Burial (41 page)

I can see her now as I saw her then, Mrs Amelia Wakeman, in a loose Indian-cotton blouse and a necklace of freshwater pearls, her hair pinned up in a sun-shining bun, pretty and tired and smiling. Then I closed the door and lolloped down the musty stairs and out into the street, where I whistled for a passing Checker, which promptly accelerated and picked up a girl in a short red skirt on the opposite side of the street.

I found Jack Hughes on the 32nd floor, in a large penthouse office overlooking Park Avenue. I walked across about a quarter of an acre of soft, dark brown carpet, and Jack Hughes rose from behind his desk and held out his hand.

I had been prepared for grey hair. I had even been prepared for
white
hair, considering what had happened to Dr Hughes the last time I had visited the Sisters of Jerusalem. But I sure as hell wasn't prepared for totally bald. Jack Hughes no longer looked like a dashing young medical expert. He looked instead like an old, cross baby. He had lost even his eyebrows.

‘Well, well,' he said. In spite of the fact Misquamacus had
taken three of his fingers, his hooklike grip was still muscular and sure. ‘I never thought that I'd ever run into
you
again.'

I looked around. ‘Nice office. Nice view. Nice works of art.'

‘Oh, yes. Nothing but the best for the Senior Administrator. But give me back my operating-theatre any day of the week.'

I prowled about. On one wall there was a dry-brush view of a farmhouse in Cushing, Maine, by Andrew Wyeth.

Original?' I asked Jack, and he nodded.

‘Unfortunately I don't get to keep it when I retire.' He came and stood beside me, admiring the painting almost as if he had never seen it before. ‘You know why Andrew Wyeth liked to paint Maine? He said he liked the nothingness.'

‘I can understand that.'

There was a lengthy silence, and then Jack said, ‘You didn't come here to talk about art, though, did you?'

‘No. I came because of one of your patients.'

‘Not another three-hundred-year-old pregnancy, I hope?'

I shook my head. ‘Not exactly. But I think it has something to do with — well, what happened here before.'

Jack looked at me level and unblinking and his eyes were washed of all colour, like the weatherboarded farmhouse in the Wyeth painting, light but no colour.

‘I'm not sure I want to know.'

‘A patient was admitted here this afternoon. His name is Martin Vaizey, he's currently under arrest for first-degree homicide.
Two
first-degree homicides.'

‘I'm aware of that. We're keeping him on eighteen, under police guard. I doubt if there's much chance of him escaping, though.'

‘I just heard that he was involved in a serious accident.'

Jack looked down at his mutilated hand. ‘Yes … you could say that. He blinded himself.'

‘I heard that, too. It was on TV.'

‘Did they say
how
he blinded himself?'

‘Unh-hunh.'

‘Well,' said Jack, ‘it was very unpleasant. In fact I don't even know how he managed to do it. He gouged out his own eyes. It looked like he did it deliberately and that he meant to cause himself maximum pain. There's some evidence that he sat in his cell for three or four minutes with his eyes pulled out on the ends of their optic nerves.'

My breathing became suddenly shallow. ‘Jesus,' I said.

‘Yes, Jesus. It wasn't your common type blinding. I mean, people
do
blind themselves. Sexual deviants and religious zealots, usually — punishing themselves for what they've seen. We had a case only two or three months ago of a young man of twenty-three who had cauterized each of his eyeballs with a red-hot screwdriver simply because he had walked in on his mother when she was taking a bath.'

I sat down on the brown hide couch that was deliberately too low and deliberately positioned at an awkward angle, so that anybody who wanted to talk to Dr Hughes while he was sitting behind his desk would have to sit right on the edge of the couch with their back straight and their neck screwed around sideways. Office psychology, sixties-style.

I said, ‘I know it's a lot to ask, and that you do have pretty strict hospital policy, but I really have to talk to this guy.'

‘He's not conscious, as far as I'm aware. He's had an emergency operation on his eyes and he's heavily sedated.'

‘When do you expect him to be
compos mentis
?'

‘Not till tomorrow morning at the earliest. And then it really depends on whether he wants to talk to
you
.'

