Faces of Fear (31 page)

The next morning was sharp and sunny. Lucy was sitting in her room playing with her dolls house. Barbie had been trying to climb out of the upstairs window, and had got her bust stuck on the windowledge. I sat crosslegged on the floor watching Lucy while she played; and then at last I said, “These
mistai
.”

She turned and stared at me with those coal-hole eyes. “What
mistai
?”

“Those mistai who told you that Janice and Laurence were bad. I mean – how did you know that they were called
mistai
?”

“Because they were.”

“You saw them? What did they look like?”

Lucy thought for a moment, and then covered her face with her fingers, so that only her eyes looked out. If you hadn't known what she was doing, you wouldn't
have thought anything of it. But I remembered what the old texts had said, the old texts about Misquamacus. ‘
On being ask'd whay ye Daemon look'd like, the antient Wonder-Worker Misquamacus covered his face so that onlie ye Eyes look'd out, and then gave a very curious and Circumstantiall Relation, saying it was sometimes small and solid, like a Great Toad ye Bigness of many Ground-Hogs, but sometimes big and cloudy, with no Shape, though with a face which had Serpents grown from it.
”

“They had their hands over their faces?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “They had
no
faces. They were
mistai.
”

“They came to the schoolyard and spoke to you?”

“Sure. They were all grey and I couldn't hardly see them but they said that Janice Muldrew was bad and Laurence Cullen was bad and some of the other kids. And all I did was say that they were bad; because they were.”

“Then what?” I asked her.

She looked away. “Then Janice tried to hit me and I told her to fly through the air.”

“You
told
her? You didn't pick her up?”

“Janice is too fat. I couldn't pick her up.”

“Then what? You told Laurence to push his face into a wall?”

“Unh-huh. I never touched him.”

“You told them and they did it? Just like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what about the other kids? The same thing with them?”

“That's right. They wanted to hit me but I told them all to fall over, and they did.”

I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. This was serious. This was even more serious than I had imagined. If Lucy had told Janice to fly through the air and hurt
herself; and forced Laurence to run into a wall; then she could be using a hugely powerful form of Indian magic known as Enemy-Hurts-Himself, a form of supernatural judo, in which all of your opponents' hate and aggression is turned against him.

I could feel Misquamacus. I could feel his influence, like a huge dark sea-creature resting hundreds of feet below the surface of human consciousness. In his day, in the 1600s, he had been the most startling medicine-man of his age – the only medicine-man who had dared to make direct contact with the ancient gods of North America, the Great Old Ones. His magic had been legendary. He had changed the course of rivers, caused it to rain, and been seen by reliable witnesses on both sides of the American continent in the space of a few hours – at a time when it had taken months to cross from the eastern seaboard to the west.

I could almost
smell
him, he was so close. He had been there when Lucy was conceived, with his black, glittering headdress of living beetles, and his hard-hewn face, and his eyes that were filled with all the rage and malevolence of a man whose people had been systematically wiped out, and whose world of natural magic had been overwhelmed by money and guns and the principle of manifest destiny.

“Have you had your breakfast?” I asked Lucy.

She nodded. “Lucky Charms.”

“Oh, sure. And I bet you ate all the mallow bits and left all the plain bits.”

She laughed. She seemed perfectly normal now. But Misquamacus had always proved himself to be fiercely unpredictable, and there was no telling how or when he would choose to make his presence felt. I closed Lucy's door and went back to the living-room, where Karen was reading
Architectural Digest
and drinking espresso.

“I'm going to call Norman Vogel,” I told her. “Maybe he could see Lucy this afternoon.”

“Harry, you know that there's nothing wrong with her, not psychiatrically.”

“Of course. But she's still going to need a clean bill of health from a psychiatrist before they'll let her back into school. And if I can take her today, she'll get one. She's calm, she's rested. She's going to be fine.”

“And what if she goes back to school and the same thing happens again?”

“It won't. I'm going to find out if it
was
Misquamacus who made her behave like that; and if it was, I'm going to make sure that he leaves her alone. And leaves her alone permanent.”

