Burial

by Graham Masterton

  ‘The Army refused to believe they were genuine,’ she said. ‘They said that somebody had fixed them, somebody who wanted to make the Department of Indian Affairs believe that the Indians had extraordinary occult powers, which the Army wouldn’t be able to beat. They said that these photographs were some kind of crude retaliation for the way in which the Sioux chiefs had been brought to the east and shown around our shipyards and our munitions plants, in order to convince them that it wasn’t worth them fighting for their lands.’

  Papago Joe and I studied the photographs minutely. It was plain that Mark Kellogg had taken them under the most harrowing conditions, and four out of the six were quite blurred. But they clearly showed a deep coulee, its sides dotted with sagebrush, and a barren hill beyond it. In the first photograph, soldiers were riding up from the coulee, towards the hill; and although the sky above the hill looked unusually dark, that could have been faulty exposure.

  But the next photograph showed something coming up over the brow of the hill. Something dark, with writhing tentacles, like a giant squid made out of smoke. The leading cavalry officer was half-turned around, and his horse was rearing up. Behind him, some of the other troopers had already tightened their reins and prepared themselves for a hasty retreat.

  ‘This is another aspect of these pictures that the Army didn’t care for,’ said Mrs Keitelman. ‘Quite simply, they show the famous US 7th Cavalry turning tail and running away. But you can hardly blame them when you see what happened next.’

  What happened next was that a huge black bulky shape rose up over the horizon, and three troopers seemed to have fallen — or been dragged — off their horses. One of them was crushed by his falling mount; the others tried to escape, but were wrapped in black smoky tentacles before they could ride back more than fifteen yards.

  The massacre that followed was even more grisly than I had imagined it would be. But in the fourth photograph in the sequence, there was still no sign of the Indians. The cavalry were being torn from their saddles, stripped and slaughtered. Their horses lay dead and injured all around, like gutted sofas, and I saw a young Santee woman walking from one to the other, stripping off saddles and belts and boots and rifles.

  There were two more pictures. One of them showed a huge shadow rising up, and some of the troopers must have fired at it, and hit it, because I could see smoke and fragments of what could have been ectoplasm.

  The last picture was the most stunning, though, and if I hadn’t known that such things could exist, I wouldn’t have believed the evidence of my own eyes. It was hard to believe, but there it was, on its original print paper, faded and yellow.

  The date, scribbled in pencil on the back of the original, was Sunday, June 25, 1876 — the actual date of the Battle of Little Big Horn, the very Sunday on which Custer and all his troopers had died.

  The picture showed cavalry troopers desperately riding for their lives down the slopes of the coulee. Even in this fudge-coloured old print their eyes showed up white in screaming panic. Close behind them — and already catching up with some of them — was a monstrous thing that you’d have to invent a new dictionary to describe.

  It was like a black cloud concealing all of your worst nightmares. Inside the cloud, I could just make out a kind of face, a face like a human shriek. Out of the face, curled tentacles like snakes. But it wasn’t the snakes that upset me so much. It was the creature’s underbelly, which seemed to be made up of a tangled mass of human heads, hundreds and hundreds of human heads; and the smoky squid creature was running across the hilltop in a terrible spindly uneven rush, on human arms, on hundreds of human arms.

  ‘Christ,’ I said, and sat back, in awe.

  Mrs Keitelman raised an eyebrow, disapproving of my blasphemy, but satisfied because she could see that I believed.

  ‘This is authentic, isn’t it?’ she said.’ You believe that it’s authentic. There’s no photographic trickery here. This is real.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Papago Joe, his voice hoarse from tiredness but very controlled, ‘I’ve seen drawings and paintings of this thing here ever since I was small. I’ve heard stories about it that kept me awake, night after night. But I never thought for one moment that I’d ever get to see a photograph of it.’

  ‘You know what it is?’ asked Mrs Keitelman.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, this is Aktunowihio, the native American god of darkness. And this is the reality of what happened at Little Big Horn. It wasn’t Crazy Horse who killed Custer; it was Aktunowihio.

