Graham Masterton - The Manitou

"Of course I have guilt, and I have sympathy, too. And it's because I have sympathy that I'm going to get it done."

"I don't follow."

"Harry," said Jack, "that medicine man is in pain. He didn't know why, but he said it was the light. If you know anything about gynecology, you'll know why we never X-ray fetuses unless we believe they are already dead, or they're a threat to their mother's lives. Every time a human being is X-rayed, the rays destroy cells in the area where the X-ray is directed. In an adult, that isn't too important, because they're fully developed, and the loss of a few cells isn't harmful. But in a tiny fetus, one cell destroyed can mean that a finger or a toe or even an arm or a leg will never develop."

I stared at him. "Do you mean that —"

"I simply mean that we've poured enough X-rays into that medicine man to see through FortKnox on a foggy day."

I looked down at the vein-laced bulge that squirmed on Karen Tandy's back. "In other words," I said, "he's a monster. We've deformed him."

Jack Hughes nodded. Outside, it was snowing again.

I don't know what I expected a modern-day medicine man to look like, but Singing Rock could just as well have been an insurance salesman as a practitioner of ancient Indian magic. When I met him the next morning at La Guardia after his arrival from Sioux Falls, he was wearing a glossy gray mohair suit, his hair was short and shiny with oil, and there were heavy-rim spectacles on his less-than-hawklike nose.

He was dark-skinned, with black glittering eyes, and there were more wrinkles on his fifty-year-old face than you would expect on a white man, but otherwise he was as mundane and unspectacular as all the other businessmen on the flight.

I walked over to him and shook his hand. He only came up to my shoulder.

"Mr. Singing Rock? My name's Harry Erskine."

"Oh, hi. You don't have to call me Mr. Singing Rock. Singing Rock on its own is okay. Was that a terrible flight? We had blizzards all the way. I thought we were going to have to put down in Milwaukee."

"My car's outside," I told him.

We collected his baggage and made our way to the car park. A watery sun was melting the slush, and there were the beginnings of a spring-like feeling around. A row of drips splashed on to the sidewalk from the terminus building, and one of them caught me on the neck.

I looked up. "How come they don't hit you ?" I asked.

"I'm a medicine man," said Singing Rock urbanely. "You think a drop of water would dare to hit me?"

I stowed his cases in the trunk, and we climbed into the car.

"Do you like the Cougar?" asked Singing Rock.

"It's pretty neat," I said. "I like it."

"I have a green one," he told me. "I use it for fishing weekends. For work, I have a Marquis."

"Oh," I said. It didn't sound as though the medicine business was too bad down on the reservation these days.

As we drove out of La Guardia toward Manhattan, I asked Singing Rock how much he knew about the Karen Tandy case.

"I was told that some ancient medicine man was about to make a reappearance inside her body," he said.

"And you don't find that hard to believe?"

"Why should I… I've seen stranger things than that. Learning to escape into another time is pretty strong medicine, but there have been recorded cases of it happening. If you say it's true, and Dr. Snow says it's true, then I'm inclined to believe that it's true."

"You know this has got to be kept a strict secret?" I asked him, overtaking a truck, and switching on my windshield wipers to dear away the spray thrown up by its wheels.

"Of course. I wouldn't want to publicize it anyway. I have a steady investment business back in South Dakota, and I wouldn't want my clients to think I was reverting back to savagery."

"You also know that this medicine man is extremely powerful?"

Singing Rock nodded. "Any medicine man who can project himself through three centuries has got to be very powerful. I've been looking up the whole subject, and it appears that the greater the time span the medicine man is able to cross, the more powerful his magic can be."

"Did you find out anything more about it?"

"Not a great deal, but enough to give me a clear idea of what approach I'm going to have to take. You've heard of Gitche Manitou, the Great Spirit? Well, what we're dealing with here is the spirit, or manitou, of this particular medicine man. He is obviously very strong, which means that even in his previous lifetime in the 1650s, he was into his fourth or fifth reincarnation. You see, each time a manitou lives on earth as a human being, he gains more knowledge and more strength. By the time he is into his seventh or eighth reincarnation, he is ready to join Gitche Manitou forever as a permanent spirit. It's like graduation."

I changed lanes. "There's a similar kind of concept in European spiritualism. What I want to know is, how do you defeat a manitou like this?"

Singing Rock fished in his pocket for a small cigar and lit it.

"I'm not saying it's easy," he said. "In fact, the whole business is touch-and-go. But the basic principle is this. Every magical spell, according to its strength, can be diverted. You can't nullify it. You can't stop it in its tracks. It has its own spiritual momentum, and to arrest that momentum would be like trying to stand in front of an express train. But you can divert that express train and send it back the way it came. All you need then is enough strength to alter its course through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees."

"It may be easier than you think," I said. "The doctors made X-rays of this medicine man when he was still in a fetal stage, and it looks as though they've deformed or injured him."

"That won't make any difference," said Singing Rock. "The spell was made when he was still whole and well, and that's what counts."

"Can you actually make him leave Karen Tandy?"

"I hope so. I don't think I'll have the power to divert him right back to the 1650s. That would take a very strong and experienced medicine man — somebody much more powerful than me. But what I can do is get him out of her, reverse the growth inside her, and redirect it to someone else."

I felt a chill. " Someone else? But you can't wish that on someone else. What's the point of saving Karen Tandy's life if we kill another person?"

Singing Rock puffed at his cigar. "I'm sorry, Mr. Erskine. I thought you understood the problems. There's no other way of doing it."

"But who will the manitou go to?"

"It could be anybody. You have to realize that he'll be fighting for his own existence, and he'll look for any host that is weak and receptive."

I sighed. All of a sudden, I felt very tired. It's not at all easy, battling against something that doesn't know the meaning of physical exhaustion, and which is totally committed to its own survival.

"If what you're saying is true, Singing Rock, then you might as well fly straight back to South Dakota."

Singing Rock frowned. "But surely you wouldn't object if we transferred the manitou to someone useless — like a hopeless drug addict, maybe, or a bum from the Bowery, or a Negro criminal?"

"Singing Rock, that's out of the question. This whole thing has happened because one race exercised prejudice against another. If it hadn't been for the way the Dutch threatened this medicine man back in 1650, he wouldn't be here now, threatening us. I can't see that there's any justification for doing the same thing all over again to another racial minority. I mean, we'd just be perpetuating the evil."

The Indian medicine man in the mohair suit looked across at me curiously.

"That's pretty funny, hearing that from a white man," he said. "My father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather before him, they all felt the same way about white men. Unscrupulous devils with hearts of stone. Now, when you've finally taught us how to be as hard and uncompromising as you, you turn soft on us."