The manitou (15 page)

The feeling of
fear woke me up. I immediately looked at my watch to see how long I’d been
asleep. Not more than five or ten minutes, I guessed. I stood up and went over
to the window of Karen Tandy’s room. She was still lying there, covered by a
loose sheet, which hid most of the hideous bulge on her back. She was still
unconscious, and her face was yellow and almost skull-like. Her eyes were
circles with purple shadows, and there were deep drawn lines on her cheeks. She
looked as though she were on the verge of death. Only the flickering needles of
the electric diagnosis machines beside her bed showed that something was still
alive inside her body.

The male nurse,
Michael, sat cross-legged reading a science fiction paperback called Girl from
Green Planet. I would gladly have traded it for my academic tome of the
lifestyle of the Hidatsas.

I went back to
my bony chair and sat down. Singing Rock was due to relieve me at three a.m.,
and I couldn’t wait. I smoked and twiddled my thumbs. That time of night, you
feel that the whole world is empty, and you’re on your own in some strange
secret time – a time when pulse rates slur and fade, and deep breathing takes
you diving down into a bottomless well of monstrous dreams and nightmares.

I finished my
cigarette, ground it out, and checked my watch again. It was two-thirty.
Evening was long past, and morning was still a long way ahead. Somehow, the
idea of facing Misquamacus by night was much more frightening than the thought
of facing him by day. At night, you feel that evil spirits are much more ready
to call, and that even shadows, or the odd shape of your clothes across the
back of a chair, can take on a sinister life of their own.

When I was a
child, I used to be terrified to go out to the bathroom in the middle of the
night, because it meant passing by the open living-room door. I was frightened
that one night, when the moonlight was slanting in through the venetian blinds,
I would see people sitting silent and still in the chairs. Not blinking, not
moving,
not
speaking. Previous occupants, long dead
, relaxing
stiffly in the chairs that were once theirs.

I had that same
feeling now. I kept glancing down the long and empty corridor, to see if some
blurry shape were moving in the distance. I looked at all the doors, to see if any
of them were easing slowly open. Night is the province of magic and magicians,
and my Tarot cards had warned me about night and death and men who worked evil
wonders. Now I was facing the threat of all three of them.

At
two-forty-five I lit another cigarette and puffed the smoke softly into the
total silence of the empty corridor. By now, even the elevators had stopped
running and the feet of the night staff were muffled by the thick plush
carpets. For all I knew, I could be totally alone in the whole world. Every
time I shifted my feet, I frightened myself.

Tired as I was,
I began to wonder whether the whole situation was truly real, or whether I was
dreaming it, or imagining it. Yet if Misquamacus didn’t exist, how did I know
his name, and what was I doing here, keeping up this lonely vigil in a hospital
corridor? I smoked, and tried to read Dr. Snow’s book a little more, but my
eyes were too blurry with exhaustion, and I gave up.

It must have
been the soft squeaking of skin on glass that made me look up at the window of
Karen Tandy’s room right then. It was a tiny, almost imperceptible sound, like
someone cleaning, silver spoons in another part of the house. Squeak,
squikkkkk...

I jumped with
shock. There was a face pressed against the window, with horribly contorted
features.
It’s
eyes bulged and its teeth were bared in
a stretched, silent howl.

It was only
there for a second, and then there was a slushy, spraying sound, and the whole
window was obliterated with blood. A spout of thick red liquid even pumped from
the keyhole, and ran down the outside of the door.

“Singing ROCCCKKKK!”
I yelled, and burst into the next-door
room where he was sleeping. I banged on the light, and he was sitting up, his
face crumpled with sleep, his eyes wide with expectancy and fear.

“What
happened?” he snapped, rolling out of bed and pushing quickly out of the room
into the corridor.

“There was a
face there – at the window – just for a second. Then there was nothing but all
this blood.”

“He’s out,”
said Singing Rock.
“Or nearly.
That must have been the
male nurse you saw at the window.”

“The nurse?
But what the hell has Misquamacus done to him?”

“Old Indian magic.
He’s probably invoked the spirits of the
body, and turned him inside-out.”

