The manitou (9 page)

Underneath it,
the actual wooden surface of the table began to rise in a lump. I bit my tongue
until the sharp taste of blood flowed into my mouth. I was petrified with fear,
but I couldn’t turn away, couldn’t refuse to look. The power of the circle held
us all too strongly, and we could only sit there and stare at this terrifying
spectacle in front of us.

The black shiny
wood in the middle of the table formed into a human face, a man’s face, with
its eyes closed like a death mask.

“God,” said
MacArthur, “what is it?”

“Quiet,”
whispered Amelia. I could see her white, intense expression by the unnatural
light of the air. “Leave this to me.”

Amelia leaned
forward toward the frozen wooden face.

“Who are you?”
she asked, almost cajolingly. “What do you want with Karen Tandy?”

The face
remained still. It was a fierce, deeply lined face, the face of a powerful man
in his late thirties, with a distinctively hooked nose, and wide full lips.

“What do you
want?” asked Amelia again. “What is it you’re looking for?”

I could have
been mistaken, but I thought I saw the black wooden lips move into a quiet and
self-satisfied smile. The face stayed like that for a moment, and then the wood
seemed to flow and bend, and the features melted away, and soon there was
nothing there but the flat polished table.

The weird light
faded, and we were back in darkness.

“Harry,” said
Amelia. “For God’s sake put the lights on.”

I let go of
MacArthur’s hand, and Mrs. Karmann’s hand, and stood up. At that second, there
was a shattering crack, and a brilliant white flash of light, and the windows
smashed with a bomb-like explosion that sent glass spraying everywhere. The
drapes flapped and billowed in the icy wind from the snowy night outside, and
Mrs. Karmann screamed in terror.

I went to the
lights and snapped them on. Everything in the dining room had been thrown
around, as if a hurricane had come howling through. There were glasses and
decanters on the floor, paintings were hanging askew,
chairs
were knocked over. The cherrywood dining table had split from one side to the
other.

MacArthur stood
up and came crunching across the carpet through the litter of glass. “I’ve had
enough, man. From now on,
it’s
social security plates
for me, and nothing else.”

“Harry,” called
Amelia. “Help me get Mrs. Karmann through to the living room.”

Together we
carried the old lady into the next room and laid her down on the settee. She
was white and shivering, but she didn’t seem to be hurt. I went over to the
cocktail cabinet and poured her a large glass of brandy, and Amelia held it for
her to sip.

“Is it all
over?” she whimpered. “What happened?”

“I’m afraid
there’s a bit of damage, Mrs. Karmann,” I told her. “The windows broke, and
some of your glassware is smashed. I’m afraid the table’s cracked too. But it’s
a clean split. Maybe you can get it repaired.”

“But what was
it?” she said. “That face!”

Amelia shook
her head. MacArthur had found some cigarettes in a silver box, and he handed
her one. She lit it with trembling hands, and blew the smoke out in a long
unsteady stream.

“I don’t know,
Mrs. Karmann. I’m not that expert as a medium. But whatever it was, it was very
powerful. Usually, a spirit has to do what you tell it to do. This one was just
showing us that it didn’t give a damn what we thought of it.”

“But Amelia,” I
said. “Is that the thing that’s been giving Karen Tandy all those nightmares?”

She nodded. “I
think so. I mean, it’s so strong that it must be causing some kind of
vibrations in this apartment. And I expect that’s what Karen picked up in her
dreams. When you’re asleep, you’re very receptive to vibrations, even weak
ones, and these are much more powerful than any I’ve ever come across. There’s
something here that’s possessed of real magical strength.”

I lit a
cigarette myself and thought for a moment. “Did you say magical?” I asked Amelia.

“Sure. Any
spirit with that kind of control over itself would have to be the spirit of
somebody who knew about the occult when they were alive. It might even be a
person who’s still living today, and is able to float around as a spirit when
they’re asleep. It has been known.”

“Sounds like
bullshit t’me,” said MacArthur. “If I was Mrs. Karmann, I’d take that table
back and complain.”

I grinned. It
was good to have a real skeptic around, even if he wasn’t helping us much.

