Burial Read online

  I raised my hand emphatically. ‘Mr Vaizey, believe me, this has nothing to do with Mrs Greenberg.’

  ‘What other psychic manifestations are you handling right now, apart from Mrs Greenberg’s?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘Like what?’ Martin Vaizey challenged me.

  ‘Well, just one, as a matter of fact. A lady on East 86th Street’

  ‘And what precisely is the nature of the psychic manifestation on East 86th Street?’

  I glanced at the face on the Velazquez book. It was still whispering, still opening and closing its eyes. ‘Her piano plays by itself. At least, she thinks it plays by itself.’

  Martin Vaizey was silent for a while, watching me. I glanced at him two or three times, trying to smile. I don’t think I had much success.

  ‘You want to tell me who he is, our spirit friend?’ he suggested, at last.

  ‘Can you take off the book jacket? Just to make sure.’

  Martin Vaizey carefully picked up the book, and held it up facing me at eye-level. Then he slipped off the illustrated jacket and let it drop to the floor. I was confronted with the same living death-mask, only this time it faced me at the same height as the real man might have faced me, and its skin was a pale marble-effect cream colour, the colour of the book’s inside binding. The gold-blocked name Velazquez encircled its forehead like a headband. Its eyes blindly blinked at me, its mouth kept on whispering.

  There was no doubt about it. No doubt at all. I was filled with the most unmanageable mixture of grief and cowardice.

  The first time I had seen this face was on a slushy spring day nearly twenty years ago, when I had gone to La Guardia Airport to meet a flight from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

  The first time I had seen this face I hadn’t known what butchery lay ahead of me; what cans of writhing spiritual worms were going to be opened up.

  The first time I had seen this face, I hadn’t understood magic, or death beyond death, or what total shit-freezing terror was.

  It was Singing Rock, real-estate developer, part-time medicine man — dead now, and dead for a very long time.

  Singing Rock went on whispering ‘… clear the land from sea to … back to what it was … any idea what …’

  ‘You want to tell me who he is?’ Martin Vaizey repeated, more gently. It was only then that I realized I had tears in my eyes.

  I swallowed hard. ‘He’s a — friend of mine. Well, acquaintance of mine. I can’t say that we were really ever friends. His name’s Singing Rock.’

  ‘An Original Person, I assume, with a name like that?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Can you think of any reason why he might be trying to warn you?’

  ‘I can, but I’m not sure that I want to.’

  ‘Do you want to try calling him by name? Maybe we’ll get a clearer response.’

  I hesitated, but Martin Vaizey nodded encouragement, and so I stepped nearer to the face on the book. I looked into its blind cream marble-effect eyes and said, with a catch in my throat, ‘How’re you doing, Singing Rock?’

  The eyes opened and closed. ‘… Harry … you can hear me …’

  ‘Sure I can hear you. But very faint. Where are you speaking from?’

  The face almost smiled. ‘… what you would call the Happy Hunting Grounds … what I call the Great Outside …’

  ‘I see. We’ve got a pretty bad connection.’

  ‘… and me … always had a bad connection …’

  ‘Singing Rock, something’s bothering you. Singing Rock? I said, something’s bothering you. Something’s making you edgy. That’s right. I can hear some of what you’re saying, yes, but I don’t understand what it is. I don’t understand what’s going down.’

  ‘… every trace … they ‘re clearing the sacred lands of every trace …’

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t understand you.’

  ‘… very little time … believe me …’

  His voice faded altogether, and all I could hear was a thick stream of static.

  ‘Singing Rock?’ I called him. ‘Singing Rock!’

  Singing Rock’s eyes closed, and he began to breathe more rapidly.

  Martin Vaizey said, ‘We’re losing him. Something’s happening, I can feel it! There’s something around him: some other presence.’

  ‘What? What do you mean? What presence?’

  ‘Something’s circling around him. Something dark. Something black.’

  ‘Jesus! Is he all right?’

  The face on the book suddenly opened its eyes and stretched its mouth wide and screamed at me. I was so frightened I practically wet myself. Martin Vaizey shouted out, ‘Aaahh!’ in terror and flung the book into the air.

