The manitou (12 page)

“Gradually, the
guilt of what we did to the Indians has eroded our sense of owning and
belonging to our own country. This isn’t our land, Harry. This is the land we
stole. We make jokes about Peter Minuit buying Manhattan Island for twenty-four
dollars. But, these days, that kind of deal would be considered a theft, an
out-and-out con. Then there’s all this business about Wounded Knee, and every
other Indian massacre. We’re guilty, Harry. There’s nothing we could or should
do about the past, but we’re still guilty.”

I had never
heard Jack Hughes speaking so eloquently. I watched him drag at his cigarette
and brush some ash from his crumpled pants.

“That’s why
this case is so interesting – and so frightening,” he said. “If it’s really
true, this whole medicine man bit, then for the first time ever, white men with
a fully developed sense of guilt are going to come into contact with a red man
from the earliest days of our settlement. Today, we think about Indians in a
totally different way. Back in the seventeenth century, they were savages and
they were standing in the way of our need for land and our greed for material
wealth. These days, now we have everything we want, we can afford to be softer
and more tolerant. I know we’ve all been talking about destroying this medicine
man, and fighting him, but don’t you feel some sympathy for him as well?”

I stubbed out
my cigarette. “I feel some sympathy for Karen Tandy.”

“Yes,” said
Jack, “of course you do. She’s our patient, and her life is in terrible danger.
We can’t forget that. But don’t you feel anything for this savage from the
past?”

In a strange
way, Jack Hughes was right. I did feel something. There was a tiny part of my
brain that wanted him to survive. If there was a way in which both Karen Tandy
and the medicine man could live, then that would be the way I would choose. I
was frightened of him, I was terrified of his powers and his mastery of the
occult, but at the same time he was like a mythical hero of legend, and to
destroy him would mean destroying something of America’s heritage. He was a
lone survivor from our country’s shameful past, and to kill him would be like
grinding out the last spark of the spirit that had given the United States such
a colorful and mystical background.

He was the last
representative of original American magic.

Just then, the
telephone bleeped. Jack Hughes picked it up, and said: “Hughes.”

Someone was
speaking very excitedly on the other end. Jack Hughes frowned and nodded, and
said: “When? Are you sure? Well, have you tried forcing it? What do you mean,
you can’t?”

Finally, he
laid the receiver down.

“Is anything
wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know.
It’s Karen. McEvoy says they can’t get the door open. There’s something going
on in her room, and they can’t get the door open.”

We left the
office and rushed down the corridor to the elevator. There were two nurses in
there with a trolleyful of bottles and kidney bowls and we wasted precious
seconds while they maneuvered it out of the way. We got in, pressed the button
for ten, and sank downwards.

“What the hell
do you think has happened?” I asked Jack tersely.

He shook his
head. “Who knows?”

“I just hope to
God that medicine man isn’t able to use his powers already,” I said. “If he
can, we’re totally sunk.”

“I don’t know,”
replied Jack Hughes. “Come on, we’re here.”

The elevator
doors hissed open, and we ran swiftly down the corridor to Karen Tandy’s room.

Dr. McEvoy was
standing outside with two male nurses and Selena, the radiologist.

“What’s
happened?” snapped Jack.

“She was left
alone for less than a couple of seconds,” explained Dr. McEvoy. “The nurses
were changing over their duty. When Michael here tried to get back in, he
couldn’t open the door.

And look.”

We peered into
Karen Tandy’s room through the glass panel in the door. I was shocked to see
that she was no longer lying in bed. The sheets and blankets were rumpled and
pushed aside.

“There,”
whispered Jack.
“In the corner.”

I angled my
head and saw Karen Tandy standing at the far corner of the room. Her face was
horribly white, and her lips were drawn back over her teeth in a stretched and
grotesque grin.

She was leaning
forward under the weight of the huge distended bulge on her back, and her long
white hospital nightgown was torn away from her shoulders, revealing her
shrunken breasts and prominent ribs.

“Good God,”
said Jack, “she’s dancing.”

He was right.
She was hopping slowly from foot to foot, in the same slow silent waltz that
Mrs.

