The manitou (2 page)

“What do you
make of them, Selena?” asked Dr. McEvoy, taking the envelope across the room to
his light-box.

“I’m not sure
at all, Dr. McEvoy. It’s clear enough, but it doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

Dr. McEvoy took
out the black X-ray film and clipped it up. He switched on the light, and they
had a view of the back of Miss Tandy’s skull, from the side. There was the
tumor, all right – a large shadowy lump. But inside it, instead of the normal
fibrous growth, there seemed to be a small tangled knot of tissue and bone.

“See here,”
said Dr. McEvoy, pointing with his ballpoint. “There seem to be roots of some
kind, bony roots, holding the inside of the tumor against the neck. Now what
the hell do you think that is?”

“I haven’t the
slightest idea,” said Dr. Hughes. “I’ve never seen anything remotely like this
before. It doesn’t seem like a tumor at all.”

Dr. McEvoy
shrugged. “Okay, it’s not a tumor. So what is it?”

Dr. Hughes peered
closely at the X-ray. The little knot of tissue and bone was too formless and
mixed-up to make any sense out of it. There was only one thing to do, and that
was to operate.

Cut it out, and
examine it in the open. And at the rate it was growing, that operation had
better be done quickly.

Dr. Hughes
picked up the telephone on Dr. McEvoy’s desk. “Mary? Listen I’m still down here
with Dr. McEvoy. Would you see how soon Dr. Snaith has a space available for
surgery? I have something here that needs urgent attention. That’s right. Yes,
a tumor. But it’s very malignant, and there might be problems if we don’t
operate fast. That’s it. Thanks.”

“Malignant?”
said Dr. McEvoy. “How do we know it’s malignant?”

Dr. Hughes
shook his head. “We don’t know, but until we find out whether it’s dangerous or
harmless, I’m going to treat it as dangerous.”

“I just wish I
knew what the hell it was,” said Dr. McEvoy gloomily. “I’ve been right through
the medical dictionary, and there just isn’t anything like it.”

Dr. Hughes grinned
tiredly. “Maybe it’s a new disease. Maybe they’ll name it after you.
McEvoy’s Malady.
Fame at last. You always wanted to be
famous, didn’t you?”

“Right now I’d
settle for a cup of coffee and a hot beef sandwich. The Nobel Prize I can have
any time.”

The phone
bleeped. Dr. Hughes picked it up. “Mary? Oh, right. Okay, that’s fine. Yes,
that’ll do fine. Tell Dr. Snaith thank you.”

“He’s free?”
asked Dr. McEvoy. “Tomorrow morning, ten a.m. I better go and tell Miss Tandy.”

Dr. Hughes
pushed through the double doors into the waiting room, and Miss Tandy was still
sitting there, halfway through another cigarette, and staring, without seeing,
at the open magazine on her lap.

“Miss Tandy?”

She looked up
quickly. “Oh, yes,” she said. Dr. Hughes drew up a chair and sat down next to
her with his hands clasped in front of him. He tried to look serious and steady
and reliable, to calm her obvious fright, but he was so tired that he didn’t
succeed in looking anything but morbid.

“Listen, Miss
Tandy, I think we’ll have to operate. It doesn’t look as though this swelling
is anything to worry about, but at the rate it’s been growing, I’d like to see
it removed as soon as possible, and I guess you would too.”

She raised her
hand toward the back of her neck, then dropped it and nodded. “I understand.
Of course.”

“If you can be
here by eight o’clock tomorrow morning, I’ll have Dr. Snaith remove it for you
around ten. Dr. Snaith is a very fine surgeon, and he has years of experience
with tumors
like
yours.” Miss Tandy attempted to
smile. “That’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

Dr. Hughes
shrugged. “Don’t thank me. I’m only doing my job. But, listen I don’t think you
have anything to worry about. I won’t pretend that your condition is not
unusual, because it is. But part of our profession is dealing with unusual
conditions. You’ve come to the right place.”

Miss Tandy
stubbed out her cigarette and gathered her things together.

“Will I need
anything special?” she asked. “A couple of nightdresses, I suppose, and a
wrap?”

Dr. Hughes
nodded. “Bring some slippers, too. You’re not going to be exactly bedridden.”

