Faces of Fear (33 page)

I held the thighbones, one in each hand, and began to tap them rhythmically together as if they belonged to a man who was walking across a prairie. Imagine the grass, Singing Rock had told me, as deep as your knees. Imagine the tiny white flowers. Then imagine the prairie growing darker and darker as evening falls, and the shadow of Aktunowihio falling across the land, Aktunowihio the spirit of the night. Imagine that the tiny white flowers have become stars, sparkling in the heavens, and that you are walking through the world of the spirits now, accompanied on all sides by
tasooms
, the souls of the dead who are rising into the sky like the smoke from the lodges in which they once lived.”

I closed my eyes, I kept on knocking the bones together at a slow walking pace. The three of us kept on reciting the words that Singing Rock had taught me. “
Misquamacus, I want to see you. Misquamacus, I want to hear your voice. Misquamacus, I want to touch your hand.

We went on like this for almost five minutes, and I began to think that it wasn't going to work. I might have White Bull's thighbones, and I might be reciting the right words, but I was a white man, out of touch with the spirits of the earth and the sky, the manitous of rocks and trees and running water.
Singing Rock
, I
thought,
help me. I'm not getting anywhere here, I just cant do what you used to do.

I was still crossing that grassy, flower-speckled prairie, to the clacking rhythm of White Bull's bones. But I distinctly felt a shiver in the grass, as if a cold wind had blown across it. In my mind's eye I felt a stormcloud moving in, as dark as slate, and the feeling that somebody was walking close beside me. I could hear the rustling of his feet, and the closeness of his breathing. It wasn't frightening. It was a good feeling: a feeling of companionship.

“
Misquamacus, I want to see you
” I chanted, and this time I could hear another voice joining in; a deeper voice; a voice right inside of my head. “
Misquamacus I want to touch your hand.
”

In my mind's eye, I turned my head, and for one instant I saw Singing Rock walking close beside me, dressed in all the feathers and beads and finery of a fully-fledged wonder-worker. But the second I looked, he vanished; and when I turned back, I wasn't walking through the prairie grass any longer, I was walking knee-deep in stars – high in the sky, in the Hanging Road, where the spirits walked beside me.

I heard a sharp electrical crackling. I opened my eyes. Both Karen and Lucy had their eyes closed now, and they were still chanting, soft and monotonous, as if they were hypnotized. The shadows from the Japanese nightlight dipped and flickered like dancing ghosts. I heard the crackling again, louder this time, and I smelled the raw ozone aroma of a powerful electrical short-circuit. The area around Lucy began to ripple and distort, the way that heat ripples on a midsummer sidewalk.

Karen's eyes suddenly opened. She looked toward Lucy and saw what I could see, too. A huge, hunched shape, formed of shadows and refracted light, almost invisible
to the naked eye, shifting and changing, but so intense in its presence that neither of us could mistake it for what it was.

It was a man, wearing an immense head-dress that appeared to have feathers and beads and even small skulls dangling from it. It was impossible to make out his face. It shifted and changed like the surface of a shallow pool. I was sure that I could see clouds reflected in it, and smoke, and fog that hung heavy over winter reservations.

The crackling of static grew louder, sparks jumped around Lucy's head in a crown of electrical thorns. Karen half stood up, and reached out toward her, but I shouted, “
No
! Don't touch her! He's all around her!”

The crackling was suddenly filled out with a heavy rushing noise, like a badly-tuned radio turned up to full volume. Through the noise, I could just hear somebody speaking – a slow, cold, emotionless voice – a voice that should have been silenced for ever more than three hundred years ago.

“
The spirits … will bring me justice … my weak white brother … the spirits … will reward me for what I have done … and will fill you with … all the arrows of sacrifice
…”

“Misquamacus,” I said. I was trying to sound challenging, but my voice was wobbling all over the place. “What kind of a warrior are you, that you have to take the spirit of a four-year-old child; and a girl-child, at that? I thought you were brave! I thought you could work amazing wonders!”

