Blind Panic (30 page)

“Harry, come
on!
” Amelia insisted, and pulled at my sleeve.

“Don’t worry about it!” I shouted back at her. “He can’t touch us!”

I might have sounded confident, but I was praying that Dr. Snow had been one hundred percent sure about his Native American mythology, and that if Misquamacus had accepted Tyler’s self-sacrifice, he would have to back off and return to the Happy Hunting Ground and stop trying to wreak his revenge on us.

Misquamacus came even closer. The blood was coursing down his angular cheeks, and it made him look as if he were weeping with rage. “I will destroy you one day!” he said. “Now that I can return to the world of touching flesh, I can promise you that!”

“Oh, really?” I yelled back at him. “I’d like to see you try!" I was exhausted, and seriously pissed. “The only reason you can stand here and threaten me is because we gave you the soul of a white man, and you took it! A friend of ours, somebody we respected and cared for! Without us, you’d be nothing but a cold draft, blowing up some old Wampanaug woman’s nightgown!”

Misquamacus was breathing deeply. Above our heads, there was yet another lightning display, and this time even more debris came thumping onto the bloody grass all around us.

Misquamacus shouted, “How many times did your people make promises to my people, and how many times did they break their promises? This is my people’s land! These are my people’s mountains, and lakes, and hunting grounds! But where are my people now?”

He paused, and then he said, so quietly that I could hardly hear him, “I will say one thing to you. You think you are a false shaman. You do not believe in yourself. You think you have no power but the power of trickery. But I will say to you that you are a true wonder-worker, as I once was.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. But I wasn’t going to stay around to ask Misquamacus what he meant, because now the lightning had burned through most of the wires that held the floating heart together, and the blood was pouring down in a warm red blizzard, and all kinds of hideous remains were bouncing onto the ground. A woman with only one leg and no face at all. The forequarters of a black-and-white cow. A garden bench. A tangled-up slew of dead cats.

Misquamacus raised his voice again, and waved his medicine stick from side to side. “I make you this promise! Now that I can return to the world of touching flesh, I will return! And I will burn this land from one ocean to the other!”

Amelia screamed, “
Harry! Leave him! Come on!
”

Auntie Ammy and Remo and Charlie and the rest of them had already left us, and were hurrying away down the side street. But I couldn’t turn away. Not now, not again. Not after all these years. I was no goddamned hero, but I had lost too many friends and witnessed too much pain and too much death and too much goddamned destruction.

A long cast-iron fence pole had fallen onto the grass only a few feet away from me. It had a spike on the end, like a medieval spear. I sidestepped my way toward it, keeping my eyes on Misquamacus all the time.

Misquamacus began some kind of chant. I don’t know what it meant. I don’t even know what language it was in. But I guessed that it was a curse, or a promise, or maybe a bit of both. There was no way that Misquamacus was ever going to accept what the white men had done to his people, whether he was alive or dead or half dead.

He was still chanting and waving his medicine stick when I bent down and picked up that fence pole. It was much
heavier than I had thought it was going to be. In fact I could hardly lift it. But I hefted it up in both hands and without any hesitation at all I swung around and ran at him. I think I shouted, “
Geronimo!
”

I saw Misquamacus stretch his mouth wide-open in a silent scream. He probably
did
scream, out loud, but I didn’t hear him. I saw his eyes, too. They were utterly black, and empty, as if there were nothing inside his head but infinite space. It’s hard to describe, but it was a hair-raisingly intimate moment. We had never come so physically close to each other before, but now here we were, like two lovers rushing into each other’s arms.

The point of the fence pole penetrated his chest with only the faintest
plock!
and I felt barely any resistance as I pushed it right through him. He wasn’t flesh and blood and bone, after all. He was ectoplasm, the cloudy substance of spirits: visible and audible, but as insubstantial as gauze. When I let go of the fence pole, however, and stepped away from him, he remained impaled. He gripped the fence pole with both hands, trying to tug it out of his chest, and all the time he stared at me with an expression of cold and absolute rage.

