Burial (49 page)

Her face was so bloodless. Her eyes were so dark. If she hadn't been moving and breathing and talking, I would have sworn that she had just been disinterred from the local cemetery.

The question was, when does somebody you care for stop being somebody you care for? When they die, when they go cold, or when they appear in your shower in the middle of the night, white of skin and blank of eye, and demand that you kiss them?

‘Karen,' I said, ‘you're cold.'

She smiled. ‘I don't mind being cold. I don't feel the cold.'

‘Karen, you have to see this from my point of view. You disappeared into a hole in a floor in New York; and now you're here in Phoenix, with no clothes on, freezing cold —
and there's no possible way you could have gotten in here.'

‘You're worried about me,' she said.

‘Too damn right I'm worried about you. I'm worried about
me
.'

She wrapped her cold arms around my shoulders. She was still elfin, still enticing. ‘Why are you worried?' she wanted to know. ‘I'm
here
, aren't I? I'm safe.'

‘Sure, you're safe and you're here, but are you
you
?'

She pressed her fingertips to her mouth and gave a stylized, girlish giggle; and if there was anything that was guaranteed to give me a totally chilly shudder down my spine, that was it. ‘You're so silly,' she said. ‘Of course I'm me. Who else should I be?'

I didn't really know what to do next But Karen tugged my hand. ‘Come on,' she said. She kept on tugging, and tugged me through to the bedroom. ‘Do you want me to
prove
that I'm me?' she asked me.

‘Listen, Karen, we have to get a few things straight here. When you disappeared through that floor —'

She pushed me back against the bed. ‘Don't be silly, that was nothing. You don't always have to leave by the door, any more than you have to come in by the door. The world is full of other ways of coming in and going out; not just
doors
.'

‘Well, yes, but —'

She gave me a small, sharp shove so that I fell backward. Before I could get up again, she had climbed on top of me and straddled my chest

‘Karen,' I protested. ‘I can't just —'

She leaned over me so that her face loomed over mine. ‘You can't
what
? You're so cautious, Harry! You can do anything you want!' And with this, she started to lick my face all over, and her tongue was as chilly and slimy as pig's liver. I tried to pull away from her, but she was gripping me firmly between her thighs, and her strength and weight were those of a man, not a lightly-boned young woman. She stopped
licking and looked down at me, her mouth glistening with saliva, her eyes as dusty-dead as woodlice.

‘You can do anything you want,' she repeated, and her voice was low and very harsh. It was then that I knew for certain that Karen was possessed. This wasn't Karen talking to me. This was the manitou of Misquamacus. He had filled her mind and her body like black ink spreading across blotting-paper. He had filled her up with his spiritual essence and his tribal ferocity — and his malevolence, too, and his insatiable hunger for revenge.

‘Karen,' I said, ‘you'd better —'

But now she was unbuckling my belt, and tugging down my trousers. I tried to stop her, tried to thrash my legs, but suddenly she came back up the bed and slapped my face, hard enough to hurt. I tried to protest but she slapped me again — a cold, hard, stunning slap, and then another, and another, until my cheeks were stinging and my eyeballs were jolted in their sockets.

‘Now you're going to do what I want to do,' she told me.

I gave one last wrestle, but she slapped me again. My head jerked back against the pillow. I almost began to understand how battered wives must feel, when they're faced with somebody who won't listen and won't compromise, and won't do anything but lash out. But quite apart from that, she was still Karen, her body was still Karen, and I didn't want to hurt her. She was so small that one hard punch could have broken her jaw, or worse.

‘Karen —' I began again, but she shook her head and said, ‘Shussh … This time it's my turn.'

I lay back shivering, my cheeks still hot from all of her slapping. She shuffled her way up my body until she was straddling my throat, and her pubic hair was tickling my Adam's apple. She looked down at me, and said, ‘I always wanted this. You know that, don't you? Right from the moment we met?'

‘Karen,' I complained, ‘this isn't right. It just isn't right.'

