Burial (34 page)

Have you ever felt like smashing the wall with your fist? That's what I felt like then.

I opened the wine and leafed through the paper while Amelia watched the news. It was all Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. Slow-motion replays of the Sears Tower collapsing. Interviews with grieving relatives. Looting, and scenes of panic. After a while, the sheer magnitude of what had happened made me feel numb. I turned to some of the newspaper's back pages.

That was when I saw it. A four-paragraph item from Phoenix, Arizona. BODYSHOP MASSACRES. I poured myself some more wine and read it slowly.

‘Pinal County police were today trying to identify the dismembered bodies of seven men and women discovered in a disused automobile bodyshop.

‘The remains were discovered after a deputy was called to
investigate complaints of a “demolition derby” at a used-car dealership.

‘Scores of cars were crushed in what the deputy called “an orgy of auto-wrecking”. It was afterwards that the bodies were discovered in an oily inspection-pit in the bodyshop nearby.

‘So far only two of the victims have been identified. Sheriff Wallace said that all of them were out-of-towners, as far as he could determine, and that they had “nothing obvious in common.” One of the victims came from Anaheim, California, and the other, a woman, from St Louis, Missouri.

‘Sheriff Wallace appealed for anybody who may have friends or relatives missing in southern Arizona to contact him. He would make no specific comment on the injuries sustained by the victims but said, “They looked like they were attacked by a psychotic sushi-chef.”

‘E.C. Dude, a 22-year-old man who worked at the dealership, was questioned by police but later released. He denied involvement in the slayings or with the auto-wrecking. Dude claimed that the cars “wrecked themselves”. “They were all dragged across the lot like somebody was pulling them with a giant magnet,” he claimed. He says he glimpsed “shadows” but did not see the auto-vandals face-to-face.

‘Police described his explanation as “spacey, but so far we have no evidence to the contrary. We're more concerned with catching a multiple killer.”'

I read the news item twice over, and then I passed it to Amelia. She glanced at it distractedly and asked, ‘What?'

‘“The automobiles were all dragged across the lot like somebody was pulling them with a giant magnet,”' I quoted. ‘“He says he glimpsed shadows.” Doesn't that remind you of something? Like the Greenbergs' apartment?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘Where was this?'

‘Someplace near Phoenix, Arizona.'

‘What possible connection could there be between a mass murder in Phoenix, and what happened to the Greenbergs?'

‘I'm not sure, but it's this business about things being dragged along that makes me wonder.'

Two pages later, my attention was caught again; and this time I could sense that I was onto something. TWISTERS FLATTEN TWO COLORADO TOWNS. It was obvious that this had probably been the paper's intended front-page story until Chicago started to collapse. It had been patchily edited and cut down, and jammed in next to an advertisement for J.C. Penney's Summer Picnic Sale.

‘Freak tornadoes hit two small towns on opposite sides of Colorado today, wrecking homes and leaving “hundreds” killed or missing.

‘State emergency services were called to Pritchard in the south-east and Maybelline in the north-west after unexpected storms raged through both communities. The extent of the damage is reported to be “severe to very severe” and all utilities are cut off.

‘Early eye-witness accounts say that the tornadoes pulled whole buildings for hundreds of feet, along with vehicles, fencing, animals and human beings. In Maybelline, where there were only a handful of survivors, rescue crews talked of houses being dragged into the ground.

‘They said that, at one point during the storm, the sky turned dark red “like something out of the Old Testament”'

I put down the paper.
They are clearing the sacred grounds
. First Mrs Greenberg's apartment; then a used-car dealership in Arizona; then two Colorado townships; then Chicago. And the same characteristics every time. Darkness,
and dragging down. Buildings not collapsing, but vanishing into the ground. Even
people
vanishing into the ground, like Karen had vanished into the floor.

I had a terrible feeling that America was no longer safe beneath our feet — that we were all standing on a huge darkness that was threatening to swallow us up.

I stood up, and switched off the television. Amelia was looking very tired.

‘What did you do that for?' she asked.

‘Because we're not helping by watching.'

