“The first hazel was brought to America by the Pilgrims, because they believed the story that God gave Adam a hazel branch so he could strike the surface of a lake with it and produce any animal he wished for. They thought it would save them from having to carry too many sheep and pigs with them on their ships.”
“Hey—that would have been really neat if it had worked.”
“Another magical thing about hazel twigs: If you tangle some into your hair, they make a ‘wishing-cap’ and you’ll soon be granted everything you ever wished for.”
“Either that or get locked up in the nuthouse for walking around looking like a scarecrow.”
Amelia raised the hazel twig a little and closed her eyes.
“Do you hear something?” I asked her.
“Sshh. There’s a very faint resonance. Somebody’s talking.”
“Who is it? Does it sound like Singing Rock?”
“Ssshh!”
I shut my mouth and kept it shut. Amelia slowly waved the hazel twig in ever-widening circles, and then held it up high above her head, and very still. She closed her eyes, and then she said, “I kill us.”
I was bursting to ask her what she meant, but now she was listening even more intently, nodding her head slightly, and moving her lips. “I kill us. Car winner.”
Almost half a minute went past, and she kept on nodding and murmuring. “Car winner and shy lower.”
I waited for more. If this gibberish was all she could pick up from the Great Beyond, then her thought-dowsing wasn’t going to help us very much.
“I kill us,” she repeated.
Another half minute went by, and then she abruptly opened her eyes. “I’m sure that was Singing Rock,” she said. “He was very faint, and there was so much white noise—probably some of the psychic static that Misquamacus left behind him—but it was definitely him.”
“Well, I’m glad he told us something useful—not,” I said. “‘I kill us’? ‘Car winner’? ‘Shy lower’? What the hell did any of that mean?”
Amelia pulled her socks back on, and then her thong and her bra. “Whatever it was, it must have been important. He kept on saying it over and over. ‘I kill us. I kill us.’”
“Well, maybe it is important,” I complained. “But don’t you think that spirits can be a right royal pain in the ass? Why don’t they just speak-a da English, like living people do? Oh, no. They have to communicate in signs and portents and mysterious mutterings.”
Amelia was buttoning up her Gloria Vanderbilts and buckling her leather belt. While she was doing so, however, I suddenly saw a dark blue spot appear on the pale blue wall behind her. Almost immediately, it started to grow, creeping around counterclockwise until it became a semicircle. I pointed to it and said, “Would you take a look at that? What the hell do you think that is?” But by the time Amelia had turned around it had formed almost a complete circle, around nine or ten inches in diameter.
I went up to it and rubbed it with my fingertip. “It’s not Magic Marker or anything like that. It’s not wet, anyhow.”
I was still peering at it when another dark blue mark appeared to the right, and that, too, started to form a circle. We watched it in bemusement. It was as if somebody were drawing on the wall from the inside.
As soon as the second circle was complete, a third circle started to appear, and then a fourth. We waited for more, but it looked as if four circles were all we were going to get.
I folded my arms. “Okay. These are a sign from the Great Beyond, unless I’m mistaken.”
Amelia cautiously touched each circle with her fingertips. “I’m sure of it. Singing Rock must have realized that we might not have understood what he was saying, so he’s given us a clue.”
“Four circles? What kind of a clue is that? Why doesn’t he just tell us straight?”
“Because he can’t, probably. Misquamacus could be running interference. Stopping Singing Rock from speaking to us directly.”
We were still staring at the circles when a large turquoise butterfly came flickering in through the balcony door. It fluttered around the living room for a while, and then it perched itself in the center of the left-hand circle and stayed there, its wings rising gently up and down.
“So, is this a clue, too? Or just some stray lepidoptera?”
“I don’t know, Harry. Really, I don’t.”
As we were watching, however, the butterfly suddenly took off, and perched itself in the center of the second circle. Then, a few seconds later, it flew to the third circle, and perched there, too. This had to be a message, although I didn’t have the foggiest notion what it was.
The butterfly landed on the fourth circle, and there it seemed content to stay.
