The manitou (16 page)

“Gitche
Manitou,” chanted Singing Rock, “send your messengers with locks and keys. Send
your jailers and your guards. Hold down this spirit, imprison Misquamacus. Shut
him up with bars and with chains. Freeze his mind and stay his sorcery.”

He then went
into a long Indian invocation that I could hardly follow, but I stood there and
prayed and prayed that his magic would work, and that the medicine man on the
bed would be trapped by spiritual forces.

But a weird
feeling began to penetrate my mind – a feeling that what we were doing was puny
and useless, and that the best thing we could do would be to leave Misquamacus
alone, leave him to do whatever he wanted to do. He was much stronger than us,
he was so much wiser. It seemed to me then that it was futile to continue to
battle against him, because he would only have to summon one of his Indian
demons, and we would both meet a horrible death.

“Harry,” gasped
Singing Rock. “Don’t let him into your mind. Help me – I need your help”

I made an
effort to shrug off the pall of hopelessness that was seeping through my brain.
I turned to Singing Rock, and I saw sweat running down his face, and deep lines
of strain and anxiety carved into his cheeks.

“Help me,
Harry, help me!”

I stared at the
dark, hideous creature on the bed and I concentrated every ounce of my will
into paralyzing him. He stared back at me with those glassy yellow eyes, as if
daring me to defy him, but I tried to ignore my terror and pin him down with
sheer mental effort. You are helpless, I thought, you cannot move, you cannot
work your magic.

But, inch by
inch, Misquamacus began to work himself off the bed. He kept his eyes on both
of us all the time. Singing Rock was throwing powders and beating his bones,
but Misquamacus seemed unaffected by everything that he was doing. The medicine
man dropped
himself
heavily to the floor, and crouched
on his ghastly little legs within the magic circle, his face a mask of
impassive hate.

Painfully,
using his hands to swing himself along like an ape, Misquamacus approached the
circle.

If that doesn’t
hold him, I thought, I am going to be out of that door and halfway to Canada before
you can say cold-blooded cowardice.

Singing Rock’s
voice grew shriller and shriller. “Gitche Manitou, hold Misquamacus away from
me!” he called. “Keep him within the circle of charms! Lock and chain him!”

Misquamacus
paused, and stared balefully around at the medicine circle. For a moment, I
thought he was going to heave himself straight across it, and launch himself
toward us. But then he paused, and settled back on his hips, and closed his
eyes again. Singing Rock and I stood silent for one breathless moment, and then
Singing Rock said: “We’ve held him.”

“You mean he
can’t get out?”

“No, he can get
across it all right.
But not yet.
He hasn’t the
strength. He’s resting to get it back.”

“But how long
is he going to need? How long do we have?”

Singing Rock
looked warily at the hunched naked form of Misquamacus.

“It’s
impossible to say. It might be a few
minutes,
it might
be a few hours. I think I’ve called enough spiritual interference down to give
us thirty or forty minutes anyway.”

“What now?”

“Well just have
to wait. As soon as Dr. Hughes gets here, I think we ought to have this floor
of the hospital evacuated. He’s going to wake up before long, and then he’s
going to be angry and vengeful and almost impossible to deal with, and I don’t
want innocent people hurt.”

I checked the
time. “Jack should be here at any minute. Listen, do you really think we
shouldn’t have a few guns?”

Singing Rock
wiped his face. “You’re a typical white American. You’ve been brought up on a
diet of TV Westerns and Highway Patrol, and you think that the gun is the
answer to everything.

Do you want to
save Karen Tandy or not?”

“Do you
seriously think she can be saved? I mean – just look at her.”

The limp,
shriveled form of Karen Tandy’s body was lying awkwardly and emptily across the
bed. I could hardly recognize her as the same girl who had come into my flat
only four nights before, telling me about her dreams of ships and moonlit
coasts.

Singing Rock
said softly: “According to the lore of Indian magic, she can still be saved. If
there’s a chance, I think we ought to try.”

“You’re the
witch doctor.”

At that moment,
Dr. Hughes and Wolf, the other male nurse, came clattering down the corridor.
They took one look at the blood, and at the silent form of Misquamacus, and
stepped back in horror.

