The Manitou Read online

  “Just a minute,” said Jack Hughes, “how did your detective get in touch with this computer?”

  Lieutenant Marino said: “By phone. It’s available to all police forces in the state of New York. If there’s anything you need to know about missing automobiles, missing persons, crime patterns, anything like that, it can tell you in just a few seconds.”

  “Is it a big computer?”

  “Sure. Unitrak is one of the largest on the Eastern seaboard.”

  Jack Hughes turned to Singing Rock. “I think we have found you a technological manitou,” he said. “The Unitrak computer.”

  Singing Rock nodded. “That sounds more like it,” he said. “Do you have the phone number, lieutenant?”

  Lieutenant Marino looked bewildered. “Now wait a minute,” he said. “That computer is strictly for authorized police personnel only. You need a code to get through.”

  “Have you got a code?” asked Singing Rock.

  “Sure, but—”

  “But me no buts,” said Singing Rock. “If you want to catch the thing that killed your eleven men, then this is the only way to do it.”

  “What are you talking about?” snapped Lieutenant Marino. “Are you trying to tell me that you can conjure up a goddamned spirit out of a police department computer?”

  “Why not?” said Singing Rock. “I won’t say it’s going to be easy, but Unitrak’s manitou is bound to be Christian and God-fearing and dedicated to the cause of law and order. Unitrak was made for that purpose. A machine’s manitou cannot go contrary to the underlying intent with which it was fashioned. If I can summon it up, it will be perfect. History will repeat itself.”

  “What do you mean—history will repeat itself?”

  Singing Rock rubbed the back of his neck tiredly. “This continent and its Red Indian spirits were defeated once by the white manitous of law and Christianity. I expect they can be defeated again.”

  Lieutenant Marino was just reaching for his computer code card when the air seemed to go suddenly still. We looked around at each other uncertainly. The floor had stopped swaying, but now it was vibrating, very faintly, as if someone was drilling their way through concrete, floors and floors beneath us. Way down below in the street, we heard sirens and fire truck horns, and also the sorrowful moan of that magical wind.

  Abruptly, the lights died Lieutenant Marino shouted: "Don’t move! Nobody move! If anyone moves, I’ll shoot!" We stayed frozen like statues, listening and waiting to see if we were being attacked. I felt drops of sweat sliding silently down the side of my face and into my collar. The rooms on the eighteenth floor were stifling and airless, and it was obvious that the air-conditioning had stopped, too.

  I heard them first. Rushing and scurrying down the walls, like a phantom river. I saw Lieutenant Marino raise his police special in alarm, but he didn’t fire. Chilled with fright, we peered through the luminous gloom of the offices, and saw them. They were like ghostly rats—torrents and torrents of scampering ghostly rats—and they were pouring down every wall. They emerged from nowhere, and disappeared into the floor as if it wasn’t solid at all. There must have been millions of them—whispering and rustling and scuttling everywhere in a hideous tide of furry bodies.

  "What is it?" said Lieutenant Marino hoarsely. "What are they?"

  “Exactly what they look like,” said Singing Rock. “They are the parasites that accompany the Great Old One. In a spiritual sense, he is verminous, and these are the vermin. It looks as if Misquamacus is using the hospital building itself as a gateway to summon the Great Old One, and that’s why they’re pouring down the walls like that. I expect they’re assembling on the tenth floor. After that—well, who knows?”

  Lieutenant Marino didn’t say a word. He simply handed his computer code card to Singing Rock, and pointed to the number on it. He seemed to be shocked and numbed, but then we all were. Even the newspaper reporters and the television crew were silent and apprehensive, and we stared at each other with the haunted eyes of men who are trapped in a sinking submarine.

  Singing Rock went into a small side office and picked up the phone. I stayed with him while he dialed, and I could hear the ringing tone, and the click of the recorded answering machine. Squinting closely at Lieutenant Marino’s card, Singing Rock read off a series of numbers, and waited to be put in touch with Unitrak.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him. “How can you tell a computer that you need some help from its manitou?”