I went up close to it, but it made no attempt to fly away. It had dark brown ovals on its wings that almost looked like human eyes staring back at me, and a crimson head, like a large drop of fresh blood. “This is some butterfly,” I said. “It doesn’t look Portlandian, or Oregonish, does it? It looks tropical.”
“I never saw a butterfly anything like it before.”
“Oh, I did. When little Lucy came down to spend the weekend in Miami and I took her to Butterfly World. It’s probably a greater green cross-eyed squinter, or something like that.”
“Butterfly World,” Amelia repeated. She came up to the wall and touched the circles again, one by one. “Butterfly World. That’s it! That’s what these are! They’re worlds.”
“Worlds? How do you work that out? They could be hula hoops for all we know.”
“No, Harry, they’re worlds, I’m sure of it. I feel it.”
“Okay. You’re the genuine authentic psychic. Who am I to argue?”
“Four worlds—that’s right. And you can go from one world to the next, just like that butterfly.”
“So what does that tell us?”
“That tells us that we have to find ourselves a PC.”
“Okay…They have one downstairs, in reception. They’ll probably let you use it for free if you offer to do it in your birthday suit.”
Amelia gave me one of her old-fashioned looks.
“Okay, sorry,” I said. “But anytime you’re thinking of trying any more thought-dowsing, and you need moral support, or even if you need immoral support, I’m your man.”
She reached up and gave me a playful pat on the cheek. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said. At the same time, the butterfly suddenly flickered away and vanished out through the balcony door.
Down in the hotel lobby, the Art Garfunkel look-alike ungraciously allowed us to use one of the hotel’s laptops. The fuss he made about it, you would have thought we wanted to play Cajun fiddle music on his prize Stradivarius.
We sat close together on one of the bright red Bugs Bunny-style couches and Amelia tapped in “Four Worlds.”
Our answer came up instantly. Neither of us had ever heard of the Four Worlds before, but here on the Internet was everything we needed to know.
It turned out that the Four Worlds were part of the belief system of some of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Their legends said that Tawa the Sun Spirit had created a world where his people could live together in peace and harmony.
In his First World, however, the Pueblos began to misbehave themselves—stealing and lying and fighting and indulging in all kinds of sexual shenanigans. So the least badly behaved were taken by Tawa’s messenger, the Spider Grandmother, to a Second World, and those who were left behind in the First World were promptly incinerated. Well, that’s life. You steal, you lie, you fight, you indulge in sexual shenanigans, you’re toast.
After a while, though, the inhabitants of the Second World began to conduct themselves just as disgracefully, and so they were moved by Spider Grandmother to a Third World—and at last to a Fourth World. By the seventeenth century, the Pueblos had reached a state of physical grace and social harmony—just in time to be invaded by the Spanish, who built Catholic missions all across New Mexico and tried to wipe out
their native beliefs altogether—Four Worlds and all. Five hundred Pueblo Indians who refused to convert to Roman Catholicism each had one foot cut off.
To their credit, the Spanish taught the Pueblos how to farm wheat and barley and grow fruit trees, but the Pueblos’ new prosperity brought more and more attacks from wandering Indian tribes such as the Navajo and the Apache, who seriously coveted their neighbors’ oxes and their asses, not to mention their apples and their stores of grain. Apart from being continually raided by other Indians, the Pueblos contracted all kinds of European diseases from the Spanish, and hundreds of them died of smallpox and scarlatina.
Eventually they rebelled against the Spanish and the Roman Catholic religion and returned to their old gods like Tawa and Spider Grandmother. To punish them, General Juan Trevino arrested forty-seven Pueblo medicine men on charges of witchcraft. He had three of them hung and the rest publicly flogged. Big mistake. In 1680, a rebellious San Juan Indian called Popé organized a mass revolt. Houses and missions were burned, and over four hundred Europeans were hacked to pieces. The Spanish were driven out of New Mexico and it was fifteen years before they were able to fight their way back.