“Amelia,” I
said. “If you’re saying that what we saw tonight was the spirit of someone
magical, then there’s an interesting tie-in. I was reading my Tarot cards the
other evening, and I kept coming up with The Magician. No matter how I dealt or
redealt them, I always ended up with the same card.”

Amelia brushed
her long brown hair away from her eyes. “In that case, I guess it’s fair to
suppose that whoever is doing this, whether they’re alive or dead, is a
magician. Or somebody
like
a magician.”

“Witch doctor?”
suggested MacArthur.

“Could be.
I mean, he looked like some kind of African. Not
just because the
wood was black, but because of his lips,
remember
?”

Mrs. Karmann
sat up, clutching her glass of brandy. “Well, I’ll tell you what he reminded me
of,”

she
said weakly. “He reminded me of a cigar-store Indian.”

MacArthur
snapped his fingers. “That’s it – Indian.
The hooked nose,
right, and the lips, and the high cheekbones.
He’s not a witch doctor,
he’s a medicine man!”

Amelia
brightened up. “Listen,” she said. “I have quite a few books on Indians. Why
don’t we go back to my place and see what we can find out about medicine men?
Mrs. Karmann, do you think you’ll be all right now?”

“Oh, you go
ahead,” said the old lady. “I’ll stay across the hall with my neighbor Mrs.
Routledge, and Karen’s parents will be here later. If you think that any of
this can help poor Karen, then the sooner you get going the better.”

“Mrs. Karmann,”
said Amelia, “you’re an angel.”

“Not yet a
while, I hope,” smiled Mrs. Karmann.
“Not yet a while.”

Back in the
untidy jumble of Amelia’s apartment in the Village, surrounded by books and
magazines and tapestries and pictures and old hats and half a bicycle, we went
through a dozen volumes on Indian lore. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much about
medicine men, apart from stuff on buffalo magic and rain dances and battle
spells. Out of the eleven books, nothing gave us any clues about the wooden
death mask on Mrs. Karmann’s table.

“Maybe we’re
totally mistaken,” said Amelia. “Perhaps the spirit is somebody living today. I
mean, a hooked nose doesn’t have to be Indian. It could be Jewish.”

“Wait a
minute,” I told her. “Have you any other history books, or anything at all that
might contain a cross reference to Indians or medicine men?”

Amelia scuffled
through a couple of heaps of books, and came up with a history of early
settlements in the United States, and the first volume of a three-volume study
of New York. I went to the indexes and looked up Indians. The book on early
settlements contained nothing more than the usual generalizations about Indian
civilization. In those early days people were more in the mood for
land-grabbing than studying the indigenous culture of the natives. But the book
on New York had an illustration which gave me the biggest break I’d had since
I’d found Karen Tandy’s nightmare ship in the library.

I’d seen the
drawing before – in school books and history books – but it was only when I
came across it that night in Amelia Crusoe’s apartment that I realized just
what its implications were. It was a sketchy engraving of the tip of an island.
On the shore was a small cluster of houses, windmill, and a high-walled fort in
the shape of a cross of Lorraine. There were ships standing offshore, and
canoes and jolly-boats paddling around in the foreground.

The largest of
the ships were identical to Karen Tandy’s nightmare vessel and the picture’s
caption bore the connection out. It read: “Earliest known view of New
Amsterdam, 1651. The director-general of the Dutch West India Company lived in
this small but important settlement.”

I passed the
book over to Amelia. “Look at this,” I said. “This is the exact ship that Karen
Tandy dreamed about – and
look
, there are half a dozen
Indians in that canoe. This is what New York was like, three hundred and twenty
years ago.”

She studied the
picture carefully. “Harry,” she said, “this could be it. This could be just
what we’re looking for. Supposing there was an Indian medicine man in New York,
or New Amsterdam, all those centuries ago, and supposing that Karen actually
picked up his vibrations in the same place that he once used to live.”

“That’s right,”
put in MacArthur, scratching his beard. “There musta been an Indian village on
East Eighty-second Street. Mind you, it sometimes looks as though there still
is.”

