Revenge of the Manitou (21 page)

“Just about everything.
The last time Harry and I
encountered
Misquamacus
, he was into his
fourth,
or more likely his fifth, reincarnation. I could
judge that because of the vast distance of time he had covered in one leap-from
1650 to the present day. It takes a powerful medicine man to do that. Now, from
what you’ve told us about the things you found out in Calistoga,
Misquamacus
lived again in the 1830s, and that would have
been his sixth reincarnation.”

Neil wiped dust
from his mouth with the back of his hand. The house was in sight now, and he
was driving more slowly. “You’re trying to tell me this is his last
reincarnation?”

“I believe so,”
nodded Singing Rock. “He’s almost ready to take his place in
Wajok
, and that means he’s immensely powerful, immensely
strong, and almost unbeatable by any other medicine man. He had to go through a
physical rebirth the last time we met him, like a human fetus, but now he’s
growing himself inside of your son’s mind. Don’t ask me how he does it. It’s
beyond my medicine. But he’s doing it and, even before he’s finished doing it,
he’s demonstrated some magic that no present-day wonder-worker could even
touch. Creating that wooden man, Neil, takes occult powers that could make
earthquakes. And that’s before he’s emerged from your son’s mind, before he’s
ready to zap us with everything he’s got. There isn’t any doubt at all that
he’s going to call down
Ossadagowah
, and when he does
that, we’re really up against it.”

Neil stopped
the pickup outside his backyard and took out the keys.

“Are we going
to die?” he asked Singing Rock quietly.

Singing Rock
sighed. “That is one prediction I don’t care to make,” he replied. “But
remember this is
Misquamacus’s
seventh and last
reincarnation. After this, he won’t have any further opportunities to take his
revenge on the white people, except if this
manitou
is summoned to earth by other medicine men. And when you consider the general
condition of Indian magic in America today, I’d say that’s pretty unlikely.”

They pulled up
outside Neil’s weather beaten house and climbed out. Neil led the way across
the yard and into the kitchen, and he showed Singing Rock to the bathroom to
freshen up. Harry carried his suitcase into the parlor.

“Does Singing
Rock drink?” asked Neil, taking a six-pack of Coors out of the icebox.

“I don’t think
so. But he might appreciate a cup of coffee.”

Singing Rock
returned, hung his sport coat on the back of his chair, and rolled up his shirt
sleeves. His arms were muscular and sinewy, and decorated with elaborate
patterns of tattoos and scars. As he sat down at the pine table, Neil had the
feeling that he had some experienced, professional help at last.

“I want to see
everything,” said Singing Rock.
“The children’s paintings,
the wardrobe upstairs, the sheets that attacked your wife.
I want you to
tell me everything, too, all over again, in as much detail as you can remember
it. If we’re going to win out against these medicine men at all, we have to
know as much about them as possible.”

Neil reached up
to one of the top cupboards and brought down the sheaf of paintings from Toby’s
classmates. Singing Rock went through them all meticulously, peering at every
figure, and comparing one nightmare picture closely with another.

As he examined
the pictures, he asked Neil to tell him about the first appearance of the
visitation they knew as “Dunbar,” and everything that Billy Ritchie had told
him about Bloody
Fenner
and that grisly day up at
Conn Creek.

Neil was
nervous” at first, but as he drank and talked, he found he was able to confide
in Singing Rock, and tell him everything about his days of fear and horror.
Singing Rock glanced at him from time to time, and the Indian’s eyes
were understanding
and wise in a way that Neil had never
seen before in anyone. Harry, who had heard it all before, sat at the end of
the table smoking and drinking his beer out of the can.

Eventually,
when Neil had finished, Singing Rock laid out the paintings on the kitchen table,
twenty-two garish illustrations of the same terrible incident

“I think it’s
pretty clear what’s happened,” he told them. “The medicine men needed to draw
on the strength of an Indian victory to help them in their reincarnation. It’s
difficult to explain it exactly, but they’ve used the massacre at Las Posadas
as a focal point for their rebirth, like a politician trying to make a comeback
by reminding people of his past achievements. The massacre was what
Misquamacus
meant when he was referring to the gateway. He
didn’t want you to disturb the historic vibrations that he had been setting up
with Alien
Fenner’s
guidance.