She reached for her cigarettes, but I caught hold of her wrist and said, gently, ‘Don't Maybe it was me who started you smoking. In which case I think I have a right to wean you off it.'

‘Harry Erskine, you have no rights as far as I'm concerned. Your rights were all used up a very long time ago.'

‘MacArthur once told me that you were the most beautiful woman he had ever met.'

Amelia said nothing, but lowered her eyes.

‘MacArthur once told me that you threw linguine at him.'

‘He was lying, it was fettucine.'

I kissed her awkwardly, half on the left temple and half on the frame of her spectacles. Middle age, it makes adolescents out of us all over again.

‘Look at these news stories,' I said. ‘Arizona, Colorado, and now Chicago.'

She did me the courtesy of looking at them and I waited patiently while she read. Then she took off her glasses and said, ‘You really believe they're all connected?'

‘The same dragging, the same disappearing,' I pointed out. ‘When has that ever happened before? Have
you
ever heard about that happening before?'

‘It may be happening all the time, for all I know. I don't usually read the newspapers.'

‘Well, I think there's a connection here and I think that connection is Misquamacus.'

‘You seriously think that Misquamacus is bringing down the whole of Chicago?'

‘I don't know. I don't know what the hell to think. But what a coincidence, all these similar-type disasters, all within a matter of days.'

‘Perhaps we need some expert advice,' said Amelia.

‘Oh, for sure. But the only expert I ever knew was Singing Rock.'

‘No, it wasn't. What about Dr what's-his-name, up at Albany? The one who first found Singing Rock for us.'

‘Oh, you mean Dr Snow. I don't know. He's probably dead by now. It's been nearly twenty years.'

‘You can try, can't you?'

We drove up to Albany early in the morning when the Hudson Valley was gilded with haze. I borrowed a newish midnight-blue Electra from an old friend of mine who ran a guide-book publishing company, on pain of returning it in pristine condition with the ashtrays licked clean. Personally I was always pretty careless about what I drove, and it made me nervous to take charge of an automobile that smelled of leather and gleamed so much.

We listened to the radio for a while, but the news from Chicago was overwhelming and unrelentingly painful to hear. The building collapses seemed to have abated; but thousands and thousands of people were killed or missing or injured and the emergency services were stretched to the limit The greatest feeling this morning was one of hurt and bewilderment — as if somebody had gripped the very heart of America and torn it out.

The President would address the nation this afternoon. But what could he say, except tell us all how shocked and grief-stricken we already knew ourselves to be?

Amelia lit a cigarette, then immediately tossed it out of the car window.

‘I'm not
forcing
you to give up,' I told her.

‘Don't flatter yourself,' she replied. ‘You never forced me to do anything.'

We arrived at Dr Snow's house — the same brick-built house on the outskirts of Albany where we had first met him twenty years ago. Then, the house had been surrounded by tall mournful-looking cypresses, but all except one had been cut down, and the house now looked lighter but shabbier. The yellowed net curtains had been replaced by strong chintzes that looked as if they had been chosen from a mail-order catalogue.

We were greeted at the door by a tall, plain woman with bobbed hair and large feet. She wore a poncho tied at the waist by a fraying silk cord. ‘I'm Hilda,' she said, letting us into the hallway. ‘Daddy's in the conservatory in back. You won't overtire him, now, will you?'

She led us past the rows of fierce Indian masks that I remembered from my first visit; and the stuffed birds in glass cases; and the dark long-case clock, the clock that had ticked twenty years ago as if it were very weary, and which now sounded wearier still.

‘Would you like some herbal tea?' she asked us. I recalled that Dr Snow didn't allow alcohol in the house.

I said, ‘A cup of black coffee would be good.' But she tightly smiled and shook her head.

‘Daddy doesn't believe in artificial stimulants.'

We walked through the musty living room into a large octagonal conservatory, far too warm and far too dry, in which a profusion of brown-and-yellow palms were gasping their last. The glass roof was emerald with algae, lending the whole conservatory a ghastly morgue-like greenness; and giving Dr Snow the appearance of death.

