The Manitou Read online

  “Malignant?” said Dr. McEvoy. “How do we know it’s malignant?”

  Dr. Hughes shook his head. “We don’t know, but until we find out whether it’s dangerous or harmless, I’m going to treat it as dangerous.”

  “I just wish I knew what the hell it was,” said Dr. McEvoy gloomily. “I’ve been right through the medical dictionary, and there just isn’t anything like it.”

  Dr. Hughes grinned tiredly. “Maybe it’s a new disease. Maybe they’ll name it after you. McEvoy’s Malady. Fame at last. You always wanted to be famous, didn’t you?”

  “Right now I’d settle for a cup of coffee and a hot beef sandwich. The Nobel Prize I can have any time.”

  The phone bleeped. Dr. Hughes picked it up. “Mary? Oh, right. Okay, that’s fine. Yes, that’ll do fine. Tell Dr. Snaith thank you.”

  “He’s free?” asked Dr. McEvoy. “Tomorrow morning, ten a.m. I better go and tell Miss Tandy.”

  Dr. Hughes pushed through the double doors into the waiting room, and Miss Tandy was still sitting there, halfway through another cigarette, and staring, without seeing, at the open magazine on her lap.

  “Miss Tandy?”

  She looked up quickly. “Oh, yes,” she said. Dr. Hughes drew up a chair and sat down next to her with his hands clasped in front of him. He tried to look serious and steady and reliable, to calm her obvious fright, but he was so tired that he didn’t succeed in looking anything but morbid.

  “Listen, Miss Tandy, I think we’ll have to operate. It doesn’t look as though this swelling is anything to worry about, but at the rate it’s been growing, I’d like to see it removed as soon as possible, and I guess you would too.”

  She raised her hand toward the back of her neck, then dropped it and nodded. “I understand. Of course.”

  “If you can be here by eight o’clock tomorrow morning, I’ll have Dr. Snaith remove it for you around ten. Dr. Snaith is a very fine surgeon, and he has years of experience with tumors like yours.” Miss Tandy attempted to smile. “That’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

  Dr. Hughes shrugged. “Don’t thank me. I’m only doing my job. But, listen I don’t think you have anything to worry about. I won’t pretend that your condition is not unusual, because it is. But part of our profession is dealing with unusual conditions. You’ve come to the right place.”

  Miss Tandy stubbed out her cigarette and gathered her things together.

  “Will I need anything special?” she asked. “A couple of nightdresses, I suppose, and a wrap?”

  Dr. Hughes nodded. “Bring some slippers, too. You’re not going to be exactly bedridden.”

  “Okay,” she said, and Dr. Hughes showed her out. He watched her walk quickly down the corridor to the elevator, and he thought how slim and young and elf-like she looked. He wasn’t one of those specialists who thought of his patients in terms of their condition and nothing else—not like Dr. Pawson, the lung specialist, who could remember individual ailments long after he’d forgotten the faces that went with them. Life is more than an endless parade of lumps and bumps, thought Dr. Hughes. At least I hope it is.

  He was still standing in the corridor when Dr. McEvoy poked his moonlike face round the door.

  “Dr. Hughes?”

  “Yes?”

  “Come inside a moment, take a look at this.” He followed Dr. McEvoy tiredly into his office.

  While he had been talking to Miss Tandy, Dr. McEvoy had been looking through his medical reference books, and there were diagrams and X-rays strewn around all over his desk.

  “You found something?” asked Dr. Hughes. “I don’t know. It seems to be as ridiculous as anything else in this case.”

  Dr. McEvoy handed him a heavy textbook, opened at a page covered with charts and diagrams. Dr. Hughes frowned, and examined them carefully, and then he went over to the light-box and peered at the pictures of Miss Tandy’s skull again.

  “That’s crazy,” he said.

  Dr. McEvoy stood there with his hands on his hips and nodded. “You’re quite right. It is crazy. But you have to admit, it looks pretty much like it.”

  Dr. Hughes shut the book. “But even if you’re right—in two days?"

  “Well, if this is possible, anything is possible.”

  “If this is possible, the Red Sox will win the next series.”