Herz had been
dancing. It seemed as if she were skipping to a soundless drum, a noiseless
flute.

“We have to
break in there,” ordered Jack. “She could kill herself, running about like
that.”

“Michael,
Wolf,” said Dr. McEvoy to the two male nurses. “Do you think you can get your
shoulders to the door?”

“We’ll try,
sir,” said Wolf, a burly young German with a dark crew cut. “I’m sorry about
this, sir, I didn’t realize.”

“Just get the
door down,” said Jack.

The two nurses
stood back a yard or two, and then rushed at the door together. It splintered
and cracked, and the glass broke. A strange cold draught, like the draught that
had blown during our seance in Mrs. Karmann’s apartment, flowed icily from the
jagged hole.

“Again,” said
Jack.

Michael and
Wolf stepped back again, and smashed against the door once again. This time,
they wrenched it right off its hinges, and it twisted open. Dr. Hughes stepped
in and went straight up to Karen, where she was bobbing and hopping on the rug.
The great swollen hunch on her back was wobbling and jiggling with every step.
It looked so obscene I felt sick.

“Come on, Karen,”
said Jack Hughes soothingly.
“Back into bed now.”

Karen turned on
one bare foot and stared at him. Again, they were not her eyes. They looked
fierce and bloodshot and powerful.

Jack Hughes
came toward her with his hands held out. She backed away from him slowly, with
the same glare of hatred in her eyes. The hump on her back twisted and
squirmed, like a sheep imprisoned in a sack.

“He – says –
you – must – not –
“ she
said haltingly in her own
voice.

Dr. Hughes
stopped. “He says I must not what, Karen?”

She licked her
lips. “He – says – you – must – not – touch – him.”

“But Karen,”
said Dr. Hughes. “If we don’t look after you, he will not survive either. We
are doing our best for both of you. We respect him. We want him to live.”

She backed
further away, knocking a tray of instruments on to the floor.

“He – does – not – believe – you.”

“But why not, Karen?
Haven’t we done everything we can to
help? We’re not soldiers, or warriors. We are medicine men, like
himself
. We want to help him.”

“He – is – in –
pain.”

“In pain?
Why?”

“It hurts –
him. He – is – hurt.”

“Why is he
hurt? What hurt him?”

“He – does –
not – know. He – is – hurt. It was – the light.”

“The light?
What light?”

“He – will –
kill – you – all...”

Karen suddenly
started swaying. Then she screamed, and screamed, and dropped to her knees,
clawing and clutching at her back. Michael and Wolf rushed up to her, and
carried her swiftly back to bed. Jack Hughes fixed a hypodermic of
tranquilizer, and shot it without hesitation into Karen’s arm. Gradually, her
cries diminished, and she sank into a nervous sleep, twitching and shaking and
flickering
her eyes.

“That settles
it,” said Dr. Hughes.

“Settles what,
Jack?” I asked him.

“You and I are
going straight to her parents and we’re going to tell them exactly what’s
wrong.

We’re going to
get that medicine man in from South Dakota and we’re going to fight that beast
until he’s dead.”

“No guilt?” I
asked. “No sympathy?”

“Of course I
have guilt, and I have sympathy, too. And it’s because I have sympathy that I’m
going to get it done.”

“I don’t
follow.”

“Harry,” said
Jack, “that medicine man is in pain. He didn’t know why, but he said it was the
light. If you know anything about gynecology, you’ll know why we never X-ray
fetuses unless we believe they are already dead, or they’re a threat to their
mother’s lives. Every time a human being is X-rayed, the rays destroy cells in
the area where the X-ray is directed. In an adult, that isn’t too important,
because they’re fully developed, and the loss of a few cells isn’t harmful. But
in a tiny fetus, one cell destroyed can mean that a finger or a toe or even an
arm or a leg will never develop.”

I stared at
him. “Do you mean that...
”

“I simply mean
that we’ve poured enough X-rays into that medicine man to see through Fort Knox
on a foggy day.”

I looked down
at the vein-laced bulge that squirmed on Karen Tandy’s back. “In other words,”
I said, “he’s a monster. We’ve deformed him.”