He sat in a complicated modern wheelchair close to the windows, staring out at his drought-dried garden. He was very shrivelled now, with a fine dandelion mane of intensely
white hair, and green-tinted glasses. He wore an off-white bathrobe which — for all its thickness — failed to conceal the skeletal emaciation of his body.

‘Dr Snow,' I said, to his back.

‘Well, well, Mr Erskine,' he replied, without turning around. ‘How is the shaman hunter today?'

‘You remember,' I said.

He rotated his wheelchair, and confronted me. ‘Of course I remember. You were the first and only person in the whole of my academic career who ever asked me for practical help.'

‘Do you remember Ms Crusoe?' I asked him, nudging Amelia forward.

‘Mrs Wakeman,' Amelia corrected me, and stepped forward and took hold of Dr Snow's hand.

‘It's been a very long time,' said Dr Snow. He patted Amelia's hand, and gave her a badly-arranged smile. ‘A very, very long time.' Hmm, I thought. He doesn't believe in artificial stimulants, but he's not averse to some real live ones. But you know me. Eternally jealous, even of the women I don't really want. Or
kid
myself I don't really want.

‘Dr Snow,' I said, ‘you've probably heard what's happened in Chicago.'

He nodded. ‘A great natural tragedy. Terrible. I have a good friend there, Dr Noble, at the Cook County Medical Center. Of course I'm very concerned for his welfare.'

‘I think —' I began, and then I hesitated. The connections that I had worked out between the Greenbergs and Karen and the bodyshop homicides in Arizona and the two towns in Colorado and Chicago — well, quite frankly, they suddenly seemed a little tenuous, to say the least. I had forgotten how formidable Dr Snow had first appeared to me, how much of a stickler for logical thought and totally unvarnished argument. He was one of the country's greatest experts on Indian lore and Indian magic, but he wasn't at all romantic or superstitious or even politically correct.

‘You're experiencing another problem with Indians,' he said. His voice sounded as if he had a mouthful of that white gritty sand they heap in hotel ashtrays.

I shrugged, smiled, and said, ‘I guess so. Yes. That's about the size of it.'

‘Of course it is. You wouldn't have come to see me if you weren't, would you? And the truth of the matter is that we shall all experience problems with Indians for ever and ever, amen. Not so much with Indians, perhaps, but the mystical forces in which the Indians believed.

‘We tend to dismiss every other religion apart from our own as invented, as make believe. We believe our own religion to the point where the words “Act of God” even have a legal meaning. But really, you know, in America, the God of the Jews has very little relevance. He's a European fetish; a kindly but not-very-powerful deity from the Middle East.

‘We should be worshipping not the gods of Europe; not the gods of Europe's pirates and Europe's adventurers, but the real, ethnic gods of America, just as the Indians did. These gods are equally powerful, equally vengeful, equally just; equally concerned for our welfare. Even more relevant, they're
real
, and they're
here
.'

‘Dr Snow,' I told him, ‘I believe that Red Indian wonder-workers brought down Chicago.'

Dr Snow pushed himself closer. His knees were wrapped in a blue and green Buchanan-plaid blanket. He smelled of violet cachous and some indefinable medical rub. ‘You really believe that?'

‘You've seen the way the buildings collapsed. In fact they didn't collapse, they vanished.'

‘That's right. So what are your suspicions?'

I told him all about the Greenbergs, and Martin Vaizey, and Karen, and then I showed him the newspaper clippings about Arizona and Colorado.

‘This is all most interesting,' he said. ‘Would you care for
a cup of herbal tea?'

‘Thanks, but no thanks. I just want to know if I've lost it or not.'

Dr Snow studied the paper; studied my notes; and then took off his green-tinted eyeglasses and closed his eyes. ‘Greenwich Village … Apache Junction … Pritchard … Maybelline … Yes!'

‘Did you think of something?' I asked him; but without hesitation he opened his eyes and propelled his wheelchair out of the conservatory and through the living room and out of sight. I looked blankly at Amelia and Amelia looked blankly at me.

‘Maybe it was those onion-rings we had for lunch,' I suggested. I cupped my hand in front of my mouth and smelled my breath.