  Singing Rock lit himself a small cigar, and puffed out smoke. “I guess it’s going to be a question of using the right language,” he said. “And also persuading the programmers that I’m not totally crazy.”

  There was another click, and a matter-of-fact WASPish voice said: “Unitrak. Could you state your business please?”

  Singing Rock coughed. “I’m speaking for Lieutenant Marino of the New York Police Department. Lieutenant Marino would like to know if Unitrak has a spiritual existence.”

  There was a silence. Then the voice said: “What? Would you repeat that?”

  “Lieutenant Marino would like Unitrak to state if it has a spiritual existence.”

  There was another silence. Then the voice said: “Look—what is this? Some kind of a joke?”

  “Please—just ask the question.”

  There was a sigh. “Unitrak is not programmed to answer questions like that. Unitrak is a working computer—not one of your fancy university poem-writing gadgets. Now, if that’s all?”

  “Wait,” said Singing Rock urgently. “Please ask Unitrak one important question. Ask it if it has any data on the Great Old One.”

  “The Great What?”

  “The Great Old One. He’s a—kind of a criminal ringleader.”

  “What division? Fraud, homicide, arson—what?”

  Singing Rock thought for a moment, then he said: “Homicide.”

  “There was a silence. The voice said: “You’re spelling ‘Great’ as in ‘Great Grief?’”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Okay—hold on, then.”

  Through the receiver, I could hear distant whirrs and clicks as Singing Rock’s question was punched on to cards. Singing Rock smoked and fidgeted, and in the background we could hear the terrible sound of that spooky wind. The floor stirred again, and Singing Rock covered the mouthpiece with his hand and whispered: “I don’t think this is going to work. It won’t be long now, and the Great Old One will be let through the gateway.”

  I hissed: “Is there anything else we can do? Any other way of stopping him?”

  Singing Rock said: “There must be another way. After all, the ancient wonder-workers were able to seal the Great Old One in his own domain. But even if I knew what it was, I don’t expect I’d be capable of doing it.”

  As we waited for Unitrak to come up with an answer, I began to feel an odd kind of nausea. At first I thought it was the swaying and rippling of the hospital floor, but then I realized it was a smell. A ripe, fetid, revolting smell that reminded me of a frozen rabbit I had once bought which turned out rotten. I sniffed, pulled a face, and looked at Singing Rock.

  “He’s coming,” said Singing Rock, without apparent emotion. “The Great Old One is coming.”

  I heard shouting outside, and I left Singing Rock holding on to the telephone and went to see what was going on. There was a crowd of doctors and nurses around the CBS camera. I pushed my way through to Jack Hughes and asked him what had happened. He looked pale and ill, and his hand was obviously hurting him a great deal.

  “It was one of the cameramen,” he said. “He was holding on to his camera, and it seemed like he just collapsed. He was shaking like he’d had an electric shock, but it isn’t that.”

  I struggled forward toward the cameraman. He was young and sandy-haired, dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt. His eyes were closed and his face was contorted and white. His bottom lip kept shuddering and curling in a strange kind of snarl. One of the interns was rolling up his sleeve to
inject him with tranquilizer.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Is he having a fit?”

  The intern carefully inserted the hypodermic into the cameraman’s arm and squeezed the plunger. After a few moments, the facial spasms and the shuddering seemed to die away, and apart from a few isolated twitches, the cameraman began to calm down.

  “I don’t know what it is,” said the intern, shaking his head. He was a callow young doctor with carefully combed hair and a round, freshly poured face. “It looks to me like some kind of severe psychological shock. Probably a delayed reaction to everything that’s been going on here.”

  “Let’s get him out of here and try to fix him up more comfortably,” called Dr. Winsome. Three or four of the doctors went for a trolley, while the rest of us, frustrated and frightened, dispersed in awkward silence to wait for whatever manifestation was going to make its presence felt on us next. I heard Lieutenant Marino talking angrily on the telephone to his reinforcements, and it was clear that they were still having trouble gaining access to the building. Mingled with the moans of Misquamacus’s wind, I could hear more sirens howling in the streets outside, and I could see spotlights flickering against the windows. In an hour or two, it would start to grow light, if we survived long enough to see it. The putrid stench of the Great Old One was thick in the air now, and two or three people were retching. The temperature kept fluctuating from stifling heat to uncomfortable cold, as if the whole building had a raging and uncontrollable fever.

