Burial (57 page)

In the centre of the workshop floor, a wide hole had opened up — a hole just like the hole in the Belford Hotel — a hole which led to nothing at all but darkness and emptiness and death. Everything around us was being dragged into it — everything
white
, that is. Trailers and pick-ups and sheds and motorcycles and miles and miles of fencing and telephone-wires and water-piping.

Everything tipped into the gaping hole in a thunderous Niagara of tearing metal and protesting wood and the horrific screaming of everybody who had been caught up
in it. I saw a young farmboy sliding across the parking-lot on his back, his denims half-ripped off, his right shoulder bloody-black and raw, and he was screaming at me,
screaming
at me,
Help me! Help me! Stop me! Help me
!

I saw pale-faced children, some of them still wearing bloodied pajamas. I saw two young women who had been dragged through razor-wire; their flesh cut into diamond-patterns, like a butcher scores pork-rind. I saw a man whose thighs were both ripped open in a chaos of muscle and bone. I saw another man impaled through the chest with a length of scaffolding-pole. He kept trying to stand up, trying to wrestle that pole out of his ribcage, but with the eyes of somebody who was technically dead, I could see that his spirit was dimming, I could see that his life was flickering out.

A huge cement truck was dragged through Papago Joe's lot, and I saw it topple over just as it reached the edge of the hole, and crush a little girl who was trying to crawl away, crush her flat.

‘Oh, Jesus, Joe,' I told him. ‘I don't think that I can take this.'

He turned and looked at me, dark-eyed and serious. ‘You don't have a choice, do you? Neither do I. This is our destiny. This is what we were born for. We can't back down now.'

‘You want to know the truth?' I yelled at him. ‘You really want to know the truth?'

‘I know the truth already,' he replied. ‘The truth is that you're scared to death, and so am I. So let's get on with it, can we, before any more children get killed?'

He paused, and then he said, ‘We
have
to do this, Harry. There's no question of opting out.'

I took a deep breath, and then I said, ‘Okay, I'm sorry. Let's get going. I guess I'm dead already, so what does it matter?'

As we approached the hole, we had to wade our way
knee-deep through rubbish and dust and detritus: magazines, automobile tires, telephones, calendars, tinned food, bottles, cartons and cardboard boxes. Anything and everything that wasn't native to pre-Columbian America was being dragged away, and falling into the hole in Papago Joe's workshop with a steady, earth-trembling roar.

I had visited Niagara only once, with my grandparents, soon after David had drowned. I guess they had taken me away to help me get over his death. I had stood watching Niagara the way I watched this torrent now, fascinated, terrified.
The waters which fall from this horrible precipice do foam and boil after the most hideous manner imaginable, making an outrageous noise, more terrible than that of thunder
. That was what some French cleric had written, back in the seventeenth century. That was what I felt like now.

‘What the hell do we do?' I shouted at Papago Joe, as we stood right on the very brink of the hole, with debris cascading against our legs.

Papago Joe pointed downward. ‘We take our chances, I guess.'

I looked around. I saw a signboard that could be a makeshift sledge; but it was whirled away down the hole before I could reach it. Then I saw a ten-foot length of boardwalk sliding towards me through the rubbish. I waited until it had almost collided with my knees, and then I plunged onto it, chest-first, riding it like a surfboard. I heard Papago Joe shouting, ‘
Wait for me
!' but I was already being dragged towards the hole.

Up until then the most nerve-racking stunt that I had ever performed was swinging across to the balcony at the back of the Belford Hotel. But this was heart-stopping: although it was sensational, too. I dropped straight into nothingness, into pitch-black nothingness, surrounded by the deafening rumble of cars and concrete — even chunks of tarmac — and the higher-pitched sounds of corrugatediron
roofing and window-glass and people screaming in total terror.

