Blind Panic (9 page)

“Does she know about any of
this?
” I asked her, nodding toward the TV.

The nurse said, “Lord no. We haven’t told any of our acute-care patients yet. We think they have enough stress to deal with, coping with their blindness.” She paused, and
then she said, “It’s just terrible, isn’t it? A dear friend of mine was supposed to be flying to Miami today and I still haven’t heard from her.”

She led us along the corridor, her white sneakers squeaking on the shiny, polished floor.

Lizzie was sitting up in bed with a pale green mask over her eyes. She was three or four years younger than Amelia, and a little plumper, with freckles across the bridge of her nose, but just as pretty. When Amelia came into the room and said, “Lizzie?” she lifted both arms and let out a painful sob. Amelia embraced her, and shushed her, and then she sat down on the side of her bed and held her hands.

“How’s Kevin? And Shauna? And David?”

“They’re just the same as me. Totally blind, and the doctors don’t know why.”

“How are they coping?”

“Kevin and David seem to have accepted it, but poor Shauna can’t stop crying.”

“I brought Harry with me,” said Amelia.

“
Harry?
Harry Erskine? My God, I haven’t seen Harry for years.” She tried to smile, and said, wryly, “Not that I can see him now.”

“Hi, Lizzie,” I told her. “I’m real sorry about what’s happened to you guys.”

Lizzie held out one of her hands in my direction. “It’s so good of you to come, Harry. It’s been like a nightmare.”

I took hold of her hand and kissed her on both cheeks. “Let’s hope this is only temporary, huh? What have the doctors told you?”

“Nothing so far, except that the lenses in our eyes have all misted over, and they don’t know why.”

“They don’t have any idea at all?”

Lizzie shook her head. “At first they thought it might have been caused by some rare kind of infection that we caught in the woods. But they’ve done dozens of tests and there’s nothing else wrong with us, except that we’re blind.”

“Maybe it’s traumatic,” Amelia suggested. “You know,
like people who have a terrible shock and find that they can’t speak for a while.”

“We didn’t suffer any trauma,” said Lizzie. “We were just cycling up the side of the canyon and there he was, standing by the side of the road.”

She hesitated, as if she had forgotten what she was going to say. Amelia and I frowned at each other, and Amelia had just started to say, “What did he look like?” when Lizzie interrupted her. Her voice sounded oddly flat and expressionless, as if another woman were reading her words from a cue card. “Of course, we deserved it.”

“You told me that before, on the phone,” said Amelia. “What do you mean, you
deserved
it?”

Underneath her mask, Lizzie frowned. “I don’t understand you,” she said, and this time she sounded like her normal self.

“You just said ‘we deserved it,’ and I wanted to know
what
you deserved.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Lizzie, you said it quite clearly. Harry heard you. Didn’t you, Harry?”

“He was standing by the side of the road,” said Lizzie. “He was standing by the side of the road and there were two reflections, one on each side.”

I hunkered down close beside the bed. “‘Reflections’?” I asked her. “What do you mean by ‘reflections’?”

She made a slow up-and-down motion with her hand, as if she were cleaning a pane of glass. “They were like two long mirrors, standing beside him. They were like men but they were like reflections of men.” Again, that subtle change in tone. “We deserved it, though. We deserved to go blind. We spread the disease, after all.”

“Lizzie, what did he look like?”

“He looked like the One Who Went and Came Back. He looked like Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht. Tall, very tall, with a face like a stone.”

“He looked like
who?
”

“Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht. Thunder Rolling in the Mountains.”

“I see,” I said, although I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about. “And this Hin-mut-too-whatever, he spoke to you?”

“He said that we deserved to go blind and die. He said that we spread the disease and the bones of his fathers were singing to him to show us no mercy.”

“Listen to me, Lizzie,” said Amelia. “Can you remember what happened then? After he spoke to you, what did he do?”

Lizzie began to move her head from side to side very emphatically. “We are all going to go blind and die. All of us. We deserve it. We
deserve
to be punished.”

“Lizzie,” I said, “did he tell you his name?”

“He looked like Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht. But he was not really Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekt. He was the One Who Went and Came Back.”

I glanced meaningfully at Amelia and Amelia glanced meaningfully at me. We both knew the various names of the One Who Went and Came Back. But who had told Lizzie about him? And who the hell was Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht?

Lizzie suddenly turned toward me and announced, “He knows who you are. He knows that you have come to see me. He says that this time you will be ground into dust. And he says that the wind will carry your dust far away from this land so that you will never be remembered here and there will be no trace of you to taint the ground in which the bones of his fathers are buried.”

“Lizzie,” I urged her. “Listen to me, Lizzie. I need you to tell me his name. It’s important.”

“I cannot speakhis name. He was driven out of this world, but he has returned. This time he has many faces and many names.”

I grasped her hand and held it tight. She was very cold—so cold that she was shaking. “Was his name Misquamacus?" I asked her.

“Harry,
no—!
” said Amelia.

But it was too late. Lizzie’s back stiffened. Her fingers splayed out and her entire body went into a spasm. She thumped her head back onto the pillows and started to scream. It was like no scream that I had ever heard before. It was half scream and half roar, terrifying, and it went on and on without her taking a breath.

The door burst open and two nurses came hurrying in, followed closely by a Chinese intern.

“What happened?” one of the nurses asked us, while the other one bent over Lizzie and pressed her hand over her forehead, trying to calm her down.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “She just suddenly lost it. I really don’t know.”

What else could I say? That I had spoken the name of the most powerful Indian wonder-worker who had ever walked the North American continent? He Whose Face Appeared in the Sky? He Who Brings the Terror of Eternal Darkness? Misquamacus? The One Who Went and Came Back?

Lizzie kept on screaming. Her voice was so piercing and harsh that we could hardly hear one another. Without any further hesitation the intern unlocked the drugs cabinet on the wall, took out a small bottle, and quickly filled a hypodermic needle. Then he walked around the bed, lifted up Lizzie’s left arm, and injected her.

“Just a little sedative,” he told us. “Something to settle her down.”

We waited, but more than a half minute went by and Lizzie continued to scream, her mouth stretched wide-open and every muscle in her body locked tight.

The intern kept his hands cupped over his ears. “I don’t understand…She should have calmed down by now.” He paused. “To be totally frank with you, she should be unconscious. That dose would have dropped a horse.”

One of the nurses looked up and said, “She’s hyperventilating, but I don’t know how. She’s screaming but she’s not breathing in.”

The intern took another bottle of tranquilizer out of the medicine cabinet. Amelia said, “My God, how much are you going to give her?”

“Only a very small dosage,” the intern assured her. He filled up his hypodermic again, but before he could approach the bed, Lizzie abruptly stopped screaming, and lay panting as if she had just finished running a marathon.

“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
.”

“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…”