Revenge of the Manitou (11 page)

In the
foreground of the picture stood a group of men with drooping mustaches, and
just to their left, sitting on the edge of the boardwalk, was an Indian, in a
dusty, black business suit. He was handsome and well-built, and around his neck
he wore strings of necklaces and beads, which indicated that he was a medicine
man.

The other
photograph was taken in the woods someplace. Neil didn’t recognize the scenery
at all. A group of Indians were standing by a fallen tree, squinting at the
camera as if they mistrusted it. Among them was the same medicine man, in a
woollen
robe this time, but wearing the same necklaces and
beads.

“All right,”
said Neil, “
it’s
two pictures of the same Indian.
What’s that supposed to prove?”

“Look at the
dates on the back,” suggested Billy Ritchie.

Neil turned the
photographs over. One, the street scene in Calistoga, was marked 8/1/15. The
woodland scene was marked August 5th, 1915.

“I don’t get
it,” persisted Neil. “These were taken three days apart. What’s so strange
about that?”

Billy Ritchie
cackled. “What’s so strange about it is that the picture in the woods was taken
by a photographer called Lewis Clifton, of Massachusetts, up by the Wampanoag
settlement on the
Miskatonic
River in New England.
These photographs were taken three days apart, sure. But they were also taken
three thousand miles apart.”

“That’s
impossible,” said Neil. “In 1915, it would have taken almost a week to get from
New England to the Napa Valley.”

“That’s right,”
nodded Billy Ritchie. “And yet both of these photographs are authenticated, and
their dates are plumb correct.”

Neil peered
closer at the calm, amused face of the
Wampanaug
medicine man. Even though the pictures were almost seventy years old, they had
a curious freshness about them, as if they had been taken only a few weeks ago.
He said, “That’s strange, that’s really strange.”

“Not strange at
all when you know who that is,” said Billy Ritchie. “That’s the best-known of
all the Indian men, the most powerful Indian sorcerer who ever lived. That’s
Misquamacus
.”

“
Misquamacus
?”

“That was what
they called him, among a whole lot of other names. But the reason I spent some
time finding those photographs is because of what that trapper told me, up in
the Modoc Forest. He said that when the day of the dark stars came around, this
man
Misquamacus
would be the fellow to bring all the
twenty-two wonder-workers together. This man
Misquamacus
,
he said, was obsessed with taking his revenge on the white folks, and that his
whole aim in life was to see white people die in the cruelest way possible.”

Billy Ritchie
began to stroke his cat again. “I’d say that the cruelest way possible would be
to call down
Nashuna
and Pa-la-
kai
and
Ossadagowah
, and let them loose. Now, that would
be cruel.”

T
hey talked until midafternoon. Billy Ritchie, as the Old Crow
loosened his tongue, began to ramble about his childhood, and the old days in
Calistoga and the hot springs country, and the girls he’d known and chased.
Neil began to feel claustrophobic in the small, airless house, but he stayed
because he wanted to know more about Bloody
Fenner
,
and about the day of the dark stars.

He said to
Billy Ritchie, “Do you think that Bloody
Fenner
could
have done anything to irritate the
Wappos
, or any of
the tribes? Something they might have wanted revenge for?”

Billy Ritchie
shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. I never heard tell of him falling out with
the Indians. The way I heard it, they was always the best of friends, and
that’s what made him so treacherous to whites.”

“But you don’t
know for sure?”

“Who does? All
that happened one hundred and forty years ago, and there
wasn’t
more than a dozen men in the whole of the Napa Valley who could read or write,
so they didn’t keep no diaries. They were dark days, for sure.
Mighty dark days.”

Neil took out
his handkerchief and wiped sweat from the back of his neck. “Well, tell me
this,” he said. “If Bloody
Fenner
had done something
to upset the Indians, way back in the 1830s, how would an Indian medicine man
go about taking his revenge?”

“You mean
today? Here and now?”

