Burial (39 page)

He felt Karen moving around behind him. He didn't
know what she was doing, but he didn't dare to open his eyes and find out. This was Samuel's trance, using Samuel's spiritual energy, and if Martin were to break it off now, without warning, he might cause Samuel severe harm. He might even silence his spirit for ever.

The darkness in front of him was dense and smoky. He thought he could detect things moving about in it, black glistening things that coiled and uncoiled.

‘What are you?' he demanded. ‘What do you want?'

There was a long silence, and then Martin heard a breathy, reverberating voice, more like the wind blowing down a hollow reed than a voice.

‘
You thought to find me
?'

Martin licked his lips. ‘Yes, I thought to find you.'

‘
You thought to defeat me
?'

‘You killed Michael and Naomi Greenberg, not me. That was why I wanted to find you. I wanted to prove that it was you.'

‘
You are a fool
.'

‘Maybe I am. But I'm going to prove that you exist, even if it kills me.'

‘
Are you not afraid to die? I thought that all white men were afraid to die. At the Greasy Grass River they threw down their rifles and they cried out, “Spare us!” And we spared not a single one
.'

Martin was shuddering with cold and fear. He had come across dozens of unpleasant spirits before now; mean-minded spirits, angry spirits, bitter spirits. He had talked to murderers, bigamists, you name it. But the spirit that was hiding itself in this shadow was something else.

The spirit that was hiding itself in this shadow was something infinitely old, darkly terrifying, and possessed of powers that Martin could only guess at.

He suddenly understood that he was very, very frightened. More frightened than he had ever felt before.

‘
You want to see me
?' the breathy voice asked him.

Martin swallowed and nodded.

‘
If you wish to see me, you must open your eyes
.'

‘You're a spirit,' said Martin.

‘How can I see you if I open my eyes?'

‘
Open your eyes,
' the voice insisted.

Martin hesitantly opened his eyes.

And
saw
.

And literally jolted with terror. And closed them again, tight, in the hope that it couldn't be real, that it couldn't be true.

But then he felt a sharp, chopping pain in the sides of both his eye-sockets. He yelled out and twisted in his chair, but he felt as if his skull were caught in an iron clamp. The pain in his eyes was so intense that he stayed where he was, sitting upright, shivering.

Inside his eye-sockets there was a deep, agonizing crunching of skin and flesh and nerve-fibre. His eyes were bloodily, forcibly opened, and then pulled right out of their sockets.

‘
Oh Christ
! he screamed. ‘
Oh Christ, don't blind me
!'

It was Karen. She had taken each of his Celtic forks and dug them into his eye-sockets, dragging out his eyes. His optic nerves were stretched between the tines of the forks, so that he could still see, even though his eyes felt as if they were on fire. Blood coursed hotly down his cheeks and pattered onto the table.

‘Karen,' he babbled, ‘oh Christ, Karen, don't blind me. Karen, what are you doing, Karen, what the hell are you doing don't blind me don't blind me don't blind me-e-e-ee!'

‘
You wanted to see me,
' the voice breathed. ‘
So shall you see me; and so shall you never look away
.'

Through a scarlet fog of pain and bursting capillaries, his bare eyeballs wincing, Martin stared at the apparition that stood in front of him, half-buried in the wall and the
table, a being that could live both inside and outside a spiritual trance simultaneously, a wonder-worker of such enormous powers that the darkness shifted and trembled all around him as if an earthquake were imminent.

Martin knew who he was; and the fear that he felt was as great as the terrible thing that Karen had done to his eyes. He was Misquamacus, the greatest of all the Indian medicine-men. Misquamacus, who had walked through time and space. Misquamacus, who had travelled through fire and death and every level of cosmic consciousness.

It was said that the face of Misquamacus had appeared in trees and rivers, and that his voice had chanted in the wind. In the 1870s he had been photographed in a Sioux encampment near Fort Snelling, Minnesota, on the same day that he had been photographed with Etchemis Indians in north-eastern New England, more than 1,500 miles away.

But now he was here, in Martin's cell in the 13th Precinct, and even the air was softly thundering with his presence.