“Inside-out?”

Singing Rock
ignored me. He went swiftly back to his room, and opened up his suitcase. He
took out beads and amulets, and a leather bottle full of some liquid. One of
the amulets, a fierce green copper face on a rawhide thong, he hung around my
neck. He sprinkled some reddish powder over my hair and shoulders, and touched
me above the heart with the tip of a long white bone.

“Now you’re
reasonably protected,” he said. “At least you won’t end up like Michael.”

“Listen,
Singing Rock,” I said. “I think we ought to have a gun. I know that it would
kill Karen Tandy if we shot Misquamacus, but as a last resort, we might have
to.”

Singing Rock
shook his head firmly. “No. If we shot Misquamacus, we would have his manitou
pursuing us in vengeance for the rest of our lives. The only way we can defeat
him forever is through magic. That way, he can never return. And anyway, in any
kind of sorcery, a gun is more dangerous to the person who uses it than it is
to the person
who’s
being fired at. Now come on, we
don’t have much time to lose.”

He led me back
to the door of Karen Tandy’s room. The blood had thinned on the window now, but
all we could see inside was the dim glow of the bedside light, scarlet through
the gore.

“Gitche
Manitou, protect us. Gitche Manitou, protect us,” muttered Singing Rock, and
turned the door handle.

There was
something wet and messy behind the door, and Singing Rock had to push hard to
slide it all out of the way. There was a nauseating smell of vomit and feces,
and my feet skidded on the floor as I stepped in. Michael’s remains were lying
in a raw red bubbly heap, strung with pipes and veins and intestines, and I
could only glance at it. I felt as if I was going to puke.

There was blood
spattered everywhere – all over the walls and the bedsheets and the floor. In
the middle of this gory chaos lay Karen Tandy, and she was wriggling under her
coverings –

wriggling
like a huge white bug trying to work its way out
of a chrysalis.

“It’s very
soon,” whispered Singing Rock. “She must have been struggling and Michael went
to help her. That’s why Misquamacus killed him.”

Forcing my
stomach to stop heaving, I watched in horrified fascination as the enormous
bulge on Karen Tandy’s back began to heave and twist. It was so large now that
her own body seemed like nothing more than a papery carnival ghost, and her
thin arms and legs were flopped about by the fierce squirming of the beast that
was being born on her back.

“Gitche
Manitou, give me power. Bring me the spirits of darkness and power. Gitche
Manitou, hear my call to you,” muttered Singing Rock. He traced complicated
patterns in the air with his long magic bones, and threw powders all around.
The scent of dried herbs and flowers mingled with the vivid stench of blood.

I suddenly had
a singing, metallic sensation in my head, like breathing nitrous oxide at the
dentist. The whole scene seemed peculiarly unreal, and I felt detached and
strange, as though I were looking through my eyes from the darkness of some
other place. Singing Rock grasped my arm, and only then did the feeling begin
to fade.

“He’s casting
spells already,” whispered the medicine man. “He knows we’re here and he knows
we’re going to try and fight him. He will do many strange things to your mind.
He will try and make you feel as though you do not really exist, like he did
just then. He will also try and make you feel afraid, and suicidal, and
desperately alone. He has the power to do all that. But these are only tricks.
What we must really look out for are the manitous that he summons, because they
are almost unstoppable.”

Karen Tandy’s
body was thrown this way and that across the bed. She was dead already, I
thought, or almost dead. Her mouth opened every now and then and she gave a
little gasp, but that was only because the wriggling medicine man on her back was
pressing against her lungs.

Singing Rock
caught hold of my arm. “Look,” he said quietly.

The white skin
at the upper part of the bulge was being pressed from inside, as if by a
finger. The finger worked harder and harder against it, trying to claw its way
through. I stood frozen, and I could hardly feel my legs. I thought I might
collapse at any moment. I watched, almost without seeing it at all, as the
finger squirmed and wriggled in a desperate effort to break out.

