Blind Panic Read online

  “Oh, Harry! That’s so deep! And so true, too!”

  “You won’t forget it, will you? When you’re being naturally warmhearted.”

  “Of course not. How could I? ‘No matter how much caviar you heap on a seagull, it can never be a baked potato.’”

  “Nearly right. It’ll do, anyhow.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I was fighting my way through the billowing white sheers that hang in the Delano’s lobby when my cell phone rang.

  “Harry?”

  “Hold on there, I’ve just gotten myself tangled up in forty yards of muslin.”

  “Harry, it’s Amelia.”

  “Amelia?” My heart stopped in midbeat, as if I had been bouncing a tennis ball against a schoolyard wall and somebody had unexpectedly caught it. “How did you know where I was?”

  “I don’t know where you are. I’ve been ringing your home number but you never pick up.”

  “I’m in Miami. You remember Marco Hernandez? Marco the Taco, we always used to call him. I’m house-sitting for him while he’s off on tour, tootling his ocarina or some such.”

  Amelia; I couldn’t believe it. Amelia Carlsson, née Crusoe. She could have been the love of my life if our lives had turned out differently. She was thin, elegant, curly-haired, and highly bewitching, if you’re attracted to women with high cheekbones and prominent shoulder blades and out-of-focus eyes. We had always attracted each other, but the problem was that we hadn’t always attracted each other at the same time. When she broke up with that bearded grump MacArthur, I was happily married to Karen, with Lucy just born; and when I broke up with Karen, she was happily married to Bertil, this literal-minded Swede who thought that Friends was a reality TV show.

  I hadn’t seen Amelia for more than two years now, the last time being a nightmarish experience that both of us preferred to forget. But it wasn’t just the nightmarish experience that kept us from seeing each other. Bertil seriously didn’t like me, mainly because he had as much sense of humor as a pickled herring, but also because he was jealous of our past, mine and Amelia’s, and he wasn’t so literal-minded and pickled-herringlike that he couldn’t sense our mutual attraction. Those glances, those smiles, those brushings-together in the kitchen doorway.

  “Harry, something terrible’s happened and I couldn’t think who else to turn to.” She sounded very close to tears.

  “Something terrible? What is it?” I managed to unwind myself from the sheers and find myself a pea green leather armchair where I could sit and talk to her.

  “It’s my sister Lizzie,” she said. “She’s gone blind. Her whole family’s gone blind.”

  “What? Did you say blind?”

  “Totally. Lizzie and Kevin and the kids, too.”

  “Amelia, that’s just awful. How the hell did that happen?”

  “Lizzie doesn’t know. They were on a biking weekend at the Hell’s Canyon Recreation Area in Oregon. Apparently they were halfway up a hill when little David started to wobble and just fell off his bike. Then Shauna. Both of them were screaming that they couldn’t see. Lizzie and Kevin went to help them, but before they could reach them, they went blind, too.

  “They didn’t dare to move, because they were so close to the edge of the canyon, and it was over five hundred feet down. They were lucky that a ranger came driving past or they might have had to stay there for hours or even days.”

  “They all went blind? Just like that? And Lizzie doesn’t have any idea why?”

  “None at all. And so far the doctors don’t have any idea, either. But something so strange has happened, which is why I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

  “Something strange? How strange? I’m not too sure I like the sound of this.”

  “Harry, I really need you to come with me. Please.”

  “Where exactly are you thinking of going?”

  “The Casey Eye Institute in Portland. We need to get there as soon as we can.”

  “Did you say Portland? Portland, Oregon? That’s so far west it’s practically Japan.”

  “United has a flight to Portland from Miami, and Continental has one from Newark, and they both connect in Denver, within about an hour of each other. We could meet up there.” She paused, and then she added, “I can pay for your tickets.”

  “What about Bertie? Can’t Bertie go with you?”

  “Bertil’s in Geneva, for a really important conference. He can’t get back here for another four days.”

