Burial

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Michael, I have to eliminate all of the natural possibilities before I even start thinking about the supernatural possibilities. It’s far more likely that what happened here was caused by some kind of scientific glitch — you know, a high-voltage electrical disturbance maybe, or a localized earth tremblor, or a lightning-strike.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me that Naomi was struck by lightning?’

  ‘I have to consider it,’ I insisted. ‘She shows some of the symptoms of electrocution, right? Shock, disorientation? And all of the furniture was moved, right? They had a case like that in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about 1977. A boy was struck by lightning and all of the living-room furniture was blown into the yard. They found the couch in the next street, with the boy’s Green Lantern comic still on it, open at the exact same page he’d been reading when he was struck.’

  ‘Harry, this wasn’t lightning,’ Michael assured me, with exaggerated patience.

  ‘Well, no, I don’t really think it was.’

  ‘It wasn’t an earthquake, either.’

  ‘No,’ I conceded. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘So if it wasn’t lightning, or an earthquake, and nobody broke in, it must have been supernatural, whether any of us want to believe in the supernatural or not.’

  ‘There could be some element of the paranormal involved, yes.’

  ‘What do you mean, “some element”? Look at my wife! Look at this furniture! I’ll tell you what — try to move one of those chairs back to the middle of the room!’

  ‘Michael, your wife is suffering severe psychological trauma. I can’t deal with that. She needs heavyweight professional help.’

  Michael turned sharply to Karen, and then back to me, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Karen gave me the impression that you were the heavyweight professional help.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Michael,’ I told him. ‘I’m a clairvoyant. I tell people’s fortunes. I deal with things that look as they might be but probably aren’t. I deal with Uncle Fred who wants to get in touch with Auntie Eugenie from beyond the Cypress Hills cemetery, and tell her where he left the spare lightbulbs for the icebox. This thing — this thing that’s wrong with your wife … I can’t deal with this. This is a medical problem.’

  ‘And what about the furniture?’ Michael demanded. ‘You think the furniture is a medical problem, too? Try moving it, then you’ll see how “medical” it is!’

  Reluctantly, I went across to the tangle of furniture and took hold of one of the chairs. It felt as if it were caught on one of the other chairs, and I had to tug it hard to get it free. It was only then that I realized it hadn’t been caught at all. It was being drawn toward the wall as strongly as if it were magnetized.

  I looked around at Michael in bewilderment.

  ‘Take it into the centre of the room,’ he told me. ‘Go on. Then put it down.’

  With considerable difficulty, I carried the chair to the centre of the room, underneath the chandelier, and set it on the floor.

  ‘Now let it go,’ said Michael.

  I lifted my hands. Immediately, the chair tumbled noisily back to the opposite side of the room. No strings, no hidden mechanisms. It literally fell sideways, and clattered back into place with all the other furniture.

  I stood and stared at it and didn’t know what to do. I went back to get it, but Michael said, ‘It’ll do that every time.’

  ‘Well,’ I agreed, hunkering down, and inspecting the chair closely, ‘that’s some problem.’

  ‘And it sure isn’t a medical problem, is it?’

  ‘No, I have to agree with you. It isn’t a medical problem. There’s definitely some element of the paranormal involved here. Right now, I’m not too sure what it is; or what the extent of it is.’

  ‘But you can deal with it?’ Michael insisted. ‘Five minutes ago you guaranteed you could deal with it. “All it takes is good psychic management,” that’s what you said.’

  ‘Exactly, exactly! But you can’t exercise good psychic management until you know what kind of psychic phenomenon you’re supposed to be managing.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I admitted. ‘As I said … we could be talking psychokinesis here. Or it might be a poltergeist On the other hand, it might be neither of those things. It might be transmutation. Or levitation, even. Kind of sideways levitation.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘I see,’ he said, in obvious disappointment. Even Karen looked uncomfortable. I suddenly felt shabby and unconvincing, and about as professional as a door-to-door soap salesman. All the same, I turned back to Naomi and said, ‘Naomi … listen. I need you to tell me what happened.’

  She stared at me, her head nodding and nodding as if she had Parkinson’s Disease, saying nothing.

  ‘Was there anybody here? Did you see anybody moving the furniture?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nobody … here. Only … shadows.’

