Blind Panic

by Graham Masterton

  “That’s better, Lizzie,” said one of the nurses soothingly, stroking her arm. “Try to relax. Try to thinkwarm, peaceful thoughts. Think about walking along the seashore in summer. Think about lying in the long grass, watching the clouds roll by.”

  Lizzie stiffened again, opening and closing her mouth as if she wanted to say something but had lost the power of speech as well as her sight.

  “Come on, Lizzie, relax. Think of that lovely windy day.”

  Lizzie made a guttural sound deep in her throat.

  “She’s not choking, is she?” asked Amelia.

  Lizzie said, “Misquamacus.”

  “What?” asked the nurse in bewilderment.

  “Misquamacus,” Lizzie repeated.

  The nurse turned to Amelia and said, “Do you have any idea what she’s saying? It sounds like ‘missed the markers.’”

  Lizzie said, “We deserved it. We all deserve it.”

  She opened her mouth wide, and I thought that she was going to start screaming again, but then she closed it and gradually began to relax. She shuddered and jerked a few times, but then she lay still, and even though I couldn’t see her eyes, she seemed to be sleeping. The nurses checked her pulse and her blood pressure and took her temperature.

  “How is she?” asked Amelia.

  The nurse gave her a reassuring smile. “Her heart rate’s nearly a hundred, and her BP’s a little high, but that’s no more than you’d expect after a paroxysm like that.”

  The intern was still shaking his head. “I never saw a patient fail to react to ethchlorvynol before. Never. Normally that dosage is enough to put a patient to sleep on the count of three.”

  I didn’t say anything, and neither did Amelia. But now we knew for certain who we were up against, and we knew what we had to do next, and both of us were dreading it.

  Amelia bent over and kissed Lizzie. “God protect you, my darling.”

  The nurse said, “Don’t worry. Fits like this always look scary, but they’re usually harmless. It was probably nothing more than delayed shock. It can come out up to five or six days later. Sometimes it doesn’t come out for weeks.”

  We left the room, closing the door behind us, and walked along the corridor to see Kevin.

  “So whose voice was that she was speaking in?” I asked Amelia. “It certainly wasn’t hers. What would Lizzie know about Hin-mut-whoever? Or even Misquamacus for that matter? You’ve never told her about Misquamacus, have you?”

  “Of course not,” said Amelia. “I think it was a message. You know, like posthypnotic suggestion. As soon as she started to talk about what happened to her, out it came.”

  “Okay, but who was the message for?”

  “Us, Harry. You and me. Why do you think Misquamacus chose Lizzie to strike blind, of all people? She’s my sister. She was bait.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “We’re all going to get our sight back,” said Kevin. “I’m convinced of it. I don’t know what happened to us out there, but nobody goes blind for no reason at all, do they? Not permanently blind. Not forever.”

  He was a big, overweight man, with wide shoulders and no neck, more like a college football coach than the manager of a sportswear store, which he actually was, but because his eyes were covered with a pale green mask like Lizzie’s, he looked childlike and vulnerable. He was sitting in a high-backed hospital armchair, with a can of Diet Coke and a half-eaten cheese sandwich beside him. On the wall behind him hung an oil painting of an empty room, by somebody called Vilhelm Hammershoi. I thought it was a pretty appropriate picture for a clinic in which nobody could see anybody.

  “Kevin—can you describe what happened?” I asked him. “Lizzie says you met some guy with two long mirrors beside him. We didn’t exactly understand what she meant.”

  Kevin bent forward in his chair and wedged his stubby fingers together. “I couldn’t tell you for sure. It all happened so fast. We were cycling up the west side of the canyon. It was pretty steep, and Lizzie was maybe twenty or thirty yards ahead of me because she’s always been the stronger cyclist, and I was riding drag to keep the kids company. Then suddenly this guy stepped out from the side of the track. I don’t exactly know where he came from. He just kind of materialized.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was tall—taller than me. Maybe six-one, six-two. He had on this black hat with a wide brim, so that his face was in shadow. He was wearing a black suit and a big silver medallion, and he was carrying some kind of a walking cane. It had dangly things hanging off of it, maybe feathers or fur. I didn’t really see exactly what they were.”