  The book tumbled onto the floor, and as it did so, its cover was ripped off, as if by a hurricane-force wind, and tossed across the room, still screaming. The tide page was raised up into Singing Rock’s face, too, and that was screaming. It was torn out of the binding, and tossed after the cover. Underneath that was the acknowledgements page, and that was shaped like Singing Rock’s face, and that was screaming. The unfelt wind snatched it away.

  Page after page was torn out of the spine, and each page carried Singing Rock’s death-mask, and each death-mask was screaming. The pages whirled across the room, fifty faces, seventy faces, a hundred faces, two hundred faces. The screaming grew louder and louder with every face that was torn off into the air, until Martin Vaizey’s apartment screeched with a choir of more than three hundred agonized voices.

  ‘Spirit — go!’ bellowed Martin Vaizey. But still the blizzard of shrieking pages flew furiously around the room; and still they screamed. Somebody was banging and ringing at the door, too.

  I fought my way through the flying pages with my hands over my ears. Martin Vaizey was still standing in the thick of them, shouting, ‘Go! Do you hear me? I command you to go!’ I snatched a copy of The New Yorker from the magazine-rack, loosely rolled it, and tucked it between my knees. The screaming went on and on, so loud and harsh that I began to think that I would never be able to hear properly again.

  But I took out a book of matches, struck one, and managed to light the pages of The New Yorker like a torch.

  ‘Mr Erskine, no!’ Martin Vaizey shouted at me, but I stood up, brandishing my blazing magazine, and there was nothing he could have done to stop me. I knew what we might be up against, and he didn’t. Not yet, anyway. Or not at all, if we didn’t get rid of these shrieking faces.

  I strode through the living room, waving my torch from side to side. The flames thundered softly with every wave. I caught two or three whirling death-masks, and set them alight. They blazed up instantly, screaming with even greater ferocity. I caught another, and another, face by face, until the whole apartment was filled with blazing, whirling, screaming death-masks of Singing Rock.

  Whoever was pounding on the door, they were doing it even more furiously now, and bellowing, ‘Come on! Come on! Cut out the Goddamned noise, will you? I’ll call the cops!’

  But I turned around and strode back again, touching every death-mask that plummeted past me. They flared and crumpled in the air; they spun around and around, smoking blackly; they fell on Martin Vaizey’s white hide couch, they fell on Martin Vaizey’s ice-blue rug. They fell on Martin Vaizey’s glass-topped coffee-table and into his half-finished passion-fruit crush. The air was thick with smoke and black smudgy fragments of ash.

  I was surrounded by a circus of fire and screaming faces. The heat lifted the burning pages so that they swooped and flew. I saw Singing Rock’s face wherever I turned. Singing Rock with his nose burning off. Singing Rock with his hair alight. Singing Rock screaming out fire.

  They were nothing but masks, nothing but Xeroxes of a human soul. But all the same they were the faces of a man who had protected and defended me — a man who had sacrificed his life so that his people and our people could both forget about the past.

  ‘My God,’ said Martin Vaizey. ‘What the
hell have you done to my apartment?’

  I ignored him, and searched around and around, brandishing the stub of my burning New Yorker. I seemed to have caught every flying page; and those that I hadn’t caught had been ignited by other pages. Martin Vaizey stood and watched me, his arms folded, as if he were posing for a painting called The Importance of Controlling Your Anger.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I dragged over the Boda glass ashtray and messily crushed out the butt of my burned magazine. ‘I couldn’t think of any other way.’

  He brushed ash from the back of his couch. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you did the right thing, under the circumstances.’

  ‘I know some very good upholstery cleaners,’ I told him.

  He used a long silver cocktail spoon to fish ash out of his drink. He stared into it to make sure that it was no longer contaminated, and then decided not to drink it after all.

  ‘I don’t think our first priority is to worry about cleaning the upholstery,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that you and your Mrs Greenberg are both in serious trouble.’

  ‘How serious is your interpretation of serious?’