Above us, lightning struck the floating heart again—or what bloody bits and pieces were left of it—and it suddenly collapsed. A last cascade of body parts and timber and broken concrete dropped down on top of us, and I was struck on the shoulder by a severed arm. All the barbed wire unraveled, too, and fell on us. A twisted length of wire caught in my hair, but I managed to untangle myself, although I cut open the pad of my right thumb while I was doing it. I was already plastered in blood, so it didn’t make too much difference.

Misquamacus staggered around and around, wrenching the fence pole from side to side. He started to roar with frustration and pain, but I suddenly realized that he didn’t have the strength or the substance to drag it out of himself.

“
You!
” he bellowed at me. “
You! I curse you forever!
”

But at that instant, a blinding bolt of lightning struck the point of the fence pole, which was protruding from his back. Misquamacus exploded, so violently that I was thrown almost ten feet backward. There was a deafening bang of thunder, so loud that I couldn’t even think.

A thousand sparkling fragments burst into the air above us. But this felt as if it were more than an explosion. The earth felt as if it were
twisting,
underneath me, and even the sky seemed to be distorted. There was an echo, and then another echo, and then I heard a high shrieking sound coming toward us. For a few seconds, we were buffeted by a screaming wind, and it was then that I saw how powerful Misquamacus had been, and how much he had nearly changed the course of history.

I felt as if time itself had collapsed, and I heard drumming and shouting and a thousand voices chanting. I saw buffalo, thousands of them. I saw fires and dust and snow and men dressed as demons. I saw the sun rise and immediately go down again. I saw the moon circling the sky. I saw what might have been if Misquamacus had been able to take us all back to the days when America belonged to
his
people, and the Great Old Ones still ruled the world.

There was another shattering bang, as if a huge door had been slammed shut, and then the main square was quiet again. I lay on my side, stunned. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I raised my head and saw Amelia hunkering down next to me. I couldn’t hear what she was saying at first, but she was nodding, and smiling, and then she kissed me on the forehead, even though both of us were sticky with drying blood.

I managed to sit up. There was no sign of Misquamacus, only a few remaining sparks that drifted down on us, and then winked out. The fence pole was lying on the grass, bent double like a giant bobby pin.

“He’s gone,” said Amelia, in a voice as tiny as a fairy in a bottle.

I stood up, with Amelia’s help, and walked over to the spot where Misquamacus had been standing. The grass was scorched, and some beads and birds’ skulls were scattered about, as well as the black, charred body of the mummified rat, but nothing more.

We looked around. The main square was littered with terrible remains, as if a massive bomb had exploded, and I could hear people sobbing. But the smoke and the clouds were beginning to clear, and the stars were coming out.

Amelia bent down and picked something out of the grass. She held it up and looked at it, and then she handed it over to me.

“Souvenir,” she told me.

“What?” I shouted at her, cupping my hand around my ear.

“
Keepsake
,” she yelled. “
I think you deserve it.
”

I looked down at it. It was the silver medallion that Misquamacus had worn around his neck, embossed with the writhing tentacles of the greatest of the Great Old Ones. I was tempted to throw it away as far as I could, but then I thought,
No, this is for Singing Rock. I’m going to keep this in his memory. He deserves it much more than I do.

Not far away, among the carnage, we found Tyler, lying on his side, next to the Kawasaki that he had commandeered. His arms and legs were at awkward, impossible angles, but his eyes were open and he looked unexpectedly peaceful and calm.

Tina knelt down beside him. “He’s gone,” she said. “Looks like his neck’s broken.”

“Guy was a fucking hero,” said Remo.

I turned around. The crowd from the café was gradually returning to the main square. Some of them were looking up at the stars, but many of them were still blind, and were holding tight to their friends and asking what had happened.

“Yes,” I said. “He was a hero. And so was everybody else who was here tonight.”

We were still gathered around Tyler’s body when a black Cadillac Escalade, with red and blue lights flashing, appeared from the south side of the main square,. It was followed by two more. The motorcade drove right up to the side of the café, and immediately the doors opened and at least eight guys in dark suits and white shirts and sunglasses climbed out. They formed a circle around the Escalades, and one of them called, “Clear!”

I went up to him and said, “What’s going on?”

