The Manitou Read online

  "Talk," insisted Amelia. “Tell us who you are. I command you to talk.”

  The breathing seemed to change. It grew harsher and louder, and with each breath the chandelier pulsed and flickered. I could see its green reflections in the dark pool of the cherrywood table. Mrs. Karmann’s hand was digging deep into mine, but I hardly felt it. There was a persistent chilliness around the room, and the draught blew uncomfortably up my legs.

  “Talk,” repeated Amelia. “Speak and tell us who you are.”

  “Christ,” said MacArthur impatiently, “this is—”

  “Ssshhh,” I told him. “Just wait, MacArthur, it’s coming.”

  And it was coming. I stared at the center of the table, and there seemed to be something shivering in the air a few inches above the surface. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and creep as the air twisted and flowed like smoke, then began to form itself into some sort of shape.

  The breathing grew deep and loud and close, as though someone was actually breathing in my ear. The dim light of the chandelier faded altogether but the pouring snake of air in front of us had a luminescence all its own.

  Underneath it, the actual wooden surface of the table began to rise in a lump. I bit my tongue until the sharp taste of blood flowed into my mouth. I was petrified with fear, but I couldn’t turn away, couldn’t refuse to look. The power of the circle held us all too strongly, and we could only sit there and stare at this terrifying spectacle in front of us.

  The black shiny wood in the middle of the table formed into a human face, a man’s face, with its eyes closed like a death mask.

  “God,” said MacArthur, “what is it?”

  “Quiet,” whispered Amelia. I could see her white, intense expression by the unnatural light of the air. “Leave this to me.”

  Amelia leaned forward toward the frozen wooden face.

  “Who are you?” she asked, almost cajolingly. “What do you want with Karen Tandy?”

  The face remained still. It was a fierce, deeply lined face, the face of a powerful man in his late thirties, with a distinctively hooked nose, and wide full lips.

  “What do you want?” asked Amelia again. “What is it you’re looking for?”

  I could have been mistaken, but I thought I saw the black wooden lips move into a quiet and self-satisfied smile. The face stayed like that for a moment, and then the wood seemed to flow and bend, and the features melted away, and soon there was nothing there but the flat polished table.

  The weird light faded, and we were back in darkness.

  “Harry,” said Amelia. “For God’s sake put the lights on.”

  I let go of MacArthur’s hand, and Mrs. Karmann’s hand, and stood up. At that second, there was a shattering crack, and a brilliant white flash of light, and the windows smashed with a bomb-like explosion that sent glass spraying everywhere. The drapes flapped and billowed in the icy wind from the snowy night outside, and Mrs. Karmann screamed in terror.

  I went to the lights and snapped them on. Everything in the dining room had been thrown around, as if a hurricane had come howling through. There were glasses and decanters on the floor, paintings were hanging askew, chairs were knocked over. The cherrywood dining table had split from one side to the other.

  MacArthur stood up and came crunching across the carpet through the litter of glass. “I’ve had enough, man. From now on, it’s social security plates for me, and nothing else.”

  “Harry,” called Amelia. “Help me get Mrs. Karmann through to the living room.”

  Together we carried the old lady into the next room and laid her down on the settee. She was white and shivering, but she didn’t seem to be hurt. I went over to the cocktail cabinet and poured her a large glass of brandy, and Amelia held it for her to sip.

  “Is it all over?” she whimpered. “What happened?”

  “I’m afraid there’s a bit of damage, Mrs. Karmann,” I told her. “The windows broke, and some of your glassware is smashed. I’m afraid the table’s cracked too. But it’s a clean split. Maybe you can get it repaired.”

  “But what was it?” she said. “That face!”

  Amelia shook her head. MacArthur had found some cigarettes in a silver box, and he handed her one. She lit it with trembling hands, and blew the smoke out in a long unsteady stream.

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Karmann. I’m not that expert as a medium. But whatever it was, it was very powerful. Usually, a spirit has to do what you tell it to do. This one was just showing us that it didn’t give a damn what we thought of it.”