  ‘You’re in physical danger, that’s my interpretation of serious.’ He looked at his watch, 1930s Rolex. A watch like that could have paid my rent for two years. ‘Give me fifteen minutes to shower and change. Please — try to clean up as best you can. Don’t rub ash into the fabrics.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  He had already half-turned toward the bathroom. ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘Do I understand from this sudden burst of activity that you’ve agreed to help me with Mrs Greenberg?’

  His face was very grim. He had a muscle in his right cheek that kept twitching, over and over, as if he were grinding his teeth, which he probably was.

  ‘Mr Erskine, what we witnessed just now was the most flamboyant display of psychic intervention that I have ever seen in my life. And, as I’ve said, you’re in serious trouble.’

  South-East Colorado

  Wanda heard her small brother whooping and calling so she left off shelling the peas and came out onto the verandah. The wind was up; and the screen door slammed so loudly behind her that it made her jump. Joey was sitting on his swing, swaying wildly backwards and forwards and shouting, ‘Lookit! Lookit! Lookit the sky!’

  Wanda went over to the verandah rail and lifted her eyes to the clouds. They were so low that they looked almost as if they were resting on the roof of the house, like a huge oppressive quilt. There was an ominous circular swirl in them, too, the kind of swirl you saw when a cyclone was stirring. Wizard of Oz weather. But it was the colour of the clouds that made them so extraordinary. They were dark crimson, almost blood-red, like no clouds that Wanda had ever seen before, even at sunset.

  All around them the grasslands were rustling, silvery-bright. There was a strange feeling of anticipation in the air. The chicken-coop door was bang-pause-banging, and small dust-devils were dancing across the yard. A flock of sharp-tailed grouse feathered their wings against the wind, and angled south-westward.

  ‘Joey!’ called Wanda. ‘You’d best come in!’

  ‘It’s only the sky!’Joey protested.

  ‘You come on in. Mom said I was in charge and there’s an end to it.’

  ‘But it’s only the sky!’

  ‘Could be a twister and then what? You’d be sucked up into the air. Member Mr Begley’s sheep? They found it all the way over in Bent County, six days later, with its neck broke.’

  Joey reluctantly spun and swang, spun and swang. The grasslands were beginning to lash like the sea, and the flying dust stung Wanda’s eyes.

  ‘Joey Mcintosh you come inside!’

  But Joey kept on spinning and swinging; sometimes facing Wanda and sometimes turning away.

  Wanda clattered down the verandah steps and crossed the windy yard. She was a small plain girl of nearly fifteen, thin-wristed, skinny-legged, in jeans and a black-and-white checkered shirt. Her mom had left her in charge and as far as she was concerned that meant that she was in charge, no ifs and ans.

  She looked up at the clouds and they were whirling, rotating, like she’d never seen them whirling before. And they were so low! She could hardly believe they were real.

  Just as she reached Joey, an upstairs window dropped on its sash and loudly broke.

  ‘Joey … come on, there’s a cyclone coming. We’d best get down in the cellar.’

  Joey clung tight to his swing-seat. Blond-headed, impish, in a grubby blue T-shirt and grubbier shorts. ‘This aint no cyclone. Can’t you feel it?’

  ‘Feel it?’ asked Wanda. ‘Feel what?’

  ‘This sure aint no cyclone!’Joey repeated, in triumph, while the clouds roiled over his head.

  ‘Joey!’ snapped Wanda. ‘You have to come in!’

  Already, her mother’s painstakingly cultivated vegetable garden had become clogged up with dust. The lettuce leaves had been filled with dust and then buried, the tomatoes would be next, then the beans. Wanda knelt down beside the rows of scallions and tried to dredge out the sand with her hands. But it was no good at all. The faster she dug, the harder the wind seemed to blow, and the quicker the runnels of dust poured into the beds.

  Joey ignored her for a while, tilting on his swing. He sang, at the top of his voice, ‘It aint no cyclone, no, no way! Doo-dah! Doo-dah! It’s Old Man Chopper come to stay! Oh, doo-dah-day!’ At last, however, he stopped singing, and allowed gravity to slow him down. He hopped off his swing, and came across the yard to watch her dig.

  ‘It’s filling up faster than you’re emptying it,’ he remarked.

  She glanced up. ‘You could help, couldn’t you?’