I fell over and over and for one unforgettable second I thought that I was going to go on falling for ever, into space, into time, into the bottomless blacklined coffin of death. In that unforgettable second I was sure that Papago Joe's ‘death powder' had been nothing but hearth-sweepings, nothing more than milk-powder and crushed-up paracetamol, and that I was just about to die for real. But then — instead of falling — I found that I was swinging like a trapeze-artist, swinging in a wide parabola, and that gravity was pulling me back
upwards
. There was a long, long moment of no sensation at all, weightlessness, blindness and deafness. Then my feet collided with black grass, and rich black prairie soil, and I was thumped on the shoulder and pummelled on the side of the head, and then I was rolling helplessly sideways down a long slope.

I lay back on the grass and I knew that I was here. I was actually here. I was lying in the darkness of the Great Outside. But what I hadn't anticipated was that the ground would be up and the sky would be down — that I would be clinging onto the ceiling of the world like some kind of fly. This was what Dr Snow must have meant when he described the Great Outside as a lake of shadows, a dark reflection of the real world. Just like a man reflected in a lake, I was hanging by my shoes, and below my head was the total infinity of sky and space and forever.
Below me
, for Christ's sake, and I had the world's worst case of vertigo.

I shut my eyes tight. I gripped my fists tight. I was clinically dead and I was upside-down, and my brain was beginning to refuse the evidence of my senses. I felt closer to madness at that moment than I had ever done before — even when I had seen Martin Vaizey pull Naomi Greenberg inside-out. Even when Misquamacus had appeared in my motel room, with his chiselled face and his warpaint and his
headdress of living insects. My sanity was clinging on like the last shred of tarpaper clinging to a hurricane-devastated roof. Flapping, twisting, just about ready to go sailing off into the darkness.

‘Papago-Joe-what-the-fuck-is-happening-Papago-Joe-where-the-fucking-hell-are-you?' I screamed out

It was then that I heard a thumping noise close beside me, and a sharp rustle of grass. Papago Joe collided with me, and lay beside me, and said, ‘Shit.'

This place is upside-down,' I told him.

He took two or three breaths, very deep breaths. ‘I know. I hate heights. I really hate heights. I'm not just frightened, Harry, frightened is the wrong word. I'm shitless.'

‘Maybe we'll get used to it,' I said, trying to comfort him. ‘Maybe — I don't know — maybe our perceptions will adapt. Do you know what I mean? Do you remember that experiment where they made this guy walk around with a kind of periscope in front of his face, so that he saw everything upside-down? After a couple of days his brain worked out what was wrong, and turned everything round the right way for him, so that he saw it normally.'

With great caution, Papago Joe sat up. He looked east and then he slowly looked west. ‘There's no doubt about it, is there?' he said, at last. ‘There's gravity here. But, holy mackerel, it's pulling us
up
.'

I sat up, too, and looked round. In every direction, there was sweeping prairie — undulating hills, deeply-cleft draws. Black prairie, with black grass, under black star-prickled skies. An upside-down prairie under an upside-down sky. I heard the wind rustling through the grass and I smelled burning. I smelled cooking-fires and horses and smells that I had never smelled before. I smelled
history
. I smelled Indian history. The same smells that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse must have smelled.

‘This is it,' I said, with a sense of enormous awe — because
this was the place that you'd always heard about in cowboy books and Indian movies and here it was — the Great Outside, the Happy Hunting Ground. To put it bluntly, this was heaven, and we were in it

But there was a difference. This wasn't the realm of puffy clouds and cherubs and twanging harps. The Indians didn't believe in heaven — not the way that we believed in it. They believed in dark and they believed in light, they believed in Heammawihio and Aktunowihio, that was all. And they had made a bargain with Aktunowihio to drag the white man and all his inventions into the realm of darkness, so that they could have the realm of light.

The prairie rumbled, the prairie shook. Over to the north-east, in an awesome fountain, hundreds of automobiles and houses and signboards and pieces of shattered wood were being thrown up into the air, and thunderously falling into the grass. They were being dragged into the Great Outside from the world above, and spewed out into the darkness. The wrecked, the broken, the dead, the maimed.

I saw a gasoline truck flung into the air, and explode, in a bellowing orange fireball, and then crash burning into the grass. I saw houses burst apart, windows and doors and shingles, and children flying through the air like Raggedy Anns and Raggedy Andys.

