Blind Panic (17 page)

I held my fist up and shouted out, “John Singing Rock!
John!
Here!”

The man in black spat at me, again and again, and I was thrown from one wall to another. But I kept on staggering back onto my feet, and brandishing Singing Rock’s bracelet, and I could see that Singing Rock’s skin and clothes were rolling back up again to cover him. The man in black let go of his wrists and stalked toward me, tossing an armchair out of his way, his face contorted with anger. But Singing Rock, released from his grasp, immediately began to fade. His color was leached away until he was translucent, and he looked like the ghost he really was. Silently, his ectoplasm
twisted around, like a long white chiffon scarf, rose up into the air, and floated away. It flew out the open door that led to the balcony, and upward into the sunshine, out of sight.

All that was left was smoke, and that began to shudder, and curl, and blow away, too. As it vanished, I felt the bracelet tighten and tingle, and I knew that Singing Rock’s spirit was back inside the black pebbles that he had carefully picked from the bed of the Okabojo when he was only a young man and first learning the art of Native American shamanism.

The man in black stormed right up to me and stood over me like a angry bull, his chin tilted aggressively upward.

“You want Singing Rock?” I asked him. He was so close that I could feel his chilly breath on the back of my upraised fist. “He’s
here
now, where you can’t hurt him anymore. His spirit’s inside this bracelet, Misqua-smartass-macus, and you can’t go after him because you don’t happen to
have
a spirit any longer, now do you?”

“I could destroy you where you stand,” whispered the man in black. “I could turn your heart into a stone or boil your brain. I could fill your stomach with venomous snakes and your lungs with fire ants. I could flay you alive, like your treacherous friend.”

I didn’t answer him. To be totally truthful, I was too scared to open my mouth. Amelia was looking at me from the other side of the room, and from the expression on her face I could see that she was just as frightened as I was. The candle flame had gone out now, but the rug was still smoldering and fragments of glowing ash were still floating down from the skeletal remains of the lampshade.

The man in black stayed in front of me, breathing hard, for what seemed like an hour, even though it was probably no longer than twenty seconds. Then he said very softly, “I promised you that I would show you your people scattered and blown to the winds, and I shall keep my promise. But when the sun sets on that day of destruction, you will pay for what you have done to me, both you and this woman, and
the pain that I inflicted on your treacherous friend will be as nothing compared with the pain that I will inflict on you.”

I still couldn’t find the words to answer him. The last thing I wanted to do was provoke him into changing his mind, so that he peeled
my
skin off, as if some kind of gory banana. I couldn’t even work out how to nod.

At last he turned away from me, and as he turned away he vanished, as if he had never been there. I
felt
something, like a door opening and closing, and a momentary draft, but that was all. Wovoka had more substance than Misquamacus. At least he could make himself visible. But he was still no more than a spirit, and every spirit has to return to the other side sooner or later.

“Has he really gone?” I asked Amelia.

She closed her eyes for a moment and raised one finger, as if she were trying to feel which way the wind was blowing. Then she opened her eyes again and said, “Yes…he’s gone.”

I came over and stamped on the smoldering carpet until I had extinguished the last of the glowing orange sparks. The smell of burned wool made me sneeze three times, which my grandmother always told me was bad luck. Sneeze once, you wake up the devil. Sneeze twice, he realizes where you are. Sneeze three times and he comes to get you.

“What Singing Rock said about Misquamacus was right, then?” I said. “He’s borrowing the spirits of other medicine men so he can come back into the real world and get his revenge.”

“It looks like it,” said Amelia. She was looking nervy and shaken, and she kept folding and unfolding her arms and touching her cheek, like somebody who badly needs a cigarette. “And of course there used to be
hundreds
of medicine men and wonder-workers, all across the country, so he has plenty to choose from.”

“Well, Singing Rock told us a few of them, didn’t he? Infernal John and Chief Hot Dog or whatever his name was.”

Amelia said, “Every tribe had at least one medicine man.
Sometimes more than one. They all had their different ways of making magic, but their powers were pretty similar. Healing people or making their enemies sick. Making it rain or making it stop raining. Filling up lakes with plenty of fish. Shape-shifting into coyotes. Turning into eagles and flying.”

