Burial (36 page)

‘Here, Bishop Whipple writes, “Mr Hood turned out to be a very taciturn young man, with the wildest hair, and dressed in curious leathers and rags. He carried about his belt numerous bells and bones and several pear-shaped bottles, which he called ‘shadow-bottles'. His only explanation for the use of these bottles was that warring Indians would often be possessed by a shadow or darkness from the Great Outside, which I took to mean the Indian equivalent of Purgatory. If he could capture any traces of this shadow — even the slightest fragment of it — the shadow would lose its spiritual integrity. It would be wounded … it would hemorrhage darkness. If it didn't return at once to the Great Outside it would literally bleed to death.

‘“The Indian would be exorcized; and would no longer have the power or the magical abilities which the spirit had lent him.

‘“I was sceptical of Mr Hood's abilities, I must confess, but equally I had never seriously believed that the Indian medicine-men were capable of any genuine acts of supernatural power. Mr Hood on the other hand was utterly convinced that they could work real and dangerous magic. He said that he had once been captured by the Cheyenne, and that his soul had been tortured by a Cheyenne shaman. This experience had taught him about shadows from the
Great Outside and also how to become so skilful with weapons that nobody would ever be able to best him.

‘“He said that he had learned from the Cheyenne how to momentarily become a
mistai
, a shadow-man, so that bullets would fly right through his body without injuring him. But he never volunteered to demonstrate this skill, saying that magic was for serious purposes, not for exhibition.

‘“Later, Colonel Sibley also recruited a negro man from somewhere in Louisiana. This person was always dressed as if for the opera, and carried a cane with a silver skull for a knob. Sometimes he called himself Sawtooth and sometimes he called himself Jonas DuPaul; but most of the time he referred to himself as Dr Hambone.

‘“I found Dr Hambone to be extremely intimidating and avoided him whenever possible. Colonel Sibley said that he could make the dead speak and took him to question all of the corpses of murdered settlers in order that they could identify their assailants. I never ventured with him, being opposed to this activity, and thus I never heard any of the dead answer him, as he claimed they always did.

‘“One day Dr Hambone ventured out on his own and was apparently captured by Killing Ghost and Runs Against Something When Crawling, two of the most warlike of the Santee braves.

‘“William Hood was dispatched by Colonel Sibley to find Dr Hambone by natural or supernatural means, which he did, although he never told anybody how. He brought him back to the militia's encampment in a condition of trance. Dr Hambone eventually said that he had met a Santee shaman and that he had been shown a future world in which all of the white man's works would be enveloped in darkness, and that white men would be massacred by shadows, and that none would escape.

‘“He then departed for good, saying that the red men and the black men would walk these plains and fish these
rivers long after every white man had been buried. Colonel Sibley threatened to arrest him, but William Hood said that in his opinion it was not advisable. Dr Hambone had influences of which William Hood had no experience, and he would not be able to protect Colonel Sibley or any of his men if Dr Hambone should cut up ugly.”

‘There!' said Dr Snow, carelessly throwing the book onto the desk, and causing a miniature avalanche of
National Geographics
. ‘What do you make of that?'

‘It's fascinating,' said Amelia. She picked up the book and slowly leafed through it. ‘I've heard of shadow-bottles, but I've never seen any historical reference to one before.'

‘Oh — here,' said Dr Snow, in a very matter-of-fact way. He went across to one of his cupboards and rummaged around for a while. Eventually he produced a small bottle of thick plain glass, about the size and shape of a lightbulb, with a tarnished silver stopper.

‘You've actually got one!' said Amelia, in astonishment.

Dr Snow shrugged. ‘Found it in Baton Rouge. It doesn't look very special, does it? Ghost-hunters in Serbia were supposed to use them when they went looking for vampires. So that gives some credence to the story that William Hood was Milan Protic.'

I turned the bottle over and over, and then I returned it to Dr Snow. ‘What's going to happen now?' I asked him. ‘I mean — what the hell's going to happen
now
? Are we just going to sit around and watch the rest of the country go under? Jesus!'

