Faces of Fear (32 page)

“Sure. It's an Indian ghost. It frightens people by tugging at their blankets at night. It's kind of a messenger, too, and it whispers in people's ears and tells them what the spirits want them to do.”

“Lucy said that the
mistai
told her to kill her classmates.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“She also said that the
mistai
told her to kill any yellow-hairs … though why she should have started by burning her Barbie doll, I really couldn't say.”

“The Indians set great store by doll-figures,” I said. “The Crow used to have a sun-dance doll made of beads and animal skin. If you danced with it, and stared it in the face, it would tell you where to find your enemy, so that you could kill him. To an Indian mystic, a doll-figure like Barbie wouldn't be a toy … it would represent everything that white people had done to destroy his culture and his religion.”

“You're something of an expert, then?” said Dr Vogel.

“There was a time when I had to be.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that Karen and I have had encounters with Native American mysticism a couple of times in the past.”

“And you think that Lucy's present condition might have something to do with these encounters?”

Karen nodded. “Since you say that she's sane and intelligent, we can't think of anything else that could be making her behave this way.”

“I see,” said Dr Vogel, although he looked deeply troubled. “You don't think that Lucy's behaviour could have been affected by your talking about this Native American mysticism in front of her, or when you might have thought that she couldn't hear you?”

“We
never
talk about it,” said Karen, emphatically.

“Well… I wouldn't mind running some more detailed tests,” said Dr Vogel. “Maybe you could see how Lucy gets along and then bring her back in a couple of days.”

“If you think it'll do any good.”

“I don't know … do you have any better ideas?”

“Not really. Except that I'm going to try to find out what it is that's making Lucy behave this way, and once I know what it is, I might have a chance of getting rid of it.”

“Well, be careful,” Dr Vogel warned me. “Lucy's very impressionable. Whatever you do, you shouldn't give her the impression that you believe in any of this mysticism. You'll run the risk of reinforcing her delusion, and make it doubly difficult for me to readjust her.”

I didn't say anything. I was used to scepticism. Before Misquamacus first reared his head, I used to be a card-carrying member of the National Society of Sceptics myself. I used to pay the rent by telling fortunes to rich old ladies, under the name of the Incredible Erskine, and you need to be a sceptic to make a living like that. If you really believed what the Tarot cards foretold, you'd go right out, put bricks in your pockets, and drown yourself in the East River. You really want to know when you're going to lose your loved ones, and how? You really want to know when you're going to die? Not for me,
gracias.
Since Karen had come into money, I had hung up my spangled cloak and put the Tarot out to grass, which was just as well, because I had seen things that still gave me nightmares, and I believed in ‘Native American mumbo-jumbo' because it was just as real as I was.

“I'll give you a call,” I told Dr Vogel, and stood up. “Thanks for taking a look at Lucy, anyhow.”

“There's just one more thing I wanted to ask her,” said Dr Vogel. “How did she manage to set her dolls house
alight? You said there was no sign that she was playing with matches.”

“I just burned it,” said Lucy.

Dr Vogel leaned forward and gave her an encouraging smile. “Yes, honey, we know you burned it. But
how
did you burn it?”

Lucy blinked at him as if he were totally stupid.

“I burned it,” she repeated. “Like this.”

She looked over at his desk, and pointed her finger at it. There was a moment's pause, and then a wisp of smoke started to rise from the papers on the blotter. Then there was the softest of flaring noises, and every paper on the desk burst into flame.

Dr Vogel jumped up. “For God's sake! What the hell are you doing? Harry – there's a fire extinguisher in the waiting-room – quick!”

But flames were already leaping upward, and the desk's leather top was beginning to shrivel like human skin. Dr Vogel picked up a folder and tried to beat the flames down, but all he succeeded in doing was fanning them even higher, and sending showers of sparks all over the carpets and the furniture.

I managed to wrestle the fire-extinguisher free from its bracket on the waiting-room wall. I hurried back in and sprayed powder all over Dr Vogel's desk, and onto the seat of his leather chair, which was already starting to smolder.