“
You speak to me of bravery … you that used nothing but cunning and trickery? Now you shall know what cunning and trickery are.
”

“Leave my daughter alone,” I told him. “I don't
care what you do to me. But you leave my daughter alone.”

“
Don't you remember … your daughter was mine? I possessed your woman when she was conceived. This child is heiress to my heritage, not yours. She is my way back … into your world … and when I am returned … she will be my princess, and a worker of wonders, too … and her name will be Nepauz-had, which means Moon Goddess.
”

“You won't have her!” Karen screamed at him. “She's our daughter, not yours! You couldn't have me and you're not having her, either!”

The shifting shape turned toward her, with a harsh spitting of static. I could
almost
make out Misquamacus' flint-like profile. I could
almost
see the folds of his deerskin robes. But then the vision melted and changed again, and all I could see were thin red flickers of electricity, like graveworms crawling over a body that had already been devoured.

“
Remember that fate chose you to be my vessel
,” Misquamacus told Karen. “
When I was nothing but the smallest spark of life, carried over three thousand moons to find justice for my people, you were waiting for me. When I lost all physical existence, you and this man created a new way for me to walk once again in the world of men. I was reborn in your daughter; and now that I am strong enough, I shall take human shape, and finish the task that the gods appointed me to do.
”

“Bullshit,” I told him. “If you so much as pluck one hair out of my daughter's head, I'll take your medicine bundle and shove it so far up your ass you won't be able to sit down until the drying-grass moon.”

“
You were always a man of no respect
,” said Misquamacus. “
But now is your chance to be the greatest living wonder worker. I will leave this child alone if you allow me to
take your substance … if you surrender your flesh and your blood and your bones so that I may once again live not only as a spirit but as a man.
”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I snarled at him; although I had mostly got the picture already. He had used Lucy's spirit as a way of returning to the material world, but now he needed real sinew and real muscle. In other word, I may have been thinning on top and seriously unfit, but he needed
me.

As Misquamacus spoke, Lucy's eyes glowed an eerie phosphorescent blue, and her skin turned as white as plaster. I felt like snatching her away, but I knew enough about Misquamacus to realize how dangerous that could be. He was only able to make himself visible by externalizing some of Lucy's spirit, and to try to tear her away could easily kill her.

“
We must go to the sacred place where I was born; and on that spot I must invoke the spirit of Ka-tua-la-hu. You will become nothing more than a spirit, a
tasoom,
as I am now, while I will regain the form in which I was in the great and magical days before the white devils came.
”

“You're going to
kill
him?” asked Karen, desperately.

“
I am going to send his spirit on a journey to the Hanging Road
.”

“You can't do that!” Karen insisted.

“
Then I will have to take the child; and bring her up as Nepauz-had; and teach her the ways of magic, until she has the power to release me.
”

When he said that, Lucy's eyes blazed like two blowtorches, and she stretched open her mouth in a terrible grimace. Misquamacus was showing us that he could do anything he wanted with her.

I'm not a brave person, never was. I dodged the draft and I would always rather conciliate than start slugging.
But I knew then that I had to do something brave. If the price of Lucy's survival was for me to take an early journey along the Hanging Road; then that was the price that I would have to pay. I was her father, it was my responsibility.

I took hold of Karen's hand and I felt calmer than I ever had before. “Okay, then,” I said. “Where's this sacred place of yours?”

“
You will have to search for it in your maps and writings. Its name was Natukko, and it was here on this island.
”

“But supposing I can't find it?”

“
You will have to find it; and you will have to be there tomorrow, when the moon rises. Otherwise, I will take Nepauz-had and you will never see her again.
”

Karen's cheeks were stained with tears. “That's impossible!” she shouted. “That's impossible!”

But there was a deep, sucking sound like an ocean breaker sliding back over a pebbled shore; and then the tiniest sparkle of static, and Misquamacus had vanished. The air in the room was cold that our breath smoked.