“-ly,” added Karen. She was always correcting me.

I poured myself a cup of coffee, sat back on the sofa and picked up the phone. However, I had hardly finished dialing Dr Vogel's number when we heard a piercing screaming coming from Lucy's room. I banged down the phone, jumped up, and knocked espresso all over the lemon-yellow carpet. Together, Karen and I ran along the corridor and opened Lucy's door.

Lucy's dolls house was in flames. Its roof was alight and already the sides were burning. Lucy had her hand caught in one of the windows, and was screaming wildly as she tried to pull it out. Without a second's hesitation I pulled out the whole plastic window-frame and freed her, but all the same I burned the back of my hand. I said, “Here!” and handed her to Karen, while I went over to Lucy's bed, pulled off the quilt, and dropped it over the dolls house to smother the flames.

It was all over in seconds, but the bedroom was filled with smoke and Lucy was totally hysterical, screaming and coughing and kicking her legs. Karen carried her over
to the washbasin and we ran cold water over her fingers. They didn't look too badly burned, but I thought we ought to call the doctor to make sure they were bandaged properly, and to give Lucy something for shock. After we had kept her hands under running water for a while, she began to calm down, but she was deathly pale and she was shivering all over.

While Karen wrapped her up in a blanket and carried her into the living-room, I cautiously lifted the quilt off the dolls house to make sure that the fire was out. The plastic roof had been reduced to stringy, rancid loops, and the wooden sides were badly charred. Inside, Barbie had half melted. Her hair was nothing but a blackened brush and one side of her face was distorted. What made her look even more grotesque was the way she was still smiling at me, as if she had enjoyed her immolation.

I carried the dolls house out of the apartment and into the elevator. Mick the doorman opened the door to the back yard for me. He peered inside at Barbie's remains, and said, “That'll teach her for smoking in bed.”

Dr Van Steen came around a half-hour later. He didn't usually make housecalls, but he had known the Tandys even before Karen was born, and he was a close family friend as well as a physician. He was white-haired, immaculately dressed in black and grey, with shining steel-rimmed spectacles and shining patent-leather shoes.

“Well, now,” he said, sitting next to Lucy on the sofa. “I understand your dolls house burned down. How did that happen?”

Lucy said nothing, and turned away.

“There were no matches anyplace around,” I said. “I can't understand how it happened.”

“Let's take a look at those fingers,” said Dr Van Steen, and took hold of Lucy's hands. “They're a little blistered, aren't they, but they'll heal up all right. Little girls of your age, they heal so quick they're usually better before I can get around to see them.”

Lucy turned back and stared at him. “I wanted Barbie to die,” she said, very clearly, and with great emphasis on the word ‘
die
'.

Dr Van Steen looked over at me with his eyebrows lifted. “That wasn't a very nice thing to do, was it? Why did you want her to die?”

“Because she's a yellow-hair.”

“A yellow-hair? Don't you like yellow-hairs?”

“All yellow-hairs have to die. And all white faces.” At that, she covered her face with her bandaged hands, so that only her eyes looked out.

“Just a little joke of hers,” I put in. I didn't want Dr Van Steen to push her any further.

“Oh, I see,” said Dr Van Steen. “Well… no accounting for humour, is there?”

After he was finished bandaging Lucy's fingers, however, I took him into the hallway and closed the living-room door behind us.

“Between you and me, doctor, Lucy's been acting real strange. She had a fight in the schoolyard today and hurt some of her classmates. The school won't let her back until she's undergone a psychiatric evaluation. Now this.”

“Is there anything worrying her?”

“Not that I know of. What does a four-year-old have to worry about? Too many repeats of
Sesame Street
? The rising price of M&Ms?”

“You'll forgive my being personal, but are you and Karen getting along okay? There aren't any domestic upsets?”

“Well, Karen's been working pretty hard lately, and we've had one or two contretemps about that. But nothing else.”

“She's not being teased or bullied at her nursery-school?”

“No … no indication of that.”

Dr Van Steen said, “What's all this about yellow-hair? Do you know what that means?”