  I went back to Singing Rock. He was scribbling down a series of numbers on the corner of a magazine, and he looked intense and anxious. I waited for him to finish, then said: “Do you think you can make it?”

  Singing Rock examined the figures carefully. “I’m not sure, but there’s something here. The computer programmer said that the machine had no police records on anyone called the Great Old One, and he combed back for ten years through every known criminal alias. But Unitrak did respond with a message and a series of numbers.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Well—the programmer translated the message for me, and it says Call Procedure Follows Promptly. Then we get the numbers.”

  I wiped my forehead with my stained handkerchief. “Does that help? Does that mean anything?”

  “I think so,” said Singing Rock. “At least Unitrak answered. And if it answered—well, maybe it knows that we want.”

  I pointed to the numbers. “You mean these numbers tell you how to summon its manitou?”

  “Possibly. We don’t know until we try.”

  I sat down wearily. “Singing Rock, it all sounds too far-fetched for me. I know what I’ve done and I know what I’ve seen, but don’t tell me that some publicly funded computer is going to tell us how to raise its own spirit. Singing Rock, it just doesn’t sound sane.”

  Singing Rock nodded. “I know, Harry, and I don’t think I believe it any more than you do. All I can say is that the message from Unitrak is here, and that these numbers do tally with the appropriate ritual for summoning the manitous of manmade objects. In point of fact, it’s one of the easiest of rituals. I was taught it by the medicine man Sarara, of the Paiute, when I was only twelve years old. I learned to raise the manitous of shoes and gloves and books and all kinds of things. I could make a book turn all its pages, without touching it at all.”

  “But a book is a book, Singing Rock. This is a multimillion-dollar computer. It’s powerful. It could even be dangerous.”

  Singing Rock sniffed the stench of the Great Old One that was already crowding the room. “Nothing could be more dangerous than what we are about to experience now,” he said. “At least if we have to die, we will die a hero’s death.”

  “A hero’s death doesn’t interest me.”

  Singing Rock laid his hand on mine. “You didn’t think of that when you faced the Star Beast alone.”

  “No, but I’m thinking of it now. Twice in one night is too much for any man.”

  Singing Rock said: “What was all that noise outside? Was someone hurt?”

  I reached for a cigarette from the pack on the desk. “I don’t think so. It was a cameraman from CBS. He was walking about filming and he just collapsed. I guess he must’ve been epileptic or something.”

  Singing Rock frowned. “He was filming?”

  “That’s right. I guess he was just taking shots of everybody in the whole place. He went over like someone had knocked him on the head. Don’t ask me—I didn’t see it.”

  Singing Rock thought for a moment. Then he walked quickly out of the office, and over to the CBS reporters. They were standing in an uneasy circle, five or six of them, smoking and trying to figure out what to do next.

  Singing Rock said: “Your friend—is he all right?”

  One of the reporters, a short stocky man in a plum-colored shirt and heavy glasses, said: “Sure. He’s still with the doctors, but they say he’s going to be okay. Say listen, do you know what the hell’s going on here? Is this true, about evil spirits?”

  Singing Rock ignored his questions. “Is your friend prone to fits?” he asked intently.

  The TV reporter shook his head slowly. “Never saw him have one before. This is the first time, far as I know. He never said he was an epileptic or nothing like that.”

  Singing Rock looked grave. “Was anyone else looking through a camera at the same time?” he asked.

  The TV reporter said: “No sir. We only have this one camera here. Say—do you know what that terrible smell is?”

  Singing Rock said: “May I?” and lifted the portable television camera out of its case. It was dented where the falling cameraman had dropped it, but it was still working. One of the technicians, a dour man in blue denim, showed him how to heft it on to his shoulder, and how to look through the viewfinder.