  “But Amelia,” I said. “Is that the thing that’s been giving Karen Tandy all those nightmares?”

  She nodded. “I think so. I mean, it’s so strong that it must be causing some kind of vibrations in this apartment. And I expect that’s what Karen picked up in her dreams. When you’re asleep, you’re very receptive to vibrations, even weak ones, and these are much more powerful than any I’ve ever come across. There’s something here that’s possessed of real magical strength.”

  I lit a cigarette myself and thought for a moment. “Did you say magical?” I asked Amelia.

  “Sure. Any spirit with that kind of control over itself would have to be the spirit of somebody who knew about the occult when they were alive. It might even be a person who’s still living today, and is able to float around as a spirit when they’re asleep. It has been known.”

  “Sounds like bullshit t’me,” said MacArthur. “If I was Mrs. Karmann, I’d take that table back and complain.”

  I grinned. It was good to have a real skeptic around, even if he wasn’t helping us much.

  “Amelia,” I said. “If you’re saying that what we saw tonight was the spirit of someone magical, then there’s an interesting tie-in. I was reading my Tarot cards the other evening, and I kept coming up with The Magician. No matter how I dealt or redealt them, I always ended up with the same card.”

  Amelia brushed her long brown hair away from her eyes. “In that case, I guess it’s fair to suppose that whoever is doing this, whether they’re alive or dead, is a magician. Or somebody like a magician.”

  “Witch doctor?” suggested MacArthur.

  “Could be. I mean, he looked like some kind of African. Not just because the wood was black, but because of his lips, remember?”

  Mrs. Karmann sat up, clutching her glass of brandy. “Well, I’ll tell you what he reminded me of,” she said weakly. “He reminded me of a cigar-store Indian.”

  MacArthur snapped his fingers. “That’s it—Indian. The hooked nose, right, and the lips, and the high cheekbones. He’s not a witch doctor, he’s a medicine man!”

  Amelia brightened up. “Listen,” she said. “I have quite a few books on Indians. Why don’t we go back to my place and see what we can find out about medicine men? Mrs. Karmann, do you think you’ll be all right now?”

  “Oh, you go ahead,” said the old lady. “I’ll stay across the hall with my neighbor Mrs. Routledge, and Karen’s parents will be here later. If you think that any of this can help poor Karen, then the sooner you get going the better.”

  “Mrs. Karmann,” said Amelia, “you’re an angel.”

  “Not yet a while, I hope,” smiled Mrs. Karmann. “Not yet a while.”

  Back in the untidy jumble of Amelia’s apartment in the Village, surrounded by books and magazines and tapestries and pictures and old hats and half a bicycle, we went through a dozen volumes on Indian lore. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much about medicine men, apart from stuff on buffalo magic and rain dances and battle spells. Out of the eleven books, nothing gave us any clues about the wooden death mask on Mrs. Karmann’s table.

  “Maybe we’re totally mistaken,” said Amelia. “Perhaps the spirit is somebody living today. I mean, a hooked nose doesn’t have to be Indian. It could be Jewish.”

  “Wait a minute,” I told her. “Have you any other history books, or anything at all that might contain a cross reference to Indians or medicine men?”

  Amel
ia scuffled through a couple of heaps of books, and came up with a history of early settlements in the United States, and the first volume of a three-volume study of New York. I went to the indexes and looked up Indians. The book on early settlements contained nothing more than the usual generalizations about Indian civilization. In those early days people were more in the mood for land-grabbing than studying the indigenous culture of the natives. But the book on New York had an illustration which gave me the biggest break I’d had since I’d found Karen Tandy’s nightmare ship in the library.

  I’d seen the drawing before—in school books and history books—but it was only when I came across it that night in Amelia Crusoe’s apartment that I realized just what its implications were. It was a sketchy engraving of the tip of an island. On the shore was a small cluster of houses, windmill, and a high-walled fort in the shape of a cross of Lorraine. There were ships standing offshore, and canoes and jolly-boats paddling around in the foreground.

