Graham Masterton |
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The September Special Guest Story is by Graham Masterton Please feel free to visit Graham at: http://www.grahammasterton.co.uk/ |
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SPIRIT-JUMP I was waiting in the hallway to collect Lucy from nursery school when her teacher came up to me and said, “Mr. Erskine? Do you think we could have a private word?” Ms. Eisenheim pursed her lips. “I’m afraid that there were witnesses, Mr. Erskine, and not just children. Ms. Woolcott saw what happened too.” ***** I found Lucy sitting alone in a small classroom at the back of the building. The grey fall light made her look very small and pale and vulnerable, and her eyes were still red from crying. A young blonde-haired assistant was sitting at the next desk, reading a story about a girl who fell in love with a bear, and gradually changed into a bear herself. ***** ***** The next morning was sharp and sunny. Lucy was sitting in her room playing with her dolls house. Barbie had been trying to climb out of the upstairs window, and had got her bust stuck on the windowledge. I sat crosslegged on the floor watching Lucy while she played; and then at last I said, “These mistai.” “-ly,” added Karen. She was always correcting me. ***** Dr. Van Steen came around a half-hour later. He didn’t usually make housecalls, but he had known the Tandys even before Karen was born, and he was a close family friend as well as a physician. He was white-haired, immaculately dressed in black and grey, with shining steel-rimmed spectacles and shining patent leather shoes. ***** The following afternoon we took Lucy to Dr. Vogel’s clinic on Park Avenue. The city was covered in low, grey cloud, and it was raining. Lucy wore her red hooded raincoat and her little red rubbers, and carried her favourite doll with her, a grubby, floppy thing with the highly original name of Doll. “But she persists in this aggressive delusion that her classmates were responsible for killing babies, and that they not only deserved the whupping she gave them, they actually deserved to die. And she’s full of this Native American mumbo-jumbo. For instance “- he frowned down at his notepad “- do you have any idea what a mistai is?” “Sure. It’s an Indian ghost. It frightens people by tugging at their blankets at night. It’s kind of a messenger too, and it whispers in people’s ears and tells them what the spirits want them to do.” “Lucy said that the mistai told her to kill any yellow-hairs…though why she should have started by burning her Barbie doll, I really couldn’t say.” “The Indians set great store by doll-figures,” I said, “The Crow used to have a sun-dance doll made of beads and animal skin. If you danced with it, and stared it in the face, it would tell you where to find your enemy, so that you could kill him. To an Indian mystic, a doll-figure like Barbie wouldn’t be a toy…it would represent everything that white people had done to destroy his culture and his religion.” “You’re something of an expert, then?” said Dr. Vogel. “There was a time when I had to be.” “Meaning?” “Meaning that Karen and I have had encounters with Native American mysticism a couple of times in the past.” “And you think that Lucy’s present condition might have something to do with these encounters?” Karen nodded. “Since you say that she’s sane and intelligent, we can’t think of anything else that could be making her behave this way.” “I see,” said Dr. Vogel, although he looked deeply troubled. “You don’t think that Lucy’s behaviour could have been affected by your talking about this Native American mysticism in front of her, or when you thought you might have thought that she couldn’t hear you?” “Well…I wouldn’t mind running some more detailed tests,” said Dr. Vogel. “Maybe you could see how Lucy gets along and then bring her back in a couple of days.” “If you think it’ll do any good.” “I don’t know…do you have any better ideas?” “Not really. Except that I’m going to try to find out what it is that’s making Lucy behave this way, and once I know what it is, I might have a chance of getting rid of it.” “Well, be careful,” Dr. Vogel warned me. “Lucy’s very impressionable. Whatever you do, you shouldn’t give her the impression that you believe in any of this mysticism. You’ll run the risk of reinforcing her delusion, and make it doubly difficult for me to readjust her. I didn’t say anything. I was used to scepticism. Before Misquamacus first reared his head, I used to be a card-carrying member of the National Society of Sceptics myself. I used to pay the rent by telling fortunes to rich old ladies, under the name of the Incredible Erskine, and you needed to be a sceptic to make a living like that. If you really believed what the Tarot cards foretold, you’d go right out, put bricks in your pockets, and drown yourself in the East River. You really want to know when you’re going to lose your loved ones, and how? You really want to know when you’re going to die? Not for me, gracias. Since Karen had some into money, I had hung up my spangled cloak and put the Tarot out to grass, which was just as well, because I had seen things that still gave me nightmares, and I believed in ‘Native American mumbo-jumbo’ because it was just as real as I was. “I’ll give you a call,” I told Dr. Vogel, and stood up. “Thanks for taking a look at Lucy, anyhow.” “There’s just one more thing I wanted to ask her,” said Dr. Vogel. “How did she manage to set her dolls’ house alight? You said there was no sign that she was playing with matches.” “I just burned it,” said Lucy. Dr Vogel leaned forward and gave her an encouraging