The Manitou Read online

  The Manitou

  Graham Masterton

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  “On being ask’d what ye Daemon look’d like,

  the antient Wonder-Worker Misquamacus covered

  his face so that onlie ye Eyes look’d out,

  and then gave a very curious and Circumstantiall

  Relation, saying it was sometimes small and

  solid, like a Great Toad ye Bigness of many

  Ground-Hogs, but sometimes big and cloudy,

  with no Shape, though with a face which had

  Serpents grown from it.”

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Introduction

  by

  Bernhardt J. Hurwood

  Ordinarily readers of fiction do not find introductions when they settle down with what they are expecting to be a good book—especially when it comes to novels of spine-chilling suspense. But then, The Manitou is no ordinary novel.

  In case you don’t know what a Manitou is, I have no intention of diminishing the plot’s shock value; you will find out soon enough. Let it suffice for me to say, as one who has had considerable experience exploring the darker side of the supernatural, that you are in for a fair share of shudders and chills as you plunge into the tale that lies ahead.

  If you have any qualms about the unknown, about unlocking doors that unleash terrors which might creep against your will into your nightmares, then put this book down and rush out into the sunshine. Now! Like some mind-gripping drug, it has the uncanny ability to seize you and hold you firmly in its clutches from the moment you begin until you drop the book from your trembling fingers after you have finally finished the last page.

  When a charming, witty, and sophisticated fellow like author Graham Masterton succeeds in conjuring up such dreadful horrors from the back recesses of his mind, I wonder about the rest of us. He has succeeded in weaving such a persuasive web of terror and suspense against a rather commonplace and familiar background that despite our desire to believe that such things cannot be, there remains a gnawing doubt, an uncomfortable tendency to feel a creeping fear. Perhaps he has discovered something that he wishes he never had—like Pandora.

  It is very easy when you start reading The Manitou to assume that it is just another novel of mystery and suspense, but like burning phosphorus, once ignited, it sticks and envelops you, and refuses to stop until you have been consumed.

  For true horror buffs The Manitou has a multi-pronged advantage. By combining elements like a master chef, the author has concocted something with a flavor that is vaguely familiar, enough to make you devour it voraciously, and afterward come to the realization that you have tasted something quite unique.

  And now, to give you something to think about—here is a fact that may seem totally irrelevant, but that I recommend you stow away in your file of miscellaneous information. Like MSG it may enhance the flavor later. Fact: several years ago a fifteen-year-old Japanese boy developed what doctors thought was a tumor in his chest. The larger it grew, the more uncharacteristic it appeared. Eventually it proved to be a human fetus. This actually happened, whether Graham Masterton knew about it or not.

  Whereas Rosemary’s Baby gave us the minatory spawn of woman and Satan, and The Exorcist was a titanic clash between the forces of good and evil, The Manitou presents us with elements of both—plus the added ingredient of an intelligent menace that equally renders helpless the powers of the cross and modern science. It takes the familiar concepts of horror and manipulates the reader with a totally shocking and unique combination of terror woven into a solid suspense yarn.

  —Bernhardt J. Hurwood

  Prelude

  The phone bleeped. Without looking up, Dr. Hughes sent his hand across his desk in search of it. The hand scrabbled through sheaves of paper, bottles of ink, week-old newspapers and crumpled sandwich packets. It found the telephone, and picked it up.

  Dr. Hughes put it to his ear. He looked peaky-faced and irritated, like a squirrel trying to store away its nuts.

  “Hughes? This is McEvoy.”

  “Well? I’m sorry Dr. McEvoy, I’m very busy.”

  “I didn’t meant to interrupt you in your work, Dr. Hughes. But I have a patient down here whose condition should interest you.”

  Dr. Hughes sniffed and took off his rimless glasses.

  “What kind of condition?” he asked. “Listen, Dr. McEvoy, it’s very considerate of you to call me, but I have paperwork as high as a mountain up here, and I really can’t—”

  McEvoy wasn’t put. off. “Well, I really think you’ll be interested, Dr. Hughes. You’re interested in tumors, aren’t you? Well, we’ve got a tumor down here to end all tumors.”

  “What’s so terrific about it?”

  “It’s sited on the back of the neck. The patient is a female Caucasian, twenty-three years old. No previous record of tumorous growth, either benign or malignant.”

  “And?”

  “It’s moving,” said Dr. McEvoy. “The tumor is actually moving, like there’s something under the skin that’s alive.”

  Dr. Hughes was doodling flowers with his ballpen. He frowned for a moment, then said: “X-ray?”

  “Results in twenty minutes.”

  “Palpitation?”

  “Feels like any other tumor. Except that it squirms.”

  “Have you tried lancing it? Could be just an infection.”

  “I’ll wait and see the X-ray first of all.”

