Burial (42 page)

‘You'll need his forks, that's what he said.'

‘Forks? What? I don't understand. I don't know what the hell you're talking about.'

Samuel's image had darkened so much that I could scarcely make him out at all.

‘Samuel!' I shouted.

His red dressing-gown rose and fell like a red patch of seaweed glimpsed on an outgoing tide.

‘It's Misquamacus,' he said, in that short-wave-radio voice, rising and falling. ‘He's seen him. It's really him. It's Misquamacus.'

The darkness thickened and stirred, and his image was blotted out by a shadow that almost seemed to have a life of its own. But — as he vanished — I heard two tiny words carried across the static of Samuel's psychic aura. ‘Little …' Then, ‘Big …' Then nothing at all.

I turned back to Jack. He was sitting behind his desk watching me, his fingers steepled. ‘You're sweating,' he said.

‘Are you surprised? I was scared shitless.'

He stood up, came around the desk, and felt my pulse. ‘One hundred and five,' he said, after a while. ‘A little high for a man of your age, but nothing too much to worry about.'

‘Jack … I saw Martin Vaizey's brother … he was standing right there.'

‘Sure you did. I believe you.'

‘Jack, for Christ's sake don't humour me. He said something about somebody called Mr Kellogg. Then he said that I needed Martin's forks. Then he said, “It's Misquamacus … it's really Misquamacus.” Then he vanished.'

Jack let go of my wrist and stared at me cautiously. ‘He said you needed Martin's forks?'

‘That's what it sounded like. It didn't make any sense.'

‘Did any of the nurses mention forks?'

‘Hey, come on, Jack, what are you driving at here?'

Jack said, with simmering, suppressed annoyance, ‘When Martin Vaizey pulled his eyes out of their sockets, he did it with two antique forks.'

He lifted his hands to his temples and gave me a graphic mime of what Martin had done to himself.

‘Jesus,' I said.

‘Yes, Jesus,' snapped Jack. ‘But
I
didn't tell you that, did I? And if any of my staff told you that, I want to know who it was. The police asked me specifically to keep that under wraps. They wanted to ask questions around the antique stores; and around the museums; and they wanted to do it before the newspapers and the TV people got ahold of it. If one of my staff mentioned forks —'

‘Of course none of your staff mentioned forks,' I protested. ‘I found out just the way I told you — about two minutes ago, right here in this room, from a ten-year-old dead boy in a red dressing-gown and grey pajamas.'

‘You're not discussing this very maturely, are you?'Jack demanded. ‘I should have remembered what you were like from before. You're about as rational as a Mexican jumping-bean. Listen, forget about Martin's forks. Forget about Martin. It seems to me like you're suffering from terrific stress — maybe you should forget the whole thing and take a few days away.'

‘Like where? Chicago? Or Maybelline, Colorado? Or Apache Junction, Arizona?'

Jack Hughes said, in a very level voice, ‘You can talk to Martin when he's feeling well enough. I'm not going to stop you. You can do whatever you damned well like. But I went after Misquamacus once before, Harry — and for me, that once was more than enough, so don't you dare to ask me to do it again. End of discussion.'

I laid my hand on his shoulder. I looked around, at the place where Samuel had been. Then I said, ‘Thanks, Jack. I'm sorry if I upset you. I'm not asking you to go after
Misquamacus again. I guess it disturbed some of us more than others.'

I knew why I had annoyed him so much. By mentioning Martin's forks, I had proved to him that there
had
been a spirit in his office. And that meant that I was right about Misquamacus — and that he had lost his fingers and his career as a surgeon in vain.

Jack picked up a framed photograph from his desk, and held it too close for me to be able to focus on it. It looked like a plain woman with dark hair and spectacles.

‘I'd help if I could, Harry. But I'm married now. We're expecting our second child.'

‘Sure,' I said, and gave his shoulder one more squeeze, and left his office.

Shit
, I thought, as I went down to the hospital lobby in the elevator, crammed between a wheelchair and a hugely fat woman in a lime-green pant-suit,
where have all the heroes gone, the guys you could count on
?

What had happened to “give me some men who are stout-hearted men
”?

Grown older
, I answered myself.
Once they were twenty and didn't care. Now they're forty and all they see is lost opportunity, unfulfilled ambition
.

