Burial (51 page)

Karen lifted her arms and Misquamacus lifted his arms, too, although his arms were so vague and shadowy that I could scarcely see them. Karen's muscles continued to ripple, and with her arms uplifted her ribcage was as bony and prominent as a crucified martyr. ‘
Aye! Paukunnawaw! Wajuk! Nish! Aye-aye-aye-aye-wejoo-suk
!'

I kept on backing away. In the distance, I could hear a deep rumbling barrage of thunder. Storm rising, I thought. And what a storm. I reached out behind me and felt the handle of the bathroom door. If Karen had somehow managed to squeeze in through the bathroom window, maybe I could squeeze out of it. Or maybe wrap a towel around my fist and punch out the glass.

I opened the bathroom door behind me, hesitated for just one moment, and then dodged inside, scratching my arm on the sharp tongue of the lock. My hands were juddering so much that I could barely manage to twist the lock. I doubted if a plywood cavity door could keep Misquamacus out for very long, but it might just give me the time I needed to escape. I pressed my forehead against the door and took three deep breaths, and told myself that I had fought against Misquamacus before, and beaten him, and that I was going to beat him again.

The day after David drowned, my father said to me, very gravely, ‘Harry—you're going to have to find more courage inside of you now than you ever knew you had.' I said that to myself then, with my forehead pressed against that flimsy door.

Courage, that's what I said. Then I turned around and David was standing in the bathroom, his face pale and decaying, his funeral suit dripping onto the tiles.

‘
You must,
' he whispered.

He walked past me, only a couple of inches away, but I couldn't bring myself to touch him. Maybe I should have done, but I couldn't. He unlocked the door with his white, water-swollen fingers, and pushed it open. Water dripped from his ears, and into his collar. ‘You
must,
' he told me.

Karen was standing by the bed, waiting for me. I stepped mechanically back into the bedroom. The wind was singing under the door, and outside I could hear clattering and banging and somebody shouting. I turned back to David and he was still there, still watching me, and this was soul-torture, believe me.

Karen's eyes were dark again, dark and introspective. Her muscles seemed to have stopped twitching, and apart from a strange shadowy look, she could have almost appeared normal, like the Karen I had known before Misquamacus possessed her. But how could I possibly make love to a woman whose soul was filled up with the soul of a man, a woman whose whole being belonged to some barbaric reeking savage?

‘You must, Harry,' she echoed.

I gave it one last shot. I strode to the front door, and
grasped the handle, and snapped at Karen, ‘You want seed, you bastard, you go to a goddamned garden centre.' Then I flung open the door, and there he was, standing in the wind, in his sodden funeral suit.

‘
You must,
' he insisted.

I looked back at Karen.
I'm going
, I thought.
David may have upset me, but he's only a kid. I'll shove him out of the way now and worry about the spiritual implications later
.

But without any warning at all, Karen strode forward and seized my arm. Karen? It looked like Karen, it felt like Karen, but it was strong and quick and I didn't stand a chance. She flung me onto the bed, and then she slapped my face and my forehead so hard that she gave me a nosebleed. When I tried to get up, she slapped me again, and then she slapped me again, just because she felt like it.

Without a word, she tugged open my trousers and wrestled them down my legs. I tried to sit up again, but this time she seized hold of my hair and screwed it around, and slapped me once, twice, three times, and then pushed me back onto the bed. I shoved her away with the heels of my hands, but she double-slapped me across the face, so hard that my ears rang.

‘Get off me!' I yelled at her. ‘Get the hell off me!'

But now she seized my left ear in one powerful clawlike hand, so tight that I could hear the cartilage crunching. And with her other hand, she grasped my cock and began feverishly to rub and tug at it, her fingernails digging into the skin. In spite of the pain, in spite of my fear — or maybe
because
of them — my cock began to stiffen. Karen kissed me and bit me with a dreadful urgency, and her breath was cold, so that I didn't know whether I was being raped by a young and lustful white woman, or a three-hundred-year-old medicine-man who wanted my heart and my soul and my only offspring, too.

