Burial (19 page)

It was then that I heard a noise like somebody slowly
emptying a large sack of shingle onto the floor. On the wall in front of Martin, the shadows rose and swelled; and the large-headed shadow appeared to approach him, and raise its own hands to meet Martin's hands, so that to all intents and purposes it
became
Martin's shadow.

Martin began to quiver. ‘It's you,' he whispered.

‘It's who?' I asked him.

‘
It's you
,' Martin repeated. His voice was flooded with fear and awe.

He turned slowly around to face me. Then he stepped back, so that his back was pressed flat against the shadow, so that he and the shadow became one. A visible
darkness
seemed to flow over him, as if a black veil were being lowered over his head. His eyes closed, and the skin of his face began to pull back over his forehead and his cheekbones, so that the contours of his skull became startlingly obvious. His lips were drawn back over his teeth in the thinnest of grimaces, almost a snarl. If I hadn't known that he was travelling from one psychic plane to another, and that he was somewhere further away in time and reality than I could even begin to think about, I would have said that he was dying.

He grew darker and darker. It wasn't so much that his skin was changing colour. It was his whole aura. There was a feeling of terrible
oldness
about him; a feeling of black and bitter nights, long before any of us here had been born. There was a feeling of tragedy and dread. I could smell not only sagebrush but blood.

Naomi started to chant once again, but very softly, so that I couldn't really hear what she was saying — not that I could have understood her, even if I had. But there was always a chance that — when we played back Michael's recordings — somebody might be able to translate them, even if she was only chanting
The Camptown Races
backward.

Martin held out both hands, and pointed toward the bowl of water on the floor.

‘You seek to trick me, as you have always sought to trick me?' he asked. His voice was remarkable. It was very deep, very vibrant — so vibrant that I heard it through my jawbone, more than my ears. ‘You seek to insult those very spirits on whom your civilization is built?'

I didn't realize at first that he was talking to me, so I didn't answer. But then he abruptly opened his eyes and roared at me, ‘You bring this water into my lodge? You seek to insult me?'

‘Er, no, I'm not seeking to insult you,' I told him. Then, very gently, very diplomatically, I said, ‘Pardon me, but are you still Martin?'

Martin stared at me and his eyes were so strange that I physically shivered. They looked as if they had been cut out of an old black-and-white photograph and pasted onto his eyelids. In other words they were real and they were focused but somehow they weren't real at all. More like a memory of somebody's eyes; somebody very long dead.

So that onlie ye Eyes look'd out
.

‘You must take this water away,' Martin directed me.

‘Is that you?' I asked him. ‘First of all you wanted the water and now you don't want the water?'

‘It has no spirit.'

‘Oh, so that's it Maybe you'd like a little bourbon with it.'

‘It has no spirit,' Martin repeated. ‘It is white man's water. Dead water.'

I took a step nearer. All this talk of lodges and white man's water could mean only one thing: that Martin had contacted Singing Rock, my old medicine-man buddy. Well, buddy isn't really the right word. It's almost impossible for a white man to be buddies with a native American; not real buddies, not soulmates; and it's even harder for a white man to be buddies with a medicine-man. How can you be buddies with somebody who can see the ghosts of his ancestors in every hill and every tree and every puff of wind? Especially
when you and your kind have been responsible for decimating those trees and laying eight-lane highways over those hills and filling those puffs of wind with sulphur dioxide?

I'll tell you what kind of relationship I had with Singing Rock. Once I showed him my grandparents' tombstone in Newark, and he asked me very politely if he could piss on it ‘After all, you white men have been pissing on my grandparents' graves ever since you got here.'

At first I had been seriously angry. Did I say angry? I thought he was sick, and I told him so. ‘You're one sick Sioux,' that's what I told him. I told him that he was bitter and vengeful and that he was taking history far too personally. Was it my grandparents' fault, what had happened to the Indians? Was it
my
fault?

But sometimes you need to be angry before you can understand. Singing Rock had calmly explained that his 21-year-old great-great-great grandmother, a Northern Cheyenne, had been killed at Sand Creek, near Denver, in the summer of 1864. Raped, scalped, mutilated. Was it wrong for him to feel bitter and vengeful about that?