  ‘What shadows?’

  Fearfully, she edged her eyes towards the wall. ‘Shadows … on … the … wall … it … bit him …’

  ‘It bit him? What bit him?’

  There was a very long silence. Naomi sat staring at the wall, breathing deeply and harshly. Then, without warning, she did something that — for some reason — utterly chilled me. She covered her face with her hands so that only her eyes looked out; and looked slowly and threateningly from right to left, and back again.

  ‘It … bit … him …’ she repeated, and made her fingers writhe and wriggle like a nest of white snakes. ‘It … bit … him …’

  Then she raised both writhing hands so that they rested on top of her shock-white hair, like horns or antlers, or a Gorgon’s snakes.

  As unexpectedly as she had started this performance, she lowered her hands and resumed her grip on the seat of her chair, staring at me as if she expected me to understand exactly what she had been doing.

  ‘Has she ever done that before?’ I asked Michael.

  ‘No, never. Not to anybody.’

  ‘Has she said “it bit him” to anybody else?’

  ‘Not unless she said it to Dr Stein when I was out of the room.’

  I stood frowning, thinking. Shadows on the wall. Naomi had seen shadows on the wall. At the moment, there were very few shadows on the wall, because all of the light came from the dim chandelier suspended from the ceiling. The main shadows were mine and Naomi’s, in small misshapen pools around our feet. So how had Naomi seen shadows on the wall?

  ‘Michael … could you bring me a desk-lamp, something like that?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, and went back through to the living room.

  Karen stood in the doorway, her arms cradled, her face pale. ‘I’m sorry, Harry. I didn’t realize how difficult this was going to be.’

  I grunted. ‘Difficult? This isn’t difficult. This is so far out it’s meeting itself coming the other way.’ I wasn’t angry with her. I just felt inadequate, and seriously embarrassed.

  Michael returned with a small red enamel desk-lamp and I set it down on the floor and plugged it in. As I stood up again, however, it slid sharply across the room, unplugging itself as it did so, and clattered up against the opposite wall, next to the dining-table.

  ‘“A slight element of the paranormal,”’ Michael quoted me.

  ‘All right, no problem,’ I retaliated. ‘I deal with this kind of stuff every day of the week.’ In actual fact I didn’t really deal with this kind of stuff every day of the week. I had never dealt with anything like this before, ever. But I wasn’t going to let Michael’s scepticism get the better of me. I could understand the man’s bitterness; I could understand his sense of frustration; but the fact is that there isn’t anybody trained to cope with the supernatural, there aren’t any Duc de Richelieus or Harvard professors of Occult Goings-On, no matter what they tell you in Dennis Wheatley novels and Stephen Spielberg movies. So I was just as qualified as the next guy. Or just as unqualified. It depends how charitable you want to be.

  I cross
ed the room and picked up the lamp. I had to pull at it with almost my entire strength in order to carry it back across to the far side of the room.

  ‘Michael, I’m going to plug this in again. Do you want to hold it, please, to stop it from sliding away?’

  Michael came into the room and knelt down beside the desk-lamp, holding it by the neck like a live rooster — and, believe me, if he had let it go, it would have rattled away from him just as fast. He switched it on, so that it illuminated the opposite wall. I stood in front of it and did a few of my shadow-tricks. A rabbit. A dove, with flapping wings. A turtle.

  ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ Michael wanted to know.

  ‘Shush. I want to attract Naomi’s attention, but I don’t want to upset her. Well, not yet, anyway.’

  Naomi was watching my shadow-pictures out of the corner of her eye. She flinched slightly when I made them move, but she didn’t look away.

  ‘Now, Naomi,’ I asked her. ‘Is this the kind of shadow you saw on the wall?’

  She shook her head. But still she didn’t look away.

  I did a dog, and a giraffe, and Oliver Hardy. That was about the sum total of my repertoire. No wonder the kids always used to boo me when I tried to entertain at children’s parties. But then I tried to imitate Naomi. I covered my face with my hands, so that only my eyes peered out. Then I slowly wriggled my fingers.

  Naomi was staring at the wall with widened eyes. I kept on wriggling my fingers, and I gradually lifted my hands higher and higher, the same way that Naomi had done, until they crowned my head like antlers.