  “All the same, he won’t be very happy if I come with you, will he? What about that gay friend of yours? What’s his name, Blake Thingy the Third? Or that woman you met when you were teaching, the one with the teeth? You must have a million friends you can call on.”

  “Harry, it has to be you.”

  A very pretty young waitress in a white uniform with gilt buttons appeared through the sheers and asked me whether I would like anything from the bar.

  “I’ll have another Nagayama Sunset, thanks. But go easy on the Nagayama. Oh—and bill it to Mrs. Zlotorynski, would you? In seven fifteen.”

  Amelia said, “I hate to ask you, Harry. But nobody else will understand.”

  “Understand what, exactly?”

  “I’ve been talking to Lizzie on the phone. She’s so confused. She keeps saying things that don’t make any sense. I asked her if she was feeling any pain, but all she says is, ‘We spread the disease, didn’t we?’ But when I ask her what disease, she doesn’t answer.”

  “Go on,” I coaxed her.

  “This morning, she said, ‘We deserve this, don’t we?’ I said of course they didn’t. The doctors would soon find out what was wrong with them, and give them their sight back. But she said, ‘No, we deserve it, and it’s not just me and Kevin and the kids—it’s all of us. We’re all going to go blind and we’re all going to die, every single one of us.’”

  “She’s in shock,” I suggested. “People say the weirdest things when they’re in shock. I was hit by a bus once, on Broadway, and for hours afterward I kept asking the way to Sarge’s Deli. Why would I want to go to Sarge’s Deli? Their blintzes are never hot enough and they have the rudest staff in the world.”

  Amelia said, “I thought it was shock, to begin with. I told her to relax. I told her I’d make sure that she and her family got the best treatment possible. But she said, ‘Doctors can’t treat this blindness, Amelia. It’s not a medical condition. It’s medicine.’”

  “Medicine? What did she mean by that?” This was definitely starting to disturb me, big-time. Unlike me, Amelia was a genuine clairvoyant and medium, and she could discuss pasta recipes with dead people. She could tell you what kind of person you were going to marry and what stinky old bag lady you were going to bump into when you crossed Lexington Avenue tomorrow. She knew all about plants and herbs and mirrors and crystal balls, and she could look at the worn-down pattern on the soles of your shoes and tell you that you were going to die by choking on a fishbone. She could even tell you what kind of fish.

  “I asked her that, too,” said Amelia. “She didn’t answer me directly. She said, ‘We saw them, before we went blind. They were standing by the side of the road.’ I said, ‘Who was standing by the side of the road?’”

  She hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “‘The One Who Went and Came Back. He had two mirrors with him.’”

  I felt my scalp tingle as if my hair were infested with lice. “The One Who Went and Came Back? Are you sure?”

  “She said it twice, Harry.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “What do you think? I asked her if she could tell me what he looked like. I asked her how she knew who he was.”

  “And?”

  “She said a word I didn’t understand. She kept repeating it. Something like ‘fatality,’ but not quite that.”

  “And that was all? ‘Fatality?’”

  “She put the phone down, and when I called back the nurse told me that she was too tired to talk to me any more. So I d
id a bead reading.”

  “A bead reading? I never saw you do a bead reading before.”

  “A smoke reading would have been better, but I was at work and there was no smoking. The beads are Navajo misfortune beads. They’re like Tibetan tala beads, only they’re not so concerned about how your rice is going to grow at twenty thousand feet above sea level. They’re more concerned with who your enemies are, and what’s going to come jumping out at you when you least expect it.”

  The waitress brought my cocktail and I signed the check, including a two-fifty tip. I took a sip of frosty cachaca, and then I said, “Okay…So what did they say, these beads?”

  “They said that a great darkness was coming. They said that a black cloak was sweeping across the sky. They said that men who cannot see can no longer be the masters of the world.”

  “Go on,” I told her.

  “They said that a great wonder worker had turned air and water and fire into flesh, and was walking the land of his ancestors, just as they had, in times long ago.”

  I didn’t say anything, not right away.

  Amelia said, “Harry? Are you still there?”