It was General Trevino’s letters that gave Amelia and me the answer we were looking for. In fact, when Amelia brought up a translation of his last letter to the royal court in Spain, we just turned and looked at each other and said, almost simultaneously, “I kill us.”
Your Reverence, having been murderously attacked by Taos, Picuris, and Tewa Indians in their respective pueblos, we retreated with a hundred and fifty settlers to Isleta Pueblo, which was the only pueblo where the natives had not turned against us.
As dusk fell, however, three Tewas approached the pueblo from the southwestern side, along a dry arroyo. I recognized two of them as medicine men who had been imprisoned at Santa Fe for practising witchcraft.
Accompanying them were at least twenty strange figures. They were wearing expressionless white masks with slits for their eyes. They were dressed in some manner of armor, which appeared to be crudely constructed of wood, and painted in red and black. This creaked and rattled as they approached us, and for some reason we began to feel deeply apprehensive.
In the dim light, I found it difficult to ascertain precisely how many of these strange figures there were. At times it seemed as if there were more than two score. Then there seemed to be no more than six. They altered their positions as if they were chess pieces upon a board, and one moment they appeared to be extremely tall, and the next moment as small as children, and far away.
Te’E, one of the older Indians, was standing close to me. I asked him what these figures were, and if they had any connection to witchcraft. Whereupon he covered his face with his hands, so that only his eyes looked out, and he explained that these were Eye Killers, the demons produced when Pueblo girls became impregnated by foreign objects, such as prickly cactus prongs.
He said that they were sometimes known as shilowa, which is the Zuni Indian word for red, and sometimes as k’winna, which is the Zuni word for black. He said that we should retreat from the pueblo with all haste, because the Eye Killers were capable of blinding us with a single look.
“‘Car winner’ and ‘shy lower,’” said Amelia. “Black and red, in Pueblo Indian-speak.”
“That’s what Singing Rock was trying to tell us, then. Misquamacus has called up these Eye Killer things.”
We read on. General Trevino had taken old Te’E seriously, and ordered the settlers and the Isleta Indians to evacuate the pueblo and make their way northeastward. At the same time he directed twelve of his soldiers to take up positions at the top of the arroyo and prevent the Tewa medicine men and their scary collection of Eye Killers from entering the village.
As the strange figures came closer, I called upon the Tewas to stay where they were, but even if they heard me they did not respond, and continued to climb toward us. I gave the order to open fire, but the first volley of harquebus shot inflicted no casualties on the Tewas and their strange companions.
My men prepared to engage them with sword and pike, but as they advanced, the eyes of the white-faced figures flashed as brightly as summer lightning. One after the other, my men fell to the ground, each of them crying out that he had been blinded, and calling on the Lord for help.
I realized that it would be futile for me to stay, and that if I, too, were to be blinded, I would be of no service to those settlers who depended upon me for their protection. Therefore I left the pueblo without further delay.
“So the gallant general skedaddled,” I said. “Mind you, I can’t say that I blame him.”
Amelia closed the laptop. “What are we going to do now?” she asked me. “We should really tell somebody about this—shouldn’t we?—and as soon as we possibly can.”
“The trouble is, who? And who’s going to take us seriously? You can imagine what they’d say if we tried to call the Pentagon, or the FBI.”
“We need to know more about these Eye Killers,” said Amelia. “What they are, where they come from, and if there’s any way we can stop them.”
“Maybe we could try asking Singing Rock again.”
Amelia shook her head. “It’s much too dangerous. For Singing Rock, as well as for us. What we need is somebody who knows all about Pueblo shamanism, but who isn’t on Misquamacus’s radar.”
“Oh, simple,” I said. “Maybe we should look in Yellow Pages.”
I took the laptop back to the desk. The Art Garfunkel look-alike wasn’t around, so I put his precious computer on a shelf underneath the register.
Amelia and I went back upstairs. As we walked along the corridor toward our room, we saw that our door was open and the Ersatz Art was standing there talking to the maid.
