The Manitou Read online

  Karen Tandy’s body was thrown this way and that across the bed. She was dead already, I thought, or almost dead. Her mouth opened every now and then and she gave a little gasp, but that was only because the wriggling medicine man on her back was pressing against her lungs.

  Singing Rock caught hold of my arm. “Look,” he said quietly.

  The white skin at the upper part of the bulge was being pressed from inside, as if by a finger. The finger worked harder and harder against it, trying to claw its way through. I stood frozen, and I could hardly feel my legs. I thought I might collapse at any moment. I watched, almost without seeing it at all, as the finger squirmed and wriggled in a desperate effort to break out.

  A long nail pierced the skin, and a watery yellow fluid suddenly gushed from the hole, streaked with blood. There was a rich, fetid smell, like decaying fish. The sac on Karen Tandy’s back sank and emptied as the birth fluid of Misquamacus poured out of it on to the sheets.

  “Call Dr. Hughes—get him here as quick as you can,” said Singing Rock.

  I went to the phone on the wall, wiped the blood off it with my handkerchief, and dialed the switchboard. When she answered, the girl’s voice seemed so blank and unconcerned that she seemed to be speaking from another world.

  “This is Mr. Erskine. Can you get Dr. Hughes up to Miss Tandy’s room—as soon as you can. Tell him it’s started, and it’s urgent.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  “Call him right away. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I turned back to the hideous struggle on the bed. From the slit in the skin, a dark hand had emerged, and was tearing a larger and larger hole in the bulge with a sound like ripping plastic.

  “Can’t you do anything now,” I whispered to Singing Rock. “Can’t you put a spell on him before he gets out of there?”

  “No,” said Singing Rock. He was very calm, but I could see by the strain on his face that he was also very frightened. He held his bones and his powders ready, but his hands were trembling.

  A long tear, about three feet deep, had now appeared in Karen Tandy’s back. Her own face now lay pale and dead against the bed, smothered in clotted blood and sticky fluid. I couldn’t believe that there was any way to revive her now. She seemed so mutilated and torn, and the thing that was coming out of her seemed so strong and evil.

  Another hand emerged from the rip in her flesh, and the skin was parted wide. Slowly, greasily, a head and shoulders rose from the hole, and I felt a deep dark chill when I saw the same hard face that had appeared on the cherrywood table. It was Misquamacus, the ancient medicine man, coming alive again in a new world.

  His long black hair was flattened against his broad skull with oil and fluid. His eyes were stuck closed, and his coppery skin glistened with the fetid muck of his womb. His cheekbones were high and flat, and his prominent hooked nose was occluded with fetal fats. Strings of mucus hung from his lips and chin.

  Both Singing Rock and I stood totally silent as Misquamacus peeled Karen’s flaccid skin away from his bare greasy torso. Then the medicine man raised himself on his hands, and worked his hips free. His genitals were puffy and swollen, the same way that a boy child’s are at birth, but there was dark pubic hair smeared against his scarred belly.

  Misquamacus heaved one leg out, with a sickening suction sound, like pulling a rubber boot out of thick mud. Then the other leg.

  And it was now that we saw what damage the X-rays had done to him. Instead of full muscular legs, his lower limbs both ended above the knee, in tiny deformed club feet, with pulpy dwarfish toes. Modern technology had crippled the medicine man in his womb.

  Gradually, with his eyes still tight shut, Misquamacus lifted himself away from Karen Tandy’s torn body. He gripped the rail of the bed to support himself, and sat there with his stunted little legs, sucking air into his fluid-filled lungs, and letting the creamy phlegm run from the side of his mouth.

  All I wished at that moment was that I had a gun, and could blow this monstrosity to pieces, and have it over with. But I had seen enough of his occult power to know that I wouldn’t be doing myself any favors. Misquamacus was capable of haunting me for the rest of my life, and when I died his manitou would have horrible revenge on mine.