A long nail
pierced the skin, and a watery yellow fluid suddenly gushed from the hole,
streaked with blood. There was a rich, fetid smell, like decaying fish. The sac
on Karen Tandy’s back sank and emptied as the birth fluid of Misquamacus poured
out of it on to the sheets.

“Call Dr.
Hughes – get him here as quick as you can,” said Singing Rock.

I went to the
phone on the wall, wiped the blood off it with my handkerchief, and dialed the
switchboard. When she answered, the girl’s voice seemed so blank and
unconcerned that she seemed to be speaking from another world.

“This is Mr.
Erskine. Can you get Dr. Hughes up to Miss Tandy’s room – as soon as you
can.

Tell him it’s
started, and it’s urgent.”

“Okay, sir.”

“Call him right
away. Thank you.”

“You’re
welcome.”

I turned back
to the hideous struggle on the bed. From the slit in the skin, a dark hand had
emerged, and was tearing a larger and larger hole in the bulge with a sound
like ripping plastic.

“Can’t you do
anything now,” I whispered to Singing Rock. “Can’t you put a spell on him
before he gets out of there?”

“No,” said
Singing Rock. He was very calm, but I could see by the strain on his face that
he was also very frightened. He held his bones and his powders ready, but his
hands were trembling.

A long tear, about
three feet deep, had now appeared in Karen Tandy’s back.
Her
own
face now lay pale and dead against the bed, smothered in clotted
blood and sticky fluid. I couldn’t believe that there was any way to revive her
now. She seemed so mutilated and torn, and the thing that was coming out of her
seemed so strong and evil.

Another hand
emerged from the rip in her flesh, and the skin was parted wide. Slowly,
greasily, a head and shoulders rose from the hole, and I felt a deep dark chill
when I saw the same hard face that had appeared on the cherrywood table. It was
Misquamacus, the ancient medicine man, coming alive again in a new world.

His long black
hair was flattened against his broad skull with oil and fluid. His eyes were
stuck closed, and his coppery skin glistened with the fetid muck of his womb.
His cheekbones were high and flat, and his prominent hooked nose was occluded
with fetal fats. Strings of mucus hung from his lips and chin.

Both Singing
Rock and I stood totally silent as Misquamacus peeled Karen’s flaccid skin away
from his bare greasy torso. Then the medicine man raised himself on his hands,
and worked his hips free. His genitals were puffy and swollen, the same way
that a boy child’s are at birth, but there was dark pubic hair smeared against
his scarred belly.

Misquamacus
heaved one leg out, with a sickening suction sound, like pulling a rubber boot
out of thick mud.
Then the other leg.

And it was now
that we saw what damage the X-rays had done to him. Instead of full muscular
legs, his lower limbs both ended above the knee, in tiny deformed club feet,
with pulpy dwarfish toes. Modern technology had crippled the medicine man in
his womb.

Gradually, with
his eyes still tight shut, Misquamacus lifted himself away from Karen Tandy’s
torn body. He gripped the rail of the bed to support
himself
,
and sat there with his stunted little legs, sucking air into his fluid-filled
lungs, and letting the creamy phlegm run from the side of his mouth.

All I wished at
that moment was that I had a gun, and could blow this monstrosity to pieces,
and have it over with. But I had seen enough of his occult power to know that I
wouldn’t be doing myself any favors. Misquamacus was capable of haunting me for
the rest of my life, and when I died his manitou would have horrible revenge on
mine.

“I will need
your support,” said Singing Rock quietly. “With each spell^ I cast, I will want
you to concentrate deeply on its success. With two of us here, we might just
succeed in holding him down.” As if he had been listening, the crippled
Misquamacus slowly opened one yellow eye, and then the other, and looked across
at us with a chilling mixture of curiosity, contempt and hatred.

He then looked
down at the floor, and saw the medicine circle around the bed, with its red and
white powders and its bones.

“Gitche
Manitou,” said Singing Rock loudly. “Hear me now, and send your power to my
aid.”

He began to
shuffle and dance, and make patterns in the air with his bones. I tried to do
as he had asked me, and concentrate on making the spell work. But it was hard
to take my eyes away from the cold and passive creature on the bed, who was
staring at us with total vindictiveness.