“Okay,” she
said, and Dr. Hughes showed her out. He watched her walk quickly down the
corridor to the elevator, and he thought how slim and young and elf-like she
looked. He wasn’t one of those specialists who thought of his patients in terms
of their condition and nothing else – not like Dr. Pawson, the lung specialist,
who could remember individual ailments long after he’d forgotten the faces that
went with them. Life is more than an endless parade of lumps and bumps, thought
Dr. Hughes. At least I hope it is.

He was still
standing in the corridor when Dr. McEvoy poked his moonlike face round the
door.

“Dr. Hughes?”

“Yes?”

“Come inside a
moment, take a look at this.” He followed Dr. McEvoy tiredly into his office.

While he had
been talking to Miss Tandy, Dr. McEvoy had been looking through his medical
reference books, and there were diagrams and X-rays strewn around all over his
desk.

“You found something?”
asked Dr. Hughes. “I don’t know. It seems to be as ridiculous as anything else
in this case.”

Dr. McEvoy
handed him a heavy textbook, opened at a page covered with charts and diagrams.

Dr. Hughes
frowned, and examined them carefully, and then he went over to the light-box
and peered at the pictures of Miss Tandy’s skull again.

“That’s crazy,”
he said.

Dr. McEvoy
stood there with his hands on his hips and nodded. “You’re quite right. It is
crazy.

But you have to
admit, it looks pretty much like it.”

Dr. Hughes shut
the book. “But even if you’re right – in two days?”

“Well, if this
is possible, anything is possible.”

“If this is
possible, the Red Sox will win the next series.”

The two pale
doctors stood in their office on the fifteenth floor of the hospital and looked
at the X-rays and just didn’t know what to say next. “Perhaps it’s a hoax?”
said Dr. McEvoy. Dr. Hughes shook his head.
“No way.
How could it be?
And what for?”

“I don’t know.
People dream up hoaxes for all kinds of reasons.”

“Can you think
of a reason for this?” Dr. McEvoy grimaced. “Can you believe it’s real?”

“I don’t know,”
replied Dr. Hughes. “Maybe it is. Maybe it’s the one case in a million that’s
really real.”

They opened the
book again, and studied the X-ray again, and the more they compared the
diagrams with Miss Tandy’s tumor, the more resemblance they discovered.

According to
Clinical Gynaecology, the knot of tissue and bone that Miss Tandy was harboring
in the back of her neck was a human fetus, of a size that suggested it was
about eight weeks old.

I
f you think it’s an easy life being a mystic, you ought to try
telling fifteen fortunes a day, at $25 a time, and then see whether you’re
quite so keen on it.

At the same
moment that Karen Tandy was consulting Dr. Hughes and Dr. McEvoy at the Sisters
of Jerusalem Hospital, I was giving old Mrs. Winconis a quick tour of her
immediate prospects with the help of the Tarot cards.

We were sitting
around the green baize table in my Tenth Avenue flat, with the drapes drawn
tight and the incense smoldering suggestively in the corner, and my genuine
simulated antique oil lamp casting pretty mysterious shadows. Mrs. Winconis was
wrinkled and old and smelled of musty perfume and fox-fur coats, and she came
around every Friday evening for a detailed rundown of the seven days ahead.

As I laid out
the cards in the Celtic cross, she fidgeted and sniffed and peered across at me
like a moth-eaten ermine scenting its prey. I knew she was dying to ask me what
I saw, but I never gave any hints until the whole thing was set out on the
table.
The more suspense, the better.
I had to go
through the whole performance of frowning and sighing, and biting my lips, and
making out that I was in communication with the powers from beyond. After all,
that’s what she paid her $25 for.

But she
couldn’t resist the temptation. As the last card went down, she leaned forward
and asked: “What is it, Mr. Erskine? What do you see? Is there anything about
Daddy?”

“Daddy” was her
name for Mr. Winconis, a fat and dour old supermarket manager who chain-smoked
cigars and didn’t believe in anything more mystical than the first three
runners at Aqueduct. Mrs. Winconis never suggested as much, but it was plain
from the way she talked that her greatest hope in life was for Daddy’s heart to
give out, and the Winconis fortune to come her way.

I looked at the
cards with my usual elaborate concentration. I knew as much about the Tarot as
anybody did who had taken the trouble to read Tarot Made Easy, but it was the
style that carried it off. If you want to be a mystic,
which
is actually easier than being an advertising copywriter, or a summer camp
warden, or a coach-tour guide, then you have to look like a mystic.