  “I will need your support,” said Singing Rock quietly. “With each spellI cast, I will want you to concentrate deeply on its success. With two of us here, we might just succeed in holding him down.” As if he had been listening, the crippled Misquamacus slowly opened one yellow eye, and then the other, and looked across at us with a chilling mixture of curiosity, contempt and hatred.

  He then looked down at the floor, and saw the medicine circle around the bed, with its red and white powders and its bones.

  “Gitche Manitou,” said Singing Rock loudly. “Hear me now, and send your power to my aid.”

  He began to shuffle and dance, and make patterns in the air with his bones. I tried to do as he had asked me, and concentrate on making the spell work. But it was hard to take my eyes away from the cold and passive creature on the bed, who was staring at us with total vindictiveness.

  “Gitche Manitou,” chanted Singing Rock, “send your messengers with locks and keys. Send your jailers and your guards. Hold down this spirit, imprison Misquamacus. Shut him up with bars and with chains. Freeze his mind and stay his sorcery.”

  He then went into a long Indian invocation that I could hardly follow, but I stood there and prayed and prayed that his magic would work, and that the medicine man on the bed would be trapped by spiritual forces.

  But a weird feeling began to penetrate my mind—a feeling that what we were doing was puny and useless, and that the best thing we could do would be to leave Misquamacus alone, leave him to do whatever he wanted to do. He was much stronger than us, he was so much wiser. It seemed to me then that it was futile to continue to battle against him, because he would only have to summon one of his Indian demons, and we would both meet a horrible death.

  “Harry,” gasped Singing Rock. "Don’t let him into your mind. Help me—I need your help”

  I made an effort to shrug off the pall of hopelessness that was seeping through my brain. I turned to Singing Rock, and I saw sweat running down his face, and deep lines of strain and anxiety carved into his cheeks.

  “Help me, Harry, help me!”

  I stared at the dark, hideous creature on the bed and I concentrated every ounce of my will into paralyzing him. He stared back at me with those glassy yellow eyes, as if daring me to defy him, but I tried to ignore my terror and pin him down with sheer mental effort. You are helpless, I thought, you cannot move, you cannot work your magic.

  But, inch by inch, Misquamacus began to work himself off the bed. He kept his eyes on both of us all the time. Singing Rock was throwing powders and beating his bones, but Misquamacus seemed unaffected by everything that he was doing. The medicine man dropped himself heavily to the floor, and crouched on his ghastly little legs within the magic circle, his face a mask of impassive hate.

  Painfully, using his hands to swing himself along like an ape, Misquamacus approached the circle. If that doesn’t hold him, I thought, I am going to be out of that door and halfway to Canada before you can say cold-blooded cowardice.

  Singing Rock’s voice grew shriller and shriller. “Gitche Manitou, hold Misquamacus away from me!” he called. “Keep him within the circle of charms! Lock and chain him!”

  Misquamacus paused, and stared balefully around at the medicine circle. For a moment, I thought he was going to heave himself straight across it, and launch himself toward us. But then he paused, and settled back on his hips, and closed his eyes again. Singing Rock and I stood silent for one breathless moment, and then Singing Rock said: “We’ve held him.”

  “You mean he can’t get out?”

  “No, he can get across it all right. But not yet. He hasn’t the strength. He’s resting to get it back.”

  “But how long is he going to need? How long do
we have?”

  Singing Rock looked warily at the hunched naked form of Misquamacus.

  “It’s impossible to say. It might be a few minutes, it might be a few hours. I think I’ve called enough spiritual interference down to give us thirty or forty minutes anyway.”

  “What now?”

  “Well just have to wait. As soon as Dr. Hughes gets here, I think we ought to have this floor of the hospital evacuated. He’s going to wake up before long, and then he’s going to be angry and vengeful and almost impossible to deal with, and I don’t want innocent people hurt.”

  I checked the time. “Jack should be here at any minute. Listen, do you really think we shouldn’t have a few guns?”

  Singing Rock wiped his face. “You’re a typical white American. You’ve been brought up on a diet of TV Westerns and Highway Patrol, and you think that the gun is the answer to everything. Do you want to save Karen Tandy or not?”

