Burial Read online

  ‘They — ‘Naomi began, but Martin turned around and said, ‘Quiet, please. Transplanary trance is difficult enough, without you talking all the time.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I told him. ‘Sorry.’ And when Naomi tried again to tell me how the shadows had bitten somebody, I said, ‘Shush, shush. Tell me later.’

  ‘But I should tell you now,’ she hissed. ‘Before it’s too late.’

  ‘Please,’ Martin asked us; and I pressed my finger tight against my lips so that Naomi couldn’t possibly misunderstand me.

  ‘He’s doing something very complicated,’ I whispered. ‘Something that needs his complete concentration. We mustn’t say anything, because he’s going into a special kind of trance; and if you break somebody’s concentration when they’re in this special kind of trance, it can be really dangerous. You can leave half of their psyche in the spirit world and half —’

  Martin said, with huge self-restraint, ‘Harry, do you mind, please, shutting up?’

  ‘Oh — sure,’ I said, and gave him my obliging Columbo style salute. ‘Anything you say. I was just telling Naomi that — well, never mind. You go ahead. You go right ahead. Don’t pay any mind to me. I’m just helping.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Martin asked me. ‘Is that the end of the conversation?’

  I nodded, and saluted again. It has always amazed me, how much concentration other people need. I can go for weeks and never have to concentrate once.

  Martin turned back to the wall and pressed his hands flat against it.

  ‘I am summoning a spirit called Singing Rock … a spirit from South Dakota, a wonder-worker from the Sioux. I want to feel his presence; I want to touch his hand. I am summoning him to help me; to guide me through the levels. I am asking him to show himself, so that he and I can hunt down the spirit who has possessed this room.’

  We waited for four or five minutes; although it seemed more like four or five years. The room remained chilly and silent, except for the distant cacophony of traffic, and the thumping of rock’n’roll from the Bensons.

  Naomi began to hum; and then to sing that high, keening song that I had heard before, although not so loudly this time. Martin stayed where he was, his head bowed, his hands still pressed against the wallpaper. I had no idea whether he was angry, bored, or simply waiting for Naomi and me to stop making distracting noises.

  ‘I am summoning a spirit called Singing Rock,’ he repeated. ‘I am asking Singing Rock to help me.’

  Again, there was no obvious reply; although Naomi continued to keen and ullulate under her breath. ‘Aye-aye-aye-aye-wejoo-suk,’ she chanted. ‘Aye-aye-aye-aye-alnoba-na’Iwiwi.’

  I wondered whether Michael had managed to record any of this singing, and I was just about to stick my head out of the dining room door and ask him when Martin suddenly said, ‘I hear you. I see you.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I asked him.

  ‘I want to talk to Singing Rock,’ said Martin. His back was still turned. ‘A Sioux Indian called Singing Rock. He came across — Harry, when did Singing Rock die?’

  ‘What?’ I said, confused.

  ‘When did Singing Rock die?’

  ‘I, uh — seventy-nine, summer of seventy-nine. Lake Berryessa, California.’

  Martin repeated this information as if he were talking to somebody else on the telephone. I stared at him in perplexity. Was he really talking to the spirit-world? To dead people? It all seemed incredibly casual. Why did everybody make such a fuss about dying, if you could get in touch with the living as easily as this? Next thing we knew, the dead would be sending us faxes. Having a great time, wish you were here, Uncle Chesney.

  ‘I can hear you,’ Martin repeated. ‘I can see you, too, but not very clearly.’

  I edged back slowly to Naomi’s side, watching Martin all the time. Naomi was chanting, ‘Aye-aye-aye-aye-wejoo-suk.’ Then, ‘Aye-aye-aye-nayew.’

  ‘Shush,’ I told her. But she kept on singing and rocking on her precious chair; and in the end I decided that she wasn’t worth worrying about. I was much more interested in what Martin was doing. He seemed to be talking to somebody — quite fluently and cogently — even though his face was turned to the wall.

  ‘I want you to bring me Singing Rock. Yes. He knows me. He’s seen me with Harry Erskine. Tell him Harry Erskine wants him here.’