“God,” said
Jack Hughes shakily. “What the hell happened?”

We stepped out
of the room and into the corridor with him.

“He killed
Michael,” I said. “I was sitting here when it happened. It was too quick to do
anything about it. Then he forced his way out of Karen. Singing Rock thinks
we’ve held him for a while with the medicine circle, but we don’t have long.”

Dr. Hughes bit
his lips. “I think we ought to call the police. I don’t care what century that
thing is from, he’s murdered enough people.”

Singing Rock
firmly protested. “If we call the police, he will only kill them as well.
Bullets can’t solve this problem, Dr. Hughes. We’ve decided to play this game a
particular way, and now we’re stuck with it. Only magic can help us now.”

“Magic,” said
Dr. Hughes bitterly. “To think I’d end up using magic.”

“Singing Rock
thinks we ought to evacuate this floor of the hospital,” I said. “Once
Misquamacus wakes up, he’s going to use everything he’s got to get his revenge
on us.”

“There’s no
need,” said Dr. Hughes. “This is a surgical and operating floor only. We had
Karen down here so that she could be nearer the theater. There are no other
patients on ten. All I have to do is tell the rest of the staff to stay away.”

He dragged some
more chairs into the corridor and sat down, keeping a watchful eye on the
motionless bulk of Misquamacus. Wolf went up to Dr. Hughes’ office and came
back with a couple of bottles of bourbon, and we revived ourselves. It was
three-forty-five, and we still had a long night ahead of us.

“Now that he’s
emerged,” said Dr. Hughes, “how are we going to deal with him? How are we going
to make him give up Karen Tandy’s manitou?” I could tell he was embarrassed
about using the Indian word for spirit.

“The way I see
it,” said Singing Rock, “we have to convince Misquamacus somehow that he’s in a
hopeless situation, which he is. Although he is very powerful, he’s an
anachronism. Magic and sorcery may be dangerous, but in a world where people
don’t believe in it, they have very limited uses. Even if Misquamacus kills all
of us – even if he kills everyone in this hospital – what’s he going to do in
the outside world? He’s physically crippled, he’s completely unversed in
contemporary culture and science, and one way or another,
he
will just be overwhelmed.
Even if it doesn’t happen right
here, somebody’s going to put a bullet in him sooner or later.”

“But how are
you going to convince him?” I asked Singing Rock.

“I guess the
only way is to tell him,” said Singing Rock. “One of us will have to open up
his mind to Misquamacus, and give him a mental tour of what the modern world is
really like.”

“Won’t he think
that’s just a magical trap? A bluff?” asked Dr. Hughes.

“Possibly.
But I don’t see what else we can do.”

“Wait a
minute,” said Dr. Hughes, turning to me. “Something just occurred to me. You
remember when you told me about Karen Tandy’s dream, Harry – the one about the
ship and the coast and all that stuff?”

“Yes, of
course.”

“Well, what
strikes me about that dream is that there was so much fear in it. Misquamacus
was afraid of something. And it was obviously something that was terrifying
enough to make him risk this whole business of swallowing burning oil and being
reborn. Now, what do you think he could have been afraid of?”

“That’s a good
point,” I said. “What do you think, Singing Rock?”

“I don’t know,”
said the Sioux. “He might simply have been afraid of death at the hands of the
Dutch. Just because their manitou go on living in limbo after death, that doesn’t
mean that medicine men aren’t concerned about being killed. And there are ways
of killing medicine men so that their manitous can never return to the earth.
Maybe the Dutchmen knew how to do it, and threatened him.”

“That still
doesn’t make sense,” said Dr. Hughes.

“We’ve seen
already how Misquamacus can defend himself. No Dutchman could have gotten close
enough to harm him. Yet he was still frightened. Now, why? What did the Dutch
have in the seventeenth century that could have terrified a medicine man like
Misquamacus?”

“I guess they
had guns,” said Wolf “The Indians didn’t have guns, did they?”

“That wouldn’t
fit,” replied Singing Rock. “Misquamacus is powerful enough to resist guns. You
saw what he did to Harry’s friends, with the lightning-that-sees. You would
only have to point a gun at him, and he could blow it up in your hand.”