She lifted herself over me. At the same time her fingernails
imprisoned my balls in a dangerous sharpened cage. I felt the skin of my scrotum crinkle. Fear, physical fear, but strangely masochistic excitement, too. I didn't speak, I didn't move. My heart pumped, my blood rushed, I could feel thunder shaking the whole motel. I looked into Karen's eyes and I couldn't have told you whether it was really Karen or not. They were bright eyes; twinkling and sharp. But whose eyes? And were they looking at my face, or staring into my soul?

‘Who are you?' I asked. But she didn't answer. Instead, she piloted the head of my cock in between her legs, and massaged it for a while, and then slowly sat on me.

‘Who are you?' I repeated, but she shook her head, to show me that she wouldn't answer, and lifted her finger to her lips. She started to ride up and down on me, faster and faster, deeper and deeper, until with each downstroke my balls were crammed into the crevice of her bottom.

I tried to sit up, but Karen slapped me yet again,
slapped
me, with both hands at once, and I could feel my nose spring blood. Then she tilted herself forward, and squashed her breasts against my chest, and reached down with both hands and seized my buttocks, digging her nails in deep. She thrust and plunged and thrust with her hips, and then she raked her nails across my bare, unprotected flesh, and clawed at my scrotum, and I climaxed. A thick, pumping ejaculation.

‘
Ak !Ak! Ak
!' she shrieked, throwing her head back, and even before I had finished, I felt a surge of shame and disgust and fright I slapped at her, and tried to struggle out from underneath her, but then she hit me with her clenched fist, right on the bridge of my nose, and I dropped back onto the pillow with tears bursting out of my eyes.

She leaned over me and I could see that she was no longer Karen. I saw angular cheeks and a hard-chiselled nose, and eyes as blank as coulee-washed pebbles.

‘White devil,' he said, so softly that I could scarcely hear
him. ‘At last you have given me what I want An heir, white devil. A son that I can call my own.'

He leaned back, and whooped, a high soul-chilling whoop that reminded me of all the cowboy-and-Indian movies I had ever seen. Then he looked down at me again, and he was Karen.

I stayed where I was, flat on my back on the bed, while she slowly climbed off me. ‘See,' she said, as she stood up. ‘The greatest act of contrition that you ever could have made. ‘And with that, she parted her vagina with her fingers so that I could see the sperm that had filled it. A drop of it slid shining and hesitant down her thigh, but I knew as well as she did that Karen was pregnant again, with another wonder-worker, the unnaturally conceived heir of Misquamacus.

‘Now what?' I said, and my voice was no more than a croak.

She dragged one of the blankets off the bed and wrapped herself in it. ‘Now you have paid for your treachery,' she said. Her eyes slowly rolled upward, until she was staring at me with solid whites. ‘Now you must die.'

I edged crabwise across the bed, still on my back. Karen was already changing, already altering. She grew taller, and darker. I had to remember that she and Misquamacus were sharing the same body and the same soul, and so sometimes (if he let her)
she
could predominate, just like she had on the bed, but sometimes
he
could predominate, and that meant serious violence, such as being turned inside-out, or being ripped into pieces, or having your soul torn up like confetti.

I had seen what had happened to George Hope and Andrew Danetree, and I never wanted that to happen to me. I would rather have died, instantly. I would rather have shot myself directly in the head, like the desperate troopers at the Little Big Horn.

Karen said, ‘It's a good day to die.' She circled the end of the bed, and she didn't take her eyes off me once.

I retreated toward the opposite side of the room. Karen came after me, but I noticed that the further away from the wall she went, the slower she became, in the same way that Martin had slowed down at the Greenbergs'. The shadow on the wall was all-important. It obviously gave Misquamacus strength — and the further he retreated from it, the weaker he became. Comparatively, that is. Misquamacus's weak was still devastatingly strong. He was probably capable of tearing out my lungs with his bare hands; and he probably wouldn't hesitate to do it. Not for an instant.

‘Karen,' I said, ‘try to be strong. Try to be yourself. Don't let this sucker take you over completely. Come on, Karen, fight!'

Karen took one step toward me, then another, her eyes still blinded white.