smile. “Yes, honey, we know you burned it. But how did you burn it?” Lucy blinked at him as if he were totally stupid. “I burned it,” she repeated. “Like this.” She looked over at his desk, and pointed her finger at it. There was a moment’s pause, and then a wisp of smoke started to rise from the papers on the blotter. Then there was the softest of flaring noises, and every paper on the desk burst into flame. Dr. Vogel jumped up. “For God’s sake! What the hell are you doing? Harry – there’s a fire extinguisher in the waiting-room – quick!” But flames were already leaping upward, and the desk’s leather top was beginning to shrivel like human skin. Dr Vogel picked up a folder and tried to beat the flames down, but all he succeeded in doing was fanning them even higher, and sending showers of sparks all over the carpets and the furniture. I managed to wrestle the fire-extinguisher free from its bracket on the waiting-room wall. I hurried back in and sprayed powder all over Dr Vogel’s desk, and onto the seat of his leather chair, which was already starting to smoulder. Dr. Vogel picked up his half charred report. “What the hell have you done?” he bellowed at Lucy. “Do you know how long it took to – For God’s sake, Harry! What the hell has she done?” Karen put her hands protectively on Lucy’s shoulders. “Dr. Vogel – please don’t curse. It was just an accident.” “Accident? That was no accident! She deliberately put out her finger and – and – look at this mess! This is going to take me days to sort out! Weeks!” “Come on Michael, quiet down,” I told him. “There’s no way Lucy could have started it.” “Then what?” He shouted. “A cigarette? I don’t smoke. A short-circuit? All I have is a battery-operated calculator. An Act of God? Or a Goddamned act of vandalism? Get her out of her, go on. I don’t want to see her again. Think yourself lucky if I don’t sue you for criminal damage.” I was trying to think of something to say that would calm Dr Vogel down when Lucy pointed her finger at his face. Again, there was a moment’s pause; but then Dr Vogel suddenly clamped his hands to his face and let out a terrible shout. His beard had burst into flame, hundreds of pinpricks of orange fire, like a burning brush. His hair suddenly caught fire, too, and then his shirt collar and his cuffs. He screamed and beat his face, stumbling from side to side in agony, but in only a few seconds he was blazing from the shoulders upward. I stripped off my leather jacket, bundled it over his head, and pushed him heavily to the floor, jarring my knee against the side of his desk. He writhed and struggled and kept on screaming, and I turned to Karen and said, “Get Lucy out of here, fast! And call an ambulance!” Dr. Vogel stopped screaming and began to whimper and shiver, I carefully lifted up my leather jacket, and the smoke that rose from underneath it smelled as if somebody had accidentally barbecued a cat. Dr Vogel’s face was unrecognisable – not just as Dr Vogel, but as a human being. His beard had burned down to fine black ash, his nose and lips were swollen and raw, and as he breathed out, smoke poured out of his nostrils. “Hurts,” he mumbled, quaking as if he were cold. “Hold on,” I told him, I was shivering almost as much as he was. “The medics won’t be long.” “Hurts, Harry,” he repeated. “Hurts like all hell.” “Don’t worry, Michael, they’ll soon give you something for the pain.” He tried to open his eyes, but the skin around his eyelids had fused together, so that his eyes looked like two roughly-peeled plums. “Did she really do this?” he asked me. “You mean Lucy? I don’t know. Maybe not Lucy, but whatever’s taken control of her.” “I’m going to die,” said Dr. Vogel. “This hurts too much. I’m going to die.” He didn’t say anything else. I stayed beside him until the paramedics arrived, and then I took one last look at him and left the office. Karen and Lucy were waiting for me in the reception area, talking to two police officers. “You’re this lady’s husband?” asked one of them. “Can you tell us exactly what happened in there?” “Dr. Vogel caught fire,” I told him. “I don’t know how it happened. He just spontaneously combusted, right in front of us.” “Do you have any idea how that could have happened?” the policeman asked me. I shook my head. But Lucy took hold of my hand and looked up at the officers, and said, “He was a yellow-hair.” The officers grinned at each other. But if only they had understood the significance of what Lucy had told them, they wouldn’t have been grinning. They would have been putting as much distance between themselves and Lucy as they possibly could. ***** “You realize how dangerous this could be?” said Karen, as I drew the drapes and blocked out the daylight. “Don’t you remember…your daughter was mine? I possessed your woman when she was conceived. This child is heiress to my heritage, not yours. She is my way back…into your world…and when I am returned…she will be my princess, and a worker of wonders, too…and her name will be Nepauz-had, which means Moon Goddess.” “Bullshit,” I told him. “If you so much as pluck one hair out of my daughter’s head, I’ll take your medicine bundle and shove it so far up your ass you won’t be able to sit down until the drying grass moon.” “What the hell are you talking about?” I snarled at him; although I had mostly got the picture already. He had used Lucy’s spirit as a way of returning to the material world, but now he needed real sinew and real muscle. In other word, I may have been thinning on top and seriously unfit, but he needed me. As Misquamacus spoke, Lucy’s eyes glowed an eerie phosphorescent blue, and her skin turned as white as plaster. I