“He’s gone,” said Amelia, in a voice as tiny as a fairy in a bottle.
I stood up, with Amelia’s help, and walked over to the spot where Misquamacus had been standing. The grass was scorched, and some beads and birds’ skulls were scattered about, as well as the black, charred body of the mummified rat, but nothing more.
We looked around. The main square was littered with terrible remains, as if a massive bomb had exploded, and I could hear people sobbing. But the smoke and the clouds were beginning to clear, and the stars were coming out.
Amelia bent down and picked something out of the grass. She held it up and looked at it, and then she handed it over to me.
“Souvenir,” she told me.
“What?” I shouted at her, cupping my hand around my ear.
“Keepsake,” she yelled. “I think you deserve it.”
I looked down at it. It was the silver medallion that Misquamacus had worn around his neck, embossed with the writhing tentacles of the greatest of the Great Old Ones. I was tempted to throw it away as far as I could, but then I thought, No, this is for Singing Rock. I’m going to keep this in his memory. He deserves it much more than I do.
Not far away, among the carnage, we found Tyler, lying on his side, next to the Kawasaki that he had commandeered. His arms and legs were at awkward, impossible angles, but his eyes were open and he looked unexpectedly peaceful and calm.
Tina knelt down beside him. “He’s gone,” she said. “Looks like his neck’s broken.”
“Guy was a fucking hero,” said Remo.
I turned around. The crowd from the café was gradually returning to the main square. Some of them were looking up at the stars, but many of them were still blind, and were holding tight to their friends and asking what had happened.
“Yes,” I said. “He was a hero. And so was everybody else who was here tonight.”
We were still gathered around Tyler’s body when a black Cadillac Escalade, with red and blue lights flashing, appeared from the south side of the main square,. It was followed by two more. The motorcade drove right up to the side of the café, and immediately the doors opened and at least eight guys in dark suits and white shirts and sunglasses climbed out. They formed a circle around the Escalades, and one of them called, “Clear!”
I went up to him and said, “What’s going on?”
“Please step back, sir,” he told me, but the “please” didn’t sound at all like a polite request and the “sir” was very much less than respectful.
But then the rear door of the second Escalade opened up, and President David Perry stepped out. I stepped back, as I was told. I hadn’t voted for David Perry, but he was still the president, after all.
He approached us, with his Secret Service detail staying close. He was wearing a black overcoat but no hat.
“Jesus,” he said. “What happened to you? You’re all covered in blood. Are you hurt?”
“No, sir, Mr. President,” I told him. “We were in kind of a fight, that’s all. You should have seen the other guy.”
The president looked slowly around Memory Valley’s main square, and then at the Aspen Café, with its smashed windows, and the smoking remains of the Eye Killers lying strewn on the sidewalk in front of it. Then he looked up at the stars.
“Never seen a storm blow itself out so quick,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me fly up here from SFX, on account of the weather. Now look at it.”
“Name’s Erskine,” I told him. “Harry Erskine. And this is Mrs. Amelia Carlsson.”
The president held out his hand. I showed him my own hand, which was covered in drying blood, but he said, “I’m not squeamish, Mr. Erskine,” and shook hands with both of us. “What exactly happened here?” he asked me.
I said, “You didn’t come up here by accident, Mr. President, did you?”
“No, Mr. Erskine, I didn’t. I was warned that something pretty damn catastrophic was going to happen.”
“It nearly did. But you can breathe easy now. We found a way to stop it.”
The president started to walk toward the smoldering coffin bodies of the Eye Killers. I followed him.
He stopped, and then without looking at me he said, “Does the name Misquamacus mean anything to you, Mr. Erskine?”
“Yes, sir.” I realized then that the president already had a rough idea of what had happened in Memory Valley that evening. Not the details, of course. He wouldn’t have known anything about the Thunder Giant, or the sacrifice that Tyler Jones had made to save us, or about the ghostly reappearance of General Lawrence and his men. But if he knew the name Misquamacus, the One Who Went and Came Back, then he must have guessed what kind of a battle we had fought here.
“Someplace we can go and talk?” he asked me. “Maybe you can fill me in.”
“Sure,” I nodded. “Mrs. Carlsson and me, we’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast just along the street there. But there’s one or two things I need to do first. We lost an old friend tonight, and a new one, too.”
The president turned to the people from the Aspen Café, who were gathered around us in bewildered but respectful silence.
“Whatever you folks did this evening, your country thanks you,” he said. He went across to Mickey and held out his hand. Mickey hesitated. He was holding Cayley’s left hand with his right hand, and if he let go of her, he would lose his sight again.
“Mr. President, sir—” I said, but Mickey took the plunge, released his grip on Cayley, and blindly held out his hand.
The president shook it and said, “What’s your name, son?”