  “And how about the mirrors? Did you see those?”

  “Well, they didn’t exactly look like mirrors to me. They were more like a mirage, I guess. I was sure I could see two other guys, one standing on either side of him, but when I looked directly at them, there was nobody there. You know you get that thing sometimes when you’re tired, and you think you see a black cat out of the corner of your eye? But you turn around, and it’s not there at all. They were just like that.”

  “What did they look like to you?”

  Kevin thought for a while, his head slightly raised and cocked to the right, as if he were trying to visualize the shadows in his mind.

  “They both had these very white faces. Chalk white, I can remember that. But sometimes they looked tall and sometimes they looked quite small, as if they were quite a distance away from us. I know this sounds crazy, but I can remember thinking that they looked like puppets rather than real men.”

  “What happened then, Kevin?” asked Amelia.

  “Lizzie cycled up to this guy in the black hat and the black suit and stopped, and I could see that she was talking to him, although me and the kids were still a little ways from catching up, and what with the wind blowing I couldn’t clearly hear what she was saying to him at first. I thought that maybe he was out walking and he’d gotten himself lost and he was asking her the best way to go.

  “Then I got closer and he started to jab his walking cane at her, and shouting. It was like, ‘I blame all of you! Your forefathers and you and your children and your children’s children!’ Naturally I didn’t like the sound of this at all, so I cycled up beside Lizzie and said, like, ‘What the hell’s going on here, man? Why are you yelling at my wife?’

  “But he didn’t answer me. Didn’t say a word. He just stared at me and lifted up both of his arms as if he were going to try flying. He said something that I didn’t understand, and then I saw this dazzling blue light. I mean, it was like staring directly into a halogen headlight from about two feet away. I kind of staggered back, because I couldn’t see nothing at all, and I stumbled over Shauna, who was standing right next to me, and we both fell over. I could hear Lizzie and David fall over, too.

  “That was it. I didn’t hear the guy walk away. Lizzie was sobbing and the kids were both crying and I felt like crying myself. But I wanted to make sure that we stayed where we were because there was a five-hundred-foot drop on the right-hand side of us.”

  “Puppets,” Amelia repeated.

  Kevin shrugged. “Like I say, I couldn’t see them straight on. Only, like, sideways. But there was something about the way they walked, like a funny little dance, and the way they tilted their heads. Don’t ask me. They just put me in mind of puppets, that’s all.”

  I stood up and gripped his shoulder. “Thanks, Kevin. Take care of yourself. Okay if we talk to the kids? We’ll try not to upset them.”

  “Sure, but be gentle with Shauna, won’t you?”

  Amelia gave Kevin a kiss, and then we walked along the corridor to the children’s rooms. David was asleep, lying on his back with his mouth open, breathing in that clogged-up way that kids do, so we left him.

  Shauna was awake, but she was bundled up in bed, clutching a brown stuffed rabbit and looking sorry for herself.

  “Shauna?” said Amelia. “How are you feeling, darling?”

  “Sad,” said Shauna, and
she started to cry. Amelia took her in her arms and hugged her. Even with her green mask on, I could see that she was a cute little girl, with a snubby little nose and Titian hair like Amelia’s, but curly. We couldn’t see her eyes, of course, but tears kept sliding out from underneath her mask, and she spoke almost entirely in painful sobs.

  “Mommy and Daddy are going to buy me a puppy for my birthday,” Shauna wept. “Now I’ll never be able to see what it looks like.”

  “Don’t you give up hope, darling,” said Amelia. “Harry and me, we know some pretty clever tricks. Don’t we, Harry?”

  “Tricks?” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “We know more tricks than a five-legged pony.”

  “Harry,” said Amelia. I loved it when she scolded me.

  I went across and tugged a couple of Kleenex out of the box on Shauna’s nightstand, and I carefully dabbed the tears away from her cheeks.

