Burial (60 page)

Saying goodbye to Singing Rock and Martin Vaizey had been the strangest experience. I felt as if my whole insides had taken a step back from the rest of me; and when I turned around in the darkness, Martin had been standing there, sad, smiling, pale as ash; and Singing Rock had been standing next to Papago Joe.

‘We'll catch you guys later,' was all that I could think of to say.

Singing Rock had raised his hand in the Sioux sign that means ‘my heart was empty when you came, but now it is full to overflowing.'

My heart felt just the same way.

The
Tribune
office was closed for lunch when we arrived, and the iron-haired woman behind the reception desk wouldn't open the door for us for anything — not even when I pressed my hands together in mock-prayer, and then squashed my face against the glass and blew my mouth out, Bart Simpson-style.

We went across the road to The Crossing Restaurant, and sat at a small corner table with a red checked cloth and ordered steaks and onion-rings and beer.

Our waitress had bouffant black hair and scarlet lipstick and a beauty-spot on her upper lip with a black hair growing out of it. She kept winking at me and she gave me extra
onion-rings, ‘On the house, honey, because you look like you could use them.'

Papago Joe looked at me with those deep-set eyes, chewing. ‘You know something,' he said. ‘There's nothing so useful when you're fighting a bloodthirsty wonder-worker as extra onion-rings, don't you agree?'

‘I'll be able to waste him just by breathing on him,' I agreed.

When the
Tribune
reopened, we found our way to the photograph archive, a stuffy little room lined wall-to-wall with grey filing-cabinets. A short bald man with jazzy braces directed us to the files for 1876.

‘We're looking in particular for photographs that were taken at the battle of the Little Big Horn,' I told the archivist.

He blinked at me. He reminded me of Mickey Rooney back in his Andy Hardy days. ‘I'm sorry, I don't believe that any photographs were taken at the battle of the Little Big Horn. If there were, I've never seen any. They would be famous, wouldn't they? Actual photographs of the Little Big Horn, my goodness!'

‘The
Tribune
sent a reporter to the Little Big Horn along with General Custer. The reporter's name was Mark Kellogg. I understand that Mark Kellogg was quite a photography buff, and took his own cameras with him. He took pictures at the Little Big Horn and even though Mark Kellogg was killed, the negatives survived.'

‘I never heard that story,' said the archivist, shaking his head. ‘You can look if you like, but I've catalogued all of these photographs — especially the historical collection — and I've never seen any pictures from the Little Big Horn.'

We searched through scores of large brown envelopes. We found photographs that had been taken by Mark Kellogg — even a portrait of General Custer by Mark Kellogg, lounging outside a tent with his Indian scout Bloody Knife
and two mangy-looking mongrels. But after two hours we had to admit that there were no photographs of the Little Big Horn.

The archivist came back. ‘There's one thing you might try,' he suggested, ‘and that's the Kellogg family home. They still live in Bismarck, on Edwinton Avenue East. According to the special edition we printed back in 1876, Mark Kellogg was killed by the Sioux but he wasn't mutilated, and his clothes and possessions were eventually returned to his mother and father.'

‘All right, thanks,' we told him, wearily, and left the building.

On our way to Edwinton Avenue East, we walked past a TV store. I stopped to comb my hair in my own reflection. But as I did so, I noticed news pictures of crumbling buildings and crushed automobiles and bodies being dragged along cluttered sidewalks.

‘Look —' I told Papago Joe. ‘It's happening again.'

A passing old-timer paused for a moment to stand beside us and watch the news pictures, too.

‘New York,' he remarked, and spat.

‘That's New York?' I asked him, in horror.

He nodded. ‘Serve ‘em right for building so high and stooping so low.'

Mrs Keitelman sat in her tapestry-covered armchair with the yellow blinds drawn, so that the afternoon sun wouldn't fade the furnishings. The sitting room was crowded with hefty, ugly furniture, most of it darkly varnished oak, in the gargantuan style favored by Sears, Roebuck catalogues of years gone by. Next to me, on a pedestal table, a glass dome covered a bevy of stuffed songbirds, faded and moulting and dull-eyed; while just above a huge rolltop bureau the size of a Wurlitzer organ, a morose carp swam in a garishly-painted lake.