felt like snatching her away, but I knew enough about Misquamacus to realize how dangerous that could be. He was only able to make hiMs.elf visible by externalising some of Lucy’s spirit, and to try to tear her away could easily kill her. “We must go to the sacred place where I was born; and on that spot I must invoke the spirit of Ka-tua-la-hu. You will become nothing more than a spirit, a tasoom, as I am now, while I will regain the form in which I was in the great and magical days before the white devils came.” “You’re going to kill him?” asked Karen, desperately. “I am going to send his spirit on a journey to the Hanging Road.” “You can’t do that!” Karen insisted. “Then I will have to take the child; and bring her up as Nepauz-had; and teach her the ways of magic, until she has the power to release me.” When he said that, Lucy’s eyes blazed like two blowtorches, and she stretched open her mouth in a terrible grimace. Misquamacus was showing us that he could do anything he wanted with her. I’m not a brave person, never was. I dodged the draft and I would always rather conciliate than start slugging. But I knew then that I had to do something brave. If the price of Lucy’s survival was for me to take an early journey along the Hanging Road; then that was the price that I would have to pay. I was her father, it was my responsibility. I took hold of Karen’s hand and I felt calmer than I ever had before. “Okay, then,” I said. “Where’s this sacred place of yours?” “You will have to search for it in your maps and writings. Its name was Natukko, and it was here on this island.” “But supposing I can’t find it?” “You will have to find it; and you will have to be there tomorrow, when the moon rises. Otherwise, I will take Nepauz-had and you will never see her again.” Karen’s cheeks were stained with tears. “That’s impossible!” she shouted. “That’s impossible!” But there was a deep, sucking sound like an ocean breaker sliding back over a pebbled shore; and then the tiniest sparkle of static, and Misquamacus had vanished. The air in the room was cold that our breath smoked. Karen and I looked at each other; and then at Lucy. At that moment, Lucy’s eyes rolled up into her head and she collapsed onto the floor like a broken doll. ***** I spent a bad night, and I was already standing on the steps of the New York Public Library when it opened at ten. I hurried directly to the Main Reading Room, and logged myself onto a computer. I needn’t have rushed. By mid-afternoon I was still frowning and tapping away at the keyboard, while the fall sun moved around the room and lit up one section of grandiose paneling after another. I was almost ready to give up when I located a cook entitled Native Locations by Professor Harvey Fischer, from the Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was an extensive list of Native American place names in New York and New England, what they meant, and where they used to be. I surreptitiously ate torn-off pieces of a KFC chicken burger which I had smuggled into the library in my pocket, and searched with finger-lickin’ greasy keypads for Natukko. I found Pontanipo (meaning ‘cold water’); and Cowissewaschook (‘proud peak’); as well as Ammanoosuc (‘small fishing river’); and Uncanoonucks (‘hills that look like a woman’s breasts’). At last I located Natukko. It meant ‘clearing’ or ‘clearing ground’. A few more punches on the keyboard, and I found its exact location, rom a map of Manhattan Island dating from 1624, when it was owned by the Dutch West India Company. The map was signed ‘Pieter Van Huiven fecit’. I superimposed a modern streetmap of Manhattan on top of the old map, and apart from some minor distortions along the coastline, they matched surprisingly closely. There was only one problem that I could see. The clearing called Natukko was positioned on the Conrail tracks just where they came out of the tunnels at 96th Street. I sat back and stared at the screen in total despondency. When would the gods ever give me an even break? Here I was, trying to make the ultimate sacrifice to save Lucy’s life, and they couldn’t even give me a nice piece of lawn to be sacrificed on. I had to make my grand gesture on a goddamned railroad track. I was still sitting there with my chin in my hands when a pretty girl student came up to me. Her hair was long and braided, and she wore a navy-blue duffel coat. “Are you through with that terminal yet?” she asked me. “I have some really important work to do.” “Oh, sure. Sorry.” “There’s one thing you ought to remember about computers,” she said, putting down her bag of books. “What’s that?” She smiled. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.” “I’m sorry. I seem to be out of the loop here. Don’t you tell I’ve forgotten what?” “The one thing you ought to remember about computers.” I stood up, and brushed chicken burger crumbs from the chair. We seemed to be having one of those conversations that goes around and around in circles until it disappears up its own medicine-case holder. The girl said, “Computers are your friends.” She emphasised ‘your’ as if to imply that they weren’t her friends. I still didn’t understand it. I shrugged and said, “Well…sure, it’s all technology these days. Even reading a book.” But as I turned to leave she sat down, and lifted her left are so that the sleeve of her duffel coat dropped back a little way. Around her wrist was a bracelet of bones and beads, entwined with hair. An Alqonquin charm bracelet. She had already started to work, so I didn’t disturb her. Besides, I now had some inkling of what she had been trying to tell me. Computers are your friends. Meaning you, as a white