  Naomi’s scream was so high-pitched that I couldn’t hear it at first. It was far beyond the normal register of human perception, like a dog-whistle. But I was aware of it, I was aware of her panic, and I turned toward the wall to see what it was that had terrified her so much.

  I saw my own shadow. A hunched, heavy-headed creature like a goat standing on its hind legs, with a crown of writhing snakes. If such a creature had been standing right in front of me in the flesh, you wouldn’t have seen me for Reebok smoke. But I dropped my hands, just as Naomi’s scream dropped from inaudible to ear-splitting, and Michael let go of the desk-lamp, and so the creature instantaneously turned itself back into me, and then (as the desk-lamp tugged itself loose and clattered across the floor) it vanished.

  Michael wrapped his arms around Naomi as she screamed and screamed and wouldn’t stop. She rocked her chair violently from side to side, and drummed her feet on the floor. Her eyes rolled up again, and she began to froth and spit as if she were having an epileptic fit.

  ‘What the fuck have you done!’ Michael yelled at me.

  Naomi screamed and thrashed and there was nothing that any of us could do to calm her down.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ I told Michael. ‘I’m really sorry! I didn’t realize!’

  ‘Forget it!’ he shouted back at me. ‘Just get out of here! You Goddamned sham!’

  ‘Hey, who are you calling a sham?’ I retorted; but Karen caught hold of my arm and said, ‘I’m sorry, Harry. It’s better if we go. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Just get the hell out!’ Michael screamed. I didn’t know who was making the most noise: him or Naomi.

  But as I retreated, an odd thing happened. Another shadow flickered across the wall, even though there was no desk-lamp to cast it. It was so brief, so insubstantial, that I wasn’t at all sure that I had really seen it But it bore a noticeable resemblance to the creature that I had created with my hunched back and my wriggling fingers.

  As it passed across the wall, Naomi abruptly stopped screaming, and turned her head this way and that, as if she could sense that it was there.

  ‘Naomi?’ said Michael. His eyes were filled with tears and he was holding her very tight. ‘Naomi, are you okay?’

  Naomi’s pupils rolled back into view. She stared at Michael, face-to-face, expressionless, as if she had never seen him in her life before. Then she turned and stared at me.

  ‘Thank God,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’ said Michael. ‘What? Naomi — what?

  She ignored him. ‘You know, don’t you?’ she asked me, so softly that I could scarcely hear her. ‘You know what it is.’ She lifted her hands to her face in the way that she had before, so that only her eyes looked out.

  Michael said, ‘Naomi, Harry has to leave. I really don’t think —’

  ‘No!’ she interrupted him. ‘Harry mustn’t leave. He’s the only one who knows.’

  ‘Naomi —’

  ‘No! He’s the only one who knows!’

  Her speech was still slurry and mechanical, like the speech of somebody who has suffered a mild stroke, but it was much more emphatic than it had been before, much more demanding.

  There was a silence that was almost embarrassingly long, while Naomi continued to stare at me as if I was the Lone Ranger and a Chippendales dancer and John the Baptist all rolled into one.

  ‘What?’ Michael wanted to know. ‘What is it? If Harry knows what it is, then don’t you think I’m entitled to know, too?’

  ‘He knows what it is,’ Naomi repeated. But then she turned to Michael and pressed her forehead gently against his cheek, a clear demonstration of love and affection. ‘It would be much better for you, Michael … if you never knew. I don’t want to lose you, Michael … not now. Not ever.’

  Karen whispered, ‘Harry, do you really know?’

  I was going to admit that I didn’t have the faintest idea, but Michael had heard her, and gave me one of his narrow looks. ‘For sure,’ I said. ‘I had my suspicions, right from the start.’

  Michael took us back to the living room. He was tetchy, unsettled. But Naomi had told him that I wasn’t to leave, so what could he do?

  ‘So, are you going to tell me what this is?’ he asked me, taking off his glasses. His eyes were bulgy and threatening.

  I gave him the insincerest of smiles. ‘I’m sorry. You heard what your wife said. She’d prefer it if you were kept in the dark. I mean, it’d be safer, on the whole. Safer for you. Safer for all of us. There’s more to the paranormal than meets the eye.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me this is dangerous? How dangerous?’