I sat up and
stretched my aching back. “That whole business about ‘de boot’ would fit in
then. If this guy was a medicine man at the time the Dutch settled on
Manhattan, then the only words of European he’d be likely to know would be
Dutch. ‘De boot, mijnheer,’ would be his way of saying something about the
ship. And judging from Karen’s dream, he was afraid of the ship.

She told me it
seemed to her like an alien ship – almost like something from Mars. And I guess
that’s just how it would appear to an Indian.”

Amelia found a
cigarette in a crumpled pack and lit it. “But why is he so malignant?” she
asked.

“And how does
that tie in with Karen’s tumor? I mean, what’s the tumor all about?”

Unexpectedly,
MacArthur said: “I’ve found it.” He’d been looking through a large dusty
encyclopedia, and he marked the page and passed it over to me.

“Medicine Men,”
I read aloud, “were often powerful magicians who were said to be capable of
extraordinary supernatural acts. They were believed to be immortal, and if
threatened, could destroy themselves by drinking blazing oil, and be reborn at
any time or place in the future or past by impregnating themselves into the
body of a man, woman or animal.”

Amelia’s eyes
were wide. “Is that all it says?” she asked me.

“That’s all,” I
told her. “After that, it goes on to rain dances again.”

“Then that
means that Karen is...”

“Pregnant,” I
said, shutting the book.
“In a manner of speaking, she’s
about to give birth to a primitive savage.”

“But Harry,”
said Amelia, “what the hell can we do?”

MacArthur stood
up and went in search of some beer in the icebox. “All you can do,” he said,

“
is
wait until the medicine man hatches, then give him a dose
of blazing oil. That should get rid of him for you.”

“That’s
impossible,” I told him. “By the time that medicine man is ready to be born,
Karen Tandy will be dead.”

“I know,” said
MacArthur glumly, sipping beer. “But I don’t see what the hell else you could
do.”

I went across
to the phone. “Well, the first thing I’m going to do is call the hospital.
Maybe Dr. Hughes will have some ideas. At least we have a theory about it now,
which is a damn sight more than we had a couple hours ago.”

I dialed the
Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital, and asked for Dr. Hughes. When he answered, he
sounded even more tired than ever. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning,
and he must have been on duty all day.

“Dr. Hughes?
This is Harry Erskine.”

“What do you
want, Mr. Erskine? Have you got some news of your ghost?”

“I found a
medium, Dr. Hughes, and we held a seance tonight in Karen’s apartment. There
was some kind of manifestation – a face. All of us saw it. We’ve been checking
through books on Indian history and stuff like that, and we think it might be
an Indian medicine man of the seventeenth century. According to one of these
books – hold on – Indian medicine men ‘if threatened, could destroy themselves
by drinking blazing oil, and be reborn at any time or place in the future or
past by impregnating themselves into the body of a man, woman or animal.’ Do
you think that fits, Dr. Hughes?”

There was a
long silence on the other end of the telephone.

Then Dr. Hughes
said: “Mr. Erskine, I don’t know what to say. That almost fits too well. But if
it is true, what can anyone do to destroy such a creature? Dr. Snaith made more
tests this afternoon, and it’s absolutely clear that if we do anything to
remove or kill that fetus, then Karen Tandy will die. The thing has become an
integral part of
her own
nervous system.”

“How is she,
doctor? Is she conscious?”

“Just about,
but she’s not responding too well. If this fetus goes on growing at the same
rate, I can only say that she’ll be dead within two or three days. Dr. Snaith
thinks Tuesday.”

“How about the gynecological expert?”

“He’s as
baffled as the rest of us,” said Dr. Hughes. “He confirmed that the fetus
wasn’t a normal child, but he agreed with me that it has all the
characteristics of a fast-growing parasitic organism. If you believe it a
medicine man, Mr. Erskine, then your opinion is just as valid as any of the
opinions we’ve come up with here.”

Amelia came and
stood beside me and raised her eyebrows questioningly.

“How is she?”
she asked.

I put my hand
over the phone. “Bad. The doctors don’t think she’ll last until Tuesday.”

“But what about
the thing – the medicine man?” asked Amelia. “Does he think that will grow and
survive? I mean, Jesus...”