  ‘But look — Aktunowihio normally couldn’t leave the Great Outside, the dark place, the place of the dead. He didn’t have the strength and he didn’t have any way of moving himself about He was smoke, he was slime, he was everything black. Usually, he swam in darkness, but he couldn’t swim around in daylight. So he had to find a way of walking …’

  ‘All of those heads,’ I said. ‘All of those arms. They’re black.’

  ‘That’s right,’ nodded Papago Joe, his nostrils flaring in triumph. ‘That’swhy Doctor Hambone’s been involved — that’s what he did when he was captured by the Santee. He made a bargain. Look! In exchange for his life, in exchange for his freedom, he gave Aktunowihio the use of his zombies, the dismembered bodies of American slaves — alive but dead! Look at it! Shadow and death, joined together! Invincible!’

  Mrs Keitelman studied the photograph for a long time. ‘I had a feeling that it might be something like that. But, of course, what could I say? Everybody told me the photograph was just a fake. In those days, they used to fake photographs of fairies and dinosaurs and nonsense like that, and people believed them.

  ‘If you happened to have a photograph showing that Custer had been killed by an Indian demon, instead of by Crazy Horse, think of the stir! You’d upset the church, the politicians, the Indians, the whites, the military, the historians, everybody!

  ‘But,’ she said, and here she produced one more photograph. ‘He couldn’t have been completely invincible. Because, look.’

  She showed us a photograph taken from a different angle, further down the hill. How Mark Kellogg had managed to struggle down the coulee with all of that luggage and photographic equipment, I shall never know. Judging from the photographs, he had probably been far enough away from the first attack to realize what was happening, and to have run away — escaping both Aktunowihio and Crazy Horse’s braves. But he had chosen to stay, and to record what had happened for posterity. It was a particularly bitter touch that, up until now, nearly 120 years later, posterity would choose to believe that Mark Kellogg had given his life for nothing, and that his photographs were no more authentic than pictures of Big Foot, or the Loch Ness Monster, or the Yeti.

  But Aktunowihio wasn’t any of those. Aktunowihio was the embodiment of darkness and death. Aktunowihio was the shadow that floats in your mind, when you’re asleep, up and down, up and down, on the black currents of your unconscious — the ultimate predator, swallowing the private darkness on which your sanity subsists — and, in the end, your life, too. And here he was, running across the banks of the Greasy Grass River, in the worst white massacre of the Indian wars.

  This last photograph, though, told a different story. On the extreme left, a figure was standing — a thin, raggedy figure in a wide-brimmed leather hat. He was holding out something in his left hand. It was difficult to distinguish what it was, but it appeared to have smoke issuing out of it.

  Or maybe not out of it, but into it.

  I pointed him out to Papago Joe. ‘You see him? I didn’t know he was there, at the little Big Horn. But I’ll give you two hot tips at Belmont Park if that isn’t William Hood, or Million Protein, or whatever his name was. The Shadow Boy-the vampire-hunter that the US Cavalry employed to fight the Santee Indians. And there — you see, he’s holding a shadow-bottle. It looks like he’s using it to trap a little bitty piece of Aktunowihio.’

  Papago Joe nodded soberly. ‘I’ve heard of that. All that a shadow-catcher had to do was trap a small pie
ce of shadow, and the main shadow would be hurt so much that it would have to retreat to the Great Outside. Otherwise light would bleed into it and it would die. It couldn’t touch the shadow-catcher himself because a shadow can’t survive in the real world unless it’s complete … it would be just like somebody stealing your mouth, say, so that you couldn’t eat and you couldn’t breathe and you couldn’t talk. And if you tried to get it back … all the shadow-catcher would have to do is to top up the bottle with sulfuric acid, and dissolve that little piece of shadow for good. Some shadow-catchers used to keep hundreds of shadow-bottles and sell them to people who wanted to raise up shadows against their enemies, or against unfaithful wives, or business-partners they wanted to get rid of.