“Yellow-hair used to be the Native American name for a blonde. Like General Custer, for example.”

“Why should a four-year-old Caucasian child say that all yellow-hairs must die?”

I shrugged, I had my own theory about that, but I wasn't going to tell Dr Van Steen. Before I stirred up any old and unwelcome influences, I wanted to make absolutely sure that Lucy wasn't simply suffering from some conventional psychiatric glitch.

“I'm taking her to see Dr Vogel,” I said. “Maybe
he
can work out what's wrong.”

“Let me know how things go,” said Dr Van Steen. “And – oh – if you find out, let me know how Lucy could start a fire without matches.”

He gave me an odd, knowing look, as if he suspected that I was holding something back. I was; but even if I had told him what it was, he wouldn't have believed me. I didn't want to believe it myself.

The following afternoon we took Lucy to Dr Vogel's clinic on Park Avenue. The city was covered in low, grey cloud, and it was raining. Lucy wore her red hooded raincoat and her little red rubbers, and carried her favourite doll with her, a grubby, floppy thing with the highly original name of Doll.

Inside Dr Vogel's office it was all dark oak paneling
and gloom. Dr Vogel looked more like a bear hunter than a psychiatrist. He was broad-shouldered, with a huge brown beard and bright blue eyes, and hands as big as snow-shovels. He wore a blue-checkered backwoods shirt and stonewashed jeans, and he laughed a lot. He had been recommended to me by Dr Hughes, the tumour specialist who had helped Karen during the days when Misquamacus had attempted his first reincarnation. Dr Hughes had lost part of his hand to the ancient demon that Misquamacus had summoned to help him, the Lizard-of-the-Trees, and it had taken him years of surgery and years of psychiatric counseling before he had recovered. Even so, he had lost all of his hair and all of his spirit; and I had never seen a man so broken.

“Well, then, little lady,” said Dr Vogel. “It sounds like you've been having some pretty good fun at school.”

Lucy clutched Doll, and swung her head from side to side.

“So … not so much fun, huh?” asked Dr Vogel.

“Muldrews and Cullens kill babies,” she said.

“They kill
babies
? What babies?”

“All the babies at Sand Creek. All the babies at Washita River.”

Dr Vogel looked at me in perplexity. “Sand Creek? Washita River?”

“Indian massacres,” I told him. “Worse than Wounded Knee.”

“Indian massacres? What the hell have you been teaching her, Harry? She's four.”

“I never taught her that. They've been teaching her all about Native Americans at nursery school … but not about Sand Creek, for Christ's sake. Leastways, they'd better not.”

“So how does she know about Sand Creek and Washita River?”

I shook my head. “I don't have any idea. I just want to know if she's sane.”

Dr Vogel was silent for a moment. I liked him; I trusted him; but I didn't have any alternative. I had to lie to him because I wanted him to tell me that Lucy was suffering from juvenile depression or playschool psychosis or neurotic aversion to the alphabet.

I wanted him to tell me anything except that Lucy was possessed.

Karen and I sat in the waiting-room pretending to read last month's copies of
The New Yorker
and
Schizophrenic News
while Dr Vogel ran a series of tests on Lucy's intelligence, sensitivity, audio-visual responses, and what she thought an ink-blot in the shape of Cookie Monster looked like (Cookie Monster.) On the wall of the waiting-room was a brass plaque which read ‘Anybody who goes to see a psychiatrist needs their head examined.'

Eventually we were called back in. Dr Vogel unwrapped a strawberry sucker and gave it to Lucy, and then sat back with his legs crossed, looking serious. “I have to tell you, Harry, I never came across anything like this before. Lucy appears to be highly intelligent,
highly
motivated, with perceptual and analytical skills that are way above her age group. She also has extraordinary gifts of intuition.”

“But?” I asked him.

“But she persists in this aggressive delusion that her classmates were responsible for killing babies, and that they not only deserved the whupping she gave them, they actually deserve to die. And she's full of all this Native American mumbo-jumbo. For instance—” he frowned down at his notepad “—do you have any idea what a
mistai
is?”