Burial (7 page)

‘All right, no problem,' I retaliated. ‘I deal with this kind of stuff every day of the week.' In actual fact I didn't
really
deal with this kind of stuff every day of the week. I had never dealt with anything like this before, ever. But I wasn't going to let Michael's scepticism get the better of me. I could understand the man's bitterness; I could understand his sense of frustration; but the fact is that there isn't
anybody
trained to cope with the supernatural, there aren't any Duc de Richelieus or Harvard professors of Occult Goings-On,
no matter what they tell you in Dennis Wheatley novels and Stephen Spielberg movies. So I was just as qualified as the next guy. Or just as unqualified. It depends how charitable you want to be.

I crossed the room and picked up the lamp. I had to pull at it with almost my entire strength in order to carry it back across to the far side of the room.

‘Michael, I'm going to plug this in again. Do you want to hold it, please, to stop it from sliding away?'

Michael came into the room and knelt down beside the desk-lamp, holding it by the neck like a live rooster — and, believe me, if he had let it go, it would have rattled away from him just as fast. He switched it on, so that it illuminated the opposite wall. I stood in front of it and did a few of my shadow-tricks. A rabbit. A dove, with flapping wings. A turtle.

‘What in God's name are you doing?' Michael wanted to know.

‘Shush. I want to attract Naomi's attention, but I don't want to upset her. Well, not yet, anyway.'

Naomi was watching my shadow-pictures out of the corner of her eye. She flinched slightly when I made them move, but she didn't look away.

‘Now, Naomi,' I asked her. ‘Is this the kind of shadow you saw on the wall?'

She shook her head. But still she didn't look away.

I did a dog, and a giraffe, and Oliver Hardy. That was about the sum total of my repertoire. No wonder the kids always used to boo me when I tried to entertain at children's parties. But then I tried to imitate Naomi. I covered my face with my hands, so that only my eyes peered out. Then I slowly wriggled my fingers.

Naomi was staring at the wall with widened eyes. I kept on wriggling my fingers, and I gradually lifted my hands higher and higher, the same way that Naomi had done, until they crowned my head like antlers.

Naomi's scream was so high-pitched that I couldn't hear it at first. It was far beyond the normal register of human perception, like a dog-whistle. But I was aware of it, I was aware of her panic, and I turned toward the wall to see what it was that had terrified her so much.

I saw my own shadow. A hunched, heavy-headed creature like a goat standing on its hind legs, with a crown of writhing snakes. If such a creature had been standing right in front of me in the flesh, you wouldn't have seen me for Reebok smoke. But I dropped my hands, just as Naomi's scream dropped from inaudible to ear-splitting, and Michael let go of the desk-lamp, and so the creature instantaneously turned itself back into me, and then (as the desk-lamp tugged itself loose and clattered across the floor) it vanished.

Michael wrapped his arms around Naomi as she screamed and screamed and wouldn't stop. She rocked her chair violently from side to side, and drummed her feet on the floor. Her eyes rolled up again, and she began to froth and spit as if she were having an epileptic fit.

‘
What the fuck have you done
!' Michael yelled at me.

Naomi screamed and thrashed and there was nothing that any of us could do to calm her down.

‘I'm sorry!' I told Michael. ‘I'm really sorry! I didn't realize!'

‘Forget it!' he shouted back at me. ‘Just get out of here! You Goddamned sham!'

‘Hey, who are you calling a sham?' I retorted; but Karen caught hold of my arm and said, ‘I'm sorry, Harry. It's better if we go. I'm really sorry.'

‘Just get the hell out!' Michael screamed. I didn't know who was making the most noise: him or Naomi.

But as I retreated, an odd thing happened.
Another
shadow flickered across the wall, even though there was no desk-lamp to cast it. It was so brief, so insubstantial, that I
wasn't at all sure that I had really seen it But it bore a noticeable resemblance to the creature that I had created with my hunched back and my wriggling fingers.

As it passed across the wall, Naomi abruptly stopped screaming, and turned her head this way and that, as if she could sense that it was there.

‘Naomi?' said Michael. His eyes were filled with tears and he was holding her very tight. ‘Naomi, are you okay?'