  The floor of the room began to tremble and pulsate, like someone shaking in fright, or a dog reaching a sexual climax. The lights dimmed again, and the sound of that gruesome wind grew steadily louder. There was a panicky babble from the twenty or thirty doctors and police and reporters crowded into the room, and Dr. Winsome, ashen-faced and sweating, finally had to leave his clamoring internal phones off the hook. We didn’t dare to think what was happening in other wards and offices, and we couldn’t get to them now if we did. Lieutenant Marino was still hanging on to the phone, waiting to hear from his reinforcements, but he had given up any semblance of optimism. He chain-smoked, and his face was set hard and grim.

  As the floor spasm passed, Singing Rock pressed his eye to the black rubber socket of the television camera’s viewfinder, switched it on, and slowly began to scan the room. He covered it in careful, systematic sweeps, exploring every corner and behind every door. The CBS crewmen watched uneasily as he circled the room, bent forward like a water diviner his thin body tense.

  “What the hell’s that guy up to?” said one of the technicians suspiciously.

  “Ssh,” said his colleague. “Maybe he’s trying to find out where the smell comes from.”

  After a few minutes of careful searching, Singing Rock laid the camera down. He beckoned me across, and spoke to me in a low, hurried murmur, so that nobody else could hear.

  “I think I know what happened,” he muttered. “The demons which always accompany the Great Old One have passed through here. They are gone, now—probably down to the tenth floor to gather around Misquamacus. But I believe the cameraman saw them.”

  “He saw them? How?”

  “You know the old story that Indians believed they should never be photographed, because cameras would steal their spirits from them. Well, in a manner of speaking that was correct. A camera lens, even though it can never steal a man’s manitou, can perceive it. That is why there have been so many strange pictures in which ghosts—unseen when the picture was being taken—have mysteriously appeared when the picture is printed up.”

  I coughed. “You mean the cameraman saw these demons through the viewfinder? That’s why he collapsed?”
r />   “I think so,” said Singing Rock. “We’d better go and talk to him, if he’s still conscious. If he can tell us which demons he saw, we may be able to work out when the Great Old One is due to make his appearance.”

  We called Jack Hughes over and explained what was going on. He said nothing, but nodded in agreement when Singing Rock suggested speaking to the cameraman. He had a brief word with Dr. Winsome, and then he beckoned us through to the first-aid room.

  It was silent in there. On a high hospital couch, the cameraman lay pallid and twitching while three doctors kept a close watch on his pulse rate and other vital signs. They greeted Jack Hughes as we came in, and stood aside to let us gather round the cameraman’s bed.

  “Don’t be too rough with him,” said one of the interns. “He’s had a bad shock, and he’s not up to much.”

  Singing Rock didn’t answer. He leaned over the white-faced cameraman and whispered: “Can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying?”

  The cameraman simply shuddered. Singing Rock said again: “Can you hear what I’m saying? Do you understand where you are?”

  There was no response. The interns shrugged, and one of them said: “He’s deeply unconscious, I’m afraid. Whatever it was that happened to him, his mind has kind of retreated and it isn’t coming back out for anyone. It’s quite common in severe shock cases. Give him time.”

  Under his breath, Singing Rock said: “We don’t have time.” He fished in his coat pocket for a necklace of strangely painted beads, and he gently laid them on the cameraman’s head, like a halo. One of the interns tried to protest, but Jack Hughes waved him away.

  With his eyes closed, Singing Rock began an incantation. I couldn’t hear the words at all, and those which I could hear were in Sioux. At least I presumed it was Sioux. I’m not a linguist myself, and for all I know it could have been French.

  The spell didn’t seem to work at first. The cameraman remained pale and still, his fingers occasionally twitching and his lips moving soundlessly. But then Singing Rock drew a magic figure in the air over his head, and without any warning at all, the cameraman’s eyes blinked open. They looked glassy and ill-focused, but they were actually open.