Burial

by Graham Masterton

  All that kept me going was Papago Joe’s obvious determination and the sounds outside the trailer of breaking glass and screeching metal and — worse, the faint sounds of screaming. They were the sounds of a world that was gradually being torn apart, like a sackful of toys and live rabbits.

  I was just about to say to E.C. Dude, ‘How about a Coke? I’m parched,’ when the inside of the trailer went totally black. My first thought was: power-cut, but then I remembered that the power was out anyway, and that we had been sitting in candlelight. I said, ‘Joe? What’s happened?’ and my voice echoed in my ears, with a high metallic singing noise, and then I thought: I’m dead. That’s it. I’ve snorted that powder and that powder was poison and I’m dead.

  ‘Joe!’ I shouted out. I began to panic. ‘Joe, what’s happened? Where the hell are you? Joe!’

  I flailed my arms round and struck the side of the trailer. Then I felt somebody seize my hand.

  ‘Joe?’ I asked, anxiously. ‘Is that you, Joe?’

  ‘Relax,’ I heard him saying, close to my right ear. ‘Everything’s fine, everything’s going to be fine. It takes a while for your eyes to become accustomed to the darkness.’

  ‘I thought I was dead there, for a moment,’ I told him, my voice shaking.

  ‘To all intents and purposes, you were. I mean, you are.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is it. This is hallucinatory death. Your conscious brain believes that you’re dead. You’re functioning now on the very lowest levels of your psyche.’

  I swallowed. I didn’t know what to think. I was fascinated, impressed, but mostly frightened. I had been close to death’s door a couple of times, in my run-ins with Misquamacus, but I had never actually stuck my head round it.

  Very gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the condition of ‘death.’ The interior of the trailer was almost swallowed up in shadows. Even the candle-flames were flickering so dimly that I could barely make them out. I could distinguish E.C. Dude sitting back on the couch, his ankles crossed, but he appeared more as a fitful image of pale green flame than he did as a real person. Linda looked like a flame, too, but steadier, and burning more warmly. Stanley’s flame was the brightest: bright and white.

  I turned towards Papago Joe. His outline was blurred and mauvish, a shadow laid on top of shadows; but then I lifted my hand and saw that mine was, too.

  Technically, you’re blind,’ explained Papago Joe. ‘What you can see is not our bodies but our spirits. You can only see this trailer because it is invested with memories and associations, and the labour of the men who made it.’

  ‘Its manitou,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. Everything has a manitou; even an automobile, even a chair. Of course the strongest manitous are those of men and the natural world around us. But even so … everything should be treated with equal respect We reap what we sow.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked him.

  ‘We take our leave of these friends of ours and enter the Great Outside.’

  He stood up and gestured to me to stand up, too. I saw E.C. Dude moving, and I thought I could vaguely hear his voice, but I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Can he see us?’ I asked Papago Joe.

  ‘Of course, to him we look normal, our normal selves, except that our eyes are turned up into our heads so that he can see only the whites. You see how little Stanley is backing away from us. We look a little scarey, that’s why.’

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ I said. I remembered Naomi Greenberg with her eyes rolled up, and Karen too, and that had been enough to give me nightmares for ever.

  Papago Joe reached forward and opened the trailer door and led the way down the steps. Every move I made seemed muffled and slow, like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. It was just as black outside as it had been inside — black like a photographic negative. I could see newspapers and trash slowly swirling in the wind, and I felt the steady sting of grit on my face. Automobiles were being dragged across the highway and into Papago Joe’s parking-lot. But the noise they made was blurry and insulated, as if I had cotton stuffed in my ears.

  I turned and saw E.C. Dude’s flickering blue spirit waving to us, with Stanley’s bright white spirit close behind, hiding behind his legs. I waved back, and then Papago Joe and I made our way across the used-car lot toward the workshop.

  ‘Watch out for debris,’ warned Papago Joe. A sheet of aluminum siding came hurtling past us, followed by broken window-frames and roofing and scattered torrents of bricks. A Volkswagen camper rolled by, over and over, roof and wheels, until it reached the workshop and tumbled into nothing and disappeared.

