Revenge of the Manitou (18 page)

After a while,
he got up to make himself a cup of coffee. He saw his face reflected in the
dark window, and he thought how tired and washed-out he looked. He filled the
electric hot pot, and went to the cupboard to find the instant coffee. The
clock chimed the half-hour. He walked across to the sink to set his cup on the
draining board, and then, to his horror, he realized that somebody or something
was staring at him. He turned, shocked, and saw a pallid face pressed against
the glass of the kitchen window.

“
I hope I didn’t scare you too much,” Harry Erskine said.

Neil, still
fidgeting, gave him an uncertain grin. “I was just feeling edgy, that’s all.
And I didn’t expect you till the morning.”

Harry stirred
his coffee, and set the spoon down in the saucer. “I was through for the day,
and my date came down with the chicken pox, so I took the first plane going.
There was me and fifty-five rabbis, so I figured the flight just had to arrive
safe.”

“You rented a
car at the airport?”

“It’s in back
of your yard.
A yellow Pinto with a slipping transmission.
Still, what can you expect for four dollars a day?” Harry was a
round-shouldered thirty-five-year-old with an obvious penchant for
permanent-press suits and shirts that could drip dry over the tub. He could
have looked quite distinguished, except that his facial features didn’t seem
comfortable with each other. His nose was a little too large, his eyes a little
too deep-set, his chin reasonably determined but too fleshy.

His-
mouse-brown hair was thinning, and his cheeks had the permanent pallor of Tenth
Avenue.

Neil said, “Do
you want something to eat? I could fix some eggs.”

“Unh-
hunh
.
Leave it till the
morning. You’ve done enough tonight without short-order cooking.”

Neil sat down
at the table. “You say you’re a mystic?” he asked Harry. “I didn’t think anyone
could make a living at being a mystic.”

“I don’t,”
Harry told him. “I do free-lance work for my old advertising agency to make
ends meet. But I prefer to be my own boss, you know, and I’m good at mysticism.
I read old ladies’ fortunes with the tarot cards, and I hold young ladies’
hands and tell them what their palms foretell. Usually, they foretell a cheap
Italian dinner with me, followed by a nightcap at my apartment.”

“You don’t seem
to take it too seriously.”

Harry looked at
him. “I take
Misquamacus
seriously. What I do for a
living, that’s just fooling about. But
Misquamacus
,
and the spirits that
Misquamacus
can raise up, now
that’s a whole different ball game.”

Neil poured
himself a cup of coffee and sipped it. “What I don’t understand is, if you’ve
already destroyed
Misquamacus
once, how he can
possibly come back again.”

“You’ll have to
ask John Singing Rock about the finer details of that,” said Harry. “But the
way I understand it, a
manitou
is indestructible,
like a spirit. It lives forever, and not even the greatest of the gods can
destroy it. All you can hope to do when you’re fighting a reincarnated
manitou
like
Misquamacus
is break
the spells that bind it to its physical form. When we first faced
Misquamacus
, he was reborn in the body of a girl I knew.
Actually reborn, like a fetus.
But we were able to use the
electrical power of a computer to destroy him. Least, that’s the easiest way I
can explain it.”

“What about
now?” asked
Neil.
“What’s he going to do to Toby?”

Harry shook his
head. “I just don’t know. I talked to Singing Rock about it, and he was going
to consult some of the elder medicine men of his tribe. You see, whatever
Misquamacus
is doing, he seems to have learned some lessons
from the last time. Last time, he was reborn from the seventeenth century, and
it must have been his first leap through time. He was alone, and he was caught
off-balance, and once we worked out a way to get rid of him, then the struggle
wasn’t too unequal. But this time-well, God only knows. He seems to have found
himself a whole bunch of friends, and a way to reincarnate himself without
having to grow like a fetus.”

Neil said,
“He’s growing inside Toby’s mind. I can see it. I can look at Toby, and Toby
isn’t Toby at all.”

“
Misquamacus
is a pretty powerful guy,” said Harry. “He’s
also mean, and vengeful, and if I didn’t know he was going to come and find me
anyway, I would have stayed as far away from what’s going on here as humanly
possible.
Nothing personal, of course.”