man; because she was obviously Native American. As my old friend Singing Rock told me, everything in the natural world has its own spirit, its manitou, from the humblest stone by the side of the road to the greatest redwood in the north-western forests. In the great days before the white invasion of North American, Indian wonder-workers were able to summon almost every spirit, living, inanimate or dead, and use it to make their own magic. Water, fire, wind and earth, they all tumultuous natural power – and this power could be harnessed to strange and devastating effect. But the white men had brought their own brand of magic with them; and what Singing Rock had taught me was that every object made by whites had a spirit, too; a manitou of its own. A clock has a manitou, a typewriter has a manitou. And computers have manitous too. We had used a computer to beat Misquamacus when he had first appeared – not its calculating power, but its spirit, the essential meaning of what it was, and the creativity of the men who made it. In his oblique way, Singing Rock had found a way of reminding me that I was a white man living in a white man’s world, and that I was surrounded by influences and artefacts that could help me. ***** I arrived back home a little after five. Karen was looking drawn and worried, but Lucy was playing quite contentedly in her bedroom. “Well?” said Karen. “Well, I’ve found out where we’re supposed to go.” “You have?” She touched my sleeve. It was obvious that she didn’t know whether to sound pleased or sad. “I checked it with an old map. It couldn’t be more convenient, believe me. Right on the Contrail tracks at East 96th.” “You’re not serious?” “Unless some seventeenth-century Dutch mapmaker called Pieter van Huiven didn’t know his ass from his astrolabe, that’s exactly where Natukko was located. Didn’t I always say that Misquamacus was born on the wrong side of the tracks?” “Harry, do you have to make a joke of it?” “Goddamn it Karen, I’m as scared as you are. Scareder. But I think there’s a chance.” “What do you mean?” I told her about the girl in the library; and the feeling that she had given me that she was passing on a message from Singing Rock. “So what do you have to do?” Karen wanted to know. “I have to use my head, that’s what I have to do. I have to remember who I am, and who my people are; the same way that Misquamacus is always aware of what he is. I have to have a sense of tribe. I have to have a sense of belonging, Karen, that’s all. It’s something that most of us white people have long forgotten.” I went into the small, cluttered room that I liked to call my study. There was some pretty nostalgic stuff in there, from the days when I was still the Incredible Erskine, Fortunes Foretold, Futures Fixed, Destinies Dealt Out. Astrological charts, Tarot cards, mah-jongg tiles. A crystal ball that I had bought from an exquisitely beautiful hippie girl in the Café Reggio, in the Village, longer ago than I cared to recall (and was she so beautiful now?) On the top shelf of the bookcase, however, were more than a dozen well-thumbed books on Native American magic and mythology. I took down Spirit Transference and Soul Stealing by Louis Sola. It was a book I had turned to more than once. The last time I had put it back on the shelf, I had hoped I would never have to turn to it, ever again. I sat down and stated to read through it. Karen brought me a cup of coffee and stood beside me for a while, her hand on my shoulder. “How long before the moon comes up?” she asked me. I checked my watch. “Two-and-a-half hours.” “What are you looking for?” “I’m not sure. Anything that could give me an edge.” “Harry…are you sure this is the right way? Misquamacus can’t be that strong. Maybe you should try talking to Amelia…anybody. Maybe Lucy could be exorcized.” “Believe me, Karen, he’s serious. If I don’t do what he tells me, he’ll take her away. You couldn’t bear that, any more than me.” I reached up and squeezed her hand. “Listen,” I said, “thanks for the coffee; thanks for all of your caring. I love you. But right now I have to find some way of beating this son-of-a-bitch.” She left me in peace, God bless her, and I went back to Spirit Transference and Soul Stealing. There were pages of dry discussion about the realities of Indian magic, and whether it was really possibly for a spirit to return to the material world by possessing a live human being. ‘After a death that has been brought about by the breaking of a tribal taboo it may often be so weakened that it is unable to make its journey to the Happy Hunting Ground. This happened to the Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose at Beecher’s Island in Colorado in 1868, after he had unwittingly eaten food with a metal fork.’ Aha. This sounded like it. The last time we had managed to dismiss Misquamacus we had literally grounded his spirit like a lightning strike, using two metal forks. He had escaped, but his spirit had been discharged into the sky. I thought then that his life-force had been dispersed for ever. It just goes to show you, doesn’t it, that even a genius can make mistakes. I read more about poor old Roman Nose. ‘For years afterward, his voice was heard in the dead of the night begging for his spirit to be made whole again. It wasn’t until 1924 that the wonder-worker George Eagle Claw was able to give Roman Nose the peace that he so desperately wanted, in a very obscure Cheyenne ceremony known as spirit-jumping. In the ceremony of spirit-jumping, a wonder-worker will invoke the spirit of the moon, which is the mistress of time. He can alter time so that his spirit can jump out of his body for