“What about making people go blind?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know about that. And of course Singing Rock didn’t get the chance to tell us.”

“Can we bring him back?”

“If we do, that will probably bring Misquamacus back, too, to finish what he started. Do you really want to risk it?”

“Uh-uh. I don’t want Singing Rock to get skinned again. And I don’t want
us
to get skinned, either. I don’t much care for the raw look.”

“I suppose I could try to communicate with him by thought-dowsing,” said Amelia.

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s like dowsing for water, only you’re trying to find thoughts instead of hidden springs. Actually it’s more like tuning in to radio signals than dowsing, but you use a hazel twig, just the same. You can pick up thoughts right out of the air. You can hear them.”

She went over to her woven bag, rummaged inside it, and eventually produced a dry, Y-shaped twig, only about six inches long, and showed it to me.

“It’s not always successful,” she said, “especially when somebody’s been dead for quite a long time. It works best when the subject has only just passed away, and their thoughts are still in the room. But Singing Rock’s
spirit
was here, so I might have an outside chance of getting in touch.”

I took the twig from her and turned it this way and that. I even sniffed it, but it didn’t smell of anything except Amelia’s musky perfume. I have to admit that I was skeptical, but there was no harm in giving this thought-dowsing a shot. Until we found out how Misquamacus was striking people
blind, we would be groping around in the dark, just as they were.

At that moment we heard a loud bang on the street outside—then shouting and a woman calling out for help. We went onto the balcony and saw that a Shogun had collided into the back of a trolley car, and that a man had been pinned against the trolley’s rear bumper. He wasn’t yet dead, but I wouldn’t have put serious money on his chances of surviving.

A crowd had gathered, and three or four men were trying to open the Shogun’s doors. The woman driver didn’t seem to be making any attempt to get out, even though one of the men was hammering with his fist on her window.

“You have to back up!” he shouted at her. “Come on, lady, you have to back up!”

Amelia and I stood on our balcony watching this scene for a few minutes. A police car arrived, and two cops got out and tried to get the woman to back up, too.

“She’s
blind
,” said Amelia. “Look at her, the way she’s pressing her hand against the window.”

An ambulance drew up, and after the paramedics had examined the man who was crushed against the back of the trolley car, they talked to the cops, and one of the cops smashed the Shogun’s passenger-side window with the butt of his gun. The cops and the paramedics opened the driver’s-side door and helped the woman out. From the way she was holding her head, it was plain that she couldn’t see.

“We have to do something,” said Amelia. “Misquamacus is going to make us
all
go blind if we don’t.”

We watched the street scene for a few moments more, but then Amelia said, “I feel like a rubbernecker. Let’s go back inside.”

“So you’re going to try this thought-dowsing thing?” I asked her.

She nodded. She crossed over to the couch, and without any hesitation she crossed her arms and pulled off her pale
gray sweater. She was wearing a white lacy bra with rosebuds embroidered on it. She was very big breasted, and the bra didn’t leave a whole lot to my imagination. Next she unbuttoned her jeans, sat down on the couch, and took those off, too, revealing a white lacy thong that matched her bra. I had guessed the thong correctly, but not the color. White, not black. Saintly rather than satanic.

“Hey—you have to do this in your
underwear?
” I asked her, trying to sound jovial and offhand.

She reached behind her back and unfastened the catch of her bra and slipped it off. Her nipples were very pale pink, and they crinkled in the warm breeze that was blowing in from the open balcony door. I tilted my head away and half covered my eyes with my hand. When I looked back she had taken her thong off, too, and was sitting on the couch completely naked except for her short white socks.

“You have to do this in the nude?”

Amelia nodded. “The hazel twig acts as the antenna, but my skin will actually be the receiver. If I wore clothes, any thoughts that I picked up would be so muffled that I probably wouldn’t be able to understand them.”

She paused, and then she said, “If you’re embarrassed, Harry, you can always go out on the balcony, or shut yourself in the bedroom.”

“Embarrassed?
Moi?
Of course not. You go ahead.”

She peeled off her socks and then sat cross-legged in the center of the couch, with her back very straight, almost as if she were practicing yoga, except that she held up the hazel twig in front of her at eye level.