Neil finished
his coffee, and went to stack their cups in the sink. He said, “I want to thank
you for taking the trouble to fly out here, anyway. I know a lot of people who
wouldn’t have bothered.
Half this damn town, to begin with.”

“They’ve been
giving you a hard time?”

“They think I’m
crazy. And tonight, after that sheet business, they even believe I assaulted
Susan.

If I don’t do
something soon, they’re going to commit me, or run me out. Even Susan doesn’t
believe me.”

Harry took a
pack of mint-flavored dental floss out of his coat pocket and broke off a
piece.

“You want
some?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

“I think it
helps to stop me smoking,” said Harry, sawing away at his teeth. “It’s also
supposed to do wonders for the dental bills.”

“Do you want to
see Toby?” asked Neil.

“Sure. He’s
upstairs now?”

“He’s sleeping.
I guess
Misquamacus
is conserving his strength right
now.”

“How about your wife?”

“The doctor
gave her a sedative. She won’t wake up.”

Harry put away
his floss and stood up. “Well,” he said, with a pale grin. “I feel a little like
Saint George about to size up the dragon for a rematch.”

Neil opened the
door to the stairs and led the way up to the landing. It was dark and still up
there, and the ticking of the grandfather clock was the only sound they could
hear.

Harry whispered,
“Will you show me the wardrobe first? The one the wooden man came out of?”

“Sure,” said
Neil, crossing the landing. “It’s in here.”

He opened the
door to Toby’s room. He had nailed a sheet of hardboard over the window, so it
was gloomy, and still smelled of ash and smoke. Harry took a cautious peek
around, and then stepped across to the walnut wardrobe.

“Is this it?”

Neil nodded.
Harry opened it and looked inside.

“We had
something like this before, only not nearly so dramatic.
Misquamacus
manifested his head out of a solid
cherrywood
table,
right in front of us. It was real frightening.”

He closed the
wardrobe door. “He’s an Indian of the woods, you see, from Manhattan
originally, and in other lives the
Miskatonic
River
and some of the back forests of Massachusetts.

He was an
Algonquian, and a Wampanoag, and maybe a dozen other nationalities. Singing
Rock knows more about him than I do.
After we sent him back
outside, Singing Rock made quite a study of
Misquamacus
.”

Neil ran his
hand through his hair. “I don’t know what the hell I would have done if I
hadn’t found you,” he said.

“Don’t count
chickens,” warned Harry. “From what I saw of
Misquamacus
the last time, hell could be a much more comfortable alternative.”

They left
Toby’s room, and walked quietly along the landing until they came to the main
bedroom. Neil raised his finger to his lips and then slowly opened the door,
beckoning Harry to follow him.

Toby and Susan
were both fast asleep. The moon had passed by now, and the room was thick with
shadows. The luminous dial of the bedside clock, which chattered softly in the
corner, said three-thirty.

“This is your
boy?” said Harry, quietly hunkering himself down beside Toby’s bed. He touched
the flushed, sleeping cheek, and stroked the untidy hair. Toby stirred
slightly, and his small hand opened a little, but his breathing remained calm
and even.

“The trouble
is, this is a war,” Harry whispered. “It’s not just one evil character trying
to get
his own
back.

It’s the red
nation fighting to get their revenge on the white nation.
A
real war.”

He stood up,
still looking down at Toby. “And the sad thing is that, in wars, it’s always
the innocent people who get hurt the worst.”

Neil watched
Harry tiredly.

“Do you want to
get some sleep?” Neil asked. “There’s a big couch in the front room, and I can
find you some blankets.”

Harry said,
“Yes, for sure. Have you ever tried sleeping on a plane with fifty-five rabbis?
They spent the whole flight chattering about how they were going to go see
Carole
Doda
. I’m sometimes glad my mother was a
Catholic.”