  The largest of the ships were identical to Karen Tandy’s nightmare vessel and the picture’s caption bore the connection out. It read: “Earliest known view of New Amsterdam, 1651. The director-general of the Dutch West India Company lived in this small but important settlement.”

  I passed the book over to Amelia. “Look at this,” I said. “This is the exact ship that Karen Tandy dreamed about—and look, there are half a dozen Indians in that canoe. This is what New York was like, three hundred and twenty years ago.”

  She studied the picture carefully. “Harry,” she said, “this could be it. This could be just what we’re looking for. Supposing there was an Indian medicine man in New York, or New Amsterdam, all those centuries ago, and supposing that Karen actually picked up his vibrations in the same place that he once used to live.”

  “That’s right,” put in MacArthur, scratching his beard. “There musta been an Indian village on East Eighty-second Street. Mind you, it sometimes looks as though there still is.”

  I sat up and stretched my aching back. “That whole business about ‘de boot’ would fit in then. If this guy was a medicine man at the time the Dutch settled on Manhattan, then the only words of European he’d be likely to know would be Dutch. ‘De boot, mijnheer,’ would be his way of saying something about the ship. And judging from Karen’s dream, he was afraid of the ship. She told me it seemed to her like an alien ship—almost like something from Mars. And I guess that’s just how it would appear to an Indian.”

  Amelia found a cigarette in a crumpled pack and lit it. “But why is he so malignant?” she asked. “And how does that tie in with Karen’s tumor? I mean, what’s the tumor all about?”

  Unexpectedly, MacArthur said: “I’ve found it.” He’d been looking through a large dusty encyclopedia, and he marked the page and passed it over to me.

  “Medicine Men,” I read aloud, “were often powerful magicians who were said to be capable of extraordinary supernatural acts. They were believed to be immortal, and if threatened, could destroy themselves by drinking blazing oil, and be reborn at any time or place in the future or past by impregnating themselves into the body of a man, woman or animal.”

  Amelia’s eyes were wide. “Is that all it says?” she asked me.

  “That’s all,” I told her. “After that, it goes on to rain dances again.”

  “Then that means that Karen is—”

  “Pregnant,” I said, shutting the book. “In a manner of speaking, she’s about to give birth to a primitive savage.”

  “But Harry,” said Amelia, “what the hell can we do?”

  MacArthur stood up and went in search of some beer in the icebox. “All you can do,” he said, “is wait until the medicine man hatches, then give him a dose of blazing oil. That should get rid of him for you.”

  “That’s impossible,” I told him. “By the time that medicine man is ready to be born, Karen Tandy will be dead.”

  “I know,” said MacArthur glumly, sipping beer. “But I don’t see what the hell else you could do.”

  I went across to the phone. “Well, the first thing I’m going to do is call the hospital. Maybe Dr. Hughes will have some ideas. At least we have a theory about it now, which is a damn sight more than we had a couple hours ago.”

  I dialed the Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital, and asked for Dr. Hughes. When he answered, he sounded even more tired than ever. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning, and he must have been on duty all day.

  “Dr. Hughes? This is Harry Erskine.”

  “What do you want, Mr. Erskine? Have you got some news of your ghost?”

  “I found a medium, Dr. Hughes, and we held a seance tonight in Karen’s apartment. There was some kind of manifestation—a face. All of us saw it. We’ve been checking through books on Indian history and stuff like that, and we think it might be an Indian medicine man of the seventeenth century. According to one of these books—hold on—Indian medicine men ‘if threatened, could destroy themselves by drinking blazing oil, and be reborn at any time or place in the future or past by impregnating themselves into the body of a man, woman or animal.’ Do you think that fits, Dr. Hughes?”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the telephone.

  Then Dr. Hughes said: “Mr. Erskine, I don’t know what to say. That almost fits too well. But if it is true, what can anyone do to destroy such a creature? Dr. Snaith made more tests this afternoon, and it’s absolutely clear that if we do anything to remove or kill that fetus, then Karen Tandy will die. The thing has become an integral part of her own nervous system.”