As for taking history too personally — well, she hadn't been killed by history but by Captain Silas S. Soule, Company D, First Cavalry of Colorado.

Singing Rock said that you couldn't find the history of what happened to the Indians in libraries, or John Wayne movies, or even Kevin Costner movies. You could only find it in all of those tribes of shadows, which no longer had Indians to cast them.

I still wasn't too sure that I
agreed
with Singing Rock. I wasn't even sure that I
sympathized
with him. I understood most of what he was talking about; and I respected his point of view. But that wasn't exactly the stuff of buddydom, was it?

‘Singing Rock?' I asked, circling around him. Those photographic eyes followed me without blinking once. ‘Singing Rock, is that you?'

‘I know you, foolish,' Martin replied. ‘I know your name.'

His voice seemed even harsher now. Whoever was talking out of Martin's mouth, it definitely wasn't Martin. This must be a spirit whom Martin had encountered during his psychic wanderings around, and he was using Martin's mouth and breath and lips to talk to me. I backed away. He might have called me ‘foolish' but I hadn't been born after breakfast. Martin was one of the most skilful mediums I had ever come across — and what's more, he was
alive
, which meant that he should be very much stronger than anybody who had passed over. So whoever
this
spirit was, he must be one powerful mother; and he didn't seem to like
me
much, either.

‘Singing Rock, is that you?' I asked him again. It
could
have been Singing Rock. He had always been modest about his wonder-working, but he was as good as any other medicine man I had ever come across.

But Martin let out a harsh, unexpected laugh. ‘Singing Rock will never speak to you again. Singing Rock has been punished beyond your wildest imagination. He has been given the soul-torture — and no man, living or dead, has ever returned from the soul-torture with the ability to speak.'

Naomi was chanting much louder now. ‘
Nish-neip, nish-neip … Nepauz-had
…' She was rocking backwards and forwards so violently that the feet of her chair were drumming unevenly on the floorboards, and I was afraid that she might topple over.

‘Remove the water!' Martin demanded, with ill-concealed rage. ‘Remove the water or I will kill you all!'

‘No way, fella,' I told him. ‘That water stays.'

Martin practically growled with temper, but he made no attempt to move away from the wall. ‘I warn you,' he breathed, ‘this is just the beginning … We will swallow you all … everything, you and yours! From shore to shore, and all across the Plains, the lands will again be free, and nothing of the white man will ever be heard of again!'

He suddenly turned his head and stared at Naomi, rocking and chanting.

‘Here!' he commanded — and without any hesitation at all, the chair slid noisily across the room towards him, with Naomi still sitting on it. She was about to collide with his shins when he seized her hair and twisted her deftly around. She screamed and tightly clenched her fists.

‘
My chair! Not my chair
!'

I took three strides across the room and seized hold of the chair, with Naomi still on it, and tried to pull her clear. Martin stared me fiercely in the face and said, ‘You would really dare, foolish?'

I heaved at the chair but it could have been screwed to the floor for all I was able to shift it. Naomi screamed and screamed and rocked herself backwards and forward. ‘Naomi!' I told her. ‘Naomi, get off the chair!'

‘She cannot,' said Martin, in a terrible husky voice. His breath was sourish-sweet and actually
cold
. It was like opening an icebox door and smelling month-old melon.

‘Let her go,' I snapped at him.

‘Alive or dead, which do you prefer?'

‘I said, let her go!'

‘You are as foolish and as weak as ever.'

I kept my grip on the chair, and kept trying to pull it away, but at the same time I scrutinized Martin's face for any tell-tale signs of what was possessing him. I could feel it, I could talk to it, but I couldn't clearly see it. It could be a man, it could be a woman. It could be something that wasn't human at all. The story goes that there was a trapper in the 1920s in Immokalee, Florida, who was regularly possessed by a giant alligator. He tore his wife and his three children apart with his teeth before he was hunted down by the State Police and a Miccosukee wonder-worker, and shot.