  I stared at Martin in fascination; and as I did so, I saw shadows appearing on the smoothly-plastered wall. One of them danced and skipped very quickly and lightly; another was taller and thinner and much more hesitant; a third was huge-headed and silent.

  Naomi rocked wildly backward and forward, screaming, ‘Aye! Paukunnawaw! Aye! Wajuk! Aye! Nish! Aye! Neip!’

  ‘Martin,’ I cautioned. ‘Just take care of yourself.’ But when I stepped closer, it suddenly became obvious that he was no longer with me. He was with me in body but not in spirit. His hands were pressed so firmly against the wall that his knuckles were spotted with white; his cheek-muscles were rigid; his teeth were gritted together. His eyes were open but he wasn’t looking at the wall. He was focused on something way beyond it. He was still talking — and, better still, he was still breathing. But when I walked around and stared at his face, I didn’t see the man I had brought into Michael Greenberg’s front door, smiling and nodding and packed to the ears with joie d’ésprit His face looked like a death-mask, greasy and unreal, as if it had been moulded from yellow-ochre wax. And there was the faintest of auras around him; a foggy veil of dim blue light; a phosphorescence, as if he were dead already, and rotting. You know what they say about rotten herring, shining in the dark.

  ‘Martin,’ I said, with huge uncertainty.

  ‘I want to speak with Singing Rock,’ he said; but he certainly wasn’t talking to me.

  ‘Martin, talk to me! Are you okay?’

  Martin turned his head sideways and stared straight in my direction, but his eyes didn’t see me at all. ‘I can see you clearly. I saw you before; in my book. I have to know what you want.’

  ‘Martin, this isn’t funny. How can I help you if I don’t know what the hell’s going on?’

  Martin nodded, as if he had understood me. But then he said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘What the hell do you mean, why?’

  Martin said, ‘I’m not afraid, no. He’s only a spirit, after all; just like you are. There isn’t a spirit in God’s creation who can hurt me.’

  ‘Martin,’ I appealed to him. ‘Who are you talking to? There’s nobody here!’

  ‘I want his name. I want to know where to find him.’

  I was about to say something else; but then I knew for sure that Martin could neither see me nor hear me. He was in a trance, talking to spirits, talking to dead people.

  It may be hard to understand, but at that moment I was jealous of him. Jealous of his sophistication, jealous of his culture, jealous of his psychic sensitivity. He could do for real what I could only pretend to do — and, brother, didn’t the difference show. More than anything else, I was jealous because he was talking to dead people, as plainly and clearly as if they were standing right in front of him. He was talking with people who might have fought with Grant; or talked to Lindbergh; or simply lived in America when there were log cabins and hard winters and marauding Indians.

  They survive someplace; the dead survive. Their ashes enrich the earth, and their spirits enrich the air. They’re always with us, all around us, but it’s a rare talent to be able to talk to them. Martin Vaizey had that talent, and yes, I admit it, I was jealous as hell.

  I could only stand helplessly next to him while he walked through worlds that I had never even seen, and never would.

  All the same, I surprised myself. I could feel some presence in the room, even though my own perception was very blurry, like trying to see moving figures through a frosted — up window-pane. I could sense their movement. I could even hear them: not as distinct voices, but as soft blurtings and rustlings.

  I glanced back at Naomi. She was s
till clinging to her chair, rocking and dipping her head, although she had stopped chanting for the time being.

  ‘I want to talk to him,’ Martin repeated, even more insistently than before. ‘We have much to discuss.’

  ‘Martin,’ I asked, ‘are you okay?’ I very much doubted if he could hear me, or even if he wanted to answer me. But I was supposed to be his anchor-man, and I thought that the least I could do was let him know that I was still here, still watching him.

  ‘Yes, parley,’ he said; and this time the eeriest thing happened. He spoke without moving his lips, like a ventriloquist. I heard his voice quite clearly but I swear to God that he didn’t move his lips.

  ‘Martin?’ I urged him. ‘Is everything okay?’

  It was then that I heard a noise like somebody slowly emptying a large sack of shingle onto the floor. On the wall in front of Martin, the shadows rose and swelled; and the large-headed shadow appeared to approach him, and raise its own hands to meet Martin’s hands, so that to all intents and purposes it became Martin’s shadow.