a few brief minutes and into an animal such as buffalo or an elk or even an inanimate object such as a tree or a rock. This leaves his body empty of spirit – thus allowing the weakened spirit to occupy it, and to bring back together all of its different aspects – its voice, its memory, its sense of duty, its wisdom and its pride. ‘In the wonder-worker’s body, the newly-restored spirit atones for breaking a taboo by making offerings to the Great One. He makes offerings of sacred objects and he sings a song of remorse. He is then allowed to leave the wonder-worker’s body and make his journey to eternal peace. ‘After the spirit has left, the wonder-worker leaves his temporary host and returns to his own body. ‘However, if the weakened spirit is himself a wonder-worker, he may find his own way back into the material world by occupying the body of an animal or someone who is much weaker than himself, such as a new-born infant. This accounts for several interesting cases over the past century of very young children speaking in strange languages and exhibiting uncharacteristic behaviour patterns, such as sudden bouts of violence. ‘In May, 1915, Nathan Toomey, a five-year-old from Casper, Wyoming, killed his six-year-old playmate with a heavy stone. When restrained, he began to shout in a language that the local doctor recognised as Kiowa. He transcribed it, and translated it, and it turned out that the boy (or whoever was possessing the boy) was promising to return to the world of men and seek his revenge on those who had murdered him. ‘He appeared to be possessed by the notorious Kiowa wonder-worker Black Crow, the chief magical adviser to the rebellious chief Satanta. Black Crow had been captured by the military and imprisoned in Texas. The military reported that he had committed suicide by leaping out of his cell window. ‘Once such spirits have possessed a human or an animal shape, they will attempt to increase their strength by ‘jumping’ to the body of an older and stronger person, until, in essence, they are ‘real’ again. They can only achieve this, however, by using the influence of the moon to force someone’s spirit out of their body, leaving it free for occupation. There are only two known cases of this happening, although there are rumours of many more. In each case it was claimed that the invading spirit forced the spirit of his victim to ‘jump’ into an inanimate object – in one case, a large rock; in another, a tree. ‘Some Native Americans say that this accounts for so-called ‘haunted trees’ and for poltergeist phenomena, such as chairs that move by themselves or gates that will never stay shut.’ I read the passage on spirit-jumping a second time and then closed the book. It looked as if Misquamacus was going to evict my spirit out of my body and set up home there himself. And what would happen to me? I’d wind up as a fence-post or a block of concrete, imprisoned for ever, with no hope of remission for good behaviour. It sounded ludicrous, but I had seen enough of Misquamacus’ magic to know that there was nothing amusing about it, and that he was capable of turning the most ordinary day in your life into a nightmare from which you could never wake up. ***** At 96th Street, the tunnels underneath Park Avenue come to an end, and – as the ground-level falls away, the trains continue on elevated tracks all the way to the Bronx. When I was a snotty nosed kid with holes in the seat of his jeans, my friends and I used to climb up onto the tracks and walk along them. We had a fantasy about making our way through the tunnels as far as Grand Central Station, fifty-four blocks underground, so that we could exit by way of the platforms. We tried twice, but we never managed to get any further than two or three hundred feet before we lost our nerve and made our way back again. The first time we were almost turned into puree of boy by a northbound commuter train and the second time we were caught by a railroad linesman, and we had to run for our lives, panting in panic as he came lumbering after us with a ten-pound hammer. We climbed out of the cab and crossed Park Avenue, each of us holding Lucy’s hand. The traffic booped and echoed all around us. Karen said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Harry. I really do.’ I suppose I should have said “trust me”, but I didn’t even trust myself. I just gave her my famous seasick grin, and said, “So do I.” I found the place where-all of those years ago – I used to climb onto the tracks. There was still a narrow gap in the fencing. I checked my watch. There were only six or seven minutes until the moon came up. I knelt down beside Lucy and said, “Listen, sugar plum fairy, we have to climb through this gap and over this wall onto the railroad. I know it’s going to be frightening, but we have to do it.” She looked back at me with those big dark eyes and I thought for a moment she was going to say that she was too frightened, that she wouldn’t do it. But then she gave me a wide, eerie smile, and nodded; and I knew then that even if I failed, and Misquamacus took my body, I couldn’t let him take Lucy. She said something, but just then a train went rattling and clashing past, and I couldn’t hear what it was. Only the last two words, “- white face.” I checked around to see if there were any police in sight. Then I pushed myself through the gap, and started to climb over the barrier. It was filthy – thickly coated in soot and grime. But once I was over the top I reached down for Lucy’s hand and said, “Come on up, sweetheart, I’ve got you.” Lucy looked up at me, and she still had that creepy smile on her face. Somewhere inside of