Jack Hughes
nodded. Outside, it was snowing again.

I
don’t know what I expected a modern-day medicine man to look
like, but Singing Rock could just as well have been an insurance salesman as a
practitioner of ancient Indian magic. When I met him the next morning at La
Guardia after his arrival from Sioux Falls, he was wearing a glossy gray mohair
suit, his hair was short and shiny with oil, and there were heavy-rim
spectacles on his less-than-hawklike nose.

He was
dark-skinned, with black glittering eyes, and there were more wrinkles on his
fifty-year-old face than you would expect on a white man, but otherwise he was
as mundane and unspectacular as all the other businessmen on the flight.

I walked over
to him and shook his hand. He only came up to my shoulder.

“Mr. Singing
Rock? My name’s Harry Erskine.”

“Oh, hi.
You don’t have to call me Mr. Singing Rock. Singing
Rock on its own is okay. Was that a terrible flight? We had blizzards all the
way. I thought we were going to have to put down in Milwaukee.”

“My car’s
outside,” I told him.

We collected
his baggage and made our way to the car park. A watery sun was melting the
slush, and there were the beginnings of a spring-like feeling around. A row of
drips splashed on to the sidewalk from the terminus building, and one of them
caught me on the neck.

I looked up.
“How come they don’t hit you?” I asked.

“I’m a medicine
man,” said Singing Rock urbanely. “You think a drop of water would dare to hit
me?”

I stowed his
cases in the trunk, and we climbed into the car.

“Do you like the
Cougar?” asked Singing Rock.

“It’s pretty
neat,” I said. “I like it.”

“I have a green
one,” he told me. “I use it for fishing weekends. For work, I have a Marquis.”

“Oh,” I said.
It didn’t sound as though the medicine business was too bad down on the reservation
these days.

As we drove out
of La Guardia toward Manhattan, I asked Singing Rock how much he knew about the
Karen Tandy case.

“I was told
that some ancient medicine man was about to make a reappearance inside her
body,”

he
said.

“And you don’t
find that hard to believe?”

“Why should
I... I’ve seen stranger things than that. Learning to escape into another time
is pretty strong medicine, but there have been recorded cases of it happening.
If you say it’s true, and Dr. Snow says it’s true, then I’m inclined to believe
that it’s true.”

“You know this
has got to be kept a strict secret?” I asked him, overtaking a truck, and
switching on my windshield wipers to dear away the spray thrown up by its
wheels.

“Of course.
I wouldn’t want to publicize it anyway. I have a
steady investment business back in South Dakota, and I wouldn’t want my clients
to think I was reverting back to savagery.”

“You also know
that this medicine man is extremely powerful?”

Singing Rock
nodded. “Any medicine man
who
can project himself
through three centuries has got to be very powerful. I’ve been looking up the
whole subject, and it appears that the greater the time span the medicine man
is able to cross, the more powerful his magic can be.”

“Did you find
out anything more about it?”

“Not a great
deal, but enough to give me a clear idea of what approach I’m going to have to
take. You’ve heard of Gitche Manitou, the Great Spirit? Well, what we’re
dealing with here is the spirit, or manitou, of this particular medicine man.
He is obviously very strong, which means that even in his previous lifetime in
the 1650s, he was into his fourth or fifth reincarnation. You see, each time a
manitou lives on earth as a human
being,
he gains more
knowledge and more strength. By the time he is into his seventh or eighth
reincarnation, he is ready to join Gitche Manitou forever as a permanent
spirit. It’s like graduation.”

I changed
lanes. “There’s a similar kind of concept in European spiritualism. What I want
to know is
,
how do you defeat a manitou like this?”

Singing Rock
fished in his pocket for a small cigar and lit it.

“I’m not saying
it’s easy,” he said. “In fact, the whole business is touch-and-go. But the
basic principle is this. Every magical spell, according to its strength, can be
diverted. You can’t nullify it. You can’t stop it in its tracks. It has its own
spiritual momentum, and to arrest that momentum would be like trying to stand
in front of an express train. But you can divert that express train and send it
back the way it came. All you need then is enough strength to alter its course
through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees.”