I straddled one of the dining chairs and watched her and thought how much I liked everything about her. Her face, her body, her aura. The way the heel of her right foot was tucked up between her legs. In fact, I was in love with her, and I wished more than anything that she had never married Bertie.

She looked at me, her forehead furrowed in a mock frown.
“I love Bertil,” she said. “He’s a wonderful husband. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, too.”

“You heard what I was thinking,” I said. I couldn’t believe it.

“Of course I did. I wouldn’t waste my time doing this if I couldn’t.”

“Jesus, I’m embarrassed.”

Amelia smiled. “Don’t be. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that I might feel the same way about you?”

She slowly waved the hazel twig from side to side. “Hazels used to be called wishing sticks,” she said.

“Oh, really?” To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really concentrating on the twig.

“The first hazel was brought to America by the Pilgrims, because they believed the story that God gave Adam a hazel branch so he could strike the surface of a lake with it and produce any animal he wished for. They thought it would save them from having to carry too many sheep and pigs with them on their ships.”

“Hey—that would have been really neat if it had worked.”

“Another magical thing about hazel twigs: If you tangle some into your hair, they make a ‘wishing-cap’ and you’ll soon be granted everything you ever wished for.”

“Either that or get locked up in the nuthouse for walking around looking like a scarecrow.”

Amelia raised the hazel twig a little and closed her eyes.

“Do you hear something?” I asked her.

“Sshh. There’s a very faint resonance. Somebody’s talking.”

“Who is it? Does it sound like Singing Rock?”

“
Ssshh!
”

I shut my mouth and kept it shut. Amelia slowly waved the hazel twig in ever-widening circles, and then held it up high above her head, and very still. She closed her eyes, and then she said, “
I kill us.
”

I was bursting to ask her what she meant, but now she was listening even more intently, nodding her head slightly, and moving her lips. “
I kill us. Car winner.
”

Almost half a minute went past, and she kept on nodding and murmuring. “
Car winner and shy lower.
”

I waited for more. If this gibberish was all she could pick up from the Great Beyond, then her thought-dowsing wasn’t going to help us very much.

“
I kill us
,” she repeated.

Another half minute went by, and then she abruptly opened her eyes. “I’m sure that was Singing Rock,” she said. “He was very faint, and there was so much white noise—probably some of the psychic static that Misquamacus left behind him—but it was definitely him.”

“Well, I’m glad he told us something useful—
not
,” I said. “‘I kill us’? ‘Car winner’? ‘Shy lower’? What the hell did any of that mean?”

Amelia pulled her socks back on, and then her thong and her bra. “Whatever it was, it must have been important. He kept on saying it over and over. ‘I kill us. I kill us.’”

“Well, maybe it is important,” I complained. “But don’t you think that spirits can be a right royal pain in the ass? Why don’t they just speak-a da English, like living people do? Oh, no. They have to communicate in signs and portents and mysterious mutterings.”

Amelia was buttoning up her Gloria Vanderbilts and buckling her leather belt. While she was doing so, however, I suddenly saw a dark blue spot appear on the pale blue wall behind her. Almost immediately, it started to grow, creeping around counterclockwise until it became a semicircle. I pointed to it and said, “Would you take a look at that? What the hell do you think that is?” But by the time Amelia had turned around it had formed almost a complete circle, around nine or ten inches in diameter.

I went up to it and rubbed it with my fingertip. “It’s not Magic Marker or anything like that. It’s not wet, anyhow.”

I was still peering at it when another dark blue mark appeared
to the right, and that, too, started to form a circle. We watched it in bemusement. It was as if somebody were drawing on the wall from the
inside.

As soon as the second circle was complete, a third circle started to appear, and then a fourth. We waited for more, but it looked as if four circles were all we were going to get.

I folded my arms. “Okay. These are a sign from the Great Beyond, unless I’m mistaken.”

Amelia cautiously touched each circle with her fingertips. “I’m sure of it. Singing Rock must have realized that we might not have understood what he was saying, so he’s given us a clue.”

“Four circles? What kind of a clue is that? Why doesn’t he just tell us straight?”

“Because he
can’t
, probably. Misquamacus could be running interference. Stopping Singing Rock from speaking to us directly.”