‘Can I see him?'

‘You mean now? No, that's out of the question.'

‘Jack …' I said, ‘we went through a whole lot together, didn't we?'

‘Yes, we did.' His voice was as dull as two stones knocking
together on a dry creekbed. He knew that I was going to ask him a favour.

‘Jack,' I said, ‘I'm almost certain that Misquamacus is back. He's back in a very different way, but it's the same Misquamacus. More powerful,
much
more powerful. I've been talking to Dr Snow up at Albany, and Dr Snow thinks that he's enlisted the help of some kind of underworld spirit, some kind of shadow thing.'

Jack listened in silence, but then he held up his mutilated hand.

‘Harry, let me tell you this. I believe in Misquamacus. I believe in Red Indian spirits and I believe that there are forces in this country that most white people can't even begin to imagine. I lost three fingers to a lizard that was half-real and half-imaginary. I saw rats running down the walls and right through the floors. I saw monstrosities that people were never meant to see. So, don't get me wrong — I believe.

‘But there's something else I believe. I believe we managed to destroy Misquamacus for good. I believe that we won.

‘Sure — we still have nightmares about it, maybe we're still a little paranoid. But we
won
, didn't we? If I can't believe in that, then losing these fingers counts for squat. I've been prepared to sit in this office for fifteen years pushing pieces of paper around because I've always believed that it was worth it. The lives that we saved were more important than my career in surgery.

‘So don't tell me that Misquamacus is back. We won, we destroyed him. I know we did. Whatever it is you're up against now, it's all inside
here
.' He tapped his forehead. ‘It's nothing but ghosts, Harry. Nothing but delusions. I get them too. Dr McEvoy took early retirement. Dr Winsome spent the next five years of his life on tranquilizers. What makes you think that you're any different?'

‘Jack,' I insisted, ‘he's back. It was Misquamacus who brought down Chicago. He destroyed two communities in Colorado, too. God knows what he's going to do next.'

But Jack continued to shake his head from side to side, again and again, almost as if he were trying to deafen himself. ‘I'm not listening, Harry. It's over and we won.'

‘Supposing I tell you that I had to fight him again — him and a dozen more medicine-men just as goddamned vindictive, in California?'

‘I'm not listening to you, Harry. I don't want to know.'

‘Supposing I tell you that Singing Rock was killed? He was killed, Jack, Misquamacus took his head off. What kind of a sacrifice is three lost fingers, compared with that?'

‘You're lying to me, Harry.'

‘Am I? What would be the point? Anyway, the police and the military were involved in what happened in California — I can
prove
it to you.'

‘So you're trying to tell me that Misquamacus came again and that you and Singing Rock destroyed him again; and now you're trying to tell me that he's back yet
again
?'

He came around his desk and leaned forward and stared directly into my eyes. I could smell mint on his breath. ‘Harry, it's over. If you need help in coming to terms with that fact, then I can easily arrange for you to get it. It was a terrible thing that happened and it left terrible mental scars on everybody who was involved in it.

‘In your case — without being slighting or personal about it — you never had much status in life. You were always a socially disaffected kind of guy, never able to settle down, never able to make your mark.

‘When we fought Misquamacus, when we destroyed Misquamacus, that gave you some temporary social standing. That made you feel important. I can't blame for you trying to regain some of that standing. Everybody wants to relive their finest hour.

‘But it's finished, Harry, I promise you. It's all over.'

Even while Jack was speaking, my attention was drawn to a faint shivering in the air on the far side of his office, close to the window. It looked like the ripples of visible heat you can see on a sun-baked highway; or flowing from a barbecue on a hot summer day. It distorted the shape of the window-sill, and gave the heavy brown drapes the appearance of being stirred by a warm and languid breeze.

‘— everybody likes to feel that they're making a valuable contribution to the community —' Jack was droning on. But my attention was completely held by this shuddering transparent apparition on the other side of the room, this heat-devil or whatever it was.