  ‘If there’s a cyclone coming, it don’t matter. It’ll all get blowed away any old how.’

  But Wanda continued to bale out handfuls of dust; and hope that when her mother came back, she would see that she and Joey had done their best to keep things good; to keep things tidy.

  The screen door slammed, making Wanda jump for a second time. But again, it was only the wind.

  Lightning crackled on the western horizon, over towards Kim, in the heart of the Comanche National Grassland, and beyond, where the Sangre de Cristo mountains rose dark and secretive and haughty — twelve, thirteen, fourteen thousand feet above sea-level. But this lightning wasn’t like the usual lightning. This lightning was fine and thousand-branched, almost hairy. This lightning advanced across the prairie likeblazing timbers, crackle-pop-crackle, or like the blazing organza petticoats of suicidal chorus-girls. This lightning was fire. This lightning was Armageddon coming today and not tomorrow.

  Wanda snatched Joey’s hand. ‘Come on, Joey! We have got to get into the cellar!’

  ‘But what about Mom?’ Joey demanded, dragging and scuffing his heels.

  ‘Mom’s okay, for God’s sake. She probably took shelter in Springfield.’

  She took hold of Joey’s wrist and dragged him arguing back towards the house. The wind was whooping and whistling now, and she heard another upstairs window break. A harness jangled, even though the horse was long gone.

  ‘I sure hope Mom doesn’t think those windows are our fault!’ said Joey.

  Of course she won’t, she’ll know how windy it’s bin.’

  They struggled into the house. The screen door banged violently behind them. They went directly to the cellar door, but to Wanda’s consternation it was locked, and the key was gone. She rattled the handle but that was no use. Joey kicked it and that was even less use. Where was the key? She tried the hall table but that was crammed with visiting cards and bills. She stood on tip-toe and ran her fingertips along the architrave. No key nowhere.

  ‘What’re we going to do?’ asked Joey. He seemed to be much less sceptical now. The house was creaking and stirring and giving unsettling little shifts and judders; and if that didn’t mean cyclone coming then they didn’t know what else it could be.

  Through the window Wanda saw yards of fencing torn up and fly
through the air. Then the chicken-coop went over, and there were feathers and chickens and flapping tarpaper.

  ‘What’re we going to do?’ Joey repeated, much more anxious. ‘S’posin’ the cyclone sucks us up? Then what?’

  ‘How should I know?’ said Wanda, with the irritability of real fear. ‘I was never sucked up by a cyclone before.’

  All the same, she took hold of Joey’s hand and the two of them stood in the middle of the living room, in bloody and darkened shadows, while the wind gradually rose to screaming-pitch, and the shingles started to rip off the roof. The windows were filled with crimson light; so dark and glutinous that it looked as if somebody had been horribly slaughtered in an upstairs room, and their blood was running down the windowpanes.

  ‘Wanda, what’s happening?’ asked Joey, his voice tiny and tight. ‘Everything’s gone red.’

  ‘It’s the dust, that’s all,’ Wanda reassured him. ‘Storms always have colours. Brown or grey or green or black. It depends on where they come from, what dust they whup up. We learned that in Weather.’

  ‘It’s red,’ whispered Joey, in awe. Even his eyes shone red, like the eyes of a Stephen King vampire. ‘I never saw a red storm before.’

  They heard the long-case clock in the hallway beginning to strike twelve; but before it could finish striking the whole house lurched beneath their feet, and they heard the pendulum knocking and the chimes sound only once more, muffled and flat, before the clock fell sideways onto the floor. Pictures dropped from the walls; the curtain-rail collapsed. The big Zenith television-set slewed around on its axis and knocked against the red-brick chimney-breast.

  ‘I want Mommy,’ said Joey, in a tight, breathy voice. ‘Wanda, I want Mommy.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mommy’s sheltering too. She’ll be back when the storm’s blown over.’

  Wanda didn’t know whether she believed that their mother was safe or not. She had seen electric storms and hurricanes and two or three rip-roaring twisters, but she had never seen anything like this before. It felt like the whole world was being pulled sideways — like standing on a rug that somebody was forcefully dragging away beneath her feet.