The manitou (3 page)

She stood there
for a moment with a faraway smile on her withered old face. “That’s beautiful,
Mr. Erskine. I shall repeat it every morning when I wake up. Thank you for a
wonderful, wonderful session.”

“The pleasure,”
I said, “is all
mine
.”

I showed her to
the elevator, taking care that none of my neighbors saw me in my ridiculous
green cloak and hat, and waved her a fond farewell. As soon as she had sunk out
of sight, I went back into my flat, switched on the light, blew out the
incense, and turned on the television. With any luck, I wouldn’t have missed
too much of Kojak.

I was just
going to the icebox to fetch myself a can of beer when the telephone rang. I
tucked the receiver under my chin, and opened up the beer as I talked. The
voice on the other end was female (of course) and nervous (of course). Only
nervous females sought the services of a man like The Incredible Erskine.

“Mr. Erskine?”

“Erskine’s the
name,
fortune-telling’s the game.”

“Mr. Erskine, I
wonder if I could come round and see you.”

“Of course, of course.
The fee is twenty-five dollars for
your ordinary glimpse into the immediate future, thirty dollars for a year’s
forecast,
fifty
dollars for a lifetime review.”

“I just want to
know what’s going to happen tomorrow.” The voice sounded young, and very
worried. I took a quick mental guess at a pregnant and abandoned secretary.

“Well, madam,
that’s my line. What time do you want to come?”

“Around nine?
Is that too late?”

“Nine is fine,
and the pleasure’s mine. Can I have your name please?”

“Tandy.
Karen Tandy. Thank you, Mr. Erskine. I’ll see you at
nine.”

It might seem
strange to you that an intelligent girl like Karen Tandy should seek help from
a terrible quack like me, but until you’ve been dabbling in clairvoyance for
quite a while, you don’t realize how vulnerable people feel when they’re
threatened by things they don’t understand. This is particularly true of
illness and death, and most of my clients have some kind of question about
their own mortality to ask. No matter how reassuring and competent a surgeon
may be, he can’t give people any answers when it comes to what is going to
happen if their lives are suddenly snuffed out.

It’s no good a
doctor saying, “Well, see here, madam, if your brain ceases to give out any
more electronic impulses, we’ll have to consider that you are lost and gone
forever.”

Death is too
frightening, too total,
too
mystical, for people to
want to believe it has anything to do with the facts of medicine and surgery.
They want to believe in a life after death, or at the very least in a spirit
world, where the mournful ghosts of their long-dead ancestors roam about in the
celestial equivalent of silk pajamas.

I could see the
fear of death on Karen Tandy’s face when she knocked at my door. In fact, it
was so strongly marked that I felt less than comfortable in my green cloak and
my funny little green hat. She was delicately boned and pointy-faced, the sort
of girl who always won races in high school athletics, and she spoke with a
grave politeness that made me feel more fraudulent than ever.

“Are you Mr.
Erskine?” she asked.

“That’s me.
Fortunes read, futures foretold. You know the rest.”

She walked
quietly into my room and looked around at the incense burner and the yellowed
skull and the close-drawn drapes. I suddenly felt that the whole set-up was
incredibly phony and false, but she didn’t seem to notice. I drew out a chair
for her to sit on, and offered her a cigarette.

When I lit it,
I could see that her hands were trembling.

“All right,
Miss Tandy,” I asked her. “What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know
how to explain it, really. I’ve been to the hospital already, and they’re going
to give me an operation tomorrow morning. But there are all kinds of things I
couldn’t tell them about.”

I sat back and
smiled encouragingly. “Why don’t you try telling me?”

“It’s very
difficult,” she said, in her soft, light voice. “I get the feeling that it’s
something much more than it seems.”

“Well,” I said,
crossing my legs under my green silk robe. “Would you like to tell me what it
is?”

She raised her
hand shyly to the back of her neck. “About three days ago – Tuesday morning I
think it was – I began to feel a kind of irritation there, at the back of my
neck. It swelled up, and I was worried in case it was something serious, and I
went to the hospital to have it looked at.”