But that was another story; and this was frightening enough, and this was real.

‘Who are you?' I asked Martin.

Those terrible dead eyes closed, and then re-opened. ‘Don't you recognize me? I'm the one who knows you the best'

‘What the hell are you talking about?'

‘Come on, Harry … I know you better than you know yourself. I can remember things about you that you've forgotten about.'

I was beginning not to like the sound of this. The room seemed gloomier and chillier than ever, and Martin had taken on a darkness that was even more overwhelming than the shadows that I had first seen flickering on the wall. His darkness was three-dimensional — a frigid and tangible darkness. I felt that there was every possibility that the sun had set for good; and that the Earth had already started on its long and final journey into endless night.

I gave Naomi's chair a quick, forceful pull, hoping to catch Martin off-guard. But he must have been able to read my mind, because he held on to it as tightly as ever.

‘What the hell do you want?' I shouted at him. ‘Is it you who moved all of this furniture? What the hell are you doing it for?'

‘Now then, foolish; learn your place.'

‘Let her go,' I insisted.

Martin slowly shook his head, and gave a taut, unpleasant grin, like somebody peeling back the skin of a strange dried-up fruit, to reveal the structure underneath. ‘Now it's our turn. I will never let her go. I will never let any of you go. Not until you have been dragged from the face of the Earth, and every last trace of you has vanished as if you had never been, and you have been imprisoned in the place of shadows to which so many of
us
were once condemned.'

‘What are you talking about? Who are you?'

‘I am the one who knows you the best.'

‘Let the woman go. That's all I'm asking. She never did anything to you. She never hurt a fly.'

Martin shook his head again. ‘How can I let her go? How
can I release just one of you, when
all
of you have to die?'

‘For Christ's sake, Martin — whatever you are, whoever's inside of you, let her go!'

With a fierce expression on his face, Martin raised his right arm and tugged at his shirtsleeve, so that his cuff tore open. He rolled back his sleeve in three quick jerky movements. He turned his bare forearm this way and that. Then he seized hold of Naomi's hair with his left hand and violently pulled her head back.

Naomi let out a gargling squeal and kicked on the floor with her heels. Almost at once, the dining-room door was snatched open, and Michael came in. He stared at Martin, then he stared at me.

‘What in God's name is going on? What are you doing to her?'

‘Michael — it's okay,' I told him. ‘Please, just back off.'

‘I heard Naomi cry out. Listen — what are you doing? Get your hands off her hair. Listen, did you hear me? Get your hands off her hair!'

‘Out!' Martin commanded him.

But Michael stalked forward and tried to prize Naomi free. ‘Listen, pal, I gave you permission to hold a seance, not to —'

Karen was standing in the doorway. ‘Harry?' she said. ‘Is everything all right?'

Michael had stopped talking in mid-sentence. He was staring at Martin and quaking all over, as if he were being shaken.

‘Not that,' he said, thickly. ‘You can't bring that back.'

‘I can bring anything back,' Martin told him, wrenching Naomi's hair back even further. ‘I know you the best, after all. I know everything about you.
Everything
.'

Michael dropped slowly to his knees. He pressed his hands over his eyes, and I could tell by the way that his shoulders were shaking that he was sobbing.

‘What the hell have you done to him?' I asked.

‘Nothing,' said Martin, turning his attention away from Michael as if he were quite confident that he wasn't going to give him any more trouble. ‘I have shown him
himself
, that's all. And I can do the same to you.' I went over to Michael and helped him up. His face was smothered in tears. ‘Nobody could have known that,' he wept. ‘
Nobody
.'

‘Come on, Michael, I think it's better that you stay out of here.'

‘What about Naomi? What's he
doing
to her?'

‘It's okay,' I reassured him; although it wasn't okay at all. I had expected to confront some kind of apparition. I had even been prepared for voices; or glowing ectoplasm; or faces that appeared out of the floor. But I hadn't expected Martin to be taken over so completely. I felt helpless. If Martin couldn't control this spirit that was using his body, then how the hell could I?