The years have taken away too much already. They don't want to risk losing anything more
.

I must have been feeling exceptionally low, because I poured myself the
burra-peg
to end all
burra-pegs
and telephoned Dr Snow.

To begin with, he was even more cagey on the phone than he had been face-to-face.

‘I really can't advise you,' he kept telling me. ‘There's nothing I can do. I'm an anthropologist, Mr Erskine, not an Indian fighter.'

‘But you said I had to
outbid
Misquamacus. I didn't really understand what you meant.'

He paused. He was beginning to feel flattered. ‘Outbid him? Is that what I said?'

‘Yes, and I don't know what you were trying to explain.'

‘Oh. Well, neither did I. Not beyond the simple fact that Indians never do anything for nothing. And the reason they never do anything for nothing is because the spirits in which they believe never do anything for nothing.

‘Remember — you thwarted Misquamacus twice: once at the Sisters of Jerusalem and once at Lake Berryessa. Now he is obviously determined that you won't be allowed to thwart him a third time. That is why he has called on Aktunowihio to give him all the power he needs. But — like all Indian deities — like
most
deities in
most
religions — Aktunowihio must have demanded a price.

‘All
you
have to do is find out what that price was; and best it Then Aktunowihio will return to the Great Outside and leave you alone. Well … hopefully, anyway.' He gave a peculiarly girlish giggle. ‘Aktunowihio the Shadow Buffalo has rather an appetite for human souls.'

‘You're a great help,' I told him, with naked sarcasm.

‘Always glad to be of practical assistance,' replied Dr Snow, not in the least offended. ‘In fact, I find this conflict of cultures endlessly fascinating. Despite Wounded Knee, despite Sand Creek, despite the Little Big Horn, it's still going on — this shadow-wrestling for moral and political and territorial rights.'

‘Little Big Horn,' I repeated.

‘Yes,' said Dr Snow, baffled.

Little
… Samuel had said. Then,
Big
… Then, nothing.

But what other phrase in the English language combined the adjectives Little and Big in quite the same way? Apart from that movie
Little Big Man
with Dustin Hoffman, of course, and there was no earthly reason why Samuel should have mentioned
that
.

Little, Big, Horn.

Maybe that was what Martin had been trying to tell me. Somehow the key to Misquamacus's reappearance — maybe the secret to Aktunowihio, the Shadow Buffalo — was somehow involved with the Little Big Horn, Custer's Last Stand.

I thanked Dr Snow for his help. He seemed quite disappointed that I didn't want to ask him any more. I hung up, and then I dragged across a take-away menu from the Mok'po Korean restaurant, and uncapped a ballpen with my teeth. I scribbled down everything that Samuel had told me.

Mr Kellogg had taken pictures of the
Bismarck
. That was what Samuel had told me. But I could remember that Samuel had left a distinct gap between ‘the …' and ‘… Bismarck' and then another, shorter gap.

Maybe I had failed to hear the whole message. Maybe the message had originally been ‘Mr Kellogg had taken pictures of the … something-or-other … and then taken them to Bismarck …' or, maybe ‘gone to Bismarck.'

After all, as every well-informed school kid knows, Bismarck happens to be the capital of North Dakota, right in the middle of old-time Indian territory, where the Northern Pacific Railroad crossed the Missouri River, and it was far more probable that Martin had been trying to tell me something about Bismarck, North Dakota, than, say, Bismarck the German Chancellor or the World War Two battleship
Bismarck
, or the Bismarck Islands in the Pacific.

Maybe the message should have been
Mr Kellogg had taken pictures of the Little Big Horn and sent them to Bismarck
.

But it still made no sense. And what the hell did it have to do with Misquamacus? I sat and listened to the air-conditioner rattling and screaming and I decided that I might be Erskine the Incredible, but I wasn't Sherlock Holmes, not by any stretch of anybody's imagination. I stood up and gave the air-conditioner a terrific kick, and it made a terrible clacking
noise like a man I had once seen choking on a fishbone.

I set out the cards, to see if I should go to Stars for a large pastrami sandwich, or Maude's for too much to drink.