Since I am a
rather mousy thirty-two-year-old from Cleveland, Ohio, with the beginnings of a
bald patch underneath my scrubby brown hair, and a fine but overlarge nose in
my fine but pallid face, I took the trouble to paint my eyebrows into satanic
arches, and wear an emerald satin cloak with moons and stars sewn on it, and
perch a triangular green hat on my head. The hat used to have a badge on it
that said Green Bay Packers, but I took it off, for obvious reasons.

I invested in
incense, and a few leather-bound copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a
beaten-up old skull from a secondhand store in the Village, and then I placed
an advertisement in the newspapers which read: “The Incredible Erskine –
Fortunes Read, Future Foretold,
Your
Fate Revealed.”

Within a couple
of months, I was handling more business than I knew what to do with, and for
the first time in my life I was able to afford a new Mercury Cougar and a quad
stereo with earphones to match. But, as I say, it wasn’t easy. The constant
tide of middle-aged
ladies
who came simpering into my
apartment, dying to hear what was going to happen in their tedious middle-aged
lives, was almost enough to drown me forever in the well of human despair.

“Well?” said
Mrs. Winconis, clutching her alligator pocketbook in her wrinkled old fingers.

“What can you
see, Mr. Erskine?”

I shook my head
slowly and magnificently. “The cards are solemn today, Mrs. Winconis. They
carry many warnings. They tell you that you are pressing too hard toward a
future that, when it comes to pass, you may not enjoy as much as you thought. I
see a portly gentleman with a cigar – it must be Daddy. He is saying something
in great sorrow. He is saying something about money.”

“What is he
saying? Do the cards tell you what he is saying?” whispered Mrs. Winconis.

Whenever I mentioned
‘money,’ she started to twitch and jump like spit on a red-hot stove. I’ve seen
some pretty ugly lusts in my time, but the lust for money in middle-aged woman
is enough to make you lose your lunch.

“He is saying
that something is too expensive,” I went on, in my special hollow voice.

“Something is
definitely too expensive. I know what it is. I can see what it is. He is saying
that canned salmon is too expensive. He doesn’t think that people will want to
buy it at that price.”

“Oh,” said Mrs.
Winconis, vexed. But I knew what I was doing. I had checked the price-rise
column in the Supermarket Report that morning, and I knew that canned salmon
was due for an increase. Next week, when Daddy started complaining about it,
Mrs. Winconis would remember my words, and be mightily impressed with my
incredible clairvoyant talents.

“What about me?
asked
Mrs. Winconis. “What is going to happen to me?”

I stared
gloomily at the cards.

“Not a good
week, I’m afraid. Not a good week at all. On Monday you will have an accident.

Not a serious
one.
Nothing worse than dropping a heavy weight on your foot,
but it will be painful.
It will keep you awake Monday night. On Tuesday,
you will play bridge with your friends as usual. Someone will cheat you, but
you will not discover who it is. So keep your stakes small, and don’t take any
risks. Wednesday you will have an unpleasant telephone call, possibly obscene.
Thursday you will eat a meal that does not agree with you, and you will wish that
you never ate it.”

Mrs. Winconis
fixed me with her dull gray eyes. “Is it really that bad?” she asked.

“It doesn’t
have to be. Remember that the cards can warn as well as foretell. If you take
steps to avoid these pitfalls, you will not necessarily have such a bad week.”

“Well, thank
God for that,” she said. “It’s worth the money just to know what to look out
for.”

“The spirits
think well of you, Mrs. Winconis,” I said, in my special voice. “They care for
you, and would not like to see you discomfited or harmed. If you treat the
spirits right, they will treat you right.”

She stood up.
“Mr. Erskine, I don’t know how to thank you. I’d best be getting along now, but
I’ll see you next week, won’t I?”

I smiled my
secret smile.
“Of course, Mrs. Winconis.
And don’t
forget your mystic motto for the week.”

“Oh, no, of course not.
What is it this week, Mr. Erskine?”

I opened a
tattered old book that I kept on the table next to me. “Your mystic motto for
this week is: ‘Guard well the
pips,
and the fruit
shall grow without let.’“