  “Do you seriously think she can be saved? I mean—just look at her.”

  The limp, shriveled form of Karen Tandy’s body was lying awkwardly and emptily across the bed. I could hardly recognize her as the same girl who had come into my flat only four nights before, telling me about her dreams of ships and moonlit coasts.

  Singing Rock said softly: “According to the lore of Indian magic, she can still be saved. If there’s a chance, I think we ought to try.”

  “You’re the witch doctor.”

  At that moment, Dr. Hughes and Wolf, the other male nurse, came clattering down the corridor. They took one look at the blood, and at the silent form of Misquamacus, and stepped back in horror.

  “God,” said Jack Hughes shakily. “What the hell happened?”

  We stepped out of the room and into the corridor with him.

  “He killed Michael,” I said. “I was sitting here when it happened. It was too quick to do anything about it. Then he forced his way out of Karen. Singing Rock thinks we’ve held him for a while with the medicine circle, but we don’t have long.”

  Dr. Hughes bit his lips. “I think we ought to call the police. I don’t care what century that thing is from, he’s murdered enough people.”

  Singing Rock firmly protested. “If we call the police, he will only kill them as well. Bullets can’t solve this problem, Dr. Hughes. We’ve decided to play this game a particular way, and now we’re stuck with it. Only magic can help us now.”

  “Magic,” said Dr. Hughes bitterly. “To think I’d end up using magic.”

  “Singing Rock thinks we ought to evacuate this floor of the hospital,” I said. “Once Misquamacus wakes up, he’s going to use everything he’s got to get his revenge on us.”

  “There’s no need,” said Dr. Hughes. “This is a surgical and operating floor only. We had Karen down here so that she could be nearer the theater. There are no other patients on ten. All I have to do is tell the rest of the staff to stay away.”

  He dragged some more chairs into the corridor and sat down, keeping a watchful eye on the motionless bulk of Misquamacus. Wolf went up to Dr. Hughes’ office and came back with a couple of bottles of bourbon, and we revived ourselves. It was three-forty-five, and we still had a long night ahead of us.

  “Now that he’s emerged,” said Dr. Hughes, “how are we going to deal with him? How are we going to make him give up Karen Tandy’s manitou?” I could tell he was embarrassed about using the Indian word for spirit.

  “The way I see it,” said Singing Rock, “we have to convince Misquamacus somehow that he’s in a hopeless situation, which he is. Although he is very powerful, he’s an anachronism. Magic and sorcery may be dangerous, but in a world where people don’t believe in it, they have very limited uses. Even if Misquamacus kills all of us—even if he kills everyone in this hospital—what’s he going to do in the outside world? He’s physically crippled, he’s completely unversed in contemporary culture and science, and one way or another, he will just be overwhelmed. Even if it doesn’t happen right here, somebody’s going to put a bullet in him sooner or later.”

  “But how are you going to convince him?” I asked Singing Rock.

  “I guess the only way is to tell him,” said Singing Rock. “One of us will have to open up his mind to Misquamacus, and give him a mental tour of what the modern world is really like.”

  “Won’t he think that’s just a magical trap? A bluff?” asked Dr. Hughes.

  “Possibly. But I don’t see what else we can do.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Dr. Hughes, turning to me. “Something just occurred to me. You remember when you told me about Karen Tandy’s dream, Harry—the one about the ship and the coast and all that stuff?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, what strikes me about that dream is that there was so much fear in it. Misquamacus was afraid of something. And it was obviously something that was terrifying enough to make him risk this whole business of swallowing burning oil and being reborn. Now, what do you think he could have been afraid of?”

  “That’s a good point,” I said. “What do you think, Singing Rock?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Sioux. “He might simply have been afraid of death at the hands of the Dutch. Just because their manitou go on living in limbo after death, that doesn’t mean that medicine men aren’t concerned about being killed. And there are ways of killing medicine men so that their manitous can never return to the earth. Maybe the Dutchmen knew how to do it, and threatened him.”