We were still staring at the circles when a large turquoise butterfly came flickering in through the balcony door. It fluttered around the living room for a while, and then it perched itself in the center of the left-hand circle and stayed there, its wings rising gently up and down.

“So, is this a clue, too? Or just some stray lepidoptera?”

“I don’t know, Harry. Really, I don’t.”

As we were watching, however, the butterfly suddenly took off, and perched itself in the center of the second circle. Then, a few seconds later, it flew to the third circle, and perched there, too. This had to be a message, although I didn’t have the foggiest notion what it was.

The butterfly landed on the fourth circle, and there it seemed content to stay.

I went up close to it, but it made no attempt to fly away. It had dark brown ovals on its wings that almost looked like human eyes staring back at me, and a crimson head, like a large drop of fresh blood. “This is some butterfly,” I said. “It doesn’t look Portlandian, or Oregonish, does it? It looks tropical.”

“I never saw a butterfly anything like it before.”

“Oh, I did. When little Lucy came down to spend the weekend in Miami and I took her to Butterfly World. It’s probably a greater green cross-eyed squinter, or something like that.”

“Butterfly World,” Amelia repeated. She came up to the wall and touched the circles again, one by one. “Butterfly World. That’s it! That’s what these are! They’re
worlds.
”

“Worlds? How do you work that out? They could be hula hoops for all we know.”

“No, Harry, they’re worlds, I’m sure of it. I
feel
it.”

“Okay. You’re the genuine authentic psychic. Who am I to argue?”

“Four worlds—that’s right. And you can go from one world to the next, just like that butterfly.”

“So what does that tell us?”

“That tells us that we have to find ourselves a PC.”

“Okay…They have one downstairs, in reception. They’ll probably let you use it for free if you offer to do it in your birthday suit.”

Amelia gave me one of her old-fashioned looks.

“Okay, sorry,” I said. “But anytime you’re thinking of trying any more thought-dowsing, and you need moral support, or even if you need
im
moral support, I’m your man.”

She reached up and gave me a playful pat on the cheek. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said. At the same time, the butterfly suddenly flickered away and vanished out through the balcony door.

Down in the hotel lobby, the Art Garfunkel look-alike ungraciously allowed us to use one of the hotel’s laptops. The fuss he made about it, you would have thought we wanted to play Cajun fiddle music on his prize Stradivarius.

We sat close together on one of the bright red Bugs Bunny-style couches and Amelia tapped in “Four Worlds.”

Our answer came up instantly. Neither of us had ever heard of the Four Worlds before, but here on the Internet was everything we needed to know.

It turned out that the Four Worlds were part of the belief system of some of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Their legends said that Tawa the Sun Spirit had created a world where his people could live together in peace and harmony.

In his First World, however, the Pueblos began to misbehave themselves—stealing and lying and fighting and indulging in all kinds of sexual shenanigans. So the least badly behaved were taken by Tawa’s messenger, the Spider Grandmother, to a Second World, and those who were left behind in the First World were promptly incinerated. Well, that’s life. You steal, you lie, you fight, you indulge in sexual shenanigans, you’re toast.

After a while, though, the inhabitants of the Second World began to conduct themselves just as disgracefully, and so they were moved by Spider Grandmother to a
Third
World—and at last to a Fourth World. By the seventeenth century, the Pueblos had reached a state of physical grace and social harmony—just in time to be invaded by the Spanish, who built Catholic missions all across New Mexico and tried to wipe out their native beliefs altogether—Four Worlds and all. Five hundred Pueblo Indians who refused to convert to Roman Catholicism each had one foot cut off.

To their credit, the Spanish taught the Pueblos how to farm wheat and barley and grow fruit trees, but the Pueblos’ new prosperity brought more and more attacks from wandering Indian tribes such as the Navajo and the Apache, who seriously coveted their neighbors’ oxes and their asses, not to mention their apples and their stores of grain. Apart from being continually raided by other Indians, the Pueblos contracted all kinds of European diseases from the Spanish, and hundreds of them died of smallpox and scarlatina.

Eventually they rebelled against the Spanish and the Roman Catholic religion and returned to their old gods like Tawa and Spider Grandmother. To punish them, General Juan Trevino arrested forty-seven Pueblo medicine men on
charges of witchcraft. He had three of them hung and the rest publicly flogged. Big mistake. In 1680, a rebellious San Juan Indian called Popé organized a mass revolt. Houses and missions were burned, and over four hundred Europeans were hacked to pieces. The Spanish were driven out of New Mexico and it was fifteen years before they were able to fight their way back.