  Martin began to quiver. ‘It’s you,’ he whispered.

  ‘It’s who?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s you,’ Martin repeated. His voice was flooded with fear and awe.

  He turned slowly around to face me. Then he stepped back, so that his back was pressed flat against the shadow, so that he and the shadow became one. A visible darkness seemed to flow over him, as if a black veil were being lowered over his head. His eyes closed, and the skin of his face began to pull back over his forehead and his cheekbones, so that the contours of his skull became startlingly obvious. His lips were drawn back over his teeth in the thinnest of grimaces, almost a snarl. If I hadn’t known that he was travelling from one psychic plane to another, and that he was somewhere further away in time and reality than I could even begin to think about, I would have said that he was dying.

  He grew darker and darker. It wasn’t so much that his skin was changing colour. It was his whole aura. There was a feeling of terrible oldness about him; a feeling of black and bitter nights, long before any of us here had been born. There was a feeling of tragedy and dread. I could smell not only sagebrush but blood.

  Naomi started to chant once again, but very softly, so that I couldn’t really hear what she was saying — not that I could have understood her, even if I had. But there was always a chance that — when we played back Michael’s recordings — somebody might be able to translate them, even if she was only chanting The Camptown Races backward.

  Martin held out both hands, and pointed toward the bowl of water on the floor.

  ‘You seek to trick me, as you have always sought to trick me?’ he asked. His voice was remarkable. It was very deep, very vibrant — so vibrant that I heard it through my jawbone, more than my ears. ‘You seek to insult those very spirits on whom your civilization is built?’

  I didn’t realize at first that he was talking to me, so I didn’t answer. But then he abruptly opened his eyes and roared at me, ‘You bring this water into my lodge? You seek to insult me?’

  ‘Er, no, I’m not seeking to insult you,’ I told him. Then, very gently, very diplomatically, I said, ‘Pardon me, but are you still Martin?’

  Martin stared at me and his eyes were so strange that I physically shivered. They looked as if they had been cut out of an old black-and-white photograph and pasted onto his eyelids. In other words they were real and they were focused but somehow they weren’t real at all. More like a memory of somebody’s eyes; somebody very long dead.

  So that onlie ye Eyes look’d out.

  ‘You must take this water away,’ Martin directed me.

  ‘Is that you?’ I asked him. ‘First of all you wanted the water and now you don’t want the water?’

  ‘It has no spirit.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s it Maybe you’d like a little bourbon with it.’

  ‘It has no spirit,’ Martin repeated. ‘It is white man’s water. Dead water.’

  I took a step nearer. All this talk of lodges and white man’s water could mean only one thing: that Martin had contacted Singing Rock, my old medicine-man buddy. Well, buddy isn’t really the right word. It’s almost impossible for a white man to be buddies with a native American; not real buddies, not soulmates; and it’s even harder for a white man to be buddies with a medicine-man. How can you be buddies with somebody who can see the ghosts of his ancestors in every hill and every tree and every puff of wind? Especially when you and your kind have been responsible for decimating those trees and laying eight-lane highways over those hills and filling those puffs of wind with sulphur dioxide?

  I’ll tell you what kind of relationship I had with Singing Rock. Once I showed him my grandparents’ tombstone in Newark, and he asked me very politely if he could piss on it ‘After all, you white men have been pissing on my grandparents’ graves ever since you got here.’

  At first I had been seriously angry. Did I say angry? I thought he was sick, and I told him so. ‘You’re one sick Sioux,’ that’s what I told him. I told him that he was bitter and vengeful and that he was taking history far too personally. Was it my grandparents’ fault, what had happened to the Indians? Was it my fault?

  But sometimes you need to be angry before you can understand. Singing Rock had calmly explained that his 21-year-old great-great-great grandmother, a Northern Cheyenne, had been killed at Sand Creek, near Denver, in the summer of 1864. Raped, scalped, mutilated. Was it wrong for him to feel bitter and vengeful about that?

  As for taking history too personally — well, she hadn’t been killed by history but by Captain Silas S. Soule, Company D, First Cavalry of Colorado.