  ‘They said that Billy the Kid was the victim of a shadow that Pat Garrett paid good money for. You know how the story always goes that Billy stepped into a darkened bedroom, and Pat Garrett shot him? Well, think about why that bedroom was so dark. And think about why Billy’s last words were “Quien es?” — “Who is it? ”’

  We thanked Mrs Keitelman and I wished that there was more that we could have given her than thanks. I offered to read her tea-leaves but she didn’t believe in fortune-telling. Strange, really, for a widow in Bismarck, North Dakota, who was prepared to believe that a shadow-squid from hell had massacred General George Custer and his men. But then the West is made up of incongruities like that, and full of superstition, and stories of demons and ghosts and soil that whispers.

  You stand out there, like Papago Joe and I did, that summer night, after a day spent in magical darkness, and tell me that the West isn’t haunted.

  That evening we stayed at the Mandan Hotel, south-east of the city, an odd grey clapboard building that stood alone in its own scrubby lot, with the same proportions but less of the charm of an upended steamer-trunk. The owner was a grey-haired old lady with a disconcerting habit of suddenly twitching her head to one side when you least expected it. But in a floral-wallpapered dining room, home from home, she served us a good sturdy supper of pork’n’beans, and there was plenty of whisky to be had, and the convivial company of two travelling salesmen who had flown in that afternoon from Kansas City, Missouri, to interest a client in prefabricated warehousing space.

  That night, we had two slim strokes of luck, and for the first time since Karen had arrived at my consulting-rooms I began to feel that I knew what I was doing, and why; and that we had a chance of fighting this thing, and maybe — well, maybe not destroying it, who could destroy the god of all darkness? — but maybe driving it back to the Great Outside, and keeping it there.

  After Little Big Horn, after all, it looked as if William Hood had managed to beat Aktunowihio back and keep him trapped below ground for more than a century — and anything William Hood could do, I was sure we could do equally well, if not very much better. I mean, we were much more technologically advanced, right? We were much more sophisticated, when it came to science and natural phenomena. And we had just travelled all the way from Phoenix, Arizona, to Bismarck, North Dakota, over a thousand statute miles, with nothing more than human ashes, peyote, a bouquet garni of weird herbs, and a collection of dried-up sticks.

  The time had come, however, to use the telephone. More than anything else, I was worried about Amelia. On TV we saw jerky live-action newsreels of the Woolworth Building vanishing into the bedrock, then the GM building and the Pierre, then the Guggenheim. It was all dust and chaos and flashing helicopter spotlights, and mountains of abandoned cars.

  For the first hour of trying I got nothing but a busy tone. I was almost ready to give up, but Papago Joe, swallowing whisky out of the bottle, said, ‘Go on, you never know. Give it one more shot.’ I punched out the number — and almost immediately I heard a crackly voice say, ‘Yes? Who’s that?’

  ‘Amelia? Is that you, Amelia?’

  ‘Harry? You sound like you’re calling from the moon!’

  ‘Amelia, what’s happening? Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine. A little bruised. I wanted to leave the city but there’s no way. The roads are all blocked and there’s some kind of curfew. Harry — where are you? I tried to call Phoenix but all the lines are dead.’

  ‘I’m in Bismarck, North Dakota.’

  ‘Harry, listen, you know the forks that Martin Vaizey was trying to tell you about? The Celtic forks? The ones they used to trap evil spirits? Well, I went down to the precinct house and I got them!’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Good.’

  There was a short pause. Then Amelia almost screamed, ‘“Good?” What the hell do you mean “good?” I almost got myself killed! The whole precinct building collapsed and I had to jump out of a window!’

  ‘I’m only saying “good” because I guess that they’re important but I don’t know what they do.’

  ‘You don’t know what they do? I’m all bruises and cuts and I look like shit and you don’t know what they do?’

  ‘Listen, Amelia,’ I told her. ‘Stay where you are. We’re trying to fix up a couple of things and then we’re going to come and get you.’

  ‘Oh, fine. Do you want the forks or should I add them to my dinner service?’

  ‘Amelia … please. I’ll have to ask Martin.’

  ‘Martin is dead, Harry, and you’re not sensitive enough to ask him anything.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? As a matter of fact, Martin and I have gotten pretty close, and I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble asking him a simple question like that.’