  “I’m still here. How good are these beads, as a general rule? Misguided, fairly misguided, pretty accurate, or smack on the nose?”

  “They’ve never been wrong in all the years that I’ve been using them. They predicted nine-eleven, almost to the minute.”

  “Okay. You’d better book me a ticket, then.”

  I hung up the phone. The One Who Went and Came Back. I hadn’t heard that in a long time and I had hoped that I would never hear it again. It was one of the many names for the most fearsome Wampanoag medicine man of all time, Misquamacus. The prospect of a newly resurrected Misquamacus was seriously unfunny.

  Misquamacus had been born nearly four hundred years ago. Native American legends say that when he was a very young adept, under the guidance of the notorious shaman Machitehew, he discovered a way to make spiritual contact with the Great Old Ones. These were the gods who had ruled the North American continent in the so-called Empty Time—in the days before days even existed—but had eventually been banished by Gitche Manitou to the farthest reaches of time and space.

  From the Great Old Ones, Misquamacus was said to have acquired the power to bring on a thunderstorm just by shouting at the sky. He could fell hundreds of pine trees in a single day or bring down whole herds of deer with nothing more than an incantation and a tapping of medicine sticks. It was also said that he could appear in several different places simultaneously—sometimes thousands of miles apart.

  In the seventeenth century, he had fought more ferociously against the English colonists than any other Native American, but in the end the Wampanoag had been cheated of their land and sold into slavery, and even He Who Brings the Terror of Eternal Darkness had been forced to throw in the towel. In the spring of 1655 he had made a solemn oath that he would drive out every last colonist, if not then, some time in the future, and he had taken “the way of the oil”—swallowing blazing oil to burn himself alive.

  When he did that, he was able to be reborn in the body of any unsuspecting woman who happened to be in the locality of his self-immolation—either in the past or in the future, whichever he chose. And the reason why I had gotten involved with him was because he had started to grow inside the body of a young woman in Manhattan called Karen Tandy, and Karen Tandy had started to have terrifying nightmares. Because of that, her mother had brought her to the only clairvoyant she knew—which was me—desperately asking for help. In turn, I had called on Amelia. I knew all of the patter and I could shuffle the tarot cards faster than Wild Bill Hickok could shuffle a poker deck, but Amelia was the genuine article.

  With the reluctant help of a Sioux medicine man called Singing Rock, we had managed to use cutting-edge technology to send Misquamacus back to the spirit world. We had discovered that everything has a spirit, or manitou. Not just a tree or a rock or a turkey vulture, but a laptop, a Blackberry, and even a Wii. And the modern manitous were far more powerful than the ancient manitous.

  But Misquamacus had constantly struggled to return, and every time he did so he caused destruction and death on a greater and greater scale. He took his revenge on Singing Rock, and killed him. And if you lived in Manhattan at the time, you’ll remember the so-called “seismic event” that brought down so many buildings. You’ll also remember the “blood disorder” that affected so many New Yorkers in the summer of 2002. Both are euphemisms for the destructive rage of Misquamacus.

  About five years ago, I came across a picture of Misquamacus on the Internet, on some obscure website devoted to Keiller Webb, a nineteenth-century frontier photographer. There he was, Misquamacus, standing in the background of a daguerreotype taken at Pyramid Lake in Nevada on August 18, 1865. He was wearing a black stovepipe hat and was glaring at me furiously, as if he had known when this picture was taken that I would be looking at it one day.

  He was stony-faced, his cheeks scarred with magical stigmata, and his deep-set eyes were glittering.

  Then, less than eighteen months later, I came across another picture that had been taken only the previous day—August 17, 1865—at the Hassanamisco Indian Reservation near Grafton, Massachusetts. A group of Nipmuc Indians were posing in their finest clothes to celebrate the meeting of their tribal council. And right at the back of the group, on the left-hand side, was Misquamacus. It was unmistakably him, even though the distance between Pyramid Lake and Grafton is more than 2,400 miles.