Dr Vogel picked up a half-charred report. “What the hell have you done?” he bellowed at Lucy. “Do you know how long it took to – For God's sake, Harry! What the hell has she done?”

Karen put her hands protectively on Lucy's shoulders. “Dr Vogel – please don't shout. It was just an accident.”

“Accident? That was no accident! She deliberately put out her finger and – and – look at this mess! This is going to take me days to sort out! Weeks!”

“Come on Michael, quiet down,” I told him. “There's no way Lucy could have started it.”

“Then what?” he shouted. “A cigarette? I don't smoke. A short-circuit? All I have is a battery-operated calculator. An Act of God? Or a Goddamned act of vandalism? Get her out of here, go on. I don't want to see her again. Think yourself lucky if I don't sue your for criminal damage.”

I was trying to think of something to say that would calm Dr Vogel down when Lucy pointed her finger at his face. Again, there was a moment's pause; but then Dr Vogel suddenly clamped his hands to his face and let out a terrible shout. His beard had burst into flame, hundreds of pinpricks of orange fire, like a burning brush. His hair suddenly caught fire, too, and then his shirt-collar and his cuffs. He screamed and beat at his face, stumbling from side to side in agony, but in only a few seconds he was blazing from the shoulders upward.

I stripped off my leather jacket, bundled it over his head, and pushed him heavily to the floor, jarring my knee against the side of his desk. He writhed and struggled and kept on screaming, and I turned to Karen and said, “Get Lucy out of here, fast! And call an ambulance!”

Dr Vogel stopped screaming and began to whimper and shiver, I carefully lifted up my leather jacket, and the smoke that rose from underneath it smelled as if somebody had accidently barbecued a cat. Dr Vogel's face was unrecognizable – not just as Dr Vogel, but as a human being. His beard had burned down to fine black ash, his nose and his lips were swollen and raw, and as he breathed out, smoke poured out of his nostrils.

“Hurts,” he mumbled, quaking as if he were cold.

“Hold on,” I told him, I was shivering almost as much as he was. “The medics won't be long.”

“Hurts, Harry,” he repeated. “Hurts like all hell.”

“Don't worry, Michael, they'll soon give you something for the pain.”

He tried to open his eyes, but the skin around his eyelids had fused together, so that his eyes looked like two roughly-peeled plums.

“Did she really do this?” he asked me.

“You mean Lucy? I don't know. Maybe not Lucy, but whatever's taken control of her.”

“I'm going to die,” said Dr Vogel. “This hurts too much. I'm going to die.”

He didn't say anything else. I stayed beside him until the paramedics arrived, and then I took one last look at him and left the office. Karen and Lucy were waiting for me in the reception area, talking to two police officers.

“You're this lady's husband?” asked one of them. “Can you tell us what exactly happened in there?”

“Dr Vogel caught fire,” I told him. “I don't know how it happened. He just spontaneously combusted, right in front of us.”

“Do you have any idea how that could have happened?” the policeman asked me.

I shook my head. But Lucy took hold of my hand, and looked up at the officers, and said, “He was a yellow-hair.”

The officers grinned at each other. But if only they had understood the significance of what Lucy had told them, they wouldn't have been grinning. They would have been putting as much distance between themselves and Lucy as they possibly could.

* * *

“You realize how dangerous this could be?” said Karen, as I drew the drapes and blocked out the daylight.

“I can't think of any other way,” I told her. “Who's going to believe that a four-year-old girl has been misbehaving at school because she's possessed by an Indian medicine-man? Who's going to believe that she can start fires just by pointing her finger?”

“Wouldn't Amelia help?” she asked me. Amelia was the spirit medium who had first contacted Misquamacus. She and I had later become lovers, on and off, and usually more off than on. I hadn't seen her in a long while and I couldn't ask her to risk her life again.

“It has to be me,” I told her. “The whole reason this is happening is because of me. It's like an unwritten law. If an enemy defeats you, you can't just turn your back and go on to other things. You have to return to his lodge and seek to defeat him in return. There's no way that Misquamacus can regain his honour until he's had his revenge.”