  Papago Joe took hold of my sleeve. This is it,’ he said. ‘This is the gateway. We’ll have to be real careful. I mean, real careful, body and soul. Are you ready?’

  ‘I’m ready,’ I told him, with huge bravado. What else could I say? ‘I’m out of here, end of the world or not?’ Or, ‘Great Outside? Who are you trying to bullshit?’

  We rounded the corner of the workshop wall, the same wall on which E.C. Dude and Stanley had glimpsed the hunched and jumping shape of Aktunowihio, the Shadow Buffalo. The rest of the workshop had collapsed. The roof had fallen in, and most of the walls had been reduced to scatterings of broken cinderblocks. I saw all this in dim, glowing outline, with the deep, spiritual perception of the dead.

  In the centre of the workshop floor, a wide hole had opened up — a hole just like the hole in the Belford Hotel — a hole which led to nothing at all but darkness and emptiness and death. Everything around us was being dragged into it — everything white, that is. Trailers and pick-ups and sheds and motorcycles and miles and miles of fencing and telephone-wires and water-piping.

  Everything tipped into the gaping hole in a thunderous Niagara of tearing metal and protesting wood and the horrific screaming of everybody who had been caught up in it. I saw a young farmboy sliding across the parking-lot on his back, his denims half-ripped off, his right shoulder bloody-black and raw, and he was screaming at me, screaming at me, Help me! Help me! Stop me! Help me!

  I saw pale-faced children, some of them still wearing bloodied pajamas. I saw two young women who had been dragged through razor-wire; their flesh cut into diamond-patterns, like a butcher scores pork-rind. I saw a man whose thighs were both ripped open in a chaos of muscle and bone. I saw another man impaled through the chest with a length of scaffolding-pole. He kept trying to stand up, trying to wrestle that pole out of his ribcage, but with the eyes of somebody who was technically dead, I could see that his spirit was dimming, I could see that his life was flickering out.

  A huge cement truck was dragged through Papago Joe’s lot, and I saw it topple over just as it reached the edge of the hole, and crush a little girl who was trying to crawl away, crush her flat.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Joe,’ I told him. ‘I don’t think that I can take this.’

  He turned and looked at me, dark-eyed and serious. ‘You don’t have a choice, do you? Neither do I. This is our destiny. This is what we were born for. We can’t back down now.’

  ‘You want to know the truth?’ I yelled at him. ‘You really want to know the truth?’

  ‘I know the truth already,’ he replied. ‘The truth is that you’re scared to death, and so am I. So let’s get on with it, can we, before any more children get killed?’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘We have to do this, Harry. There’s no question of opting out.’

  I took a deep breath, and then I said, ‘Okay, I’m sorry. Let’s get going. I guess I’m dead already, so what does it matter?’

  As we approached the hole, we had to wade our way knee-deep through rubbish and dust and detritus: magazines, automobile tires, telephones, calendars, tinned food, bottles, cartons and cardboard boxes. Anything and everything that wasn’t native to pre-Columbian America was being dragged away, and falling into the hole in Papago Joe’s workshop with a steady, earth-trembling roar.

  I had visited Niagara only once, with my grandparen
ts, soon after David had drowned. I guess they had taken me away to help me get over his death. I had stood watching Niagara the way I watched this torrent now, fascinated, terrified. The waters which fall from this horrible precipice do foam and boil after the most hideous manner imaginable, making an outrageous noise, more terrible than that of thunder. That was what some French cleric had written, back in the seventeenth century. That was what I felt like now.

  ‘What the hell do we do?’ I shouted at Papago Joe, as we stood right on the very brink of the hole, with debris cascading against our legs.

  Papago Joe pointed downward. ‘We take our chances, I guess.’

  I looked around. I saw a signboard that could be a makeshift sledge; but it was whirled away down the hole before I could reach it. Then I saw a ten-foot length of boardwalk sliding towards me through the rubbish. I waited until it had almost collided with my knees, and then I plunged onto it, chest-first, riding it like a surfboard. I heard Papago Joe shouting, ‘Wait for me!’ but I was already being dragged towards the hole.