her, Misquamacus must have been relishing this moment – the night when he regained an earthly body, and the night when he finally revenged himself on Karen and me. Another train clattered past, and I ducked my head and kept myself low against the barrier, in case anybody was looking in my direction. The lighted windows passed me by like all the days in my life, one after the other and then they were gone. I helped Lucy to climb up, and then Karen followed her, her trainers scuffling against the rusted steel. Then we dropped down onto the aggregate, and brushed ourselves down. Karen was shivering and her white cable-knit sweater as smudged with dirt. “Where to now?” she asked me. Lucy took hold of my hand. “I know the way,” she said. She stepped over the tracks and began to walk toward the tunnel, hopping from one greasy sleeper to the next, “Lucy, get off the track!” I shouted at her. But all she did was turn and laugh, and started to run. I went running after her, and caught hold of her hand. Lucy kept on smiling at me. “We’re almost here,” she said; and suddenly her voice became overlaid with the harsh, echoing tones of Misquamacus. “This is my birthplace, Nakkro, where I first saw light of day.” I thought I heard a train approaching, and I quickly looked around, but all I could see was the blackness of the tunnel. “Come on,” said Lucy, and carried on walking toward the tunnel. As we entered it, I could hear the late rush house bustling and beeping of traffic, and the faraway wailing of sirens. Normal, everyday noises. I kept hearing clattering sounds behind me, and glancing around, but they say that railroad workers never hear the train that hits them. Only a few feet into the tunnel entrance Lucy stopped, and pointed to the ground. “It’s here,” she announced triumphantly. “This is the sacred place where I was born.” She looked up to the sky. According to my watch, the moon must have risen, although it was impossible to see it behind all the buildings. “This is the place, and the time has come.” Together, Lucy and I stood between the tracks, facing each other. “What do we do now?” I asked her. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them they were glowing incandescent blue. Her shadow appeared to rise from the railroad tracks, like somebody climbing out of bed, and stand up right behind her, a dark and threatening outline of somebody tall, unnaturally tall, with a head-dress of skulls and tails. Lucy clapped her hands. “Let the spirit of the moon descend to help me! Let the moment be moved, let the night hold its breath! Spirit of the winds, blow away this man’s spirit out of his body and find a lodge for it in this woman’s body, along with hers, so they might live together for the rest of their days.” “What?” I demanded. “What the hell are you trying to do? You can’t lodge my spirit in Karen’s body!” “Would you rather be a cockroach, or a piece of wood? I am giving you what you always wanted. A closeness that other lovers can only dream of!” “Two spirits in one body? We’ll go insane in five minutes flat!” “It is my last act of mercy.” “You don’t have a merciful bone in your body. You’re going to take your revenge on all of us, that’s all. On me and Karen, by wrapping both of us up in the same body, and on Lucy, too, because Lucy won’t have a mommy and a daddy. Lucy will have nothing less than some screaming lunatic who has to be locked up.” Lucy closed her glowing blue eyes, as if to indicate that she wasn’t going to discuss it any more. “Spirit of the moon, I worship you and serve you. Hold back the night for me, for the space of five long heartbeats. Spirit of wind, blow this man’s spirit out of his body, leave him empty. Find him a home in the woman’s body, two spirits in one earthly lodge.” Behind us, the night began to darken, and the wind began to rise. Scraps of newspaper and gum wrappers blew around the tracks, along with a fine stinging grit. I had to shield my eyes with my uprail arm. Above the clustering of the wind, Lucy was starting to scream – a harsh, high-pitched scream that was filled with unbridled fury. “Spirit of wind, blow this man’s spirit out of his body! Leave him empty! Spirit of moon! Command the night to hold its breath!” At first, I didn’t think that anything was going to happen. After all, Misquamacus was a seriously weakened spirit, and his only physical presence was that of a four-year-old girl. But then suddenly everything grew darker still. It was that darkness that closes in on you when you’re just about to faint – except that I didn’t faint. I was aware of everything that was going on. Lucy’s voice grew slow and slurred. “Spppirrriittt offff wiiiinnnndddd.” Soon it grew so slow that I couldn’t even understand it, and then it stopped. In fact, everything stopped. There was total silence, and nobody moved. Newspapers that had been blown into mid-air over the railroad tracks remained where they were, in mid-air. Misquamacus had done it. For me, at least, he had temporarily arrested time. It was then that two things happened almost at once. I began to feel a tugging sensation inside of my head, almost as if somebody were trying to pull out my brain by the roots. I began to feel everything that I ever was being dragged out of me. My boyhood, my school days, my first pet dog. My mother, my father, my Uncle Jim, looning and laughing on my fifteenth birthday. Bicycle rides – baseball games – girls in starched petticoats and girls in pick-checkered swimsuits – trips to Coney Island and Brighton Beach – sunshine, cotton candy, electric storms – they were all being drawn out of me like brightly-coloured picture-cards being sucked into a