  His face was slightly blurred, because he must have moved during the exposure, but he wore the same black stovepipe hat, and around his neck he wore the same large silver medallion that Shauna had seen, like intertwining snakes. However, I had learned from Singing Rock that they weren’t snakes at all. They were the tentacles that grew from the face of the greatest of the Great Old Ones.

  It was the symbol that Misquamacus carried of his mystical connection to a time when there was no time, and to inconceivable distances that made your head ring to think about them, and to beings that could turn the entire universe upside down, and walk around underneath the earth, in infinite darkness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Modoc County National Forest, northern California

  Lightning flashed behind the clouds as their battered old Winnebago Vista jostled and creaked down the rocky path that led to the edge of the river; and as they turned into the recreation area and parked, there was an earsplitting burst of thunder that shook the windows and rattled every plate and mug in the galley.

  “Sounds like the Great Trout God isn’t too happy to see us,” said Charlie as the first fat drops of rain pattered onto the windshield.

  “Totally the opposite, dude,” said Mickey, swinging around in the front passenger seat and rubbing his hands with enthusiasm. “Weather like this, it’s perfect for brown trout. It damps down the flies, and that brings up the fish.”

  More lightning flashed, like a cheap theatrical effect. “You’re going fishing in this?” Remo asked him.

  “Oh, sure. I’m going to stand up to my knees in water in the middle of an electrical storm, holding a carbon-fiber extension rod up in the air. You think I got some kind of death wish? I’m going to tie a few poxybacks and wait for it to roll over.”

  “Well, I think I’ll treat myself to another beer and watch you. How about you, Charlie?”

  “Absolutely. You can’t beat treating yourself to a beer and watching somebody tie a few poxybacks. World-class entertainment.”

  Cayley came struggling out of the tiny bathroom. “I hate nature. I mean, it majorly sucks. I don’t know why I came.”

  “You came to keep an eye on me,” Remo reminded her. “You imagined that me and the guys were going to spend the entire weekend with half a dozen naked hotties, having an orgy.”

  “Actually, we were,” said Charlie. “But when we found out that you were coming along, we had to call Naked Hotties ‘R’ Us and cancel.”

  Cayle
y was one of those girls who had a permanently surprised expression on her face, as if her reaction to everything that happened in her life was like, What? She had spiked up her blonde pixie-cut hair, thickened her eyelashes with mascara, and slicked her lips with sparkly pink gloss, as well as misting herself liberally with J. Lo perfume. She was wearing a white sleeveless bolero and very short safari shorts, and wedge-shaped sandals that made her totter when she walked. She peered out at the rain-swept scenery as if it were a personal insult.

  “You did bring a poncho?” asked Mickey, although he could guess what the answer was. Mickey was the thin, pale, serious one, and he blinked a lot. He wore heavy-rimmed eyeglasses on his large, bean-shaped nose, and he always looked as if he cut his own hair while watching himself in the bathroom mirror. Mickey had always wanted to be a zoologist, but his father’s pet store had gone bankrupt in 2001, and he had never been able to raise enough money to go to college.

  Charlie was chubby, with a wild mess of chestnut brown curls and cheeks that flamed crimson whenever he drank too much beer. Charlie was always joking and playing the fool, but he had lost both of his parents in a horrific car crash on I-580 when he was six years old. His grandparents had brought him up in a house that was airless with inconsolable grief, and so he had a whole childhood of silence to make up for. Charlie suffered from chronic asthma, and he always wore swirly psychedelic shirts, size XXL, but his friends tolerated his constant wheezing and his lurid wardrobe because he was always the first to pitch in whenever they got themselves into a fight, which was frequently.

  Remo was half Italian, with blue eyes and black stubble and very hairy wrists. He came from a noisy family of five brothers and two sisters and countless aunts and uncles, and every time they met for birthdays or family reunions it was like the Battle of Anzio. Remo liked to think that he was a younger and more handsome version of Nicolas Cage, and that he could have made a career in movies. Just like Mickey and Charlie, however, he had ended up as a telemarketer for Tiger Electronics in Palo Alto, marketing software and laptops and replacement ink cartridges.