Graham Masterton - Revenge of the Manitou

“I’ll come around in the morning to see how Susan’s getting along. She’s sleeping now. A mild sedative. I think it might be wise if you got yourself some sleep, too. I mean that, Neil. You could have been working too hard.”

Neil was about to burst out again, but then he checked himself and nodded, and said, “Okay, doctor. I’ll try. I’ll see you in the morning.”

He closed the kitchen door after Doctor Crowder had left, and drew up one of the kitchen chairs. He sat at the table for almost ten minutes, with every nightmarish incident of the whole night whirling around in his mind. Again and again, with eerie vividness, he saw the jerking, sexual movements of Susan’s sheets, and the expression of malevolent triumph on Toby’s face.

After a while, he got up to make himself a cup of coffee. He saw his face reflected in the dark window, and he thought how tired and washed-out he looked. He filled the electric hot pot, and went to the cupboard to find the instant coffee. The clock chimed the half-hour. He walked across to the sink to set his cup on the drainboard, and then, to his horror, he realized that somebody or something was staring at him. He turned, shocked, and saw a pallid face pressed against the glass of the kitchen window.

“I hope I didn’t scare you too much,” Harry Erskine said.

Neil, still fidgeting, gave him an uncertain grin. “I was just feeling edgy, that’s all. And I didn’t expect you till the morning.”

Harry stirred his coffee, and set the spoon down in the saucer. “I was through for the day, and my date came down with the chicken pox, so I took the first plane going.

There was me and fifty-five rabbis, so I figured the flight just had to arrive safe.”

“You rented a car at the airport?”

“It’s in back of your yard. A yellow Pinto with a slipping transmission. Still, what can you expect for four dollars a day?”

Harry was a round-shouldered thirty-five-year-old with an obvious penchant for permanent-press suits and shirts that could drip dry over the tub. He could have looked quite distinguished, except that his facial features didn’t seem comfortable with each other. His nose was a little too large, his eyes a little too deepset, his chin reasonably determined but too fleshy. His- mouse-brown hair was thinning, and his cheeks had the permanent pallor of Tenth Avenue.

Neil said, “Do you want something to eat? I could fix some eggs.”

“Unh-hunh. Leave it till the morning. You’ve done enough tonight without short-order cooking.”

Neil sat down at the table. “You say you’re a mystic?” he asked Harry. “I didn’t think anyone could make a living at being a mystic.”

“I don’t,” Harry told him. “I do free-lance work for my old advertising agency to make ends meet. But I prefer to be my own boss, you know, and I’m good at mysticism. I read old ladies’ fortunes with the tarot cards, and I hold young ladies’ hands and tell them what their palms foretell. Usually, they foretell a cheap Italian dinner with me, followed by a nightcap at my apartment.”

“You don’t seem to take it too seriously.”

Harry looked at him. “I take Misquamacus seriously. What I do for a living, that’s just fooling about. But Misquamacus, and the spirits that Misquamacus can raise up, now that’s a whole different ball game.”

Neil poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped it. “What I don’t understand is, if you’ve already destroyed Misquamacus once, how he can possibly come back again.”

“You’ll have to ask John Singing Rock about the finer details of that,” said Harry. “But the way I understand it, a manitou is indestructible, like a spirit. It lives forever, and not even the greatest of the gods can destroy it. All you can hope to do when you’re fighting a reincarnated manitou like Misquamacus is break the spells that bind it to its physical form. When we first faced Misquamacus, he was reborn in the body of a girl I knew. Actually reborn, like a fetus. But we were able to use the electrical power of a computer to destroy him. Least, that’s the easiest way I can explain it.”

“What about now?” asked Neil. “What’s he going to do to Toby?”

Harry shook his head. “I just don’t know. I talked to Singing Rock about it, and he was going to consult some of the elder medicine men of his tribe. You see, whatever Misquamacus is doing, he seems to have learned some lessons from the last time.

Last time, he was reborn from the seventeenth century, and it must have been his first leap through time. He was alone, and he was caught off-balance, and once we worked out a way to get rid of him, then the struggle wasn’t too unequal. But this time-well, God only knows. He seems to have found himself a whole bunch of friends, and a way to reincarnate himself without having to grow like a fetus.”

Neil said, “He’s growing inside Toby’s mind. I can see it. I can look at Toby, and Toby isn’t Toby at all.”

“Misquamacus is a pretty powerful guy,” said Harry. “He’s also mean, and vengeful, and if I didn’t know he was going to come and find me anyway, I would have stayed as far away from what’s going on here as humanly possible. Nothing personal, of course.”

Neil finished his coffee, and went to stack their cups in the sink. He said, “I want to thank you for taking the trouble to fly out here, anyway. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t have bothered. Half this damn town, to begin with.”

“They’ve been giving you a hard time?”

“They think I’m crazy. And tonight, after that sheet business, they even believe I assaulted Susan. If I don’t do something soon, they’re going to commit me, or run me out. Even Susan doesn’t believe me.”

Harry took a pack of mint-flavored dental floss out of his coat pocket and broke off a piece.

“You want some?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

“I think it helps to stop me smoking,” said Harry, sawing away at his teeth. “It’s also supposed to do wonders for the dental bills.”

“Do you want to see Toby?” asked Neil.

“Sure. He’s upstairs now?”

“He’s sleeping. I guess Misquamacus is conserving his strength right now.”

“How about your wife?”

“The doctor gave her a sedative. She won’t wake up.”

Harry put away his floss and stood up. “Well,” he said, with a pale grin. “I feel a little like Saint George about to size up the dragon for a rematch.”

Neil opened the door to the stairs and led the way up to the landing. It was dark and still up there, and the ticking of the grandfather clock was the only sound they could hear.

Harry whispered, “Will you show me the wardrobe first? The one the wooden man came out of?”

“Sure,” said Neil, crossing the landing. “It’s in here.”

He opened the door to Toby’s room. He had nailed a sheet of hardboard over the window, so it was gloomy, and still smelled of ash and smoke. Harry took a cautious peek around, and then stepped across to the walnut wardrobe.

“Is this it?”

Neil nodded.

Harry opened it and looked inside.

“We had something like this before, only not nearly so dramatic. Misquamacus manifested his head out of a solid cherrywood table, right in front of us. It was real frightening.”

He closed the wardrobe door. “He’s an Indian of the woods, you see, from Manhattan originally, and in other lives the Miskatonic River and some of the back forests of Massachusetts. He was an Algonquian, and a Wampanoag, and maybe a dozen other nationalities. Singing Rock knows more about him than I do. After we sent him back outside, Singing Rock made quite a study of Misquamacus.”

Neil ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what the hell I would have done if I hadn’t found you,” he said.