Faces of Fear (35 page)

Lucy closed her glowing blue eyes, as if to indicate that she wasn't going to discuss it any more.

“
Spirit of moon, I worship you and serve you. Hold back the night for me, for the space of five long heartbeats. Spirit of wind, blow
this man's
spirit out of his body, leave him empty. Find him a home in the woman's body, two spirits in one earthly lodge
”.

Behind us, the night began to darken, and the wind began to rise. Scraps of newspaper and gum wrappers blew around the tracks, along with a fine stinging grit. I had to shield my eyes with my upraised arm. Above the blustering of the wind, Lucy was starting to
scream – a harsh, high-pitched scream that was filled with unbridled fury.

“
Spirit of wind, blow this man's spirit out of his body! Leave him empty! Spirit of moon! Command the night to hold its breath
!”

At first, I didn't think that anything was going to happen. After all, Misquamacus was a seriously weakened spirit, and his only physical presence was that of a four-year-old girl. But then suddenly everything grew darker still. It was that darkness that closes in on you when you're just about to faint – except that I didn't faint. I was aware of everything that was going on.

Lucy's voice grew slow and slurred. “
Spppirrriittt offff wiiiinnnndddd.
” Soon it grew so slow that I couldn't even understand it, and then it stopped In fact, everything stopped. There was total silence, and nobody moved. Newspapers that had been blown into mid-air over the railroad tracks remained where they were, in mid-air.

Misquamacus had done it. For me, at least, he had temporarily arrested time.

It was then that two things happened almost at once. I began to feel a
tugging
sensation inside of my head, almost as if somebody were trying to pull out my brain by the roots. I began to feel everything that I ever was being dragged out of me. My boyhood, my school days, my first pet dog. My mother, my father, my Uncle Jim, looning and laughing on my fifteenth birthday. Bicycle rides – baseball games – girls in starched petticoats and girls in pink-checkered swimsuits – trips to Coney Island and Brighton Beach – sunshine, cotton candy, electric storms – they were all being drawn out of me like brightly-coloured picture-cards being sucked into a Hoover. My soul was going; my spirit was going. Dear God, I was dying.

But the other thing was: a train was approaching, its lights reflecting from the tracks. It was momentarily frozen in time, but in the next few seconds, when Misquamacus had taken over my body, it would come out of the tunnel and bear down on Lucy and
that
was going to be the bastard's real revenge, to wrap us together in the same body, and to kill our daughter, too.

At that moment, with my spirit being forcibly wrenched out of my body, I could have tried anything, with no guarantee of whether it would work. I could have run to Lucy and pushed her off the railroad tracks, but then I would have been saving Misquamacus, too. I could have accepted my fate, and let Misquamacus transfer my spirit into Karen's body, and faced a life of complete madness.

Or – I could have remembered what Singing Rock had been trying to tell me – through the dark-haired girl in the library. Computers are your friends. Computers are
your
friends.

My spirit was being twisted out of my body like the guts out of a cod. It was like dying, only it was worse than dying, because I knew that I was still alive. I rose up, floating, and I could see my body standing on the railroad tracks. I could see Lucy, with her arms outstretched, her eyes ablaze, and the dark shadow of Misquamacus hovering over her.

I had left my own body now. It was the weirdest experience of my whole life. I was conscious, I was wide awake, and yet I had been pulled right out of myself, so that I was weightless, floating, with no substance at all.

I felt a wind catching me; like a kite being tugged, I spun, and turned, and I knew that Misquamacus had directed the wind manitou to take me to Karen. I could see her, motionless, her back against the wall, frozen in
time like the whole of Park Avenue was frozen in time. I was blown nearer and nearer, and I tried to twist and spin myself away. If I ever entered Karen's body, she and I would both go mad, and die the kind of death that even schizophrenics couldn't understand.

Computers are your friends.

I twisted around just once more, and there was the train, pausing in time. A Metro North commuter service, on its way out to Westchester. A train with computers. A train with a soul. A train with its very own manitou, its white manitou, composed of every design that has ever been drawn for it, and every inch of engineering that had ever gone into it. A modest but direct descendant of the trains that had howled their way across the Great Plains, and had helped to bring abut the final downfall of the Native American Indian.

And I prayed to that train. I
prayed
to it. “
Help me, take me, I want to be part of you, rather than anything else. I want to meld in your metal and sparkle in your kilobytes. You have a spirit; you have a manitou. Help me
.”

But the wind was blowing more fiercely now, and I felt myself being buffeted across the tracks to the place where Karen was standing. She was still motionless, and her face was rigid with fright. I didn't know how long Misquamacus had managed to hold back the night, but there couldn't be very much time left, only seconds. If I didn't find a host by then, my spirit would probably scatter and disperse, the same way that Misquamacus' spirit had scattered and dispersed.

I felt myself tilting. Karen was even closer. I tried to twist myself around, and all the time I prayed to that train, I
prayed
to that train, take me, you son-of-a-bitch, a train is stronger than wind and stronger than water and stronger than all of the wonder-workers ever assembled
together, from Ute to Iroquois, so give me a break, will you, and
take me
.

