Burial (25 page)

Deke glimpsed some bodies go, too. Three children, a dog, and an elderly man. He saw one arm uplifted for a moment which suggested (to his helpless horror) that one of the children wasn't yet dead. What would happen to it, beneath the ground, he couldn't even guess.

He shouted, Tor Christ's sake, Willard! We can't land there! We'll be sucked in with all the rest of that shit!'

But the Jetranger's engine had developed a blurting, terminal cough, and the cockpit was filling with eye-watering smoke. Willard could scarcely keep the helicopter from spinning round and round on its own axis and tipping over.

‘I can't hold it no more!' he yelled. ‘We'll just have to hit the doors and run like fun!'

They were hovering over the landing-space now, tilting and teetering, only ten feet or so from the garbage-strewn ground. Just as Willard was about to push forward the collective lever, however, Deke screamed, ‘No! No! There's a kid down there!'

‘What?' yelped Willard, his voice white.

‘A kid! There's a kid down there!'

Willard dragged back the lever, and the helicopter gave a last blurt of power and jounced up into the air. Through
the rain-blurred windshield, Willard glimpsed a young pale-faced girl standing right in the middle of the landing-space, her arms by her sides, watching them.

He was too shocked to wonder what she was doing there; or why
she
wasn't being dragged off into the blackness. All he could hear was the Jetranger's engine knock and bang, and then the wind and the rain buffeting against the fuselage. Then he heard Deke screaming, really screaming like a man who knows that he is just about to die. The helicopter windmilled inelegantly forward, overshooting the landing-space, and plunging straight into the inky blackness at the edge of the park.

Willard had been in crashes before. He had broken both legs in Saigon, and only the second time he had flown for Mr Peterson he had clipped a power-line and fractured his skull. But this wasn't like a crash at all. This was violent and noisy beyond all imagination. The helicopter was crushed into the blackness like a man crushing a lightbulb into a bowl of molasses. Willard heard the windshield collapse; then the bulkheads; then suddenly the helicopter was torn away from all around him, doorframes, instrument panel, pedals, levers, floor — even his seat — and he had the extraordinary feeling that he was being swung upside-down, so that he was hanging by his boots from the ceiling.

‘
Deke
!' he shouted out. ‘
Deke, are you okay
?'

He reached out into the blackness, trying to find something to touch, something that would help him to orient himself. It was like inching his way along the pitch-dark landing of a strange house, trying to find the light switch. His eyes were open but the black filled everything. He felt that black was pouring into his head and into his lungs and drowning him.

‘
Deke, where are you
?'

He heard tearing noises, collapsing noises, crunches and smashes. He tried to take two or three steps forward, but he
still felt as if he were hanging head-downward, and that he could easily fall. He stayed where he was, his arms outstretched, blinded, trying to balance himself.

It was then that he saw something pale, approaching him through the blackness. Something pale and very tall.

He must be dead. There was no doubt about it. He must be dead.

The pale spectre came closer and closer, and as it did so Willard realized that it was somebody riding a horse. Somebody or some
thing
riding a horse — because it looked hunched and strange and it seemed to have a monstrously huge head.

If it was a man on a horse, he must be half-a-mile away at least, half-a-mile away in total blackness and
upside-down
.

The vision was so eerie that Willard started shivering with fear. He tried to close his eyes but he couldn't, they refused. They were too filled with blackness. All he could do was stand and wait for the man on the horse to flicker nearer and nearer, a spectre with all the blurry pale uncertainty of an early movie.

Above the crashing and the tearing, he heard, very faintly, the light, hard rhythm of hoofbeats.

It seemed to Willard that the man on the horse took an age to reach him. Willard no longer tried calling out for Deke. If Deke had survived the crash, he would have shouted out himself by now.

Mind you
, thought Willard,
there was always the possibility that Deke had survived the crash and that he hadn't — that he was dead, and that this was purgatory, or wherever you went when you tried to land your Jetranger with a sheared engine and found that a girl was standing in your way
.