  The two pale doctors stood in their office on the fifteenth floor of the hospital and looked at the X-rays and just didn’t know what to say next. “Perhaps it’s a hoax?” said Dr. McEvoy. Dr. Hughes shook his head. “No way. How could it be? And what for?”

  “I don’t know. People dream up hoaxes for all kinds of reasons.”

  “Can you think of a reason for this?” Dr. McEvoy grimaced. “Can you believe it’s real?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Dr. Hughes. “Maybe it is.

  Maybe it’s the one case in a million that’s really real.”

  They opened the book again, and studied the X-ray again, and the more they compared the diagrams with Miss Tandy’s tumor, the more resemblance they discovered.

  According to Clinical Gynaecology, the knot of tissue and bone that Miss Tandy was harboring in the back of her neck was a human fetus, of a size that suggested it was about eight weeks old.

  Chapter One

  Out of the Night

  If you think it’s an easy life being a mystic, you ought to try telling fifteen fortunes a day, at $25 a time, and then see whether you’re quite so keen on it.

  At the same moment that Karen Tandy was consulting Dr. Hughes and Dr. McEvoy at the Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital, I was giving old Mrs. Winconis a quick tour of her immediate prospects with the help of the Tarot cards.

  We were sitting around the green baize table in my Tenth Avenue flat, with the drapes drawn tight and the incense smoldering suggestively in the corner, and my genuine simulated antique oil lamp casting pretty mysterious shadows. Mrs. Winconis was wrinkled and old and smelled of musty perfume and fox-fur coats, and she came around every Friday evening for a detailed rundown of the seven days ahead.

  As I laid out the cards in the Celtic cross, she fidgeted and sniffed and peered across at me like a moth-eaten ermine scenting its prey. I knew she was dying to ask me what I saw, but I never gave any hints until the whole thing was set out on the table. The more suspense, the better. I had to go through the whole performance of frowning and sighing, and biting my lips, and making out that I was in communication with the powers from beyond. After all, that’s what she paid her $25 for.

  But she couldn’t resist the temptation. As the last card went down, she leaned forward and asked: “What is it, Mr. Erskine? What do you see? Is there anything about Daddy?”

  “Daddy” was her name for Mr. Winconis, a fat and dour old supermarket manager who chain-smoked cigars and didn’t believe in anything more mystical than the first three runners at Aqueduct. Mrs. Winconis never suggested as much, but it was plain from the way she talked that her greatest hope in life was for Daddy’s heart to give out, and the Winconis fortune to come her way.

  I looked at the cards with my usual elaborate concentration. I knew as much about the Tarot as anybody did who had taken the trouble to read Tarot Made Easy, but it was the style that carried it off. If you want to be a mystic, which is actually easier than being an advertising copywriter, or a summer camp warden, or a coach-tour guide, then you have to look like a mystic.

  Since I am a rather mousy thirty-two-year-old from Cleveland, Ohio, with the beginnings of a bald patch underneath my scrubby brown hair, and a fine but overlarge nose in my fine but pallid face, I took the trouble to paint my eyebrows into satanic arches, and wear an emerald satin cloak with moons and stars sewn on it, and perch a triangular green hat on my head. The hat used to have a badge on it that said Green Bay Packers, but I took it off, for obvious reasons.

  I invested in incense, and a few leather-bound copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a beaten-up old skull from a secondhand store in the Village, and then
I placed an advertisement in the newspapers which read: “The Incredible Erskine—Fortunes Read, Future Foretold, Your Fate Revealed.”

  Within a couple of months, I was handling more business than I knew what to do with, and for the first time in my life I was able to afford a new Mercury Cougar and a quad stereo with earphones to match. But, as I say, it wasn’t easy. The constant tide of middle-aged ladies who came simpering into my apartment, dying to hear what was going to happen in their tedious middle-aged lives, was almost enough to drown me forever in the well of human despair.

  “Well?” said Mrs. Winconis, clutching her alligator pocketbook in her wrinkled old fingers. “What can you see, Mr. Erskine?”