  Dr. Hughes sucked thoughtfully at the end of his pen. His mind flicking back over all the pages of all the medical books he had ever absorbed, seeking a parallel case, or a precedent, or even something remotely connected to the idea of a moving tumor. Maybe he was tired, but somehow he couldn’t seem to slot the idea in anywhere.

  “Dr. Hughes?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here. Listen, what time do you have?”

  “Ten after three.”

  “Okay, Dr. McEvoy. I’ll come down.”

  He laid down the telephone and sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. It was St. Valentine’s Day, and outside in the streets of New York City the temperature had dropped to fourteen degrees and there was six inches of snow on the ground. The sky was metallic and overcast, and the traffic crept about on muffled wheels. From the eighteenth story of the Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital, the city had a weird and luminous quality that he’d never seen before. It was like being on the moon, thought Dr. Hughes. Or the end of the world. Or the Ice Age.

  There was trouble with the heating system, and he had left his overcoat on. He sat there under the puddle of light from his desk-lamp, an exhausted young man of thirty-three, with a nose as sharp and pointy as a scalpel, and a scruffy shock of dark brown hair. He looked more like a teenage auto mechanic than a national expert on malignant tumors.

  His office door swung open and a plump, white-haired lady with upswept red spectacles came in, bearing a sheaf of paper and a cup of coffee.

  “Just a little more paperwork, Dr. Hughes. And I thought you’d like something to warm you up.”

  “Thank you, Mary.” He opened the new file that she had brought him, and sniffed more persistently. “Jesus, have you seen this stuff? I’m supposed to be a consultant, not a filing clerk. Listen, take this back and dump it on Dr. Ridgeway. He likes paper. He likes it better than flesh and blood.”

  Mary shrugged. “Dr. Ridgeway sent it to you.”

  Dr. Hughes sto
od up. In his overcoat, he looked like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. He waved the file around in exasperation, and it knocked over his single Valentine’s card, which he knew had been sent by his mother.

  “Oh ... Okay. I’ll have a look at it later. I’m going down to see Dr. McEvoy. He has a patient he wants me to look at.”

  “Will you be long, Dr. Hughes?” asked Mary. “You have a meeting at four-thirty.”

  Dr. Hughes stared at her wearily, as though he was wondering who she was.

  “Long? No, I don’t think so. Just as long as it takes.”

  He stepped out of his office into the neon-lit corridor. The Sisters of Jerusalem was an expensive private hospital, and never smelled of anything as functional as carbolic and chloroform. The corridors were carpeted in thick red plush, and there were fresh-cut flowers at every corner. It was more like the kind of hotel where middle-aged executives take their secretaries for a weekend of strenuous sin.

  Dr. Hughes called an elevator and sank to the fifteenth floor. He stared at himself in the elevator mirror, and he considered he was looking more sick than some of his patients. Perhaps he would take a vacation. His mother had always liked Florida, or maybe they could visit his sister in San Diego.

  He went through two sets of swing doors, and into Dr. McEvoy’s office. Dr. McEvoy was a short, heavy-built man whose white coats were always far too tight under his arms. He looked like a surgical sausage. His face was big and moonlike and speckled, with a snub little Irish nose. He had once played football for the hospital team, until he had fractured his kneecap in a violent tackle. Nowadays, he walked with a slightly over-dramatized limp.

  “Glad you came down,” he smiled. “This really is very peculiar, and I know you’re the world’s greatest expert.”

  “Hardly,” said Dr. Hughes. “But thanks for the compliment.”

  Dr. McEvoy stuck his finger in his ear and screwed it around with great thoughtfulness and care. ‘The X-rays will be here in five or ten minutes. Meanwhile. I can’t think what else I can do.”

  “Can you show me the patient?” asked Dr. Hughes.

  “Of course. She’s in my waiting room. I should take your overcoat off if I were you. She might think I brought you in off the street.”

  Dr. Hughes hung up his shapeless black coat, and then followed Dr. McEvoy through to the brightly lit waiting room. There were armchairs and magazines and flowers, and a fish tank full of bright tropical fish. Through the venetian blinds, Dr. Hughes could see the odd metallic radiance of the afternoon snow.

  In a corner of the room, reading a copy of Sunset, was a slim dark-haired girl. She had a squarish, delicate face—a bit like an imp, thought Dr. Hughes. She was wearing a plain coffee-colored dress that made her cheeks look rather sallow. The only clue to her nervousness was an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts, and a haze of smoke in the air.

  “Miss Tandy,” said Dr. McEvoy, “this is Dr. Hughes. Dr. Hughes is an expert on conditions of your kind, and he would just like to take a look at you and ask you a few questions.”

  Miss Tandy laid aside her magazine and smiled. “Sure,” she said, in a distinctive New England accent. Good family, thought Dr. Hughes. He didn’t have to guess if she was wealthy or not. You just didn’t seek treatment at the Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital unless you had more cash than you could raise off the floor.