  Singing Rock said that you couldn’t find the history of what happened to the Indians in libraries, or John Wayne movies, or even Kevin Costner movies. You could only find it in all of those tribes of shadows, which no longer had Indians to cast them.

  I still wasn’t too sure that I agreed with Singing Rock. I wasn’t even sure that I sympathized with him. I understood most of what he was talking about; and I respected his point of view. But that wasn’t exactly the stuff of buddydom, was it?

  ‘Singing Rock?’ I asked, circling around him. Those photographic eyes followed me without blinking once. ‘Singing Rock, is that you?’

  ‘I know you, foolish,’ Martin replied. ‘I know your name.’

  His voice seemed even harsher now. Whoever was talking out of Martin’s mouth, it definitely wasn’t Martin. This must be a spirit whom Martin had encountered during his psychic wanderings around, and he was using Martin’s mouth and breath and lips to talk to me. I backed away. He might have called me ‘foolish’ but I hadn’t been born after breakfast. Martin was one of the most skilful mediums I had ever come across — and what’s more, he was alive, which meant that he should be very much stronger than anybody who had passed over. So whoever this spirit was, he must be one powerful mother; and he didn’t seem to like me much, either.

  ‘Singing Rock, is that you?’ I asked him again. It could have been Singing Rock. He had always been modest about his wonder-working, but he was as good as any other medicine man I had ever come across.

  But Martin let out a harsh, unexpected laugh. ‘Singing Rock will never speak to you again. Singing Rock has been punished beyond your wildest imagination. He has been given the soul-torture — and no man, living or dead, has ever returned from the soul-torture with the ability to speak.’

  Naomi was chanting much louder now. ‘Nish-neip, nish-neip … Nepauz-had …’ She was rocking backwards and forwards so violently that the feet of her chair were drumming unevenly on the floorboards, and I was afraid that she might topple over.

  ‘Remove the water!’ Martin demanded, with ill-concealed rage. ‘Remove the water or I will kill you all!’

  ‘No way, fella,’ I told him. ‘That water stays.’

  Martin practically growled with temper, but he made no attempt to move away from the wall. ‘I warn you,’ he breathed, ‘this is just the be
ginning … We will swallow you all … everything, you and yours! From shore to shore, and all across the Plains, the lands will again be free, and nothing of the white man will ever be heard of again!’

  He suddenly turned his head and stared at Naomi, rocking and chanting.

  ‘Here!’ he commanded — and without any hesitation at all, the chair slid noisily across the room towards him, with Naomi still sitting on it. She was about to collide with his shins when he seized her hair and twisted her deftly around. She screamed and tightly clenched her fists.

  ‘My chair! Not my chair!’

  I took three strides across the room and seized hold of the chair, with Naomi still on it, and tried to pull her clear. Martin stared me fiercely in the face and said, ‘You would really dare, foolish?’

  I heaved at the chair but it could have been screwed to the floor for all I was able to shift it. Naomi screamed and screamed and rocked herself backwards and forward. ‘Naomi!’ I told her. ‘Naomi, get off the chair!’

  ‘She cannot,’ said Martin, in a terrible husky voice. His breath was sourish-sweet and actually cold. It was like opening an icebox door and smelling month-old melon.

  ‘Let her go,’ I snapped at him.

  ‘Alive or dead, which do you prefer?’

  ‘I said, let her go!’

  ‘You are as foolish and as weak as ever.’

  I kept my grip on the chair, and kept trying to pull it away, but at the same time I scrutinized Martin’s face for any tell-tale signs of what was possessing him. I could feel it, I could talk to it, but I couldn’t clearly see it. It could be a man, it could be a woman. It could be something that wasn’t human at all. The story goes that there was a trapper in the 1920s in Immokalee, Florida, who was regularly possessed by a giant alligator. He tore his wife and his three children apart with his teeth before he was hunted down by the State Police and a Miccosukee wonder-worker, and shot.

  But that was another story; and this was frightening enough, and this was real.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked Martin.

  Those terrible dead eyes closed, and then re-opened. ‘Don’t you recognize me? I’m the one who knows you the best’