“Why didn't he try to possess you, or me, instead of Lucy?”

“Maybe he isn't strong enough. Remember that the last time we beat him, he literally
dispersed
, like electrical energy. And what Lucy can do – pushing her schoolmates around, starting spontaneous fires – that might be frightening, but it isn't exactly the stuff of great tribal magic, is it? In his heyday, this guy could literally move mountains.”

Karen pressed her hand against her forehead as if she had an incipient migraine. “I'm so frightened,” she said. “What if anything happens to Lucy? I couldn't bear it, Harry. I think I'd die.”

“Karen,” I said, “we have to. Otherwise, who knows how many people are going to be hurt?”

I had moved a circular card-table right into the middle of the living-room, and covered it with a maroon blanket. There was a small bronze Japanese nightlight in the centre of the table, and I lit it. Then I went around and switched off all the table-lamps. The nightlight cast flickering shadows of Japanese ideograms on the walls all around.

“Why don't you go get Lucy?” I asked Karen. “Tell her this is just a new game we're going to play. Kind of like hide-and-seek.”

I sat down at the table. In front of me was a long bundle of old, uncured leather, tied with cords made of tightly-twisted hair. I hadn't opened this bundle since it was first given to me, over twenty years ago, by the son of Singing Rock. It had been intended as nothing more than a sentimental reminder of a man who had given everything in order to prevent the forces of the past from destroying the equilibrium of the future. Singing Rock had sympathized in many ways with Misquamacus, but he hadn't shared his thirst for revenge. Singing Rock had believed that what is past is past, and that all you can do is wipe away your tears so that you can look more clearly to the future.

I picked open the knots with my thumbnails and loosened the strings. Then I unrolled the bundle and revealed its contents: two human thigh-bones, decorated at each end with red and white beads and hanks of human hair, dyed blue. They had been taken from the body of White Bull, the medicine-man who had made a magical war-bonnet for the legendary chief Roman Nose. It was said that when they were beaten together, up and down, White Bull was running into the world of the spirits, and whoever was holding the bones would be carried into the world of the spirits behind him.

Karen came back into the room, holding Lucy's hand. It had been two days now since the burning incident in Dr Vogel's office, and Lucy was beginning to get over the shock. Although she had been used to channel the power that had started the fires, she was still a little girl, she was still my little sugar plum fairy, and afterward she had been just as distressed about what had happened as we were.

Karen and Lucy sat at the table.

“Why is it so dark in here?” asked Lucy, looking around.

“It's dark because we're going to play a game.”

“What game?” she wanted to know. She peered at the two thighbones lying on the table in front of me. “Knick-knack-paddywhack-give-a-dog-a-bone?”

“Unh-hunh. We're yoing to play a game of imaginary friends.”

“What's that?”

“That's when we call pretend people to come and play with us; and we see whether they really do.”

“That's silly. There's no pretend people.”

“What about Miss Ellie? She was pretend.” Miss Ellie had been Lucy's invisible companion for over a year, and a goddamned nuisance she had been, too. She always had to have a place laid for her at the table, and we could never drive anywhere until Miss Ellie had buckled up.

“Miss Ellie's gone now,” said Lucy. “She's gone away and she's never coming back.”

“Well, let's see if we can find another pretend friend. If Miss Ellie's gone, how about finding Miss Quamacus?”

Lucy put her hand to her mouth and gave an affected titter. “
That's
a silly name!”

“All the same, let's give it a try. What we have to do is think very, very hard, and keep on saying, Miss
Quamacus, I want to see you. Miss Quamacus, I want to hear your voice, Miss Quamacus, I want to feel your hand. Do you think you can do that?”

Karen was staring at me in apprehension. I didn't say anything, but I gave her a look which meant that we had to go through it. There was no other choice.

“Right,” I said. “We tap these bones together and we think very hard and then we start chanting. Miss Quamacus, I want to see you. Miss Quamacus, I want to hear your voice.”