He was tall — almost monstrously tall. His face was slablike, impassive, high-cheekboned, and decorated with flashes of red and white clay. His eyes were totally dark, like perforations in a curtain.

But it was his headdress that horrified Martin more than anything else. His scalp and his neck and his shoulders were completely covered in a swarming mass of struggling, shiny beetles-cockroaches and black-beetles and weevils and whirligigs and death-watch beetles. His head was alive with beetles, and as he stood and stared at Martin with dispassion they clicked and struggled and occasionally dropped to the floor.

Misquamacus himself was afflicted by hideous growths on his torso and his upper arms, patches of black insect hair and lumps of maroon, insect-like body-sections. On either side of his body, all the way down his ribs, pale tendrils like millipede legs waved and rippled.

What did you expect
? he whispered, inside Martin's mind.

The pain in Martin's eyes was now far too intense for him to be able to answer. He thought he was probably having a nightmare, and that he would very soon wake up. But then Misquamacus lifted a huge buffalo mask onto his head — a mask already swarming with beetles — and Martin knew without a doubt what the wonder-worker was going to do to him, and why; and that his chances of survival, blind or not, were almost nothing at all.

‘Kill me,' he said. ‘I can't stand to be hurt Please kill me.'

Misquamacus reached out his hand and gently touched Martin's gouged-out eyeballs, running his greasy, ash-blackened fingertips around their cringing, wrinkled surfaces.

‘
Can you see that
?' he asked. He flicked the corneas with his fingernails, and then laughed when Martin screamed.

‘
Perhaps you don't deserve it,
' said Misquamacus, his eyes bright, his voice thickly accented. Martin had never heard a Narragansett accent before, but he knew that if he survived he would never forget it. It was amused, declamatory, but there was also a slight hint of self-mockery in it.

‘Don't blind me,' he said. He couldn't find any other words. He knew that it was probably too late for any surgeon to save his eyes; but so long as there was the smallest chance. So long as he could still
see
.

Misquamacus took hold of Martin's right eye like a man plucking a plum. Martin knew then that the Indian was going to hurt him, and worse than hurt him. He thought he started to scream but he couldn't be sure. His lungs were clenched with dread and he may not have uttered any sound at all.

Misquamacus squeezed his eyeball until it burst. Optic fluid suddenly flooded between the wonder-worker's blackened fingers.

Roaring with rage as well as agony, Martin tried to heave himself backward. All he succeeded in doing was ripping his optic nerve through the tines of his Celtic fork. His face
exploded with pain. It was like being hit in the face with a hammer. He thrashed all around him, still roaring. Everything was black. Everything was fire. Everything was blindness and defeat.

Three officers heard him screaming and roaring and came running down to the cells. They found him lying on his back on the floor, his eye-sockets as blind as overturned pots of red ink, and the cell walls splattered with blood. Some of the blood formed exclamation points, some of the blood made question marks. But all Martin could do was kick and scream, his body convulsed in pain, and all that the cops could do was call for the paramedics.

‘Self-mutilation,' said Sergeant Friendly. ‘It happens a lot with homicide suspects. They're worried we're not going to punish them enough for what they did.'

A single cockroach zig-zagged furiously across the floor.

The next morning the humidity was even higher and my Avis air-conditioner started to cough like Monday morning on the cancer ward. I eased myself stiffly off the couch and shuffled through to my dinky little kitchenette. There was a magnifying shaving-mirror hanging from a cup-hook on the shelf, and a monstrous bloodshot eye swam around in it

Last night I had finished off the better part of a bottle of Absolut, trying not to imagine what might have happened to Karen, and trying to think what the hell I should do now. Maybe I should do nothing at all. Maybe I should accept the idea that just because I had confronted Misquamacus twice before there was no reason why it was my responsibility to
confront him again. Let him do whatever he wanted.

I scooped espresso coffee into my coffee machine, filled it with Evian water, and switched it on. There was a sharp crackling noise and a wisp of blue smoke came out of the plug. Shorted out again. That meant I would have to put on my trousers and go down to the drugstore.