  “A very bad thing has happened to you, sweetheart,” I told her. “It was horrible and it wasn’t fair. But your aunt Amelia and me, we think we’re beginning to understand what it was. I just need to ask you if you can remember anything at all about the man in the black hat, or the two people who were with him. Anything. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s not important, because it might be, and it might help us to bring your sight back.”

  Shauna shivered, as if a goose had walked over her grave. “I didn’t really see him. He was shouting at Mommy about something.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “Uh-uh. Not really. But he was wearing this kind of metal thing. I noticed it because the sun was shining on it. It was silver, and it was like all snakes, knotted up together.”

  I glanced at Amelia again. The sunlight was illuminating her face and her hair, making her look even more pre-Raphaelite than usual: fey and pale, with plum-colored circles under her eyes. Both of us were pretty much bushed.

  I turned back to Shauna. “How about the two people on either side of him?” I asked her. “Your mommy said they looked like mirrors. Your daddy thought they looked like puppets.”

  Shauna lowered her head and twisted her fingers together, the way kids do when they’re trying to explain something they don’t really understand.

  “I know there was somebody there because I kind of saw them. But when I looked at them, they were gone.”

  “Okay, that’s okay. But when you kind of saw them, what did they kind of look like?”

  “They looked like boxes.”

  “They looked like boxes?”

  Shauna nodded. “They looked like boxes with arms and legs and white faces on top.”

  “I see. What color were they? Do you remember?”

  “I don’t know. Black or maybe they were dark red.”

  “Black or dark red boxes with white faces on top?”

  Shauna nodded again. “I had a bad dream about them last night,” she said, and the tears started to flow again. “They were looking in my window and I was scared.”

  “Hey, come on—I get bad dreams, too, about all kinds of things, like losing my shorts when I’m swimming in the ocean, or finding great big hairy tarantulas swimming in my soup. Mostly I have bad dreams about the IRS. But dreams are only dreams, sweetheart. They’re not real and you shouldn’t let them scare you.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you dream about those boxes looking into your window again, clap your hands and shout out, ‘Scrammo boxerooni!’ You got it? It works every time.”

  We left Shauna and went back to say good-bye to Kevin, and also to check on Lizzie.

  Amelia said, “Scrammo boxerooni?”

  “That’s right. If you’re having nightmares about boxes, it never fails.”

  “What about the IRS?”

  “Pretty much the same thing. Clap your hands and shout out, ‘Scrammo taxerooni!’”

  Amelia had booked us a junior suite at the Inn @ Northrup Station on NW Twenty-third, the so-called “Trendy-third” district of Portland. She had booked it mainly because it had two separate queen-sized beds (for the sake of propriety, her being married to Bertie and all) and because it wasn’t too pricey. But she had also booked it because a wacky friend of hers in the West Village had told her that the interior decor was “totally mind-bending.”

  She wasn’t kidding. It was like stepping into a Bugs Bunny cartoon from the mid-1960s. The walls and the drapes were a jazzy melange of reds, oranges, purples, yellows, and pinks, and the furniture was what they used to call “contemporary" when women wore beehives and Cadillacs still had fins. The front of the reception desk was quilted in purple and there were dangly free-form mobiles hanging from the ceiling.

  Zany as it was, the welcome they gave us at the Inn was distinctly snooty. A supercilious young man who looked like an Art Garfunkel impersonator told us that Amelia’s credit card would be charged extra if our suite smelled even faintly of smoke after we had left.

  “Damn,” I told Amelia. “That rules out human sacrifice.”

  To be fair, our room was vast and airy, and it had a castiron balcony overlooking Northrup Avenue. If we had been so minded, we could have sat outside and smoked Havana cigars and watched the trolley cars go by and thrown pimento-stuffed olives at the passing pedestrians.

  But Amelia and I didn’t have time for relaxing. I went into the kitchen and opened up a bottle of Geyser Peak Shiraz, but that was only to give us some alcoholic bravado.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” Amelia asked me.