‘
Aye-aye-aye-nayew,
' she chanted. ‘
Aye-aye-aye-aye-wejoo-suk
.'

I hit the armchair and reached behind me to steady myself. I felt the drops of water that David had left on the vinyl. I circled around the back of the chair, never once taking my eyes away from Karen, never once lowering my guard. But then I felt that wetness, those few drops of water, and I suddenly remembered what Martin Vaizey had told me, and how I had chased off the shadow at the Greenbergs' apartment.

Water. White man's water. Dead water, as far as the Indians were concerned, because it was filtered and chlorinated and cleaned, and given added aluminum for brightness. But it was our water, the water of white civilization, and it was always on tap if we needed it. Like now
.

Karen took another step closer. ‘You will grow to like the darkness,' she told me. ‘You will grow to like the pain, too, in the end, after many years. You will wonder how you ever managed without it.'

‘Back off,' I said. ‘I'm warning you.'

Karen laughed, a deep, multi-layered laugh. ‘
You
are warning
me
?'

I stepped sideways into the bathroom doorway. Karen came after me, one slow movement at a time. Then — as quickly as I could — I slammed the bathroom door, and scrambled into the shower, and spun the faucet to full. I was drenched at once by an explosion of freezing-cold water, and I shouted out in shock.

Karen slammed open the bathroom door. She was still Karen, still naked and skinny, but her muscles had started up that knotty convulsion again, and her head seemed to have grown larger, so that it was more like a mask than a head.

‘Leave me alone!' I shouted at her. ‘You got what you wanted! Now get the hell out of here and leave me alone!'

‘
You have to die
! she roared at me. ‘
For everything you've done, you have to die
!'

I thought:
water, for God's sake, turn into a rattlesnake. Turn into anything that Misquamacus is afraid of
.

Karen approached me slowly, her eyeballs white, her head swaying from side to side, her teeth exposed in a maniac grin.

I thought of rattlers and water-moccasins and cobras and every goddamned snake in the book, my eyes squeezed shut. I tried to imagine that the bathroom was full of them, hissing and writhing and twisting and tangling.

I felt a chilly sliding movement across my foot, and I opened my eyes, and it had happened. The whole shower basin was filled with snakes — shining and transparent, all swarming over my bare feet — and the more water that gushed out of the shower-head, the more snakes there were. They poured out over the bathroom floor, and slid towards Karen with loathsome enthusiasm.

Karen took only one more step forward, but a water-moccasion lunged at her toes, and she shuddered, and quickly retreated. She lowered her head, and I sensed in
her posture the same sudden defeat that I had sensed in Martin Vaizey, when I had created that rattlesnake, back on East 17th Street.

Karen's head was lowered, but the shadowy head of Misquamacus rose above it, his face stony with rage, his headdress teeming with black, excited bugs.

‘
You will pay with your soul, white devil,
' he told me, through Karen's lips.

He turned, and Karen turned with him, casting one dark resentful look at me from under her tousled fringe.

‘No!' I ordered. ‘No! You can't take her with you!'

But Misquamacus thundered out of the room, dragging Karen behind him, and I heard the door wrenched open and the door slammed shut. I looked down at the bathroom floor. It was awash with water, and I was drenched, but there were no snakes anywhere. I paddled my way out, crossed the bedroom and opened the front door. I thought I glimpsed a tall dark shadow and a fleeting figure in white, just turning the corner by the Thunderbird's office. But it was impossible to tell for sure. The streetlights were out. The sky was as dark as congealing blood. And the wind was whipping up a blizzard of sand and dust and stray fragments of fencing and trash and broken siding.

I stood on the balcony and looked around me. I knew there was no point in trying to run after Misquamacus. He was gone, and Karen was gone, too. They could have been anywhere at all between here and hell and Pennsylvania. But something was happening here in Phoenix. I could hear windows breaking and sirens whooping in the distance, and as I stood on the balcony I felt a distinct
pulling
sensation, as if some magnetic force were trying to tug me right through the frosted-glass panelling and down to the courtyard and along the street and —
where
?