“I see,” I said
sympathetically. Sympathy, as you can probably guess, accounts for ninety-eight
percent of anyone’s success as a clairvoyant. “And what did the doctors tell
you?”

“They said it
was nothing to worry about, but at the same time they seemed pretty anxious to
take it off.”

I smiled. “So
where do I come in?”

“Well, my
aunt’s been to see you once or twice. Mrs. Karmann, I live with her. She
doesn’t know I’m here, but she’s always said how good you are, and so I thought
I could try you myself.”

Well, it was
nice to know that my occult services were being praised abroad. Mrs. Karmann
was a lovely old lady who believed that her dead husband was always trying to
get in touch with her from the spirit world. She came to see me two or three
times a month, whenever the dear departed Mr. Karmann sent her a message from
beyond. It happened in her dreams, she always told me. She heard him whispering
in a strange language in the middle of the night, and that was the signal for
her to trot over to Tenth Avenue and spend a few dollars with me.
Very good business, Mrs. Karmann.

“You want me to
read your cards?” I asked, raising one of my devilishly arched eyebrows.

Karen Tandy
shook her head. She looked more serious and worried then almost any client I
could remember. I hoped she wasn’t going to ask me to do something that
required real occult talent.

“It’s the
dreams, Mr. Erskine. Ever since this bump has started growing, I’ve had
terrible dreams. The first night, I thought it was just an ordinary nightmare,
but I’ve had the same dream every night, and each night it’s been clearer. I
don’t even know if I want to go to bed tonight, because I just know I’m going
to have the same dream, and it’s going to be even more vivid, and very much
worse.”

I pulled
thoughtfully at the end of my nose. It was a habit of mine whenever I was
pondering something over, and probably accounted for the size of my schonk.
Some people scratch their heads when they think, and get dandruff. I just tug
at my hooter.

“Miss Tandy, a
lot of people have recurring dreams. It usually means that they’re worrying
about the same thing over and over. I don’t think it’s anything to get het up
about.”

She stared at
me with these big deep, chocolate-brown eyes. “It’s not that kind of dream, Mr.

Erskine, I’m
sure. It’s too real. With the ordinary sort of dream, you feel it’s all
happening inside your head. But with this one, it seems to happen all around
me, outside me, as well as inside my brain.”

“Well,” I said,
“supposing you tell me what it is.”

“It always
starts the same way. I dream I’m standing on a strange island. It’s winter, and
there’s a very cold wind blowing. I can feel that wind, even though the windows
are always closed in my bedroom. It’s night time, and the moon is up there
behind the clouds. In the distance, beyond the woods, I can see a river, or
perhaps it’s the sea. It’s shining in the moonlight. I look around me, and
there seem to be rows of dark huts. It looks like a kind of village, a sort of
primitive village. In fact, I know it’s a village. But there doesn’t seem to be
anyone around.

“Then I’m
walking across the grass toward the river. I know my way, because I feel I’ve
been living on this strange island all my life. I feel that I am frightened,
but at the same time I feel I have some hidden powers of my own, and that I am
probably capable of overcoming my fear. I am frightened of the unknown – things
that I don’t understand.

“I reach the
river and I stand on the beach. It is still very cold. I look across the water
and I can see a dark sailing ship anchored offshore. There is nothing in my
dream which suggests that it’s anything else but an ordinary sailing ship, but
at the same time I am very frightened by it. It seems strange and unfamiliar,
almost as though it’s a flying saucer from another world.

“I stand on the
beach for a long time, and then I see a small boat leave the sailing ship and
start rowing toward the shore. I cannot see who is in the boat. I start running
across the grass, back to the village, and then I go into one of the huts. The
hut seems familiar. I know I have been there before. In fact, I can almost
believe that it’s my hut. There is an odd smell in it, like herbs or incense or
something.