The hoofbeats sounded louder now; more distinctive. But it was like listening to the sound of somebody running down the staircase of a thirty-storey hotel. You couldn't believe that they would ever get there.

Eventually, however, the vision flickered quite close. A white negative image in the blackness. It appeared to be a man, but if it was, he was either wearing a monstrous box-like helmet, or else his skull was hugely deformed. He sat on his white negative-image horse with both hands holding the reins, watching Willard with eyes that were little more than shadowy blurs.

His horse twitched and circled and appeared to change shape. ‘What are you?' Willard demanded. ‘Am I dead, or what?'

The whitish vision circled all the way around him. Willard turned his head to follow him, not trusting himself to move his feet, in case he fell from the ground and in to the blackest of skies.

‘I feel like I'm dead,' said Willard. ‘I don't know, either dead or unconscious or something.'

The vision came so close that Willard could feel its cold, charged aura. Willard said, ‘Can you speak? Do you know what I'm saying to you?' He looked up at that whitish, misshapen head and he wasn't even sure that he was talking to anything human, let alone anybody who could answer him in English.

There were more crashes and creaks and collapsing noises, somewhere in the blackness. Willard said, ‘Thing of it is, I don't know what's happening. I can't understand where I am.'

The vision seemed to lean forward. Willard narrowed his eyes against its brightness. He smelled the oddest of smells, like fires and burned grease, a smell that was disturbingly reminiscent of — what? He couldn't decide. He stepped cautiously back. But — as he did so — he felt something snatch hold of his right arm, and twist it around as violently as an airplane propeller. He felt an explosion in his shoulder. He heard his shirt tear. Not only his shirt, but his skin and his flesh and his arteries. He was too startled even to scream. He staggered sideways in the blackness, blind, agonized, not knowing which way to turn — not even understanding what had happened to him.

‘Shit! What have you done? Shit! What have you done to my shoulder?'

He tried to flex his right arm but he couldn't. He kept staggering and losing his balance. He felt warmth and wetness flooding his shirt. He reached across with his left hand to find out whether the vision had dislocated his shoulder, and it was only then that he felt strings of skin and slippery worms of tendon and pumping blood.

The white negative rider had torn his arm off.

Willard choked. His mouth filled with sick. He dropped to his knees in the overwhelming blackness and shivered and shook and that was all he could do.
This isn't happening. This isn't real
. But he kept seeing those maimed and bloodied young Marines in Vietnam, those boys with no legs and those boys with no arms and those boys with no faces.

What did they do, when a soldier lost his arm? Tourniquet? How? How did they stop the blood from pumping out of his body and into the blackness — pumped out for ever into oblivion
?

But he didn't have to think about it for very long. Because the white shimmering vision dismounted from his white shimmering horse and approached him with terrible swiftness.

‘
Help me,
' Willard pleaded. But without hesitation the vision swung around and hit him across the side of the head with something heavy and club-like and soft.

Willard tipped to the ground. He was clubbed again, and then again. He tried to lift his left arm to protect himself, but the vision was beating him in a frenzy. He felt blood spraying everywhere, his own blood. He felt his ribs snap, three of them, and then his jaw was dislocated, so that he couldn't do anything to express his agony but gargle.

The vision was beating him to death with his own arm. It was done vengefully, but now without frenzy, the way you might club a dog to death, if it had bitten your child.

There came a time when Willard decided that he could no longer distinguish between light and dark, up and down,
pain and pleasure. He thought he heard the vision chanting; but perhaps it was nothing more than his own heartbeat, dutifully pumping his blood out of his severed brachial artery into the darkness.

Oh God our help in ages past
, he thought to himself. Then, for some reason a ribald little nursery rhyme he hadn't thought of in thirty five years: ‘Papa loved Mama, /Mama loved Babies, /Mama caught two, /With Papa at Creybie's.'

But his ordeal was not over yet. Just when he believed that the beating might have stopped, he felt his head wrenched upward by the hair. He was crowned with white blurry light, so that he felt almost holy, almost sanctified. But then something that felt like fire cut across his hairline.