She looked down at me and smiled eerily. ‘Who says it isn't right? It feels right to me. It feels wonderful to me.'

In spite of my fear, in spite of my fear that it was Misquamacus who was making her behave the way she was, I still couldn't stop myself from feeling aroused. It was like one of those sexual nightmares in which you're turned on but terrified at the same time. I had once dreamed that a woman in black leather was trying to cut me with a straight-razor, and I had woken in a sweat of excitement and terror. In a peculiar way, the fear made it all the more stimulating. Was this actually Karen, or was it some kind of ghost?

She lifted herself up a little more, so that her sex was only about two or three inches above my mouth. The insides of her thighs were smooth and cold against my slapped cheeks. Although it was so gloomy, I could make out her dark silky fur and the glistening petal-shaped curves of her vulva.

I tensed, waiting for the moment when I could roll out from under her. But she must have sensed what I was intending to do, because she said, in the softest of voices, ‘Don't, Harry … whatever you think, I need you.'

‘Karen?' I said.

‘It's me, Harry, it's really me. Now, ssh.'

She reached down between her legs and opened her vaginal lips wide with her fingers, really stretched them wide. Then she lowered herself slowly onto my mouth, so that I was offered a kiss of moist wet flesh. At first I kept my lips tightly closed, and tried to turn my head away. But then Karen slowly began to rotate her hips, so that my mouth was smeared around and around with her juices, and I began to think to myself
I was wrong, dead wrong. This isn't Misquamacus. This can't be Misquamacus. This is Karen letting herself go. This is Karen doing just what she always wanted to do, and didn't have the nerve
.

She laughed, and her laugh sounded high and sweet and just like Karen's. I reached up with both hands and clasped her thighs and pressed her even more forcefully against my mouth. I opened my lips and slid my tongue up inside her, licking every fold of her sex, probing as deep as my tongue would allow. I heard her cry out, a thin penetrating falsetto. Her vagina was flushed with even more copious juices, and they ran out of the sides of my mouth.

After a few moments, she climbed off my face, and kissed me. She kissed my hair, she kissed my eyes, she kissed my cheeks, she kissed my mouth. Then she gradually worked her way around my shoulders, and nibbled at my nipples. I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes in total pleasure as she kissed and bit her way all the way down my sides.

‘Karen …' I heard somebody say, and it was probably me. I tangled my fingers in her hair as she took hold of my cock and firmly and slowly began to massage it up and down. She kissed and sucked at the glans, the tip of her tongue circling and circling. My cock felt so hard and swollen that I thought it was going to burst She licked the crevice, teasingly and persistentiy. Then she took it into her mouth, and I felt it slowly slide in, between her teeth, and her tongue swirling around it, and for the first time in a long time I didn't care about Misquamacus, and I didn't care about shadows that ran along like buffalos, and I didn't care about anything at all except Karen Tandy. I thought to myself,
This young lady and me, we were always meant to get together. Maybe we met through pain and tragedy and rampant evil, but this was always meant to be
.

The feelings that Karen was arousing in me were totally sensational. She had swallowed the whole length of my cock, all the way down to my pubic hair, and she was rhythmically sucking on it, without once pausing to take a breath. What was more, her tongue was actually licking around and around the shaft of my cock, all the way around, with the most incredible swirling motion, almost as if —

Almost as if her head was going around and around
.

I had an instant petrifying vision of old man Rheiner at the Belford Hotel, with his head going round and round. But then I opened my eyes and it was worse.
Karen was floating vertically in the air, her bare toes nearly touching the ceiling, slowly spinning around and around
. Her hair gently flew out as she spun, but her eyes were wide open, and each time she came around to face me, she stared at me upside-down, with an uncanny expression of mock-submission, as if she were only sucking my cock to show me how weak and vulnerable I was, and how much like other men. Ready to throw my common-sense and my principles out of the window, as soon as I was offered sex. Even ready to throw out my instinct for self-preservation.