“Please step back, sir,” he told me, but the “please” didn’t sound at all like a polite request and the “sir” was very much less than respectful.

But then the rear door of the second Escalade opened up, and President David Perry stepped out. I stepped back, as I was told. I hadn’t voted for David Perry, but he was still the president, after all.

He approached us, with his Secret Service detail staying close. He was wearing a black overcoat but no hat.

“Jesus,” he said. “What happened to you? You’re all covered in blood. Are you hurt?”

“No, sir, Mr. President,” I told him. “We were in kind of a fight, that’s all. You should have seen the other guy.”

The president looked slowly around Memory Valley’s main square, and then at the Aspen Café, with its smashed windows, and the smoking remains of the Eye Killers lying strewn on the sidewalk in front of it. Then he looked up at the stars.

“Never seen a storm blow itself out so quick,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me fly up here from SFX, on account of the weather. Now look at it.”

“Name’s Erskine,” I told him. “Harry Erskine. And this is Mrs. Amelia Carlsson.”

The president held out his hand. I showed him my own
hand, which was covered in drying blood, but he said, “I’m not squeamish, Mr. Erskine,” and shook hands with both of us. “What exactly happened here?” he asked me.

I said, “You didn’t come up here by accident, Mr. President, did you?”

“No, Mr. Erskine, I didn’t. I was warned that something pretty damn catastrophic was going to happen.”

“It nearly did. But you can breathe easy now. We found a way to stop it.”

The president started to walk toward the smoldering coffin bodies of the Eye Killers. I followed him.

He stopped, and then without looking at me he said, “Does the name Misquamacus mean anything to you, Mr. Erskine?”

“Yes, sir.” I realized then that the president already had a rough idea of what had happened in Memory Valley that evening. Not the details, of course. He wouldn’t have known anything about the Thunder Giant, or the sacrifice that Tyler Jones had made to save us, or about the ghostly reappearance of General Lawrence and his men. But if he knew the name Misquamacus, the One Who Went and Came Back, then he must have guessed what kind of a battle we had fought here.

“Someplace we can go and talk?” he asked me. “Maybe you can fill me in.”

“Sure,” I nodded. “Mrs. Carlsson and me, we’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast just along the street there. But there’s one or two things I need to do first. We lost an old friend tonight, and a new one, too.”

The president turned to the people from the Aspen Café, who were gathered around us in bewildered but respectful silence.

“Whatever you folks did this evening, your country thanks you,” he said. He went across to Mickey and held out his hand. Mickey hesitated. He was holding Cayley’s left hand with his right hand, and if he let go of her, he would lose his sight again.

“Mr. President, sir—” I said, but Mickey took the plunge, released his grip on Cayley, and blindly held out his hand.

The president shook it and said, “What’s your name, son?”

Mickey stared at him. “I can see,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not holding onto Cayley’s hand anymore, and I can see.”

“You were blinded?” asked the president.

“All of us were, me and my friends here. We found out that we could see if we held one another’s hands, but now I’ve shaken your hand—” He held up both of his hands in front of his face. “I can see!”

The president said, “Is there anybody here who is still blind? Could they come forward, please?”

A gray-haired man in a plaid shirt was led forward by his grandson. The president took hold of his hand and squeezed it. Almost immediately the man blinked and looked around, and said, “I can see! I can see everything!”

The president turned back to me and said, “I don’t have any idea how this works, but I was blinded, too. Not that it was ever announced.”

“But you can see now,” said Amelia. “How did you get your sight back?”

“Misquamacus,” he told her. “He didn’t want me to miss the sight of our society being turned back to the days of buffalo hunting and bows and arrows. He was like one of those murderers who kills a man’s family in front of him.”

Amelia said, “He probably used a very simple spell to open up your eyes again. White witches used to use a spell like that in Romania, if a village was hit by uveitis or trachoma. First of all, the witch would restore the sight of the most senior sufferer in the village, and then he or she would pass on the cure to every other sufferer, either by clasping their hands or kissing them. In fact it’s not even a spell, in the strictest sense of the word. It’s the same as laying on of hands, which is common to almost all faith healers.”