Hoover. My soul was going; my spirit was going. Dear God, I was dying. But the other thing was: a train was approaching, its lights reflecting from the tracks. It was momentarily frozen in time, but in the next few seconds, when Misquamacus had taken over my body, it would come out of the tunnel and bear down on Lucy and that was going to be the bastard’s real revenge, to wrap us together in the same body, and to kill our daughter, too. At that moment, with my spirit being forcibly wrenched out of my body, I could have tried anything, with no guarantee of whether it would work. I could have run to Lucy and pushed her off the railroad tracks, but then I would have been saving Misquamacus, too. I could have accepted my fate, and let Misquamacus transfer my spirit into Karen’s body, and faced a life of complete madness. Or – I could have remembered what Singing Rock had been trying to tell me – through the dark-haired girl in the library. Computers are your friends. Computers are your friends. My spirit was being twisted out of my body like the guts out of a cod. It was like dying, only it was worse than dying, because I knew that I was still alive. I rose up, floating, and I could see my body standing on the railroad tracks. I could see Lucy, with her arms outstretched, her eyes ablaze, and the dark shadow of Misquamacus hovering above her. I had left my own body now. It was the weirdest experience of my whole life. I was conscious, I was wide awake, and yet I had been pulled right out of myself, so that I was weightless, floating, with no substance at all. I felt a wind catching me; like a kite being tugged, I spun, and turned, and I knew that Misquamacus had directed the wind manitou to take me to Karen. I could see her, motionless, her back against the wall, frozen in time like the whole of Park Avenue was frozen in time. I was blown nearer and nearer, and I tried to twist and spin myself away. If I ever entered Karen’s body, she and I would both go mad, and die the kind of death that even schizophrenics couldn’t understand. Computers are your friends. I twisted around just once more, and there was the train, pausing in time. A Metro North commuter service, on its way out to Westchester. A train with computers. A train with a soul. A train with its very own manitou, its white manitou, composed of every design that has ever been drawn for it, and every inch of engineering that has ever gone into it. A modest by direct descendant of the trains that had howled their way across the Great Plains, and had helped to bring about the final downfall of the Native American Indian. And I prayed to that train. I prayed to it. “Help me. Take me, I want to be part of you, rather than anything else. I want to meld into your metal and sparkle in your kilobytes. You have spirit; you have a manitou. Help me.” But the wind was blowing more fiercely now, and I felt myself being buffeted across the tracks to the place where Karen was standing. She was still motionless, and her face was rigid with fright. I didn’t know how long Misquamacus had managed to hold back the night, but there couldn’t be very much time left, only seconds. If I didn’t find a host by then, my spirit would probably scatter and disperse, the same way that Misquamacus’ spirit had scattered and dispersed. I felt myself tilting. Karen was even closer. I tried to twist myself around, and all the time I prayed to that train, I prayed to that train, take me, you son-of-a-bitch, a train is stronger than wind and stronger than water and stronger than all of the wonder-workers ever assembled together, from Ute to Iroquois, so give me a break, will you, and take me. Karen suddenly turned and looked up at me. I didn’t know whether she could see me or not, but her mouth was open and she looked surprised. At the same moment the train started rolling towards us, and the traffic started honking and the sky started moving, and everything was back to normal. Except that I was jolted away from Karen and found myself plunging into aluminium and plastics. I was literally yanked into that train’s conscious mind; and instead of finding myself shoulder-to-shoulder with Karen, two spirits jostling each other in the same body till death do us part, I found myself Cool and clean and calculating; full of switching information and speed limits and braking distances. I was the train and the train was me, and we were rocking and swaying along the track past 97th Street, and there was Jesus! a child on the track, and a man, too; it was Lucy and it was me. I saw Karen run across the track, snatch up Lucy in her arms, and tumble sideways in the aggregate. I saw my own body, standing in front of the train, which was me. Behind me, I saw the blackest of boiling shadows, which was Misquamacus. His arms were uplifted, and his face was boiling with serpents. This was what he was, the servant of the Great Old Ones, no longer a tribal wonder-worker but a way through which the ancient and evil spirits of America could find their way back to reality; and destroy us all. He began to billow toward my abandoned body, like a black silk cover thrown over a bed. But I thought to myself; I’d rather kill him than let him do that. And because I had the mind of a train and the weight of a train, I short-circuited the speed controls and the train began to pick up speed, pick up speed, until it was clattering toward my teetering body at 65 mph. The black shadow of Misquamacus’ spirit funnelled itself into my body like smoke down a drain. I staggered once, and then turned toward the accelerating train. But it was too late. Inside the train’s computers, my spirit was running like