I managed to stand up. I knew that the sky was
below
me, rather than
above
me, but I managed to persuade myself that I couldn't fall upward, and I didn't. I held out my hand to Papago Joe and said, ‘We'd better get hunting … looking for Misquamacus.'

Papago Joe nodded. ‘Of course,' he said. ‘But first we have to seek our spirit-guides.'

I sat down again, and he opened his borrowed medicine-bundle and produced two dried-up looking sticks. He tapped them together in a slow, complicated rhythm, occasionally interspersed with a burst of faster tapping.

‘Hey …' I said. ‘You're good at that.'

He frowned. I could hardly see his eyes in the darkness. ‘What do you mean? I'm making this up as I go along. You don't think all medicine-men didn't make things up as they went along?'

‘I guess they must have,' I said weakly. And all these years, I'd thought that Indians had these really complex tappings and drum-messages that they totally understood. Singing Rock had told me that most Indians hadn't been able to interpret smoke-signals. His favourite joke was that it was puff after poff except after puff-puff.

But Papago Joe kept on tapping, and tap-tap-tapping, and at last he said, ‘We are dead men, brothers. We are newly dead. We are seeking friends and guides in the Great Outside. We are seeking people to lead us.'

He tapped again.
Tap-tap, tap-tap
. ‘We are seeking friends and guides,' he repeated. ‘We are newly dead, and need assistance.'

He paused, and then he said, ‘We are asking for the Sioux called Singing Rock and the white man called Martin Vaizey.'

We waited for almost twenty minutes. The prairie was black and the sky was black; and if Papago Joe was feeling anything at all like me, he was dizzy and detached and completely out of touch with any kind of reality. I think I could have vomited, at that point. Just hanging on to an upside-down world made me feel nauseous. I mean, I seemed to
sway
every time I leaned sideways.

But at last I saw a quick dancing of light across the prairie; a quick flicker of spiritual flame; and then somebody was standing right behind Papago Joe with a faint benevolent smile on his face and it was Singing Rock.

Right then, I think I could have wept. I trusted Papago Joe — well, I
mostly
trusted Papago Joe. But Singing Rock had tussled with Misquamacus right from the very beginning,
and defeated him, and even though he and I had never been close, not really close, we honoured and respected each other, and we would have died for each other, which he had eventually done for me.

I could still see his beheaded face, flying away from me. You don't even want to imagine what his expression was — his brain still functioning, his eyes still seeing.

‘
Hallo, Harry,
' said Singing Rock.

I raised my hand in greeting.

‘
Playing dead now
? Singing Rock remarked. ‘
My uncle used to take the death-powder … said it made him strong. Said he saw the buffalo-country, the way it was before the white men came. Well … you know and I know … he was only partly telling the truth
.'

I said, ‘We have to find Misquamacus. You can see what he's doing. We have to stop him.'

Singing Rock turned around and looked at the fountain of falling cars. ‘I
warned you, Harry. I warned you. He wants everything back. The mountains, the rivers, the prairies. He wants it all back, the way it was before. He wants you gone
.'

I looked at Papago Joe, but all that Papago Joe could do was to shrug. ‘And what do you think?' I asked Singing Rock. ‘Do you think he should take it all back?'

Singing Rock said, ‘
Time goes forwards, Harry, not backwards. Whatever happened before … however tragic it was … it's over now, and we have to look ahead
.'

He looked smaller than I remembered him; better-spoken, more frail. More like an insurance-salesman than an Indian wonder-worker.

‘
I know what Misquamacus is doing
.' he said. ‘
I know where to find him, too
.' He looked down at Papago Joe and said, ‘
It was you, then, who chose me as a spirit-partner
?

‘Yes,' said Papago Joe.

At the same time, I felt a hand on my shoulder and I turned around. It was Martin Vaizey. It was actually
him
,
looking the same as he had when I first met him at his apartment in the Montmorency Building. He gave me the faintest of smiles and said, ‘
Hallo, Harry. It looks as if it's your turn to be possessed
.'

I grasped his hand. ‘Hallo, Martin. How's tricks?'