“Excuse me, sir! Madam! What exactly have you been doing in here?”
I raised both hands in surrender. “We had a little accident with a candle, that’s all. I swear to God we haven’t been smoking.”
He opened and closed his mouth several times. Eventually, he said, “You’ll have to leave. Like, now. And you can expect a bill for all of the damage you’ve done.”
“Believe me, Mr. Garfunkel,” I told him, “a burned rug is the least of your worries.”
As if to emphasize what I was trying to tell him, we heard a loud collision from out in the street, and a woman screaming, and then another collision, and another.
The hotel receptionist stared at me in bewilderment, as if I had somehow caused those accidents myself, by remote control. Then he said, “My name’s not Garfunkel. Why did you call me Garfunkel? My name’s Resnick.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ladera Park, Los Angeles
Jasmine was woken up by a loud banging noise, followed by another, and another, and then people furiously shouting. She sat up on the couch. It was almost dark outside, and the sky was a dusky purple with only a narrow streak of orange where the sun had gone down.
She heard more shouting, followed by a shot. A man started screaming and a door slammed. Feet came cantering and squeaking along the corridor, maybe ten or eleven people, and it sounded as if they were all wearing sneakers. Somebody kicked at the door of Auntie Ammy’s apartment.
The baby boy was sleeping in one of Auntie Ammy’s armchairs, but now he woke up, too, and started to cry. Jasmine went over and picked him up. He was still hot, and his hair was stuck up in a lopsided plume, and he smelled of warm pee.
Somebody kicked the apartment door a second time, and then a third. Jasmine held the baby close to her chest to muffle his crying. “Shush, honey. Shush.”
There was another bang, farther along the corridor. A young man shouted, “Here, bro! Forget about that one! We got this one open!”
More shouting, more scuffling. A voice that sounded like an elderly lady. “Get out! Get out! I’ll call the police!”
“You can’t call nobody, granma! Get out of my way!”
Auntie Ammy came in from the bedroom. “What’s happening?�
� she asked. “I just dozed off for a moment and then I heard all of this hollerin’.”
“I don’t know,” said Jasmine. “It sounds like some gang’s broken into the building.”
The baby boy had stopped crying now. He leaned his head against Jasmine’s shoulder and softly snuffled. Jasmine lifted her hand to him and he clutched her fingers. Little, damp, and so vulnerable.
Auntie Ammy went across to the light switch, but when she flicked it, nothing happened. “Power’s out,” she said. “The air’s off, too. I thought it was hot.”
She went into the kitchen, pulled open one of the drawers, and took out a large black rubber flashlight. She switched it on and shone it upward into her face, so that she looked like a Halloween witch. Then she came back, slid open the door to the balcony, and stepped outside. Jasmine followed her. There was a strong smell of smoke in the air, and more than half of the city’s lights were out. Jasmine was so used to seeing the glittering lights of Los Angeles at night that she stood holding the baby boy and staring at the blackness with a terrible feeling of dread. Auntie Ammy leaned over the balcony and said, “I think there’s a fire down there. A fire burning on the first floor, God help us. That’s old Mr. Petersen’s apartment.”
They heard more screaming, and another shot. Jasmine said, “I think we need to get out of here, Auntie Ammy. It’s like they’re breaking in everywhere.”
“I aint leavin’ my apartment to get lootified. I’m goin’ to stay here and fend ’em off.”
“Auntie Ammy, we have to go. Let’s go down to the parking level and get your car and hightail it out of here. We can stay with Hubie until this rioting is all over.”
“S’pose they riotin’ in Maywood, too? I tell you, Jazz. I’m real reluctant to leave all my stuff unpertected. These pictures, these statuettes. They’re my holy things.”
But then they felt a deep, thumping explosion somewhere in the basement. They looked over the balcony and saw that smoke was pouring out the ventilator grilles that surrounded the parking level. There was another explosion, and then a third, and tongues of flame licked lasciviously out of the grilles and shriveled the bougainvillea that grew up the walls.
Blind Panic Page 19