Very slowly, very faintly, the figure of a small boy began to materialize
. He had short hair cut in the pudding-basin style of thirty years ago, and a very white face, with fatigue-smudged eyes. He was wearing a red woollen dressing-gown, tied around the waist with a frayed silk cord. He was staring at me unblinkingly, and I couldn't help shuddering, as if somebody had stepped cold-footed on my grave.

‘— have to let go at some, point, otherwise it becomes a clinical obsession, and that takes years of — '

The boy beckoned. He raised his right hand and he beckoned

I hesitated, and pointed to my chest and said, ‘Me? You mean me?'

Jack stopped in mid-sentence and stared at me. ‘Of course I mean you, Harry. Who the hell else do you think I'm talking about?'

Again, the boy beckoned, and this time I stood up and crossed the room.

‘
Harry
—' Jack protested. ‘You could at least give me the courtesy of —'

But I wasn't listening. He was wrong, anyway. I knew that Misquamacus had returned, and I knew the kind of revenge that he wanted to exact. It was no good Jack Hughes trying
to make out that I was only interested in fame and recognition and social status. I had never enjoyed being the centre of attention. I much preferred people to say, ‘Who
was
that masked man?'

The boy in the dressing-gown beckoned me closer. I was frightened because I knew that he was a spiritual manifestation of some kind; but at the same time he didn't exude that terrible deathly chill that spirits sometimes give off, like an open icebox door. Nor did he have that off-key resonance of dissatisfaction and grief. He seemed anxious, but calm.

Jack Hughes said, ‘Harry, are you all right? What the hell are you doing?' But I raised my hand to shush him.

‘Jack, there's somebody here.'

‘
What
?'

‘There's somebody here, Jack, a spirit messenger. Somebody who wants to talk to me.'

‘Harry, have you completely —'

‘
Ssh
!'

The boy said, ‘My brother's hurt.'

‘Your brother?'

‘Martin Vaizey, he's hurt, they blinded him.'

‘I know that,' I replied. ‘He's here at the hospital.'

So this was Samuel, I thought — the brother whom Martin Vaizey had lost when he was little. He was still only ten years old, but he was still just as determined to look after his younger brother. In spite of the eeriness of the situation, it gave me quite a lump in my throat. I used to have a brother once. I lost my brother, too.

‘Martin says I have to tell you three things,' said Samuel.

‘Oh, yes? What are they?'

Jack Hughes returned to his desk and made a performance of sitting down. ‘I'll tell you, Harry, I think you've flipped. I really think you've lost it.'

‘Please, Jack,' I begged him. ‘Just give me a couple of
moments more, would you? This is for real.'

‘For real? What do you mean, for real? You're having a conversation with a window!'

‘Jack!' I snapped at him. ‘There's somebody here, a boy, Martin Vaizey's brother. You may not be able to see him but he has a message from Martin Vaizey and I want to hear what it is. For Christ's sake, Jack, this is the first time that I've ever raised up a real genuine psychic manifestation in my life. So,
please
, will you do me a favour and let me listen to it?'

Jack was stunned. ‘All right,' he conceded, at last. ‘Go ahead and listen. Jesus H. Gonzales.' He punched the button on his intercom to call his secretary.

I turned back to Samuel. His image was wavering and watery, like the body of a young boy floating just below the surface of a swimming-pool.

‘He said that Mr Kellogg took pictures,' said Samuel. His voice was very odd, fading and then growing louder again, but always indistinct.

‘Who's Mr Kellogg?' I asked him. ‘And what did he take pictures of?'

‘Mr Kellogg took pictures of the …
Bismarck
.'

‘I'm sorry, I don't understand. Why did Martin want me to know this?'

‘He said you must find his forks.'

‘Mr Kellogg took pictures of the
Bismarck
and he wants me to find his forks?'

Samuel's image was growing darker now. I could feel that the shadows were gathering; the same shadows that had surrounded Singing Rock when he had appeared to me in Martin Vaizey's book of Velazquez.

I was frightened, seriously frightened. Not just for myself, not just for Karen; but for Martin and Samuel, too.

‘Samuel,' I said, ‘I don't understand what you're trying to say to me.'