Karen and I looked at each other; and then at Lucy. At that moment, Lucy's eyes rolled up into her head and she collapsed onto the floor like a broken doll.

I spent a bad night, and I was already standing on the steps of the New York Public Library when it opened at ten. I hurried directly to the Main Reading Room, and logged myself onto a computer. I needn't have rushed. By mid-afternoon I was still frowning and tapping away at the keyboard, while the fall sun moved around the room and lit up one section of grandiose paneling after another.

I was almost ready to give up when I located a book entitled
Native Locations
by Professor Harvey Fischer, from the Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts. It
was an extensive list of Native American place names in New York and New England, what they meant, and where they used to be. I surreptitiously ate torn-off pieces of a KFC chicken burger which I had smuggled into the library in my pocket, and searched with finger-lickin' greasy keypads for
Natukko.

I found Pontanipo (meaning ‘cold water'); and Cowissewaschook (‘proud peak'); as well as Ammanoosuc (‘small fishing river'); and Uncanoonucks (‘hills that look like a woman's breasts'). At last I located Natukko. It meant ‘clearing' or ‘cleared ground'. A few more punches on the keyboard, and I found its exact location, from a map of Manhattan Island dating from 1624, when it was owned by the Dutch West India Company. The map was signed ‘Pieter van Huiven fecit'. I superimposed a modern streetmap of Manhattan on top of the old map, and apart from some minor distortions along the coastline, they matched surprisingly closely. There was only one problem that I could see. The clearing called Natukko was positioned on the Conrail tracks just where they came out of the tunnels at 96th Street.

I sat back and stared at the screen in total despondency. When would the gods
ever
give me an even break? Here I was, trying to make the ultimate sacrifice to save Lucy's life, and they couldn't even give me a nice piece of lawn to be sacrificed on. I had to make my grand gesture on a goddamned railroad track.

I was still sitting there with my chin in my hands when a pretty girl student came up to me. Her hair was long and braided, and she wore a navy-blue duffel coat.

“Are you through with that terminal yet?” she asked me. “I have some really important work to do.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry.”

“There's one thing you ought to remember about computers,” she said, putting down her bag of books.

“What's that?”

She smiled. “Don't tell me you've forgotten.”

“I'm sorry. I seem to be out of the loop here. Don't you tell I've forgotten
what
?”

“The one thing you ought to remember about computers.”

I stood up, and brushed chicken burger crumbs from the chair. We seemed to be having one of those conversations that goes around and around in circles until it disappears up its own medicine-case holder.

The girl said, “Computers are
your
friends.” She emphasized ‘
your
' as if to imply that they weren't
her
friends.

I still didn't understand it. I shrugged and said, “Well … sure, it's all technology these days. Even reading a book.” But as I turned to leave she sat down, and lifted her left arm so that the sleeve of her duffel coat dropped back a little way. Around her wrist was a bracelet of bones and beads, entwined with hair. An Alqonquin charm bracelet.

She had already started to work, so I didn't disturb her. Besides, I now had some inkling of what she had been trying to tell me. Computers are
your
friends. Meaning you, as a white man; because she was obviously Native American. As my old friend Singing Rock told me, everything in the natural world has its own spirit, its manitou, from the humblest stone by the side of the road to the greatest redwood in the north-western forests. In the great days before the white invasion of North America, Indian wonder-workers were able to summon almost every spirit, living, inanimate or dead, and use it to make their own magic. Water, fire, wind and earth,
they all had tumultuous natural power – and this power could be harnessed to strange and devastating effect.

But the white men had brought their own brand of magic with them; and what Singing Rock had taught me was that every object made by whites had a spirit, too: a manitou of its own. A clock has a manitou, a typewriter has a manitou. And computers have manitous too. We had used a computer to beat Misquamacus when he had first appeared – not its calculating-power, but its
spirit
, the essential meaning of what it was, and the creativity of the men who had made it.