  ‘Well, not so much dangerous?’ I extemporized. ‘More like — unstable.’

  ‘Let me show you something, wise guy,’ said Michael. He went across to the bureau and picked up a framed photograph. He brought it back and stuck it under my nose. It showed a pretty brunette standing in a New York street, holding a splashy bunch of daffodils. She wore a blue spring coat and a long white scarf and she looked happy.

  ‘Who do you think that is?’ he asked me, and his voice was harsh.

  ‘Naomi, I guess, otherwise you wouldn’t be showing it to me.’

  ‘That’s right, Naomi. So when do you think this was taken?’

  I glanced through the dining room door at the white-haired woman clinging to her chair.

  ‘Nineteen-eighty-five?’ I hazarded. ‘Nineteen-eighty-six?’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Michael. ‘You’re absolutely wrong. I took this photograph myself, on Delancey Street, April this year.’

  I studied the photograph hard. I gave a long, dry swallow. My larynx felt like the bowl of General MacArthur’s second-best corncob pipe. Whatever this shadowy creature was that I was supposed to know about, it had done appalling things to Naomi Greenberg, and I didn’t particularly relish the prospect of it doing the same things to me. I didn’t think that white hair would suit me, to tell you the truth. I passed the photograph to Karen, but she had seen it before, and all she did was pass it back to Michael. I didn’t particularly appreciate the small, sweet smile of confidence she was giving me. Karen, I thought, I fought something supernatural for you; or what we all believed was supernatural; but once was enough; in fact, twice was enough, because I had to fight that same grisly manifestation twice. But never again. Never. Not something like this. This isn’t crystal balls or tea-leaves or fortune-telling cards. This
is death, and things that make your hair turn white; and, Karen, I don’t want to have anything to do with death, and things that make your hair turn white.

  Not now, not ever.

  Phoenix

  E.C. Dude lay back on the orange-upholstered couch in the air-conditioned Airstream trailer listening to Roxy Music’s original 1971 album Roxy Music. He wore Reynolds Engineering sunglasses, a faded black T-shirt with an Indian Head Diesel motif, second hand oil-rig boots, heavily oil-stained, and his girlfriend’s white lacy panties.

  His sun-faded jeans were hung over the back of his office chair, which was one of those rusted revolving office chairs with brown vinyl upholstery and half of the sponge-rubber seat dug out of it by all the bored people who had sat on it over the years. E.C. Dude was quintessentially thin, and very white-skinned considering that he had lived in Arizona all his life. His hair was curly and glossy, mahogany-coloured and very long.

  His face was thin and he had the looks of a corrupt saint, like a (pre-booze) Jim Morrison painted by Giotto. His chin was prickled with soft black stubble. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he sang along to Do The Strand. His legs were as white as his face, with bony knees — legs that had never ventured into the Arizona sun without the protection of Levi sun-block.

  Outside the trailer, a collection of thirty-seven used cars baked in the ninety-one degree heat. They were mostly Buicks and Oldsmobiles, around nine or ten years old, and there was a high proportion of pickups. A large hand-painted sign said PAPAGO JOE BARGAIN USED AUTOS, Nothing Over $3300. On each side of the sign a buffalo skull had been mounted, and vinyl fringes had been tacked all around it to give the impression of buckskin.

  Papago Joe himself was making a court appearance today in Phoenix, trying to win custody of his sixteen-year-old daughter Susan White Feather. That was why E.C. Dude had been left in charge of the lot, with instructions not to sell anything until Papago Joe got back.

  E.C. Dude was not seriously worried about that. Out here on Highway 60 between Apache and Florence Junctions, in sight of the wrinkled prehistoric skin of the Superstition Mountain, the passing trade in bargain Oldsmobiles was intermittent, to say the least. They had once gone three weeks without moving a single automobile. Papago Joe made most of his money by doing favours for men who wanted favours done; Indians, mostly, with grim leathery faces and shiny Cadillacs and mirror sunglasses. E.C. Dude never asked what. Tobacco and alcohol and a deteriorating ozone layer were quite enough of a health hazard, as far as he was concerned, without the added risk of annoying Indians with grim leathery faces and shiny Cadillacs.