I was raking my fingers through my hair when my intercom buzzed. I picked it up and said, ‘Erskine the Incredible — palmistry, card-divining, tea-leaf interpretation —' But I was interrupted by a voice saying, ‘Harry, it's me, Deirdre.'

‘Oh, Deirdre.' I frowned, and checked my Russian wrist-watch. It said twenty after five, which was impossible, whether it was morning or afternoon. ‘We didn't schedule a reading for today, did we?'

‘I know we didn't, but you were quite right about Mason having me followed. He's found out about Vance. And I'm worried that John has found out about Mason.'

‘I see, well, I did warn you.'

‘Harry, I know I'm being a nuisance, but could you possibly give me another reading right now? Things are happening so fast, I need an update.'

How could I refuse? Mrs John F. Lavender was my bread-and-butter. In fact she was more than my bread-and-butter, she was my Kraft cheese slices too. I pressed the buzzer and as I struggled into my crumpled fawn Chinos I heard her climbing the stairs, two at a time, like an Alpine gazelle. I opened the door for her with one hand and zippered my fly with the other.

She was wearing skin-tight emerald-green satin pants, a floppy blouse of stridently purple silk and a huge yellow straw hat with an extravagant scarlet flower on the headband.

‘Harry,' she said, ‘you look like
hell
.'

I coughed. ‘Had a rough night, I'm sorry.'

She picked up the empty vodka bottle and turned it
upside-down. ‘Well, drowning your sorrows, were you? I wouldn't have thought that clairvoyants
had
any sorrows. I mean, can't you always see what's coming?'

I shrugged. ‘Oh, for sure. But just because I can see what's coming, that doesn't always mean that I can get out of the way. Or even that I necessarily
want
to get out of the way.'

‘Oh,' said Deirdre, with a knowing, multi-eyelashed wink. ‘Affair of the heart, was it?'

I lifted a heap of newspapers and magazines from the chaise-longue. ‘Just take a seat, Deirdre. I have to shave.'

‘I kind of like you with stubble,' Deirdre flirted. ‘You remind me of Humphrey Bogart.'

I went back to the kitchenette, tugged out the plug of the coffee-machine, and plugged in my electric razor. While I shaved, Deirdre said, ‘I first realized that Mason was having me followed when I was shopping in Bergdorf Goodman. I spent
hours
looking for cyan gloves to go with my cyan evening-suit, you know the Ralph Lauren evening-suit I was telling you about, when I noticed a man in an awful cheap blazer hanging around pretending to look through the scarves. After that I went to lingerie and he followed me into lingerie. There was no doubt about it, he was a private detective.'

‘What makes you think that Mason hired him?' I asked.

‘Because you said he would, of course.'

‘Oh, yes, sure,' I called back. ‘Has Mason told you directly to your face that he knows about Vince?'

‘Vance,' Deirdre corrected me.

‘Vince, Vance, whatever. Are you sure that Mason knows for sure?'

‘Well, he didn't say so in so many actual words. But he
did
say that if he found out that I was two-timing him, he'd do something desperate.'

‘Has he done anything desperate yet?'

‘It depends on your definition of desperate, I guess. Yesterday afternoon he bought a yellow Hermes cravat in the men's department at Macy's.'

‘Hmm … I guess you'd have to be pretty desperate to do that.'

I finished shaving. Then, without any technical ceremony, I yanked the plug off the coffee machine, stripped the wires with my kitchen-knife, and jabbed them directly into the plug. There was a moment's pause, and then the machine gave out a satisfying
bloop
and I knew that a much-needed caffeine overdose was on the way. I came back into the consulting room, where Deirdre was lighting up a cigarette. I breathed in match-sulphur, saltpeter and half-burned tobacco, and my stomach gave a
bloop
in sympathy with the coffee-machine.

‘I guess you saw that new client of yours on television,' said Deirdre. ‘I told John, that's another client of Harry Erskine's. I've seen her in the flesh, for real. Mind you, I think she looks so much prettier in the flesh, if you know what I mean.'

I sat down. I had missed a small patch of stubble on my left cheek, and it felt prickly and uncomfortable. ‘I'm sorry,' I said, ‘I don't understand.'