“The Dutch were
Christians,” I suggested. “Do you think there’s anything in the Christian
religion which could have exorcised Misquamacus’ demons and manitous?

“No way,” Singing
Rock said. “There is nothing in Christianity to equal the power of the old
Indian spirits.”

Dr. Hughes was
frowning deeply, as though he were trying to remember something he’d heard
about years and years ago. Then suddenly he snapped his fingers.

“I know,” he
said. “There was something very important which the Dutch settlers had which
the Indians didn’t
Something
which threatened the
Indians, and which they had never come across before, and couldn’t fight.”

“What was
that?”

“Disease,” said
Jack Hughes. “The Dutchmen brought all kinds of viruses that were unknown on
the North American continent.
Especially influenza viruses.
Whole tribes were wiped out by European diseases, because they had no
antibodies, and couldn’t resist even the simplest colds and flu. And the
medicine men couldn’t help them, because they had no sorcery which could work
against something they knew nothing at all about.
Invisible,
deadly, and quick.
If you ask me, that’s what Misquamacus was afraid of.
The Dutch were destroying his tribe with a medicine he couldn’t see or
understand.”

Singing Rock
looked excited. “That’s inspired, Dr. Hughes. That is really inspired.”

“One thing,
though,” I interjected. “Surely Misquamacus would now be immune to influenza?
If he’s been born in anything like the way a normal baby is born, he would have
gotten antibodies from Karen Tandy’s bloodstream.”

“No, I don’t
think so,” said Dr. Hughes. “His nervous system was intertwined with Karen’s,
but their bloodstreams weren’t connected in the same way that a fetus is
connected to its mother.

The energy he
was drawing from her was electrical energy from her brain cells and spinal
system.

There was no
actual intermingling in the usual physical sense.”

“That means,”
said Singing Rock, “that we could give our medicine man a dose of the grippe.

Or threaten
to.”

“Certainly,”
said Dr. Hughes. “Hold on just a moment.”

He went to the
wall telephone and dialed quickly.

“Put me through
to Dr. Winsome,” he said, when the switchboard answered.

Singing Rock
took a look at the silent shape of Misquamacus, hunched and sinister on the
floor of Karen Tandy’s blood-smeared room. Somehow the thought of giving this
creature the influenza didn’t seem like a very effective answer. But, apart
from Singing Rock’s sorcery, we didn’t have very much else to turn to.

“Dr. Winsome?”
said Jack Hughes. “Look, I’m sorry to wake you up, but I have an urgent problem
here, and I badly need some virus samples.”

There was a
pause while Dr. Hughes listened to the tinny voice on the other end of the
phone.

“Yes, I know
it’s
four o’clock in the morning, Dr. Winsome, but I
wouldn’t have called you if it hadn’t been desperate. That’s right. I need
influenza virus. Well, how soon can you get down here?”

He listened
some more, and then hung up the phone.

“Dr. Winsome is
coming right away. He has enough influenza
virus
in
his laboratory to bring down the whole population of Cleveland, Ohio.”

“Maybe he ought
to try it sometime,” said Singing Rock, with unexpected humor.

It was now
four-oh-five, and Misquamacus hadn’t stirred. All four of us stayed in the
corridor, keeping a close watch on his dark, troll-like body, although we were
all exhausted by now, and the stench of Michael’s corpse was almost
overpowering.

“What’s it like
outside?” I asked Dr. Hughes.

“Cold.
Snowing again,” he told me. “I hope Dr. Winsome
doesn’t have any trouble getting here.”

Another half
hour passed. It would soon be dawn. We sat huddled on our chairs, wearily
rubbing our eyes and smoking to keep ourselves awake. Only sheer nervous
tension kept me from nodding off. I hadn’t slept since Sunday night, and then I
had only had four or five hours.

At
four-forty-five, we heard a rustling noise from inside Karen Tandy’s room. We
looked up quickly. Misquamacus still had his eyes closed, but he appeared to be
stirring. Singing Rock got to his feet and picked up his bones and powders.

“I think he’s
waking” he said. There was a shake in his voice. This time, he knew that the
ancient wonder-worker would have almost all his sorcerer’s powers restored. He
stepped softly into Karen Tandy’s room, and we followed him, and stood behind
him to give him support.