liquid fire through every speed control, through every braking check, and there was nothing on earth that could have stopped that mother from hitting me directly in the chest, so that I went spinning and cartwheeling off the track, with blood spraying like a pinwheel, until I came to rest on the opposite side of the tracks. I closed my (metaphorical) eyes and shut the train down. Its brakes squealed and howled like a herd of protesting pigs, and showers of orange sparks cascaded from its wheels. Even as it slid past my crumpled body, however, I felt something change. A victory won; a burden lifted. From out of my body, a shadow now, a shadow as dark and as vengeful as anything you could ever imagine. Inside the train’s computer, I could only perceive it through the black and white video system, but this is what I saw: A creature that was half-man and half-reptile. A man who had bargained so often with the gods that they had created him, in their own image. The image rose out of my body and stood for a long time looking down at me. Then, quite nonchalantly, it took hold of the left rail and the right rail, and clutched them both. “Weejoo-suk,” it whispered in Alqonquian. The wind is blowing. There was a sharp scurrying burst of paper and grit, and then the black shadow was lifted away, flying out of the tunnel entrance and high over the streets of Manhattan like a bat or a bird or a memory of times that can never be redeemed. Way up in the sky, it caught the light of the rising moon, and the spirit of the moon was not in a forgiving mood. Misquamacus had promised her an offering, a sacrifice, and now he could offer her nothing but his own shadow. The shadow flared like a loose-woven shawl that has trailed accidentally in the fire; and blazed for a moment; and fell from the sky as a shower of light grey ashes. They sifted across the railroad tracks, and you would have been forgiven for thinking that snow was early this year. ***** I opened my eyes. Karen was standing next to me, and Lucy, too. Blue and red lights were flashing. A paramedic was kneeling next to me, fixing an intravenous drip. I looked down and saw that my left leg was sticking out at right-angles. I felt totally unreal. I didn’t know whether I was a man or a train. But I could see the train twenty feet away, standing stationary, with six or seven cops and railroad personnel standing around it. “You’re going to be fine,” the paramedic told me. “Broken leg, fractured wrist, possible ruptured spleen, multiple bruising. Otherwise, you’re great for somebody who got hit by a train.” Lucy bent over and gave me a wet kiss. I looked up into those big dark eyes of hers and I’m sure that she understood something about what had happened; although I shall never know what. “I love you, daddy,” she said, and this time she meant it. “I love you too, sugar plum fairy.” Karen bent over me and kissed me, too. “What happened?” she whispered. “What did you do?” “I didn’t let the wind take me where it wanted to, that’s all. The train was stronger than the wind.” “You mean...?” “For those few seconds, I was part of the train. The thinking park. Misquamacus should have known better than to mess with modern technology.” Karen turned away for a moment. I didn’t mind. She had a beautiful profile. But then she turned back and said, “Will be ever leave us alone?” And there were tears in her eyes. Lucy was holding a police officer’s hand. She was swinging one leg and chanting. “Weksit-paktesk, weskit-paktesk, nayew neechnw, weskit-paktesk.” I squeezed Karen’s hand. I simply didn’t know what to say. Copyright (c) by Graham Masterton, 2014 |
About SPIRIT-JUMP: It features Harry Erskine the Tarot-card reader, who first appeared in THE MANITOU and it is something of a rarity because it has only had extremely limited publication. Read about Harry again in the forthcoming Manitou novel PLAGUE OF THE MANITOU which will be published by Severn House in a few months' time. About Graham Masterton Graham Masterton has published over one hundred novels, including thrillers, horror novels, disaster epics, and sweeping historical romances. He was editor of the British edition of Penthouse magazine before writing his debut horror novel The Manitou in 1975, which was subsequently filmed with Tony Curtis, Susan Strasberg, Burgess Meredith and Stella Stevens. One of his best sellers, Blind Panic, was published by Leisure Books in January 2010, and tells of a final devastating conflict between the characters that first appeared in The Manitou – Harry Erskine the phony mystic and Misquamacus the Native American wonder-worker. After the initial success of The Manitou, Graham continued to write horror novels and supernatural thrillers, for which he has won international acclaim, especially in Poland, France, Germany, Greece and Australia. He has won numerous awards, including two Silver Medals from the West Coast Review of Books, a tombstone award from the Horror Writers Network, another gravestone from the International Horror Writers Guild, and was the first non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for bestselling horror novel. The Chosen Child (set in Poland) was nominated best horror novel of the year by the British Fantasy Society. Several of Graham’s short stories have been adapted for TV, including three for Tony Scott’s Hunger series. Jason Scott Lee starred in the Stoker-nominated Secret Shih-Tan. See all of Graham's books HERE. Graham Masterton has his own page on Amazon HERE. Visit the Graham Masterton Official Website HERE or visit his Messge Board HERE. Facebook HERE and Twitter HERE
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