  Up until then the most nerve-racking stunt that I had ever performed was swinging across to the balcony at the back of the Belford Hotel. But this was heart-stopping: although it was sensational, too. I dropped straight into nothingness, into pitch-black nothingness, surrounded by the deafening rumble of cars and concrete — even chunks of tarmac — and the higher-pitched sounds of corrugatediron roofing and window-glass and people screaming in total terror.

  I fell over and over and for one unforgettable second I thought that I was going to go on falling for ever, into space, into time, into the bottomless blacklined coffin of death. In that unforgettable second I was sure that Papago Joe’s ‘death powder’ had been nothing but hearth-sweepings, nothing more than milk-powder and crushed-up paracetamol, and that I was just about to die for real. But then — instead of falling — I found that I was swinging like a trapeze-artist, swinging in a wide parabola, and that gravity was pulling me back upwards. There was a long, long moment of no sensation at all, weightlessness, blindness and deafness. Then my feet collided with black grass, and rich black prairie soil, and I was thumped on the shoulder and pummelled on the side of the head, and then I was rolling helplessly sideways down a long slope.

  I lay back on the grass and I knew that I was here. I was actually here. I was lying in the darkness of the Great Outside. But what I hadn’t anticipated was that the ground would be up and the sky would be down — that I would be clinging onto the ceiling of the world like some kind of fly. This was what Dr Snow must have meant when he described the Great Outside as a lake of shadows, a dark reflection of the real world. Just like a man reflected in a lake, I was hanging by my shoes, and below my head was the total infinity of sky and space and forever. Below me, for Christ’s sake, and I had the world’s worst case of vertigo.

  I shut my eyes tight. I gripped my fists tight. I was clinically dead and I was upside-down, and my brain was beginning to refuse the evidence of my senses. I felt closer to madness at that moment than I had ever done before — even when I had seen Martin Vaizey pull Naomi Greenberg inside-out. Even when Misquamacus had appeared in my motel room, with his chiselled face and his warpaint and his headdress of living insects. My sanity was clinging on like the last shred of tarpaper clinging to a hurricane-devastated roof. Flapping, twisting, just about ready to go sailing off into the darkness.

  ‘Papago-Joe-what-the-fuck-is-happening-Papago-Joe-where-the-fucking-hell-are-you?’ I screamed out

  It was then that I heard a thumping noise close beside me, and a sharp rustle of grass. Papago Joe collided with me, and lay beside me, and said, ‘Shit.’

  This place is upside-down,’ I told him.

  He took two or three breaths, very deep breaths. ‘I know. I hate heights. I really hate heights. I’m not just frightened, Harry, frightened is the wrong word. I’m shitless.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll get used to it,’ I said, trying to comfort him. ‘Maybe — I don’t know — maybe our perceptions will adapt. Do you know what I mean? Do you remember that experiment where they made this guy walk around with a kind of periscope in front of his face, so that he saw everything upside-down? After a couple of days his brain worked out what was wrong, and turned everything round the right way for him, so that he saw it normally.’

  With great caution, Papago Joe sat up. He looked east and then he slowly looked west. ‘There’s no doubt about it, is there?’ he said, at last. ‘There’s gravity here. But, holy mackerel, it’s pulling us up.’

  I sat up, too, and looked round. In every direction, there was sweeping prairie — undulating hills, deeply-cleft draws. Black prairie, with black grass, under black star-prickled skies. An upside-down prairie under an upside-down sky. I heard the wind rustling through the grass and I smelled burning. I smelled cooking-fires and horses and smells that I had never smelled before. I smelled history. I smelled Indian history. The same smells that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse must have smelled.