You-because
you’re a
Fenner
yourself-would have been more likely
to upset things than anyone.”

Neil asked,
“But why did Dunbar appear?
Misquamacus
wouldn’t have
wanted him around, surely?”

Singing Rock
slowly shook his head. “I’m not entirely certain. The most likely explanation
is that all this spirit activity connected with the incident in which Dunbar
died was enough to disturb his
manitou
, and he began
to make ghostly appearances. You have to remember that this is the single most
powerful psychic incident that has ever occurred in modern America, and it
involves more upheaval of the ethos than you can possibly imagine. Why do you
think you can feel all this tension? The spiritual planes are in chaos and
crisis. No wonder a few shades from the past are turning over in their graves.”

Harry said,
“What we really need are the ghosts of the entire Seventh Cavalry. Do you think
you could manage to raise them up?”

Singing Rock
smiled. “You’d be sorry if I did. The Seventh Cavalry was a great deal more
vicious than the Indians most of the time.”

Neil looked
over Singing Rock’s shoulder at the school paintings. “Do these words mean
anything to you?” he asked. “I couldn’t make them out at all.”

Singing Rock
picked up one or two.
of
the paintings. “They’re in
different dialects,” he said, “but they all seem to refer to the day of the
dark stars in one way or another. Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si was the name the
Patwin
Indians used for Napa Valley. It simply means
‘beautiful land.’
Kaimus
was the
Wappo
name for the town of Yountville, which is halfway up the valley, as you
obviously know.

These words
here, though,
sokwet
and
oweaoo
and
pados
are all Algonquian.”

“What’s a ‘
sokwet
’ when it’s at home?” asked Harry. “It sounds like
the first requirement for double pneumonia.”

“
Sokwet
is the
Alqonquian
word for
‘eclipse.’ It seems to be tied in here with the word
wata
,
which means

‘
star
.’ So I think we can safely assume that one of these
children was talking about the day of the dark star itself. The word
oweaoo
means ‘circle,’ and
pados
means ‘boat,’ but since they’re written here in isolation, they’re not
particularly helpful. I suspect we’ll discover what they mean, though.” “Sure,”
said Harry.
“The hard way.”

Singing Rock
said, “These paintings themselves are very interesting. When you first look at
them, you’d think they were painted by children.”

“Of course you
would,” said Neil. “They were painted by children.”

Singing Rock
shook his head. “This style is primitive in some respects, but it isn’t
childish. Look at this one. You can find carvings and drawings in this style
among the
Wabanaki
and the
Etchemis
.
This one shows the Indians dressed in the costumes of Arapahos. And this one
here looks distinctly Iroquois.”

Neil shuffled
through the paintings with a frown. “You mean the medicine men inside the
children created these paintings? Not the children themselves?”

“Not fully,”
said Singing Rock. “These were done a few days ago, at a time when the medicine
men wouldn’t have taken hold of the children’s minds completely. But their
tribal
characterstics
have certainly shown through. I
can identify Sioux, Micmac, Hopi, Apache, Shoshoni, and Modoc, as well as the
ones you’ve got in your hand.”

“Does that
help?” asked Neil.

“It helps a
great deal. It means that I can tell who some of the medicine men are. Each
tribe has its own mythical medicine heroes. The
Wabanaki
,
for instance, had
Neem
, the bringer of thunder. The
Apaches used to revere a medicine man called No Name, who was said to wear a
live rattlesnake as a headdress.
Misquamacus
will
almost certainly have called on the best medicine man from each tribe, and so
it won’t be too difficult to make a list of the team we’re going to be up
against.”

“Singing Rock
sees the eternal struggle between red men and white men as a kind of occult
football game,” remarked Harry.