It was General Trevino’s letters that gave Amelia and me the answer we were looking for. In fact, when Amelia brought up a translation of his last letter to the royal court in Spain, we just turned and looked at each other and said, almost simultaneously, “I kill us.”

Your Reverence, having been murderously attacked by Taos, Picuris, and Tewa Indians in their respective pueblos, we retreated with a hundred and fifty settlers to Isleta Pueblo, which was the only pueblo where the natives had not turned against us.

As dusk fell, however, three Tewas approached the pueblo from the southwestern side, along a dry arroyo. I recognized two of them as medicine men who had been imprisoned at Santa Fe for practising witchcraft.

Accompanying them were at least twenty strange figures. They were wearing expressionless white masks with slits for their eyes. They were dressed in some manner of armor, which appeared to be crudely constructed of wood, and painted in red and black. This creaked and rattled as they approached us, and for some reason we began to feel deeply apprehensive.

In the dim light, I found it difficult to ascertain precisely how many of these strange figures there were. At times it seemed as if there were more than two score. Then there seemed to be no more than six. They altered their positions as if they were chess pieces upon a board, and one moment they appeared to be extremely tall, and the next moment as small as children, and far away.

Te’E, one of the older Indians, was standing close to me. I asked him what these figures were, and if they had any connection to witchcraft. Whereupon he covered his face with his hands, so that only his eyes looked out, and he explained that these were Eye Killers, the demons produced when Pueblo girls became impregnated by foreign objects, such as prickly cactus prongs.

He said that they were sometimes known as
shilowa,
which is the Zuni Indian word for red, and sometimes as
k’winna,
which is the Zuni word for black. He said that we should retreat from the pueblo with all haste, because the Eye Killers were capable of blinding us with a single look
.

“‘Car winner’ and ‘shy lower,’” said Amelia. “Black and red, in Pueblo Indian-speak.”

“That’s what Singing Rock was trying to tell us, then. Misquamacus has called up these Eye Killer things.”

We read on. General Trevino had taken old Te’E seriously, and ordered the settlers and the Isleta Indians to evacuate the pueblo and make their way northeastward. At the same time he directed twelve of his soldiers to take up positions at the top of the arroyo and prevent the Tewa medicine men and their scary collection of Eye Killers from entering the village.

As the strange figures came closer, I called upon the Tewas to stay where they were, but even if they heard me they did not respond, and continued to climb toward us. I gave the order to open fire, but the first volley of harquebus shot inflicted no casualties on the Tewas and their strange companions.

My men prepared to engage them with sword and pike, but as they advanced, the eyes of the white-faced figures flashed as brightly as summer lightning. One after the other, my men fell to the ground, each of them crying out that he had been blinded, and calling on the Lord for help.

I realized that it would be futile for me to stay, and that if I, too, were to be blinded, I would be of no service to those
settlers who depended upon me for their protection. Therefore I left the pueblo without further delay.

“So the gallant general skedaddled,” I said. “Mind you, I can’t say that I blame him.”

Amelia closed the laptop. “What are we going to do now?” she asked me. “We should really tell somebody about this—shouldn’t we?—and as soon as we possibly can.”

“The trouble is, who? And who’s going to take us seriously? You can imagine what they’d say if we tried to call the Pentagon, or the FBI.”

“We need to know more about these Eye Killers,” said Amelia. “What they are, where they come from, and if there’s any way we can stop them.”

“Maybe we could try asking Singing Rock again.”

Amelia shook her head. “It’s much too dangerous. For Singing Rock, as well as for us. What we need is somebody who knows all about Pueblo shamanism, but who isn’t on Misquamacus’s radar.”

“Oh, simple,” I said. “Maybe we should look in Yellow Pages.”

I took the laptop back to the desk. The Art Garfunkel look-alike wasn’t around, so I put his precious computer on a shelf underneath the register.

Amelia and I went back upstairs. As we walked along the corridor toward our room, we saw that our door was open and the Ersatz Art was standing there talking to the maid.