  “Lean forward,” said Dr. Hughes. Miss Tandy bent over, and Dr. Hughes lifted the hair at the back of her neck.

  Right in the hollow of her neck was a smooth round bulge, about the size and shape of a glass paperweight. Dr. Hughes ran his fingers over it, and it seemed to have the normal texture of a benign fibrous growth.

  “How long have you had this?” he asked.

  “Two or three days,” said Miss Tandy. “I made an appointment as soon as it started to grow. I was frightened it was—well, cancer or something.”

  Dr. Hughes looked across at Dr. McEvoy and frowned.

  “Two or three days? Are you sure?”

  “Exactly,” said Miss Tandy. “Today is Friday, isn’t it? Well, I first felt it when I woke up on Tuesday morning.”

  Dr. Hughes squeezed the tumor gently in his hand. It was firm, and hard, but he couldn’t detect any movement.

  “Does that hurt?” he asked.

  “There’s a kind of a prickling sensation. But that’s about all.”

  Dr. McEvoy said: “She felt the same thing when I squeezed it.”

  Dr. Hughes let Miss Tandy’s hair fall back, and told her she could sit up straight again. He pulled up an armchair, and found a tatty scrap of paper in his pocket, and started to jot down a few notes as he talked to her.

  “How big was the tumor when you first noticed it?”

  “Very small. About the size of a butter-bean, I guess.”

  “Did it grow all the time, or only at special times?”

  “It only seems to grow at night. I mean, every morning I wake up and it’s bigger.”

  Dr. Hughes made a detailed squiggle on his piece of paper.

  “Can you feel it normally? I mean, can you feel it now?”

  “It doesn’t seem to be any worse than any other kind of bump. But sometimes I get the feeling that it’s shifting.”

  The girl’s eyes were dark, and there was more fear in them than her voice was giving away.

  “Well,” she said slowly. “It’s almost like somebody trying to get comfortable in bed. You know—sort of shifting around, and then lying still.”

  “How often does this happen?”

  She looked worried. She could sense the bafflement in Dr. Hughes, and that worried her.

  “I don’t know. Maybe four or five times a day.”

  Dr. Hughes made some more notes and chewed his lip.

  “Miss Tandy, have you noticed any changes in your own personal condition of health over the past few days—since you’ve had this tumor?”

  “Only a little tiredness. I guess I don’t sleep too well at night. But I haven’t lost any weight or anything like that.”

  “Hmm.” Dr. Hughes wrote some more and looked for a while at what he’d written. “How much do you smoke?”

  “Usually only half a pack a day. I’m not a great smoker. I’m just nervous right now, I guess.”

  Dr. McEvoy said: “She had a chest X-ray not long ago. She had a clean bill of health.”

  Dr. Hughes said: “Miss Tandy, do you live alone? Where do you live?”

  “I’m staying with my aunt on Eighty-second Street. I’m working for a record company, as a personal assistant. I wanted to find an apartment of my own, but my parents thought it would be a good idea if I lived with my aunt for a while. She’s sixty-two. She’s a wonderful old lady. We get along together just fine.”

  Dr. Hughes lowered his head. “Don’t get me wrong when I ask this, Miss Tandy, but I think you’ll understand why I have to. Is your aunt in a good state of health, and is the apartment clean? There’s no health risk there, like cockroaches or blocked drains or food dirt?”

  Miss Tandy almost grinned, for the first time since Dr. Hughes had seen her. “My aunt is a wealthy woman, Dr. Hughes. She has a full-time cleaner, and a maid to help with the cooking and entertaining.”

  Dr. Hughes nodded. “Okay, we’ll leave it like that for now. Let’s go and chase up those X-rays, Dr. McEvoy.”

  They went back into Dr. McEvoy’s office and sat down. Dr. McEvoy took out a stick of chewing gum and bent it between his teeth.

  “What do you make of it, Dr. Hughes?”

  Dr. Hughes sighed. “At the moment, I don’t make anything at all. This bump came up in two or three days and I’ve never come across a tumor that did that before. Then there’s this sensation of movement. Have you felt it move yourself?”

  “Sure,” said Dr. McEvoy. “Just a slight shifting, like there was something under there.”

  “That may be caused by movements of the neck. But we can’t really tell until we see the X-rays.”

  They sat in silenc
e for a few minutes, with the noises of the hospital leaking faintly from the building all around them. Dr. Hughes felt cold and weary, and wondered when he was going to get home. He had been up until two a.m. last night, dealing with files and statistics, and it looked as though he was going to be just as late tonight. He sniffed, and stared at his scuffy brown shoe on the carpet.

  After five or six minutes, the office door opened and the radiologist came in with a large brown envelope. She was a tall negress with short-cut hair and no sense of humor at all.

  “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.”