Neil sat down.
“What I don’t quite understand is, what are these demons like, these things
they’re going to call down to destroy us? I mean, what are they actually like?’

At that moment,
as if prompted by fate, the telephone in the front room began to ring. Neil
said, “Excuse me,” and went to answer it.

Singing Rock
and Harry waited while Neil talked. Harry crushed out his cigarette and swilled
down the last of his beer. Then Neil came back into the room, and his face was
flushed with anxiety.

“What’s wrong?”
asked Harry. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It was Mr.
Saperstein, from the school,” said Neil. “He heard you talking to Mrs. Novato
in the school yard, and he guessed you’d want to know.”

“Know? Know
what?”

Neil looked at
him, and Harry could see that he was very close to collapse. Singing Rock
advised, “You’d better sit down.” Neil shook his head. “Mr. Saperstein wants us
to come down there right away. He took some photographs of Toby and the rest of
the class last week, when they were dancing in the playground. He’s just had
the pictures developed, and he says that something’s shown up on them that’s
almost driven him mad.”

M
r. Saperstein met them in his office overlooking the back of the
school. It was a cramped, converted storeroom, and it was heaped with music
scores and books on composers and cellos with broken strings. Harry and Neil
and Singing Rock could hardly crowd themselves inside, and Mr. Saperstein had
to move a battered trumpet case and a bust of Beethoven with a chipped nose
before Harry could sit down.

“I’m sorry I
eavesdropped on your conversation with Mrs. Novato,” Mr. Saperstein said
apologetically. “It was just that I was passing, and I really couldn’t help
myself. I’m afraid I’ve always been a bit of a busybody.”

“Good thing you
were,” said Singing Rock flatly. “This is a desperate time.”

Mr. Saperstein
unlocked his desk drawer and took out a paper folder.

“I should
explain that I’m pretty keen on photography,” he said. “I take my camera around
most of the time. It was quite natural for me to shoot a picture of the
children in the school yard. I had a little exhibition of school photographs at
Sonoma last year, and it was really quite successful.”

Harry put in
impatiently, “Do you think we could just take a look at the shots?”

Mr. Saperstein
raised one hand. “What you have to realize is that I came into Mrs. Novato’s
classroom, and she said she could see her children dancing in a strange way. I
looked out of the window, too, and she was right. They were kind of shuffling
around in a circle, with their arms on each other’s shoulders. I thought it
could have been a Greek dance, you know, like in Zorba the Greek?”

Harry sighed.
“The pictures, Mr. Saperstein?”

“Of course,”
said the music teacher, opening the folder. “But before you look at them you
must realize that all I saw in that school yard was children.
Nothing else at all.”

One by one, Mr.
Saperstein passed around the large black-and-white prints. There were five of
them, each showing the school yard from Mrs. Novato’s classroom window, and the
children shuffling around in a circle. In the first picture, Neil could pick out
Toby and Andy and Daniel
Soscol
and Debbie Spun. But
there was something else besides. Out of the center of the circle of children,
mostly obscured by their bodies, a sort of whitish haze seemed to be forming,
like a twisting column of smoke.

In the next
picture, the haze was widening, and rising even higher above the children’s
heads. It was beginning to form into
tentacular
coils, which in the third picture were writhing almost up to the lower branches
of the maple tree at the edge of the school yard.

The fourth and
the fifth photographs were the most alarming. They showed a towering beast,
draped with scores of curling arms, like a kind of gaseous squid, high above
the children.

Although it was
faceless and formless, it possessed a terrible and evil aspect, as if it was
formed out of the essence of ancient malevolence. It seemed verminous and
unhealthy, and riddled with diseases of the mind and the spirit.

“What is that
thing?” asked Neil. “Is that some kind of photographic illusion?”

Mr. Saperstein replied,
“No trick, Mr.
Fenner
. They were developed for me by
Charlie Keynes down at the newspaper office. He does all my prints. He swears
blind that this is the way they came out.”