Mrs Keitelman said, ‘We were always a family for keeping things, yes. My whole attic is crammed with clothes and books and toys and ornaments and goodness-alone knows what! But Mark—great-uncle Mark—well, his things were always our special pride. We even have his pocket telescope you know!'

‘It's just the photographs we were interested in,' I told her. ‘For the time being, anyway. I mean, we'd love to come back sometime, and look through the rest of the stuff.'

She smiled. She was a well-preserved woman of seventy-five going on eighty. Her skin was very pale, almost transparent, and her hair was white and fastened with an Alice-band. She wore a loose-flowing cotton dress in hyacinth blue, which matched her eyes. For some reason I felt she looked exactly like the grandmother I had never known.

‘Well, I only saw those photographs once,' she said. ‘They were supposed to have been brought back to Bismarck from the battlefield, along with poor Mark's clothes, and his valise, and his pocket-watch, and all of those bits and pieces. They didn't bring his body back. The paper said he wasn't mutilated but my grandfather wrote in his diary that he probably was; the same as all the rest. That was why they didn't send the body home.'

‘The photographs … are they prints or are they negatives?' I asked Mrs Keitelman.

‘Oh, we have both. The original glass negatives were sent to the
Tribune
and they made three copies of each print — one for the paper, one for the Army and one as a record. But the paper never published any of the pictures — or any engravings based on the pictures, as they would have done in those days — and the Army said they had lost their copies, and in any case they didn't believe that great-uncle Mark had really made a true record, or some such nonsense. There was even some suggestion that he might have faked them. But we still have a set of prints here, as well as all the negatives.'

She left us alone for three or four minutes, while the clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the afternoon, and large cups of weak creamy coffee grew colder and colder beside us. I said, ‘I can't believe that The Army actually refused to believe that Kellogg's photographs were authentic.'

Papago Joe tiredly pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘You don't expect anybody to believe what
we've
done, do you? Sniffed up death-powder, visited the Happy Hunting Ground? They'd send us straight to the funny farm.'

‘I don't know,' I told him. ‘I still can't believe how people can be so sceptical about spirits when they're
there
… right in front of our noses.
Talking
to us, guiding us. Mingling with us, you know, just like any crowd of people. The only difference is that some of us are dead and some of us are still alive.'

Papago Joe grunted in amusement He sat back and crossed his legs, and exposed an expanse of bare leg and a red-checked sock and a worn-down cowboy boot. ‘I never thought I'd ever hear a white man say that.'

‘And I never thought I'd ever see a native American in Argyle socks.'

Mrs Keitelman came back with a photograph in a brass frame and a large, well-worn envelope. First of all she showed us the photograph. It showed a podgy, serious-faced young man with his hair parted in the middle and a wing collar.

‘That's poor great-uncle Mark, taken at Fort Yates, Dakota Territory, on September 17, 1875, the year before he was killed at the Little Big Horn. Fort Yates is where they buried Sitting Bull, you know. You can still see his grave today.'

She brought over a small card-table, set it down in front of us, and unfolded its green baize top. Then she carefully opened up the envelope and drew out six large sepia photographs, which she laid out in two rows of three.

‘The Army refused to believe they were genuine,' she said. ‘They said that somebody had fixed them, somebody who wanted to make the Department of Indian Affairs believe that the Indians had extraordinary occult powers, which the Army wouldn't be able to beat. They said that these photographs were some kind of crude retaliation for the way in which the Sioux chiefs had been brought to the east and shown around our shipyards and our munitions plants, in order to convince them that it wasn't worth them fighting for their lands.'

Papago Joe and I studied the photographs minutely. It was plain that Mark Kellogg had taken them under the most harrowing conditions, and four out of the six were quite blurred. But they clearly showed a deep coulee, its sides dotted with sagebrush, and a barren hill beyond it. In the first photograph, soldiers were riding up from the coulee, towards the hill; and although the sky above the hill looked unusually dark, that could have been faulty exposure.