The very first card I turned over showed a dark marble mausoleum with an eternal flame burning on the top of it. ‘
Illness is known, sickness is near, Fate has its own ending to fear. You lose your money, all's hopeless to you. And what's not funny, your courage fails too
.'

Terrific, I thought. I'm hungry, sober, perplexed, afraid, and now I'm going to lose my credit-rating, too.

I tossed the card across the room. The pack would be better without it. None of my ladies would want to hear that little ditty, especially Mrs John F. Lavender. Illness, fate, fear, losing your money? She had enough problems with men.

The phone rang. I picked it up and began the usual litany, ‘Erskine the Incredible — palmistry, card-diving, tea-leaf interpretation —'

‘Harry,' said Amelia, ‘I just had a call from the Sisters of Jerusalem.'

There was a long silence, as long-drawn-out as saltwater taffy.

‘It's Martin,' she said.

‘What's happened?'

She started crying. I knew that he was dead even before she managed to get the words out. ‘He was such a sweet guy,' she sobbed. ‘He wouldn't have hurt anybody …'

‘I know,' I told her. I felt like crying too. In fact, what was all this wet stuff running down my cheeks?

She continued to cry while I told her about seeing Martin's brother Samuel, and what he had told me, and I said, ‘Maybe he can still pay Misquamacus back.'

Amelia said, ‘How, for God's sake? He's dead.'

‘Sure. But dead is one thing … paying somebody back, that's another thing altogether, and you can do that, dead
or not Listen, I'm going to fly to Arizona tomorrow morning.'

To look for Karen?'

‘What else can I do?'

‘You could stay in New York and carry on being Erskine the Incredible and pretend that none of this ever had anything to do with you.'

‘Yes,' I agreed. ‘I could do that, for sure. And what about Karen?'

‘Harry, you're no match for Misquamacus. Not this time. I don't want to lose you, too.'

‘I don't want to lose me, either,' I told her. ‘I'll call you from Phoenix.' I hung up. Then I picked up the phone again, and punched out the number of United Airlines.

Until you fly to the sunbelt, you don't have any idea how many old people there are in America today. There was so much white hair on that 737 that by the time we reached St Louis I was beginning to suffer from snowblindness. Of course I was seriously spoiled and flirted-with. You know what effect I have on elderly ladies. A widow in a powder-blue leisure suit bought me two bottles of champagne and gave me her telephone number in Paradise Valley, and a retired beauty-counsellor called Lolly invited me to test her collagen-plumped lips for their kissability.

In a way I enjoyed their company, because it kept my mind off Karen, and the fear I felt about facing Misquamacus. That was if I could
find
Misquamacus. I had tried at La Guardia to find books about Custer and the Little Big Horn, but the only reference books I had been able to find were
How To Make A Million Out Of The Recession, Lose 40LBS The Celery-Stick Way
and
Peak Performance Sex
.

I decided to wait until I reached Phoenix, and try the public library.

I kept doodling around and around the words that young Samuel Vaizey had told me. ‘Mr Kellogg … Bismarck … it
is
Misquamacus.' But I didn't have enough information to make any kind of sense out of them. I wondered whether I ought to try a seance, to raise Samuel from the other side, so that he could explain himself in little more detail. But somehow I didn't think I was sensitive enough to be able to do it Samuel had appeared to me, I hadn't called him. And he had probably appeared because Martin had sensed that I was in the hospital and had sent him to give me a message.

I had called the 13th Precinct early that morning and asked Sergeant Friendly if it would be possible for me to collect Martin's antique forks; or at least take a look at them. But Sergeant Friendly had been very unfriendly indeed, and had told me that the forks were police exhibits and that even after their investigation into Martin Vaizey's blinding, I would have to produce a notarized letter of authority proving that Martin had wanted me to have them.

There wasn't much point in trying to explain to Sergeant Friendly that Martin's ten-year-old dead brother had appeared to me in the office of the Senior Administrator of the Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital and specifically requested that I have them. Most of the time the hardest part about struggling with the supernatural is that nobody, but nobody, will ever believe you. The TV newsreaders were still talking about the Chicago ‘earthquake', in spite of the fact that there had been no seismological disturbance whatsoever, not even the slightest flicker. Even when a building the size of the Sears Tower disappears into the world of the dead it doesn't show up on the Richter Scale.