I yelled out. I
think
I yelled out. Karen immediately disgorged my cock, and spun over and over in mid-air, like an astronaut tumbling over and over in a weightless space capsule. She landed spreadeagled against the wall in the far corner of the room, beside the dark-brown drapes, where she stood watching me, her face buried in shadow, breathing deeply and evenly, as if she had been running. I grabbed my pants and struggled into them, sweating and shaking in spite of the air-conditioned chill.

‘How did you do that?' I asked her. ‘How the hell did you
do
that?'

‘I can do anything, white devil,' said Karen, and this time her voice was even harsher and lower. ‘I can walk through time. I can walk through space. There is nothing that can hold me back now.'

‘What do you want?' I asked her. I wished I didn't sound so strangulated and high-pitched.

‘I want you to be my messenger.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I want you to take a message to your people. I want you to tell them that their cities are not being swallowed by
earthquakes or storms, but by the power of Misquamacus the greatest of all wonder-workers.'

‘Taking a message to my people isn't going to be quite as easy as it sounds,' I replied. I was trying to be brave and challenging but it wasn't very easy. My voice kept shaking and going off track. ‘Who am I going to take it to? I wanted to know. The President? The Office of Indian Affairs? The
Washington Post
? You don't seriously think that anybody's going to believe me?'

‘They must be told
why
they have to die,' said Karen. ‘They must know why every single artefact that they ever brought or fashioned must be taken down to the Great Outside, and banished for ever. The years of the White Faces are over, for ever. It was foretold and now it has come to be.'

‘I don't know why you're bothering to tell us
why
we have to be swallowed up,' I said. ‘Why don't you just swallow us up and leave it at that?'

‘You have to
know
? Karen retorted. ‘It is the turning of the moon, the season of darkness that follows the season of light. Just as you believed that it was your manifest destiny to kill us and steal our hunting-lands, we believe that it is
your
manifest destiny to be plunged into the ground, into the Great Outside, and there to meet the god of all shadows, who will be judge and bloody executioner of all.'

‘I still don't see that it makes any difference whether or not we
know
why we're going to be massacred,' I blustered. ‘Being massacred is being massacred, no matter what the reason for it happens to be.'

‘It is justice. It is just revenge. They have to know that. Those who survive, those who carry the story to other countries and other continents, they must all know why we have done this thing. Otherwise white men will come again, and again, and again, and we shall never know peace.'

‘Misquamacus,' I said, ‘what you're proposing to do, it's
impossible. It's totally impossible! It's way too late to turn back the clock. Supposing you get rid of New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and Denver and Pittsburgh and every place else, what are you going to be left with? A country that's back in the goddamned Stone Age!

‘Maybe it was unfair that we took your land and killed all your buffalo and changed your life. Maybe it
was
unforgivable that we killed all your women and children, and destroyed your culture. But the world is kind of like that, and human beings are kind of like that, all over the world, not just here. And times change, and people change, and however much you might resent it, you can't put it all back the way it was.'

I paused for breath. ‘It was something we did and maybe it's something we shouldn't have done, or done it differ-ently. Now it's too late. But maybe we've learned a little more humanity and a little more, I don't know,
tolerance
, I guess.'

There was a long silence. Karen stared at me with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. In his code, a man didn't apologize for what his people had done. Outside the window it was gradually beginning to grow lighter, and I heard two or three heavy tractor-trailors rumbling past.

At last, Karen repeated, ‘You will tell your people why they are going to die.'

I shrugged. ‘All right. I guess I can only try. But, as I say, the days of the smoke-signal are long gone. I don't suppose anybody will listen to me.'

‘They will listen when I have pulled down New York.'

‘You're going to pull down
New York
?'

‘I have the strength; I can pull down New York. I can pull down any city, anywhere. New York is the place where I was first betrayed by the white devils. By the time I have finished with it, it will have been levelled back down to the rocks.'