  “How is she, doctor? Is she conscious?”

  “Just about, but she’s not responding too well. If this fetus goes on growing at the same rate, I can only say that she’ll be dead within two or three days. Dr. Snaith thinks Tuesday.”

  “How about the gynecological expert?”

  “He’s as baffled as the rest of us,” said Dr. Hughes. “He confirmed that the fetus wasn’t a normal child, but he agreed with me that it has all the characteristics of a fast-growing parasitic organism. If you believe it a medicine man, Mr. Erskine, then your opinion is just as valid as any of the opinions we’ve come up with here.”

  Amelia came and stood beside me and raised her eyebrows questioningly.

  “How is she?” she asked.

  I put my hand over the phone. “Bad. The doctors don’t think she’ll last until Tuesday.”

  “But what about the thing—the medicine man?” asked Amelia. “Does he think that will grow and survive? I mean, Jesus—”

  I spoke to Dr. Hughes again. “Dr. Hughes, my friend here asks what’s going to happen to the fetus. Supposing it’s still alive when Karen Tandy dies? What are you going to do about it?”

  Dr. Hughes didn’t hesitate. “Mr. Erskine, in that event we will do what we always do. If it is a child, and it’s normal and healthy, we’ll do everything we can to save it. If it turns out to be a monster—well, we have injections that can dispose of it quietly and quickly.”

  “And if it’s a medicine man?” I asked warily.

  He paused. “Well, if it’s a medicine man—I don’t know. But I can’t see how it could be, Mr. Erskine. I’m willing to go some way toward the occult but how on earth could she give birth to a three-hundred-year-old Indian? I mean, come on, let’s be serious.”

  “Dr. Hughes, it was you who suggested we try and find out if there was anything occult going on here. And you did say that my opinion was as valid as anyone else’s.”

  Dr. Hughes sighed. “I know that, Mr. Erskine. I’m sorry. But you have to admit it sounds pretty crazy.”

  “Crazy or not, I think we ought to try and do something about it.”

  “What do you suggest?” said Dr. Hughes dully.

  “Something you recommended has worked once, Dr. Hughes. You said I ought to bring an expert in, and I did. I think it’s time we went looking for another expert—somebody who knows more than we do about Indian lore and mysticism. Give me some time and I’ll try to dig some
body up. There’s bound to be someone at Harvard or Yale who knows.”

  “Could be,” said Dr. Hughes. “Okay, Mr. Erskine. Thanks for your interest and your help. Don’t hesitate to call me if there’s anything else you want to know.”

  I put the phone down slowly. Amelia and MacArthur stood beside me, just as weary as I was, but eager to help now, and really interested. They’d seen the face on the cherrywood table, and they believed. Whatever the spirit was, whether it was an Indian medicine man or a malignant ghost of the present, they wanted to help me fight it.

  “If you ask me,” said MacArthur, “the Dutch should have kept their twenty-four dollars and left Manhattan to the Indians. It looks as though the original owners are getting their revenge.”

  I sat down and rubbed my eyes. “It looks that way, MacArthur. Now let’s get some sleep. We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  Chapter Four

  Across the Twilight

  It took us four hours to track down Dr. Ernest Snow. A friend of Amelia’s knew someone at Harvard who knew someone else who was a student of anthropology, and in turn the student of anthropology put us on to Dr. Snow.

  His credentials were impressive. He had written five monographs on Indian religious and magical rites, and a book called Rituals and Lore of the Hidatsa. What’s more, he lived within reach, in Albany, New York.

  “Well,” said MacArthur, yawning through the gloom of a dark and wintry Sunday morning, “are you going to phone him?”

  “I guess so,” I told him. “I was just wondering whether we haven’t gone off on the wrong track.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Amelia.

  “Well, I mean this whole Indian business. We don’t really have any evidence to support it. Just because the face on the table looked something like a Red Indian, there’s no real reason to think that he really was.”

  Amelia shrugged “But what else have we got to go on? And there is all this stuff about rebirth. Come on, Harry, we have to try it.”