  “That still doesn’t make sense,” said Dr. Hughes.

  “We’ve seen already how Misquamacus can defend himself. No Dutchman could have gotten close enough to harm him. Yet he was still frightened. Now, why? What did the Dutch have in the seventeenth century that could have terrified a medicine man like Misquamacus?”

  “I guess they had guns,” said Wolf “The Indians didn’t have guns, did they?”

  “That wouldn’t fit,” replied Singing Rock. “Misquamacus is powerful enough to resist guns. You saw what he did to Harry’s friends, with the lightning-that-sees. You would only have to point a gun at him, and he could blow it up in your hand.”

  “The Dutch were Christians,” I suggested. “Do you think there’s anything in the Christian religion which could have exorcised Misquamacus’ demons and manitous?

  “No way,” Singing Rock said. “There is nothing in Christianity to equal the power of the old Indian spirits.”

  Dr. Hughes was frowning deeply, as though he were trying to remember something he’d heard about years and years ago. Then suddenly he snapped his fingers.

  “I know,” he said. “There was something very important which the Dutch settlers had which the Indians didn’t Something which threatened the Indians, and which they had never come across before, and couldn’t fight.”

  “What was that?”

  “Disease,” said Jack Hughes. “The Dutchmen brought all kinds of viruses that were unknown on the North American continent. Especially influenza viruses. Whole tribes were wiped out by European diseases, because they had no antibodies, and couldn’t resist even the simplest colds and flu. And the medicine men couldn’t help them, because they had no sorcery which could work against something they knew nothing at all about. Invisible, deadly, and quick. If you ask me, that’s what Misquamacus was afraid of. The Dutch were destroying his tribe with a medicine he couldn’t see or understand.”

  Singing Rock looked excited. “That’s inspired, Dr. Hughes. That is really inspired.”

  “One thing, though,” I interjected. “Surely Misquamacus would now be immune to influenza? If he’s been born in anything like the way a normal baby is born, he would have gotten antibodies from Karen Tandy’s bloodstream.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Dr. Hughes. “His nervous system was intertwined with Karen’s, but their bloodstreams weren’t connected in the same way that a fetus is connected to its mother. The energy he was drawing from her was electrical energy from her brain cells and spinal system. There was no actual inte
rmingling in the usual physical sense.”

  “That means,” said Singing Rock, “that we could give our medicine man a dose of the grippe. Or threaten to.”

  “Certainly,” said Dr. Hughes. “Hold on just a moment.”

  He went to the wall telephone and dialed quickly.

  “Put me through to Dr. Winsome,” he said, when the switchboard answered.

  Singing Rock took a look at the silent shape of Misquamacus, hunched and sinister on the floor of Karen Tandy’s blood-smeared room. Somehow the thought of giving this creature the influenza didn’t seem like a very effective answer. But, apart from Singing Rock’s sorcery, we didn’t have very much else to turn to.

  “Dr. Winsome?” said Jack Hughes. “Look, I’m sorry to wake you up, but I have an urgent problem here, and I badly need some virus samples.”

  There was a pause while Dr. Hughes listened to the tinny voice on the other end of the phone.

  “Yes, I know it’s four o’clock in the morning, Dr. Winsome, but I wouldn’t have called you if it hadn’t been desperate. That’s right. I need influenza virus. Well, how soon can you get down here?”

  He listened some more, and then hung up the phone.

  “Dr. Winsome is coming right away. He has enough influenza virus in his laboratory to bring down the whole population of Cleveland, Ohio.”

  “Maybe he ought to try it sometime,” said Singing Rock, with unexpected humor.

  It was now four-oh-five, and Misquamacus hadn’t stirred. All four of us stayed in the corridor, keeping a close watch on his dark, troll-like body, although we were all exhausted by now, and the stench of Michael’s corpse was almost overpowering.

  “What’s it like outside?” I asked Dr. Hughes.