“That’s right”

Billy Ritchie
puffed out his cheeks. “I can only tell you what I know from stories, and from
what that trapper told me. A lot of those real mystical Indian rituals, well,
they’re so secret that half the Indians don’t know them. But what you have to
understand is that a medicine man’s spirit-what the Indians call his
manitou
- that never dies. It’s reborn, lifetime after
lifetime, for seven lifetimes in all, until the medicine man has performed enough
magic on earth to earn
himself
a place up in the
stars, alongside of the great spirits.

“The point is
,
the
manitou
can only take on
flesh if it finds itself a suitable human being to lodge itself in. It can take
on plenty of other shapes, sure. The
Narragan
-sets,
for instance, used to have stories about medicine men
who
came back to life by using rocks for flesh, or water, or even wood.
There’s
some pretty hair-rising stories about the stone men
of the
Narragansets
who used to walk at night. But a
man made of rock or wood is just as vulnerable as rock or wood, and so the
medicine man wouldn’t take on that kind of flesh unless he had nothing else.”

Neil, even
though he was trying hard to control it, was shaking. He saw, as vividly as he
had the night before, the wooden arm reaching out from the wardrobe, the fierce
face glaring from the polished walnut. He said, hoarsely, “Go on.”

Billy Ritchie
shrugged. “I don’t know much more about it. It’s not the kind of stuff a white
man gets to hear about easily.”

Neil opened
another can of Coors. His throat was dry, and he felt as if he’d been hung up
all afternoon in a tobacco-curing barn. He swallowed lukewarm beer, and then he
said, “What would happen on the day of the dark stars? Would the medicine men
need to find human beings to lodge themselves in? Would they need to use
ordinary people’s bodies to get themselves reborn?”

“Sure they
would,” nodded Billy Ritchie. “They’d pick themselves a bunch of folks,
probably the land of folks who wouldn’t put up too much of a mental fight, if
you get what I mean, and they’d use their living bodies, their flesh and their
blood and all, to come back to life.”

Neil whispered,
“The children.
My God, the children.”

Billy Ritchie
said, “What did you say? You’ll have to speak up. I bust an eardrum when I fell
off of that horse.”

Neil stood up.
If what Billy Ritchie said about Indian medicine men was even half-true, it was
the most terrifying thing he’d ever heard in his life. Everything fitted the
random and scary events of the past few days, and made sense out of them. The
day of the dark stars was going to happen soon, just the way Toby had said.
Toby couldn’t have possibly known about it unless he was really being possessed
for real. And the wooden man from the wardrobe convinced him.

It seemed
insane, but nothing else explained what was going on. The children of Mrs.
Novato’s class were being gradually infiltrated, mind and body, by the most
powerful gathering of Indian medicine men that had ever taken place, at any
time in America’s history. Toby, his own son, was among them.

Toby, when he
thought about it, may even have been the catalyst for the whole horrifying
possession. Toby was a
Fenner
, a descendant of Bloody
Fenner
, and if Bloody
Fenner
had helped the Indians in the past against the white man, then maybe he was
doing it again. The ghost or the spirit of Toby’s forefather was back in Sonoma
County, after a hundred and forty years, and preparing for another massacre.

Neil thought
about the man in the long white duster.
The man who kept
begging for help.

Maybe he was a
ghost, too-a kind of sad warning stirred up from the past. From what he said,
he may have been one of the twenty settlers who died up at Conn Creek.
One of the innocent folks who had died at the hands of the
Wappos
while Bloody
Fenner
pretended to ride off for help.

Neil took Billy
Ritchie’s hand and squeezed it

“You’ve been a
lot of help,” he said softly.

“What did you
say?” demanded Billy.

“I said
,
you’ve been a lot of help. I’m beginning to understand
things that didn’t make any sense before.” Billy Ritchie set down his bourbon
glass. He stared up at Neil with a sharp, canny look in his eye.

“You’re
worried, aren’t you?” he said.

“A little,”
admitted Neil.

“You think it’s
coming-the day of the dark stars?”

“I’ve seen some
signs.”

“What kind of
signs?”