  There was a very long silence. I heard crackling, and the high-pitched singing of long-distance wires. Then Amelia said, ‘I’m sorry, Harry. I’m scared, that’s all. Buildings are coming down all over. There’s no warning at all, they just come down, with everybody inside them, and there’s nothing that anybody can do to stop them.’

  ‘I think there is,’ I told her. ‘And in fact I think we’re doing it right now.’

  Another long silence. Then, ‘Any sign of Karen?’

  ‘Unh-hunh.’

  ‘I still worry about you, Harry.’

  ‘Listen — the feeling’s mutual. Always will be.’

  We swapped kisses over the phone. Papago Joe swallowed more whisky and rolled up his eyes and said, ‘Gitche Manitou, spare me.’

  *

  Papago Joe sat crosslegged on the end of the bed.

  ‘This is the way I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘The last time that Aktunowihio was powerful enough to come out into the real world, that was Little Big Horn, when Doctor Hambone gave him enough black souls to allow him to walk on the real earth.

  ‘Now he’s strong enough to be pulling all of these cities down, buildings, people, everything — and he’s edging his way out into the real world again, little by little, the way he did with your friend Martin Vaizey. At the same time, we hear that Doctor Hambone’s been prowling around. Him or his spirit. So it strikes me that Doctor Hambone has maybe made him a new deal, maybe through Misquamacus, so that black and red can rule this continent together, and be finally rid of the whites.’

  ‘What could Doctor Hambone have offered him?’ I asked.

  ‘Well … souls, I guess, that’s what Aktunowihio feeds on. Souls are his staple diet. The souls, that is, of anybody and everybody who’s died unjustly. The souls who die justly die content; and they go to Heammawihio, the spirit of light, and Heammawihio takes them up to spend the rest of eternity as stars. Peaceful, content, twinkling.

  ‘Probably the first time — back at the Little Big Horn — Doctor Hambone gave Aktunowihio the spirits of dead slaves. But after nearly one hundred and twenty years, I’m sure he has plenty more discontented black spirits to offer. Millions more. And that’s why Aktunowihio is now so strong. I mean he couldn’t be nearly as strong as this, not with just Indian souls. But with blacks, think of it! Think of all the blacks who were lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. Think of all the blacks who died through poverty, or hardship, or neglect. The blacks who died on the Civil Rights marches. All those spirits must
be giving Aktunowihio tremendous power — power like you wouldn’t believe possible. I’m sure of it: it’s the black souls that are helping him to pull down everything you arrogant white bastards built up.’

  I thought about that, finished my can of beer and crumpled it up in my fist. ‘Do you think you’re right?’ I asked him. ‘I mean — you’re making my head spin here.’

  He tapped his forehead with his finger. ‘I know I’m right. Believe me. Papago intuition.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘The way I see it: three things. We go for Doctor Hambone, get him out of the way, and set all of his spirits free. That’s going to leave Aktunowihio without the physical strength to drag any more buildings down. Then we catch his shadow, which will keep him trapped for as long as we want. Then we finish off Misquamacus, once and for all.’

  ‘Oh, yes, and how do we do that?’

  He sniffed. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it yet.’

  ‘And how do we get Doctor Hambone out of the way?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it yet.’

  ‘And Aktunowihio? Or haven’t you thought about him, either?’

  ‘Oh, sure! I’ve thought of that. We get Aktunowihio by catching part of his shadow in a shadow-bottle, the same way that William Hood did — you know, the shadow-catcher.’

  ‘You said that shadow-catching was a specialized art … that hardly anybody knew how to do it.’

  ‘That’s true. But we can get around that little difficulty. We call on William Hood’s spirit.’

  ‘Well, that makes some kind of wacky sense, I suppose,’ I conceded. ‘How do we go about finding him?’

  ‘The same way we found your old friend Singing Rock and Martin Vaizey, simply by going back to the Great Outside and summoning him. Then we can use the eagle-sticks to travel to New York and face up to Misquamacus and Aktunowihio.’

  ‘And Doctor Hambone? What about him?’