Dr Snow shrugged. ‘Who knows? If your Indian friends are determined to wipe every trace of the white man from the face of America, then presumably they'll carry on trying to do it. Wherever Indian blood has been spilled, they can use that place as an opening down to the Great Outside. And, believe me — apart from those few that they have used already, there are thousands more, all the way from Connecticut
to Canyon de Chelly. Thousands!

‘In Connecticut, you know, in 1638, Captains Underhill and Mason supervised the torching of a Pequot encampment; and with it the burning alive of five hundred Pequot Indians, men, women and children. Think what an opening to the underworld
that's
going to make! A tribe for a tribe! They'll probably decimate the entire state!'

He seemed almost elated. ‘They were such magicians! Such great magicians !'

‘I expect they're glad that
somebody
appreciates them,' I retorted. ‘But what the hell are we going to do to stop them?'

‘Stop them?' he frowned, as if the very idea of it hadn't occurred to him. ‘Stop them? I don't think we can. I don't think that
anybody
can.'

‘You're talking about a national disaster that's already killed thousands of innocent people and is going to have a more devastating effect than about a hundred nuclear bombs! You're talking about the end of an entire civilization, on which most of the world depends! You're talking about throwing the whole of America back into total savagery!'

Dr Snow smiled slyly. ‘That's not a very p.c. thing to say.'

‘Maybe it isn't; I'm all for noble savages and Indian rights, but I'm damned if I'm going to live in a world where I have to go looking for lunch with a spear.'

‘You won't have to,' said Dr Snow. ‘They'll probably kill us all. Either that or they'll make our lives not worth living; just as we made
their
lives not worth living.'

‘Come on, Doctor, there has to
some
way of getting back at them. And some way of getting Karen back, too.'

‘You think that Misquamacus is behind all this?' asked Dr Snow.

I nodded. ‘Singing Rock tried to warn me about it, but he was being got at, and I never really understood the whole message.'

‘Misquamacus is by far the most likely suspect,' Dr Snow agreed. ‘He always possessed such remarkable powers. He could change the wind, make rivers flow backwards, travel through time and appear in two or three different places simultaneously. The only
trouble
of course is how he managed to summon the power to draw down half of an entire city.'

‘Wouldn't the spirits have helped him? The Great Old Ones?'

‘It's possible that he could have summoned Tirawa, the great Pawnee god; or Heammawihio, the Cheyenne god of the skies. But all that darkness, you know, all that
dragging-down
!'

He pulled down his fist two or three times as if he were trying to imagine how Misquamacus might have done it.

‘You know, there's only one way I can think of,' he said, at last. ‘He would have had to make some kind of bargain with Aktunowihio, the god of the underworld. But according to legend, Aktunowihio never makes bargains. Aktunowihio is something a little too frightful to contemplate, even for a wonder-worker like Misquamacus.'

‘Do you mean he's some kind of devil, some kind of Satan?'

‘Oh, no, the Indians never thought that their gods represented good or evil. They simply had gods that were up above and gods that were down below. Heammawihio, in fact, is the Indian name for that primeval being that used to dominate earth in the very early days of pre-Columbian civilization. The Indians used to say that he came to earth down the Hanging Road, which was what they called the Milky Way. Several fanciful writers have called him Cthulhu. In fact he wasn't a he, but very much an “it”, and was probably formed out of the collective consciousness of many different species from many different galaxies. If you can imagine a being that thinks like a man, a snake, an
octopus, a wolf and a centipede, all at the same time, then you're probably quite close to understanding what Heammawihio was really like.

‘But it was Aktunowihio, you know, who frightened the Indians the most. If you died a noble and natural death, you went to the Happy Hunting Grounds without fear. But if you broke a taboo, then Aktunowihio would claim you when you died.

‘Chief Roman Nose once broke a taboo by eating before battle with a metal fork. He was shot almost immediately and went to Aktunowihio. His followers had propped his body in the high branches of a tree in the hope that he would fly upward instead of downward; but on the second night the entire tree was dragged into the ground and Roman Nose's body was never seen again.

