Graham Masterton - Revenge of the Manitou

“You mean the ghosts of twenty-two old-time medicine men are supposed to be getting together to punish us? Come on, Billy. That’s a tall story and you know it.”

Billy Ritchie didn’t look offended. ‘People have said that before,” he said, philosophically. “But let me show you something, before you make up your mind that all those old Indian legends were nonsense.”

He propelled himself across to a small bureau which stood in the far corner of the room and opened the top drawer. He shuffled through a heap of untidy papers and news clippings while Neil watched him silently and drank his beer.

“Here we are,” said Billy Ritchie, after a while, and wheeled himself over. He gave Neil two black-and-white photographs, full plate size, and told him, ‘Take a close look at those.”

One of the photographs showed a street scene in Calistoga. It was hard to tell when it was, because the town had hardly changed in fifty years. There were horses and buggies, and men in wide-brimmed hats, but it could have been taken any time between 1890 and 1920.

In the foreground of the picture stood a group of men with drooping mustaches, and just to their left, sitting on the edge of the boardwalk, was an Indian, in a dusty, black business suit. He was handsome and well-built, and around his neck he wore strings of necklaces and beads, which indicated that he was a medicine man.

The other photograph was taken in the woods someplace. Neil didn’t recognize the scenery at all. A group of Indians were standing by a fallen tree, squinting at the camera as if they mistrusted it. Among them was the same medicine man, in a woollen robe this time, but wearing the same necklaces and beads.

“All right,” said Neil, “it’s two pictures of the same Indian. What’s that supposed to prove?”

“Look at the dates on the back,” suggested Billy Ritchie.

Neil turned the photographs over. One, the street scene in Calistoga, was marked 8/1/15. The woodland scene was marked August 5th, 1915.

“I don’t get it,” persisted Neil. “These were taken three days apart. What’s so strange about that?”

Billy Ritchie cackled. “What’s so strange about it is that the picture in the woods was taken by a photographer called Lewis Clifton, of Massachusetts, up by the Wampanoag settlement on the Miskatonic River in New England. These photographs were taken three days apart, sure. But they were also taken three thousand miles apart.”

“That’s impossible,” said Neil. “In 1915, it would have taken almost a week to get from New England to the Napa Valley.”

“That’s right,” nodded Billy Ritchie. “And yet both of these photographs are authenticated, and their dates are plumb correct.”

Neil peered closer at the calm, amused face of the Wampanaug medicine man. Even though the pictures were almost seventy years old, they had a curious freshness about them, as if they had been taken only a few weeks ago. He said, “That’s strange, that’s really strange.”

“Not strange at all when you know who that is,” said Billy Ritchie. “That’s the best-known of all the Indian men, the most powerful Indian sorcerer who ever lived. That’s Misquamacus.”

“Misquamacus?”

“That was what they called him, among a whole lot of other names. But the reason I spent some time finding those photographs is because of what that trapper told me, up in the Modoc Forest. He said that when the day of the dark stars came around, this man Misquamacus would be the fellow to bring all the twenty-two wonderworkers together. This man Misquamacus, he said, was obsessed with taking his revenge on the white folks, and that his whole aim in life was to see white people die in the cruelest way possible.”

Billy Ritchie began to stroke his cat again. “I’d say that the cruelest way possible would be to call down Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah, and let them loose. Now, that would be cruel.”

They talked until mid-afternoon. Billy Ritchie, as the Old Crow loosened his tongue, began to ramble about his childhood, and the old days in Calistoga and the hot springs country, and the girls he’d known and chased. Neil began to feel claustrophobic in the small, airless house, but he stayed because he wanted to know more about Bloody Fenner, and about the day of the dark stars.

He said to Billy Ritchie, “Do you think that Bloody Fenner could have done anything to irritate the Wappos, or any of the tribes? Something they might have wanted revenge for?”

Billy Ritchie shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. I never heard tell of him falling out with the Indians. The way I heard it, they was always the best of friends, and that’s what made him so treacherous to whites.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“Who does? All that happened one hundred and forty years ago, and there wasn’t more than a dozen men in the whole of the Napa Valley who could read or write, so they didn’t keep no diaries. They were dark days, for sure. Mighty dark days.”

Neil took out his handkerchief and wiped sweat from the back of his neck. “Well, tell me this,” he said. “If Bloody Fenner had done something to upset the Indians, way back in the 1830s, how would an Indian medicine man go about taking his revenge?”

“You mean today? Here and now?”

“That’s right”

Billy Ritchie puffed out his cheeks. “I can only tell you what I know from stories, and from what that trapper told me. A lot of those real mystical Indian rituals, well, they’re so secret that half the Indians don’t know them. But what you have to understand is that a medicine man’s spirit-what the Indians call bis manitou- that never dies. It’s reborn, lifetime after lifetime, for seven lifetimes in all, until the medicine man has performed enough magic on earth to earn himself a place up in the stars, alongside of the great spirits.

“The point is, the manitou can only take on flesh if it finds itself a suitable human being to lodge itself in. It can take on plenty of other shapes, sure. The Narragansets, for instance, used to have stories about medicine men who came back to life by using rocks for flesh, or water, or even wood. There’s some pretty hair-rising stories about the stone men of the Narragansets who used to walk at night. But a man made of rock or wood is just as vulnerable as rock or wood, and so the medicine man wouldn’t take on that kind of flesh unless he had nothing else.”

Neil, even though he was trying hard to control it, was shaking. He saw, as vividly as he had the night before, the wooden arm reaching out from the wardrobe, the fierce face glaring from the polished walnut. He said, hoarsely, “Go on.”

Billy Ritchie shrugged. “I don’t know much more about it. It’s not the kind of stuff a white man gets to hear about easily.”

Neil opened another can of Coors. His throat was dry, and he felt as if he’d been hung up all afternoon in a tobacco-curing barn. He swallowed lukewarm beer, and then he said, “What would happen on the day of the dark stars? Would the medicine men need to find human beings to lodge themselves in? Would they need to use ordinary people’s bodies to get themselves reborn?”

“Sure they would,” nodded Billy Ritchie. “They’d pick themselves a bunch of folks, probably the land of folks who wouldn’t put up too much of a mental fight, if you get what I mean, and they’d use their living bodies, their flesh and their blood and all, to come back to life.”

Neil whispered, “The children. My God, the children.”

Billy Ritchie said, “What did you say? You’ll have to speak up. I bust an eardrum when I fell off of that horse.”

Neil stood up. If what Billy Ritchie said about Indian medicine men was even half-true, it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever heard in his life. Everything fitted the random and scary events of the past few days, and made sense out of them. The day of the dark stars was going to happen soon, just the way Toby had said. Toby couldn’t have possibly known about it unless he was really being possessed for real.