But the next photograph showed
something
coming up over the brow of the hill. Something dark, with writhing tentacles, like a giant squid made out of smoke. The leading cavalry officer was half-turned around, and his horse was rearing up. Behind him, some of the other troopers had already tightened their reins and prepared themselves for a hasty retreat.

‘This is another aspect of these pictures that the Army didn't care for,' said Mrs Keitelman. ‘Quite simply, they show the famous US 7th Cavalry turning tail and running away. But you can hardly blame them when you see what happened next.'

What happened next was that a huge black bulky shape rose up over the horizon, and three troopers seemed to have fallen — or been dragged — off their horses. One of them was crushed by his falling mount; the others tried to escape, but were wrapped in black smoky tentacles before they could ride back more than fifteen yards.

The massacre that followed was even more grisly than I had imagined it would be. But in the fourth photograph in the sequence, there was still no sign of the Indians. The cavalry were being torn from their saddles, stripped and slaughtered. Their horses lay dead and injured all around, like gutted sofas, and
I
saw a young Santee woman walking from one to the other, stripping off saddles and belts and boots and rifles.

There were two more pictures. One of them showed a huge shadow rising up, and some of the troopers must have fired at it, and hit it, because I could see smoke and fragments of what could have been ectoplasm.

The last picture was the most stunning, though, and if I hadn't known that such things could exist, I wouldn't have believed the evidence of my own eyes. It was hard to believe, but there it was, on its original print paper, faded and yellow.

The date, scribbled in pencil on the back of the original, was Sunday, June 25, 1876 — the actual date of the Battle of Little Big Horn, the very Sunday on which Custer and all his troopers had died.

The picture showed cavalry troopers desperately riding for their lives down the slopes of the coulee. Even in this fudge-coloured old print their eyes showed up white in screaming panic. Close behind them — and already catching up with some of them — was a monstrous thing that you'd have to invent a new dictionary to describe.

It was like a black cloud concealing all of your worst nightmares. Inside the cloud, I could just make out a kind of
face
, a face like a human shriek. Out of the face, curled tentacles like snakes. But it wasn't the snakes that upset me so much. It was the creature's underbelly, which seemed to be made up of a tangled mass of human heads, hundreds and hundreds of human heads; and the smoky squid creature was running across the hilltop in a terrible spindly
uneven rush,
on human arms, on hundreds of human arms
.

‘Christ,' I said, and sat back, in awe.

Mrs Keitelman raised an eyebrow, disapproving of my blasphemy, but satisfied because she could see that I believed.

‘This is authentic, isn't it?' she said.'
You
believe that it's authentic. There's no photographic trickery here. This is real.'

‘Ma'am,' said Papago Joe, his voice hoarse from tiredness but very controlled, ‘I've seen drawings and paintings of this thing here ever since I was small. I've heard stories about it that kept me awake, night after night. But I never thought for one moment that I'd ever get to see a
photograph
of it.'

‘You know what it is?' asked Mrs Keitelman.

‘Yes, ma'am, this is Aktunowihio, the native American god of darkness. And this is the reality of what happened at Little Big Horn. It wasn't Crazy Horse who killed Custer; it was Aktunowihio.

‘But look — Aktunowihio normally couldn't leave the Great Outside, the dark place, the place of the dead. He didn't have the strength and he didn't have any way of moving himself about He was smoke, he was slime, he was everything black. Usually, he swam in darkness, but he couldn't swim around in daylight. So he had to find a way of walking …'

‘All of those heads,' I said. ‘All of those arms. They're
black
.'

‘That's right,' nodded Papago Joe, his nostrils flaring in triumph. ‘
That's
why Doctor Hambone's been involved —
that's
what he did when he was captured by the Santee. He made a bargain. Look! In exchange for his life, in exchange for his freedom, he gave Aktunowihio the use of his zombies, the dismembered bodies of American slaves — alive but dead! Look at it! Shadow and death, joined together! Invincible!'