‘Aktunowihio, quite frankly, is everything you never want to happen to you, all in one. He's supposed to take many shapes — dogs, strange women, men without heads. Even Columbus went back to Spain with stories about men without heads.

‘But the most fearsome shape of all is that of the Shadow Buffalo. If an Indian thought he glimpsed the Shadow Buffalo when he was out hunting he would drop everything and gallop back to his lodge in a total frenzy of fear, and none of his fellow braves would think any the less of him for being frightened.

‘Aktunowihio is supposed to be able to appear in the real world by possessing the bodies of living men and women. Most of the time he can walk amongst us and we don't even realize that he's passed us by. But if you see anybody staring at you without reason; or if you feel someone touch or tug at you; then it could be Aktunowihio, or part of Aktunowihio — the Great Dead One walking the world of the living.'

‘I don't know,' I said. I sat back in my chair and gave a
tight, repressed stretch. ‘If I hadn't seen stuff like this for myself — if I'd never come across Misquamacus, well, I wouldn't believe a single goddamned word of it. Would you?'

‘Oh, once you really
know
the Indians, you'll believe anything,' said Dr Snow. ‘The trouble is, not many people know much about Indians, and nor do they
want
to know much about Indians. I've been making Indian business forecasts and giving out Indian-style weather-warnings for years now. I've only been wrong with one weather prediction,
ever
. But will the media believe me? Of course not. Even though my forecasts are so accurate the poor fools prefer to rely on a multi-million dollar satellite which consistently gives them the wrong idea.'

‘What do you suggest we do?' I asked Dr Snow, dully. Amelia reached across and held my hand.

Dr Snow made a face, pushing himself backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. ‘You need friends, no doubt of it. You need somebody who understands Indian lore instinctively rather than academically. In other words, with Singing Rock gone, you need to find yourself another wonder-worker.'

‘Easier said than done,' I told him. ‘You don't happen to know any, do you?'

He shook his head. ‘I used to correspond with Crazy Dog until the beginning of this year, but I haven't heard from him for months. He's either dead or drunk or being chased by the South Dakota cops on bigamy charges. Somehow, you'll have to find your own.'

‘Thanks a whole bunch,' I told him.

‘That's not all,' he warned me. ‘You'll also have to have people to back you up, people who understand what you're doing and aren't afraid.'

I nodded. ‘I think I can manage that. What else?'

‘Most important of all, you'll have to find out what
bargain Misquamacus struck with Aktunowihio, because if my guess is correct, and Aktunowihio is giving Misquamacus the power to drag down all these buildings, then Misquamacus must have offered him something which Aktunowihio badly wanted. All Indian magic is based on bargains. You lend me your magic bonnet, I'll give you my horse. You give me your horse, I'll strike down your enemy dead. You strike my enemy dead, I'll make your pumpkins grow. And so on.'

‘Do you have any idea what Aktunowihio might have wanted?' I asked him.

Dr Snow shook his head. The afternoon sunlight caught his glasses, like a heliograph signal from a distant butte. ‘I really couldn't say. But once you've found out —
if
you find out-you'll have to find some way to break the arrangement — some way to cancel the whole deal. Otherwise —
pfff
! — forget it.'

We drove back to the city feeling tired and defeated. It was dark by the time we crossed the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan glittered and sparkled like a city seen in a dream. As I drove southward I wondered how much longer the dream could possibly last. We may have conquered the land surface but we hadn't conquered the darkness that lay beneath it, the darkness of centuries, the world that really
was
America, when you came to think of it.

Amelia said, ‘Will you take me back to my place? I have to think.'

‘Think? Think about what?'

‘Harry — I want to sit for a while on my own and work out whether I really want to be doing this with you.'

I made a face. ‘I suppose you have that privilege.'

‘Of course I have thatprivilege! It'snoteven a privilege! You're expecting me to involve myself in something totally catastrophic and you haven't even stopped to ask me if I
want
to!'