

  There was a moment when the car was travelling so slowly that I thought that I would probably get to Papago Joe’s a whole lot faster if I abandoned it by the roadside and tried to hike it. But then something curious happened. The car began to roll just a little faster, just a little more easily. After two or three miles, it picked up even more speed. The warning alarm died away and the red light blinked off as the engine was relieved of the strain of having to pull against such an overwhelming force.

  With fewer than eight miles to go to Apache Junction, the car began to travel at fifty, then sixty, then seventy. It was when I hit 75 that I realized what was happening. The car hadn’t simply broken away from the force that had been dragging it back towards Phoenix, it was being dragged forwards in the direction of Apache Junction. The blizzard of dust and trash that was blowing all around me had changed direction, too, and I began to hear pieces
of fencing and empty Coke cans and all kinds of detritus knocking and pattering and clanging on the back of the car.

  Frightened by my rapidly-mounting speed, I jammed my foot on the brake, but the highway was slippery-dry with dust, and the car slewed from one side of the blacktop to the other, tires screaming, almost out of control. My offside wheels jounced and slammed against the rough stony edge of the highway, and my front bumper snagged a length of twisted wire fencing. I took my foot off the brake, and steered myself back to the right-hand side of the road. There was nothing I could do but let the force drag me forwards, unimpeded, otherwise — shit — I was going to end up killing myself.

  At least I was being dragged where I wanted to go. All I was worried about was what would happen when I got there. How the hell was I going to stop?

  As I approached Apache Junction, the speedometer needle was nudging eighty-five. The highway was littered with debris and derelict cars, and I had six or seven noisy but not serious collisions. It was only when I started running over bodies that I began to panic. Right on the outskirts of Apache Junction, twenty or thirty people lay dead or dying in the road — men, women and children — and I was driving right through them before I even realized what they were. But suddenly an old silver-haired man was flung up onto the hood of the car, and then a girl in jeans and a T-shirt was slammed up against the windshield, and my wheels went bumpity-bumpity-bumpity over arms and legs and bodies.

  I shouted out something, I can’t remember what I stepped on the brakes. The car skidded around and around and hurtled off the road into the side of a shed. Wooden planking exploded all around me, and then I was crashing through shelves of paint and jars of methylated spirits and boxes of screws and paintbrushes and staples, and then I was out the other side of the shed and the car was still skidding from side to side, plowing up dust and bursting into a henhouse. Brown feathers, chickens, straw, netting, wire, and then back onto the highway again with a slam of suspension that must have finished my shocks for good.