Inch by inch, with a noise like tearing calico, his scalp was wrenched from the top of his head — hair-roots crackling, skin pulling free.

It was like having his hair burned off, but very slowly. It was so painful he couldn't understand how God could have made him capable of feeling so much pain. He might have been screaming then but he simply didn't know.

It was still light when Amelia arrived at the Greenbergs' house. Karen and I had been sitting on the porch outside waiting for her. The air was thick and hot and tasted like a mouthful of pennies.

She climbed out of a sagging red Cadillac, waved to the driver, and mounted the steps. She was wearing the same orange Indian-cotton dress that she had been wearing this afternoon. She carried a straw purse and a straw hat, and her eyes were concealed behind oil-slick-coloured sunglasses.

‘Amelia!' said Karen, and hugged her. ‘It's so good to see you!'

Amelia came up to the top of the steps and stood over me. Someone in the distance was shouting, ‘Manny! Manny! You came back here right this instant!'

Amelia said, ‘I promised I'd come.'

I tried to smile. ‘I knew that you wouldn't let us down.' Almost as soon as I'd uttered it, though, I wished to God that I hadn't said ‘us'. It didn't seem like all that long ago that Amelia and I had been ‘us'.

But Karen was so pleased to see her that somehow all the sting was taken out of it. ‘You haven't changed a bit! Well, you
have
changed, but only for the better! Harry tells me you're teaching.'

‘That's right Slow and disturbed children.'

‘That must be so rewarding.'

Amelia was looking at me, rather than Karen. ‘It can be,' she said. ‘At other times, it can be very frustrating.'

‘Harry told you about the Greenbergs?'

‘Yes. I'm so sorry. It's a terrible tragedy.'

‘Do you think you can help?'

Amelia took off her sunglasses and stared up at the building's brown-painted brick facade. ‘I don't know. It depends what we've got here. If it really is Misquamacus then we could be at very considerable risk.'

Karen was beginning to look tired. ‘I thought Misquamacus was dead.'

Amelia replaced her sunglasses. ‘Oh, no. Misquamacus was never dead. Even when we first met him he wasn't dead. But then he wasn't properly alive, either. He moves around that kind of limbo-land which we call Purgatory and which the Indians call the Lodge of the Moon.'

Karen glanced up at the apartment, too. ‘Do you want to take a look?'

I took hold of Amelia's wrist. ‘There's no compulsion
about this, Amelia. You can just turn your back and walk away. I won't think any the less of you.'

Amelia gave me one of her real old-fashioned looks. ‘And I won't think any the more of you.'

Karen opened the front door and that kind of settled everything. Together we climbed the stairs to the Greenbergs' apartment. Up until lunchtime, a cop had been standing guard on the door; but now the apartment was guarded by nothing more effective than tape saying POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.

I took out my Swiss Army penknife and cut the tape.

‘I hope you realize that what we're doing is illegal,' said Amelia.

‘Trust me,' I told her. ‘Besides, there's no other way.'

I opened the door and we stepped inside. The apartment was warm but gloomy; and I could faintly detect the smell of death. Amelia must have picked it up, too, because she shivered and reached out with her right hand to steady herself against the architrave.

‘My God,' she said. ‘I never went anyplace where anybody died so recently. It's like a battlefield.'

The living room wasn't untidy. When Amelia said ‘battlefield' she meant a spiritual battlefield; a war in that other, closely-adjacent dimension; where men could run like dogs and women could be slaughtered and still desirable. Karen reached out for my hand and don't tell me that Amelia didn't notice it. But all the same she kept her composure. She was many things, Amelia Crusoe, but she wasn't petty or spiteful and she didn't care for living in the past

She reached out her left hand towards the dining-room door.

‘In there,' she said, and it wasn't a question.

‘That's right,' I said. ‘Do you want to take a look?'

She humphed in amusement. ‘I
have
to take a look, I'm sorry to say.'