  I shook my head slowly and magnificently. “The cards are solemn today, Mrs. Winconis. They carry many warnings. They tell you that you are pressing too hard toward a future that, when it comes to pass, you may not enjoy as much as you thought. I see a portly gentleman with a cigar—it must be Daddy. He is saying something in great sorrow. He is saying something about money.”

  “What is he saying? Do the cards tell you what he is saying?” whispered Mrs. Winconis. Whenever I mentioned ‘money,’ she started to twitch and jump like spit on a red-hot stove. I’ve seen some pretty ugly lusts in my time, but the lust for money in middle-aged woman is enough to make you lose your lunch.

  “He is saying that something is too expensive,” I went on, in my special hollow voice. “Something is definitely too expensive. I know what it is. I can see what it is. He is saying that canned salmon is too expensive. He doesn’t think that people will want to buy it at that price.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Winconis, vexed. But I knew what I was doing. I had checked the price-rise column in the Supermarket Report that morning, and I knew that canned salmon was due for an increase. Next week, when Daddy started complaining about it, Mrs. Winconis would remember my words, and be mightily impressed with my incredible clairvoyant talents.

  “What about me? asked Mrs. Winconis. “What is going to happen to me?"

  I stared gloomily at the cards.

  “Not a good week, I’m afraid. Not a good week at all. On Monday you will have an accident. Not a serious one. Nothing worse than dropping a heavy weight on your foot, but it will be painful. It will keep you awake Monday night. On Tuesday, you will play bridge with your friends as usual. Someone will cheat you, but you will not discover who it is. So keep your stakes small, and don’t take any risks. Wednesday you will have an unpleasant telephone call, possibly obscene. Thursday you will eat a meal that does not agree with you, and you will wish that you never ate it.”

  Mrs. Winconis fixed me with her dull gray eyes. “Is it really that bad?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t have to be. Remember that the cards can warn as well as foretell. If you take steps to avoid these pitfalls, you will not necessarily have such a bad week.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” she said. “It’s worth the money just to know what to look out for.”

  “The spirits think well of you, Mrs. Winconis,” I said, in my special voice. “They care for you, and would not like to see you discomfited or harmed. If you treat the spirits right, they will treat you right.”

  She stood up. “Mr. Erskine, I don’t know how to thank you. I’d best be getting along now, but I’ll see you next week, won’t I?”

  I smiled my secret smile. “Of course, Mrs. Winconis. And don’t forget your mystic motto for the week.”

  “Oh, no, of course not. What is it this week, Mr. Erskine?”

  I opened a tattered old book that I kept on the table next to me. “Your mystic motto for this week is: ‘Guard well the pips, and the fruit shall grow without let.’”

  She stood there for a moment with a faraway smile on her withered old face. “That’s beautiful, Mr. Erskine. I shall repeat it every morning when I wake up. Thank you for a wonderful, wonderful session.”

  “The pleasure,” I said, “is all mine.”

  I showed her to the elevator, taking care that none of my neighbors saw me in my ridiculous green cloak and hat, and waved her a fond farewell. As soon as she had sunk out of sight, I went back into my flat, switched on the light, blew out the incense, and turned on the television. With any luck, I wouldn’t have missed too much of Kojak.

  I was just going to the icebox to fetch myself a can of beer when the telephone rang. I tucked the receiver under my chin, and opened up the beer as I talked. The voice on the other end was female (of course) and nervous (of course). Only nervous females sought the services of a man like The Incredible Erskine.

  “Mr. Erskine?”

  “Erskine’s the name, fortune-telling’s the game.”

  “Mr. Erskine, I wonder if I could come round and see you.”

  “Of course, of course. The fee is twenty-five dollars for your ordinary glimpse into the immediate future, thirty dollars for a year’s forecast, fifty dollars for a lifetime review.”

  “I just want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow.” The voice sounded young, and very worried. I took a quick mental guess at a pregnant and abandoned secretary.

  “Well, madam, that’s my line. What time do you want to come?”

  “Around nine? Is that too late?”

  “Nine is fine, and the pleasure’s mine. Can I have your name please?”

  “Tandy. Karen Tandy. Thank you, Mr. Erskine. I’ll see you at nine.”