  ‘This is it,’ I said, with a sense of enormous awe — because this was the place that you’d always heard about in cowboy books and Indian movies and here it was — the Great Outside, the Happy Hunting Ground. To put it bluntly, this was heaven, and we were in it

  But there was a difference. This wasn’t the realm of puffy clouds and cherubs and twanging harps. The Indians didn’t believe in heaven — not the way that we believed in it. They believed in dark and they believed in light, they believed in Heammawihio and Aktunowihio, that was all. And they had made a bargain with Aktunowihio to drag the white man and all his inventions into the realm of darkness, so that they could have the realm of light.

  The prairie rumbled, the prairie shook. Over to the north-east, in an awesome fountain, hundreds of automobiles and houses and signboards and pieces of shattered wood were being thrown up into the air, and thunderously falling into the grass. They were being dragged into the Great Outside from the world above, and spewed out into the darkness. The wrecked, the broken, the dead, the maimed.

  I saw a gasoline truck flung into the air, and explode, in a bellowing orange fireball, and then crash burning into the grass. I saw houses burst apart, windows and doors and shingles, and children flying through the air like Raggedy Anns and Raggedy Andys.

  I managed to stand up. I knew that the sky was below me, rather than above me, but I managed to persuade myself that I couldn’t fall upward, and I didn’t. I held out my hand to Papago Joe and said, ‘We’d better get hunting … looking for Misquamacus.’

  Papago Joe nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But first we have to seek our spirit-guides.’

  I sat down again, and he opened his borrowed medicine-bundle and produced two dried-up looking sticks. He tapped them together in a slow, complicated rhythm, occasionally interspersed with a burst of faster tapping.

  ‘Hey …’ I said. ‘You’re good at that.’

  He frowned. I could hardly see his eyes in the darkness. ‘What do you mean? I’m making this up as I go along. You don’t think all medicine-men didn’t make things up as they went along?’

  ‘I guess they must have,’ I said weakly. And all these years, I’d thought that Indians had these really complex tappings and drum-messages that they totally understood. Singing Rock had told me that most Indians hadn’t been able to interpret smoke-signals. His favourite joke was that it was puff after poff except after puff-puff.

  But Papago Joe kept on tapping, and tap-tap-tapping, and at last he said, ‘We are dead men, brothers. We are newly dead. We are seeking friends and guides in the Great Outside. We are seeking people to lead us.’

  He tapped again. Tap-tap, tap-tap. ‘We are seeking friends and guides,’ he repeated. ‘We are newly dead, and need assistance.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘We are asking for the Sioux called Singing Rock and the white man called Martin Vaizey.’

  We waited for almost twenty minutes. The prairie was black and the sky was black; and if Papago Joe was feeling anything at al
l like me, he was dizzy and detached and completely out of touch with any kind of reality. I think I could have vomited, at that point. Just hanging on to an upside-down world made me feel nauseous. I mean, I seemed to sway every time I leaned sideways.

  But at last I saw a quick dancing of light across the prairie; a quick flicker of spiritual flame; and then somebody was standing right behind Papago Joe with a faint benevolent smile on his face and it was Singing Rock.

  Right then, I think I could have wept. I trusted Papago Joe — well, I mostly trusted Papago Joe. But Singing Rock had tussled with Misquamacus right from the very beginning, and defeated him, and even though he and I had never been close, not really close, we honoured and respected each other, and we would have died for each other, which he had eventually done for me.

  I could still see his beheaded face, flying away from me. You don’t even want to imagine what his expression was — his brain still functioning, his eyes still seeing.

  ‘Hallo, Harry,’ said Singing Rock.

  I raised my hand in greeting.

  ‘Playing dead now? Singing Rock remarked. ‘My uncle used to take the death-powder … said it made him strong. Said he saw the buffalo-country, the way it was before the white men came. Well … you know and I know … he was only partly telling the truth.’

  I said, ‘We have to find Misquamacus. You can see what he’s doing. We have to stop him.’

  Singing Rock turned around and looked at the fountain of falling cars. ‘I warned you, Harry. I warned you. He wants everything back. The mountains, the rivers, the prairies. He wants it all back, the way it was before. He wants you gone.’

  I looked at Papago Joe, but all that Papago Joe could do was to shrug. ‘And what do you think?’ I asked Singing Rock. ‘Do you think he should take it all back?’