Naomi's pupils rolled back into view. She stared at Michael, face-to-face, expressionless, as if she had never seen him in her life before. Then she turned and stared at me.

‘Thank God,' she whispered.

‘What?' said Michael. ‘What? Naomi —
what
?

She ignored him. ‘You
know
, don't you?' she asked me, so softly that I could scarcely hear her. ‘You know what it is.' She lifted her hands to her face in the way that she had before, so that only her eyes looked out.

Michael said, ‘Naomi, Harry has to leave. I really don't think —'

‘No!' she interrupted him. ‘Harry mustn't leave. He's the only one who knows.'

‘Naomi —'

‘No! He's the only one who knows!'

Her speech was still slurry and mechanical, like the speech of somebody who has suffered a mild stroke, but it was much more emphatic than it had been before, much more demanding.

There was a silence that was almost embarrassingly long, while Naomi continued to stare at me as if I was the Lone Ranger and a Chippendales dancer and John the Baptist all rolled into one.

‘What?' Michael wanted to know. ‘What is it? If Harry knows what it is, then don't you think I'm entitled to know, too?'

‘He knows what it is,' Naomi repeated. But then she
turned to Michael and pressed her forehead gently against his cheek, a clear demonstration of love and affection. ‘It would be much better for you, Michael … if you never knew. I don't want to lose you, Michael … not now. Not ever.'

Karen whispered, ‘Harry, do you
really
know?'

I was going to admit that I didn't have the faintest idea, but Michael had heard her, and gave me one of his narrow looks. ‘For sure,' I said. ‘I had my suspicions, right from the start.'

Michael took us back to the living room. He was tetchy, unsettled. But Naomi had told him that I wasn't to leave, so what could he do?

‘So, are you going to tell me what this is?' he asked me, taking off his glasses. His eyes were bulgy and threatening.

I gave him the insincerest of smiles. ‘I'm sorry. You heard what your wife said. She'd prefer it if you were kept in the dark. I mean, it'd be safer, on the whole. Safer for you. Safer for all of us. There's more to the paranormal than meets the eye.'

‘You're trying to tell me this is
dangerous? How
dangerous?'

‘Well, not so much
dangerous
?' I extemporized. ‘More like —
unstable
.'

‘Let me show you something, wise guy,' said Michael. He went across to the bureau and picked up a framed photograph. He brought it back and stuck it under my nose. It showed a pretty brunette standing in a New York street, holding a splashy bunch of daffodils. She wore a blue spring coat and a long white scarf and she looked happy.

‘Who do you think that is?' he asked me, and his voice was harsh.

‘Naomi, I guess, otherwise you wouldn't be showing it to me.'

‘That's right, Naomi. So when do you think this was taken?'

I glanced through the dining room door at the white-haired woman clinging to her chair.

‘Nineteen-eighty-five?' I hazarded. ‘Nineteen-eighty-six?'

‘You're wrong,' said Michael. ‘You're absolutely wrong. I took this photograph myself, on Delancey Street, April this year.'

I studied the photograph hard. I gave a long, dry swallow. My larynx felt like the bowl of General MacArthur's second-best corncob pipe. Whatever this shadowy creature was that I was supposed to know about, it had done appalling things to Naomi Greenberg, and I didn't particularly relish the prospect of it doing the same things to me. I didn't think that white hair would suit me, to tell you the truth. I passed the photograph to Karen, but she had seen it before, and all she did was pass it back to Michael. I didn't particularly appreciate the small, sweet smile of confidence she was giving me.
Karen
, I thought,
I fought something supernatural for you; or what we all believed was supernatural; but once was enough; in fact, twice was enough, because I had to fight that same grisly manifestation twice. But never again. Never. Not something like this. This isn't crystal balls or tea-leaves or fortune-telling cards. This is death, and things that make your hair turn white; and, Karen, I don't want to have anything to do with death, and things that make your hair turn white
.

Not now, not ever
.

E.C. Dude lay back on the orange-upholstered couch in the air-conditioned Airstream trailer listening to Roxy Music's original 1971 album
Roxy Music.
He wore Reynolds Engineering sunglasses, a faded black T-shirt with an Indian Head Diesel motif, second hand oil-rig boots, heavily oil-stained, and his girlfriend's white lacy panties.