“I have a
desperately urgent feeling that there is something I must do. I don’t quite
know what it is. But I must do it, whatever it is. It is something to do with
the frightening people in the boat, something to do with this dark sailing
ship. The fear seems to grow and grow inside me until I can hardly think.
Something is going to come out of the ship which will have a terrible effect.

There is
something in that ship that is alien, something powerful and magical, and I am
desperate about it. Then I wake up.”

Miss Tandy was
screwing a handkerchief around and around in her fingers. Her voice was soft
and light, but it carried a prickly kind of conviction that made me distinctly
uneasy. I watched her as she spoke, and she seemed to believe that whatever she
had dreamed about was something that had actually happened to her.

I took off my
Green Bay Packers hat. It was a little incongruous, under the circumstances.

“Miss Tandy,
that’s a very odd dream. It is always the same – in every detail?”

“Exactly.
It’s always the same. There is always this fear of
what is coming out of the ship.”

“Hmm.
And you say it’s a sailing ship? Like a yacht,
something like that?”

She shook her
head. “It’s not a yacht. It’s more like a galleon – one of those old-time
galleons.

You
know,
three masts and lots of rigging.”

I pulled my
nose some more and thought hard. “Is there anything about this ship which gives
you a clue to what it is? Is there a name on it?”

“It’s too far
away. It’s too dark.”

“Does it fly
any flags?”

“There is a
flag, but I couldn’t describe it.”

I stood up and
went over to my bookcase of occult paperbacks. I pulled out Ten Thousand Dreams
Interpreted and a couple of others. I laid them out on the green baize table and
looked up one or two references about islands and ships. They weren’t helpful.
Occult textbooks are almost invariably unhelpful, and often they’re downright
confusing. But that doesn’t stop me from drawing a few dark and mysterious
conclusions about my clients’ nocturnal flights of fancy.

“Ships are
usually connected with some kind of travel, or the arrival of news. In your
case, the ship is dark, and frightening, which suggests to me that the news may
not be good news. The island represents your feelings of isolation and
fear,
in fact the island represents yourself.

Whatever this
news may be, it is a direct threat to you, as a person.”

Karen Tandy
nodded. I don’t know why, but I felt really guilty handing her out all this
bullshit.

There was
something genuinely defenseless and tense about her, and there she was with her
dark brown bobbed hair and her pale impish face, so serious and lost, and I
began to wonder if her dreams were really real.

“Miss Tandy,” I
said, “May I call you Karen?”

“Of course.”

“I’m Harry. My
grandmother calls me Henry, but no one else does.”

“It’s a nice
name.”

“Thank you.
Look, listen, Karen, I’m going to be frank with you. I don’t know why, but
there’s something about your case that doesn’t strike the same kind of bells as
the usual stuff I get. You know, old ladies trying to get in touch with their
Pekinese dogs in the happy kennels in the sky, that kind of garbage. There’s
something about your dream that’s – I don’t know, authentic.”

This didn’t
reassure her at all. The last thing that people want to be told is that their
fears are actually well founded. Even intelligent, educated people like to be
comforted with the thought that their night-time visitations are all a cozy
kind of bunkum. I mean, Jesus, if half the nightmares that people had were
actually real, they’d go straight off their heads. Part of my job was soothing
over my clients’ terror, and telling them that the things they dream about were
never going to happen.

“What do you
mean, authentic?”

I handed her
another cigarette. This time, when she lit it, her hands weren’t quite so
trembly.

“It’s like
this, Karen. Some people even though they’re not aware of it, have the
potential power to be mediums. In other words, they’re very receptive to all
the occult buzzfuzz that’s flying about in the atmosphere. A medium is like a
radio, or a television set. Because of the way he or she is made, she’s capable
of picking up signals that other people can’t, and she can interpret them into
sound or pictures.”

“What signals?”
she frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“There are all
kinds of signals,” I said. “You can’t see a television signal, can you? Yet
it’s around you, all the time. This whole room is crowded with images and
ghosts, pictures of David Brinkley and advertisements for Kellogg’s Cornflakes.
All you have to do to pick them up is have the right kind of receiver.”