Stepping around
the end of the bed, Neil went to make sure that Susan was warm and comfortable.
He bent over her and listened to her steady breathing for a while, but he
didn’t kiss her or touch her. He felt as if he had somehow failed her, as if he
hadn’t protected her as a husband should. There didn’t seem to be any way to
make up for what had happened except to destroy
Misquamacus
,
and to free his house and his family from the terrible curse that seemed to
have descended on them.

Harry was
waiting for him by the door, darkly silhouetted by the light from the landing.
He said,

“Are you okay?
You look as if you could use some sleep yourself.”

Neil took a
last look at the bedroom and nodded. “I feel bushed, to tell you the truth.”

He was about to
close the door when he heard Toby stirring in his bed. The boy whimpered and
moaned, and seemed to struggle for a while with his sheets. Harry turned and
raised a questioning eyebrow, but Neil said, “I think he’s all right. He’s been
pretty restless ever since the dreams started.”

Harry gave a
small, nervous grunt, and made sure that he kept his eye on Toby’s sleeping
body until Neil had closed the door. It was only when they were halfway down
the landing that both of them felt a strange cold surge in the air, as if an
ocean wave had suddenly rippled under the rug.

The grandfather
clock at the end of the landing abruptly stopped ticking, and there was a sharp
odor in the air, like burnt electricity.

Harry said, in a
hollow voice, “He knows I’m here.”

“How can he?”
asked Neil.

“He knows, that’s all.
It’s what he’s been waiting for.”

Neil looked at
Harry with a face lined with exhaustion and anxiety. “I just hope we’ve got the
strength to fight this thing,” he said, hoarsely. “I just hope to God we’ve got
the strength.”

On Sunday
afternoon, a dry windy afternoon of dust storms and tumbling newspapers, Harry
and Neil and Toby drove around Bodega to visit Toby’s classmates at home. Toby
had been quiet and pale all morning, but he hadn’t objected when Neil ushered
him into the battered Pinto, and asked him to direct Harry to each of his
friends’ houses. He was Toby today, with no sign of the malevolent personality
of
Misquamacus
, although he was unusually listless
and distracted. If Neil hadn’t known what was wrong with him, he might have
guessed that he was coming down with flu.

“Singing Rock
said it was very important to take a look at the opposition,” remarked Harry,
smoking a Camel Light down to halfway and tossing the butt out of the window.
“He said we need to know names, or signs, or anything which might tell us who
these twenty-two medicine men are. Some medicine men, even the most famous, had
weak spots we could use to break them up.”

“You think
Toby’s classmates are really going to tell us that stuff?”

Harry shook his
head.
“Of course not.
But we have to do our best. If
we could find out just one name, that’d be something.”

Toby said
flatly, “Here. This is Andy Beaver’s house, right here.”

They pulled up
outside a small weatherboard house with an overgrown veranda and a yard full of
rye grass and strutting chickens. Henry Beaver, in denims and suspenders, was
sitting on the veranda reading the San Francisco Sunday Examiner. Andy was
jumping through the grass with a toy pistol, playing explorer.

Harry got out
of the car and leaned against the roof.

“How do you
do,” he called to Mr. Beaver.

Henry Beaver
folded his paper, dropped it beside him, and then crossed his arms over his
huge belly. “How do you do yourself,” he replied.

Neil climbed
out of the car, too, more cautiously. “Hi, Henry,” he said, with an awkward
smile.

Henry Beaver
didn’t smile back. “Still chasing ghosts, Neil
Fenner
?”
he asked. “Caught one yet?”

Harry closed
the door of the Pinto and walked across to Mr. Beaver’s veranda railing. He
leaned his arms on it, and then rested his chin on his arms, and regarded Mr.
Beaver very seriously.
Mr.

Beaver,
uncertain and unsettled, glanced at Neil for some kind of explanation. Neil
remained expressionless.

“Mr. Beaver,”
said Harry benignly, “I flew in from New York City last night because I heard
of the trouble that Mr.
Fenner
had been having here
in Bodega.”

Henry Beaver
looked him up and down. “You’re not FBI, are you?” he wanted to know.

Harry shook his
head. “I’m a special investigator of matters pertaining to specters and
apparitions. I’m an occultist, if you know what I mean.”