His sun-faded jeans were hung over the back of his office chair, which was one of those rusted revolving office chairs with brown vinyl upholstery and half of the sponge-rubber seat dug out of it by all the bored people who had sat on it over the years. E.C. Dude was quintessentially thin, and very white-skinned considering that he had lived in Arizona all his life. His hair was curly and glossy, mahogany-coloured and very long.

His face was thin and he had the looks of a corrupt saint, like a (pre-booze) Jim Morrison painted by Giotto. His chin was prickled with soft black stubble. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he sang along to
Do The Strand
. His legs were as white as his face, with bony knees — legs that had never ventured into the Arizona sun without the protection of Levi sun-block.

Outside the trailer, a collection of thirty-seven used cars baked in the ninety-one degree heat. They were mostly Buicks and Oldsmobiles, around nine or ten years old, and there was a high proportion of pickups. A large hand-painted sign said PAPAGO JOE BARGAIN USED AUTOS, Nothing Over $3300. On each side of the sign a buffalo skull had been mounted, and vinyl fringes had been tacked all around it to give the impression of buckskin.

Papago Joe himself was making a court appearance today in Phoenix, trying to win custody of his sixteen-year-old daughter Susan White Feather. That was why E.C. Dude had been left in charge of the lot, with instructions not to sell anything until Papago Joe got back.

E.C. Dude was not seriously worried about that. Out here on Highway 60 between Apache and Florence Junctions, in sight of the wrinkled prehistoric skin of the Superstition Mountain, the passing trade in bargain Oldsmobiles was intermittent, to say the least. They had once gone three weeks without moving a single automobile. Papago Joe made most of his money by doing favours for men who wanted favours done; Indians, mostly, with grim leathery faces and shiny Cadillacs and mirror sunglasses. E.C. Dude never asked what. Tobacco and alcohol and a deteriorating ozone layer were quite enough of a health hazard, as far as he was concerned, without the added risk of annoying Indians with grim leathery faces and shiny Cadillacs.

E.C. Dude was trying to decide whether he had the energy to go to the Sun Devil Bar & Grill and sink a couple of cold Coors. They used to have an icebox in the trailer but Papago Joe had donated it to a family on the Salt River Reservation. It had been one of those spontaneous charitable gestures to which Papago Joe was prone; although Papago Joe could have used some charity himself sometimes. Times were difficult for everyone, especially Indians, and sometimes Papago Joe would share a cigarette with E.C. Dude and tell him about the times when ‘times' weren't easy or difficult, but simply ‘times'.

‘The sun came up, the clouds passed by, this way, mostly. Then the sun went down again.'

‘Sounds like cool times,' E.C. Dude would remark, although he was never quite sure what the hell Papago Joe was talking about.

‘That's right,' Papago Joe would nod, his voice serious.
‘They were seriously cool times.'

E.C. Dude had almost persuaded himself that he didn't need a beer when he felt the trailer shudder underneath him.
Shudder
, as if somebody had gently nudged a 4X4 into the side of it. He sat up, listening, waiting for the trailer to shudder again. Then he heard a knocking, scraping noise from outside, almost as if the cars in the lot were banging together.

He swung off the couch, pushed his sunglasses onto his nose, and opened the trailer door. Outside, the glare and the heat were tremendous. It was only a few minutes after midday, and the sun stabbed at him from every windshield and every door-mirror and every polished bumper. The concrete lot was dusty white, the highway was dusty white, the sky was dusty white.

E.C. Dude hesitated, and sniffed. Over the familiar smell of hot automobiles and rubber, he was sure that he could smell something else. Like a fire burning … mesquite and charcoal and some kind of long-forgotten herb. A sourish smell, but a smell that strongly reminded him of when he was young.

He came down the hot aluminum steps of the trailer and stood with his hands resting on his hips, looking all around. The highway was silent, the sales lot was silent. High above his head, a turkey vulture idly and arrogantly circled on the thermal current, not even bothering to flap its wings. The red and white pennants all around the lot hung limp, as if they were soon going to melt and start dripping.