Mickey stared at him. “I can see,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not holding onto Cayley’s hand anymore, and I can see.”
“You were blinded?” asked the president.
“All of us were, me and my friends here. We found out that we could see if we held one another’s hands, but now I’ve shaken your hand—” He held up both of his hands in front of his face. “I can see!”
The president said, “Is there anybody here who is still blind? Could they come forward, please?”
A gray-haired man in a plaid shirt was led forward by his grandson. The president took hold of his hand and squeezed it. Almost immediately the man blinked and looked around, and said, “I can see! I can see everything!”
The president turned back to me and said, “I don’t have any idea how this works, but I was blinded, too. Not that it was ever announced.”
“But you can see now,” said Amelia. “How did you get your sight back?”
“Misquamacus,” he told her. “He didn’t want me to miss the sight of our society being turned back to the days of buffalo hunting and bows and arrows. He was like one of those murderers who kills a man’s family in front of him.”
Amelia said, “He probably used a very simple spell to open up your eyes again. White witches used to use a spell like that in Romania, if a village was hit by uveitis or trachoma. First of all, the witch would restore the sight of the most senior sufferer in the village, and then he or she would pass on the cure to every other sufferer, either by clasping their hands or kissing them. In fact it’s not even a spell, in the strictest sense of the word. It’s the same as laying on of hands, which is common to almost all faith healers.”
The president said, “Wow. You know your stuff, Mrs. Carlsson.”
“She’s the best there is,” I told him. “If anybody deserves medals for what happened here this evening, it’s Tyler and Amelia.”
“But what does this mean? Do I have to go around the country, shaking the hands of every blinded person there is? There must be hundreds of thousands of them!”
Amelia shook her head. “The cure passes from one person to another. It’s what we call a chain spell. All you have to do is announce that every formerly blinded person in the country should shake the hand of another blinded person.”
The president nodded. “So we can heal ourselves?”
“Yes, si
r, Mr. President. We can heal ourselves.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We spent most of the night telling President Perry about Misquamacus and his repeated attempts to destroy the invaders who had taken away his land and obliterated his culture. A little before dawn, he stood up, shook our hands, and said, “Thankyou for everything. I believe this country owes you. It’s going to take a hell of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of money for us to get back to business as usual, but we will. Then I think I have some Russians to talk to.”
It was raining again, but only lightly, when his motorcade drove off, and the red and blue flashing lights of his Escalades were reflected on the asphalt.
Amelia and I sat down at the kitchen table with Belinda Froggatt and had a breakfast of smoked ham and apples from the orchard. Afterward, we went outside and stood by the orchard gate. The rain had stopped, but the grass and the trees were still sparkling.
“Back to your Miami matrons, then, Harry?” Amelia asked me. She had washed and brushed her hair and it was shining in the morning light.
“I don’t know. That kind of depends.”
“On what? I thought you loved it down there. I thought you were Don Johnson with a pack of tarot cards and a pocketful of mystic mottoes.”
“It kind of depends on you, Mrs. Carlsson.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning do you want to go on being Mrs. Carlsson, or do you want to find out what your fortune would be with me?”
She leaned her head against my shoulder. “Sometimes, Harry, when you’ve made a choice in life, you have to stick with it. Where would we be if we didn’t?”
“At the Delano Hotel on Miami Beach, sucking on a Nagayama Sunset?”
She smiled wistfully. She kissed my cheek.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back to civilization.”
HIGH PRAISE FOR GRAHAM MASTERTON!
“A mesmerizing storyteller!”
—Publishers Weekly
“One of the most consistently entertaining writers in the field.”
—Gauntlet
“Graham Masterton is the living inheritor to the realm of Edgar Allan Poe.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Graham Masterton is a first rate horror writer.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Graham Masterton is always a lot of fun and he rarely lets the reader down…Horror’s most consistent provider of chills.”
—Masters of Terror
“Masterton is a crowd-pleaser, filling his pages with sparky, appealing dialogue and visceral grue.”
—Time Out (UK)
“Masterton is one of those writers who can truly unnerve the reader with everyday events.”
—Steve Gerlach, author of Rage
“Masterton has always been in the premier league of horror scribes.”
—Publishing News
“In a genre that seems filled more and more these days with the outrageously violent, outrageously weird, or just plain old boring, Masterton’s books are a welcome addition, solid performers in an unsure world.”
—Fear Zone
Other Leisure books by Graham Masterton:
DEATH MASK
THE 5TH WITCH
EDGEWISE
NIGHT WARS
MANITOU BLOOD
THE DEVIL IN GRAY
THE DOORKEEPERS
SPIRIT
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT
PREY
Copyright
A LEISURE BOOK®
January 2010
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
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New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 2010 by Graham Masterton
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