  I handed her a large glassful of pungent red wine. “The way I see it, we don’t have a choice, do we? If we try to tell their doctors the real reason why Kevin and Lizzie lost their sight, they just won’t believe us. You can just imagine it, can’t you? ‘It’s not actually a medical problem, you guys. They’ve been blinded by a Native American medicine man. Not only that—a Native American medicine man who kicked the bucket in sixteen fifty-something and should have stayed dead, but refused to.’”

  Amelia thought for a while, and then she said, “The more I think of it, the more I’m convinced that Misquamacus chose Kevin and Lizzie.” She took off her short black linen coat and hung it over the back of the chair. “I’m sure he chose them on purpose, to bring us here. Like I say, they were bait.”

  “But why? You and me, we never caused him anything but the utmost grief.”

  “No, think about it, Harry. He brought us here because he knows exactly what we’re going to do next.”

  “You mean he knows we’re planning to hold a séance? He knows we’re going to put a call through to the Happy Hunting Ground to try to get in touch with Singing Rock?”

  Amelia nodded. “I think he not only knows, but he wants us to.”

  “But why? Singing Rock gave him even more grief than we did. Without Singing Rock, you and me would have been toast the first time he reappeared. And thousands of other palefaces would have been, too. Maybe millions.”

  “Exactly,” said Amelia. “I think he wants to punish Singing Rock for saving us. He also wants to make sure that we don’t get any help from Singing Rock to thwart him again.”

  “Thwart. That’s a great word, isn’t it? I thwart I thwar a puddytat.”

  Amelia didn’t rise to that. When she was being serious, she was deeply serious, and believe me, she was never so serious as when she was talking about the spirit world.

  “Think about it,” she said. “Any spirits who want to make a physical reappearance in the world of the living have to be able to produce some kind of ectoplasm.”

  “You mean that white stuff that mediums used to pull out of their sleeves, and pretend it was the ghost of Uncle Casper?”

  “Well, that was fake. A few yards of chiffon, usually. There was one famous medium who used to hide it up inside her, and drag it out from under her dress whenever she wanted to produce a ghost. But real spirits have to generate some material substance, no matter how filmy and transparent it is, otherwise they simply wouldn’t be visible. They wouldn’t reflect the light the
way that phantoms do, and they wouldn’t be able to move things around, like poltergeists.”

  I went back into the kitchen to find a mammoth-sized bag of Combos. “Okay,” I agreed, tearing the bag open and spilling pretzels all over the kitchen counter. “But when you and me chased Misquamacus off the last time, we took away his ectoplasm, didn’t we? I guess we de-ectoplasmacized him, if there is such a word.”

  “Yes, we did. All that was left of him was his spirit—his memories and his emotions and whatever it is that makes one person different from every other. There was no him left, no possibility of self-reincarnation. No substance. Only the idea of Misquamacus.”

  “So how come he’s managed to show up now? And how did he make Lizzie and Kevin and the kids go blind?”

  “I don’t know, and that’s why we have to call on Singing Rock.”

  “But if that’s precisely what Misquamacus wants us to do…”

  “I’m guessing, of course, but he can’t touch Singing Rock in the spirit world. The spirit world is ruled by different natural laws than the real world—especially the world of Native American spirits. After death no Native American spirit can ever harm another, even if they were the bitterest of enemies when they were alive.”

  “You mean that after I’ve snuffed it, I won’t be able to sit on Jimmy Shapiro’s head for stealing my Jim Bibby card?”

  “If you want to put it like that, yes.”

  Slowly, I began to understand what Amelia was trying to explain to me. “I get it. If he’s found a way of materializing himself—and it looks like he has—and we call on Singing Rock, and Singing Rock materializes, too, then it’s a whole different kettle of scrod. They’ll both have some kind of physical substance, so Misquamacus can get his revenge on Singing Rock. Again.”

  “Not only on Singing Rock. You and me, too, if we don’t have Singing Rock to protect us any longer.”

  “So,” I asked her. “Are we going to do this or not?”

  On the opposite side of the room, the huge plasma television was showing news footage of a massive traffic accident on the LI Expressway. It looked as if hundreds of vehicles were involved—buses, trucks, automobiles, SUVs, even ambulances—and several of them were burning.