“I’ve seen a
wooden man. Least, I think I have. And I’ve heard voices from the people who
were killed up at Las Posadas.”

Billy Ritchie
rubbed his chin. “It doesn’t sound too good, does it?” he said. “It doesn’t
sound too good at all.”

“I don’t know
what to do,” said Neil. “If it’s really medicine men, then they’ve chosen the
kids at my son’s school.”

“They would, if
you’re a
Fenner
. They’d look for a spirit guide, you
see.
Someone to help them reincarnate themselves.
Out
there, out in what the Indians used to call the ‘outside,’ the spirits of those
medicine men would look for the ghost of someone who once helped them when they
were human. Bloody
Fenner
would be just their man.”

“But what can I
do?” asked Neil. “Is there anything I can do about it? I mean, how can I stop
it?”

Billy Ritchie
brushed cat hairs off his fingers. “I wouldn’t like to say,” he confessed.
“That old trapper never got as far as telling me what to do if the day of the
dark stars ever actually arrived.”

“But what about all those children?
What about my son?”

“It’s going to
be worse than that,” said Billy Ritchie. “Well-I know there isn’t
nothing
worse than your own son being hurt. But the day of
the dark stars is when the Indians take an eye for an eye, and you just think
about the thousands and thousands of Indians who died because of what the white
man did to them. If these medicine men really do turn up, and if they really
call down their demons, then we’re going to see death and horror like you can’t
even imagine.”

Neil was silent
for a few seconds, and then he squeezed Billy Ritchie’s hand again. “I’m going
to start fighting back,” he said determinedly. ‘Tm going straight to the cops,
to begin with, and we’re going to have those children, protected.”

“Well,” said
Billy Ritchie, “I just hope
yqu
can. Maybe it takes a
Fenner
to wipe out a
Fenner’s
wrong deeds. Don’t think it’s going to be easy, though. And keep on your guard.
If your ancestor’s around, then you’ve got yourself some stiff competition.
Alien
Fenner
wasn’t called Bloody for nothing.”

“Alien
Fenner
?
That was his name?”
“It sure was. Didn’t you know that?”

Neil shook his
head. “Nobody ever told me before. Everybody just called him Bloody.”

Billy Ritchie
tickled his black cat’s ears. “
Bloody’s
good enough,”
he said simply.
“
Bloody’s
good
enough.”

Sergeant Murray
sat behind his desk with the same patient expression he used for people who
complained about dogs fouling their front lawns or kids throwing stones at
their windows.

Outside, a
breeze had sprung up from the ocean, and dust blew in gritty clouds across the
police station parking lot. It was nearly five o’clock, and Sergeant Murray was
due to go home at five.

He was a big,
chubby man, with a face as large as a pig’s, and he was feeling hungry.

Beside him, his
air-conditioning unit rattled and burbled and whined. From time to time, as
Neil talked to him, he took a paper clip out of the small plastic tray on his
desk,
unbent
it, and dropped it into his wastebasket
with an audible ping.

Neil told him
about Toby’s nightmares, about the paintings at the school, about the wooden
demon, and about Billy Ritchie. Sergeant Murray listened, asking no questions,
and when Neil was finished he wedged his fat fingers together and had a deep,
silent think.

Eventually, he
lifted his head and said, “Neil-we’ve known each other a good few years.”

“What does that
have to do with it?”

Sergeant Murray
pulled a face. “Everything, when it comes down to it, Neil. A cop who didn’t
know you too well might book you for wasting police time. As it is-”

“Wasting police
time!” said Neil, astounded. “You think I’ve spent a whole day over at
Calistoga, and driven all the way back here, just to waste your time!”

“Neil,” said
Sergeant Murray, raising one porky hand to restrain him, “I don’t mean that
you’ve done it with bad intent. I don’t mean that you’ve done it deliberately.”

“Well, what the
hell do you mean? I know this is weird stuff, George. I know it sounds crazy. But
I’ve told you the facts as they are, and you can’t sit there and tell me that
something pretty threatening isn’t going on here. You can’t ignore it.”