  It might seem strange to you that an intelligent girl like Karen Tandy should seek help from a terrible quack like me, but until you’ve been dabbling in clairvoyance for quite a while, you don’t realize how vulnerable people feel when they’re threatened by things they don’t understand. This is particularly true of illness and death, and most of my clients have some kind of question about their own mortality to ask. No matter how reassuring and competent a surgeon may be, he can’t give people any answers when it comes to what is going to happen if their lives are suddenly snuffed out.

  It’s no good a doctor saying, “Well, see here, madam, if your brain ceases to give out any more electronic impulses, we’ll have to consider that you are lost and gone forever.”

  Death is too frightening, too total, too mystical, for people to want to believe it has anything to do with the facts of medicine and surgery. They want to believe in a life after death, or at the very least in a spirit world, where the mournful ghosts of their long-dead ancestors roam about in the celestial equivalent of silk pajamas.

  I could see the fear of death on Karen Tandy’s face when she knocked at my door. In fact, it was so strongly marked that I felt less than comfortable in my green cloak and my funny little green hat. She was delicately boned and pointy-faced, the sort of girl who always won races in high school athletics, and she spoke with a grave politeness that made me feel more fraudulent than ever.

  “Are you Mr. Erskine?” she asked.

  “That’s me. Fortunes read, futures foretold. You know the rest.”

  She walked quietly into my room and looked around at the incense burner and the yellowed skull and the close-drawn drapes. I suddenly felt that the whole set-up was incredibly phony and false, but she didn’t seem to notice. I drew out a chair for her to sit on, and offered her a cigarette. When I lit it, I could see that her hands were trembling.

  “All right, Miss Tandy,” I asked her. “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it, really. I’ve been to the hospital already, and they’re going to give me an operation tomorrow morning. But there are all kinds of things I couldn’t tell them about.”

  I sat back and smiled encouragingly. “Why don’t you try telling me?”

  “It’s very difficult,” she said, in her soft, light voice. “I get the feeling that it’s something much more than it seems.”

  “Well,” I said, crossing my legs under my green silk robe. “Would you like to tell me what it is?”

  She raised her hand shyly to the back of her neck. “About three days ago—Tuesday morning I think it
was—I began to feel a kind of irritation there, at the back of my neck. It swelled up, and I was worried in case it was something serious, and I went to the hospital to have it looked at.”

  “I see,” I said sympathetically. Sympathy, as you can probably guess, accounts for ninety-eight percent of anyone’s success as a clairvoyant. “And what did the doctors tell you?”

  “They said it was nothing to worry about, but at the same time they seemed pretty anxious to take it off.”

  I smiled. “So where do I come in?”

  “Well, my aunt’s been to see you once or twice. Mrs. Karmann, I live with her. She doesn’t know I’m here, but she’s always said how good you are, and so I thought I could try you myself.”

  Well, it was nice to know that my occult services were being praised abroad. Mrs. Karmann was a lovely old lady who believed that her dead husband was always trying to get in touch with her from the spirit world. She came to see me two or three times a month, whenever the dear departed Mr. Karmann sent her a message from beyond. It happened in her dreams, she always told me. She heard him whispering in a strange language in the middle of the night, and that was the signal for her to trot over to Tenth Avenue and spend a few dollars with me. Very good business, Mrs. Karmann.

  “You want me to read your cards?” I asked, raising one of my devilishly arched eyebrows.

  Karen Tandy shook her head. She looked more serious and worried then almost any client I could remember. I hoped she wasn’t going to ask me to do something that required real occult talent.

  “It’s the dreams, Mr. Erskine. Ever since this bump has started growing, I’ve had terrible dreams. The first night, I thought it was just an ordinary nightmare, but I’ve had the same dream every night, and each night it’s been clearer. I don’t even know if I want to go to bed tonight, because I just know I’m going to have the same dream, and it’s going to be even more vivid, and very much worse.”

  I pulled thoughtfully at the end of my nose. It was a habit of mine whenever I was pondering something over, and probably accounted for the size of my schonk. Some people scratch their heads when they think, and get dandruff. I just tug at my hooter.