Karen suddenly turned and looked up at me. I didn't know whether she could see me or not, but her mouth was open and she looked surprised. At the same moment the train started rolling towards us, and the traffic started honking and the sky started moving, and everything was back to normal. Except that I was jolted away from Karen and found myself plunging into aluminium and plastics. I was literally yanked into that train's conscious mind; and instead of finding myself shoulder-to-shoulder with Karen, two spirits jostling each other in the same body till death do us part, I found myself

Cool and clean and calculating; full of switching information and speed limits and braking distances.
I was the train and the train was me, and we were rocking and swaying along the track past 97th Street, and there was
Jesus
! a child on the track, and a man, too; and it was Lucy and it was me.

I saw Karen run across the track, snatch up Lucy in her arms, and tumble sideways in the aggregate. I saw my own body, standing in front of the train, which was me. Behind me, I saw the blackest of boiling shadows, which was Misquamacus.
His arms were uplifted, and his face was boiling with serpents. This was what he was, the servant of the Great Old Ones, no longer a tribal wonder-worker but a way through which the ancient and evil spirits of America could find their way back to reality; and destroy us all.

He began to billow toward my abandoned body, like a black silk cover thrown over a bed. But I thought to myself: I'd rather kill him than let him do that. And because I had the mind of a train and the weight of a train, I short-circuited the speed controls and the train began to pick up speed, pick up speed,
until it was clattering toward my teetering body at 65 mph.

The black shadow of Misquamacus' spirit funneled itself into my body like smoke down a drain. I staggered once, and then turned toward the accelerating train.

But it was too late. Inside the train's computers, my spirit was running like liquid fire through every speed control, through every braking check, and there was nothing on earth that could have stopped that mother from hitting me directly in the chest, so that I went spinning and cartwheeling off the track, with blood spraying like a pinwheel, until I came to rest on the opposite side of the tracks.

I closed my (metaphorical) eyes and shut the train down. Its brakes squealed and howled like a herd of protesting pigs, and showers of orange sparks cascaded from its wheels. Even as it slid past my crumpled body, however, I felt something change. A victory won; a burden lifted. From out of my body, a shadow now, a shadow as dark and as vengeful as anything you could ever imagine. Inside the train's computer, I could only perceive it through the black and white video system, but this is what I saw:

A creature that was half-man and half-reptile. A man who had bargained so often with the gods that they had recreated him, in their own image.

The image rose out of my body and stood for a long time looking down at me. Then, quite nonchalantly, it took hold of the left rail and the right rail, and clutched them both.

“
Weejoo-suk
,” it whispered in Alqonquian. The wind is blowing. There was a sharp scurrying burst of paper and grit, and then the black shadow was lifted away, flying out of the tunnel entrance and high over the streets of Manhattan like a bat or a bird or a memory of times
that can never be redeemed. Way up in the sky, it caught the light of the rising moon, and the spirit of the moon was not in a forgiving mood. Misquamacus had promised her an offering, a sacrifice, and now he could offer her nothing but his own shadow.

The shadow flared like a loose-woven shawl that has trailed accidentally in the fire; and blazed for a moment; and fell from the sky as a shower of light grey ashes. They sifted across the railroad tracks, and you would have been forgiven for thinking that snow was early this year.

I opened my eyes. Karen was standing next to me, and Lucy, too. Blue and red lights were flashing. A paramedic was kneeling next to me, fixing an intravenous drip. I looked down and saw that my left leg was sticking out at right-angles. I felt totally unreal. I didn't know whether I was a man or a train. But I could see the train twenty feet away, standing stationary, with six or seven cops and railroad personnel standing around it.

“You're going to be fine,” the paramedic told me. “Broken leg, fractured wrist, possible ruptured spleen, multiple bruising. Otherwise you're great for somebody who got hit by a train.”

Lucy bent over and gave me a wet kiss. I looked up into those big dark eyes of hers and I'm sure that she understood something about what had happened; although I shall never know what.

“I love you, daddy,” she said, and this time she meant it.

“I love you too, sugar plum fairy.”

Karen bent over me and kissed me, too. “What happened?” she whispered. “What did you
do
?”

“I didn't let the wind take me where it wanted to, that's all. The train was stronger than the wind.”

“You mean—?”

“For those few seconds,
I
was part of the train. The thinking part. Misquamacus should have known better than to mess with modern technology.”

Karen turned away for a moment. I didn't mind. She had a beautiful profile. But then she turned back and said, “Will he
ever
leave us alone?” And there were tears in her eyes.

Lucy was holding a police officer's hand. She was swinging one leg and chanting. “
Weksit-paktesk, weksit-paktesk, nayew neechnw, weksit-paktesk
.”

I squeezed Karen's hand. I simply didn't know what to say.

Graham Masterton (born 1946, Edinburgh) is a British horror author. Originally editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, Graham Masterton's first novel
The Manitou
was published in 1976 and adapted for the film in 1978.
Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar award by the Mystery Writers of America for
Charnel House
and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for
Mirror
. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel
Family Portrait
, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
.
Masterton's novels often contain visceral sex and horror. In addition to his novels, Masterton has written a number of sex instruction books, including
How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed
and
Wild Sex for New Lovers
.

Discover books by Graham Masterton published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/Graham Masterton

Burial
Corroboree
Feelings of Fear
Holy Terror
Lady of Fortune
The Hell Candidate

For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
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