Burial

by Graham Masterton

  Instantly, there was a spitting, crackling sound, and I was totally dazzled by a brilliant white light.

  It formed an incandescent, totem-like shape, but it was so bright that it was impossible to look at it directly. It kept on popping and spitting, like a Fourth of July firework crammed with magnesium, and with every second it burned it seemed to flare brighter.

  Aktunowihio made a noise that was unlike anything I had ever heard before — or ever want to hear again. It was an insect-like screeching, as if it had been torn out of a throat that was lined with bristly black hairs. The shadowy tentacles recoiled from the light, and slithered away, running back down E.C. Dude’s legs and retreating from his feet.

  As they did so, I saw murky flashes of light within Aktunowihio’s bulk. I saw things that looked like red, glowering eyes; and I saw something that looked like a humped, grotesque buffalo. For a moment, as the sun-powder flared its last flare, I saw the Shadow Buffalo more clearly; and I don’t want to say what it looked like, because I don’t want to remember what it looked like. It was everything that hides in every shadow. It was everything that makes the night terrifying.

  Misquamacus had frightened me many times; but he had never shaken me right down to the roots of my sanity, the way that the Shadow Buffalo did.

  It was black and it writhed and the only way that you could look at it was through the chinks of your fingers, so that only your eyes looked out.

  E.C. Dude circled and backed away. But then he saw one shrinking tentacle, close to his feet, and he stamped on it with his boot-heel, and caught it. He ducked right down with his ketchup bottle, and prodded the tip of the tentacle until it coiled itself around the neck of the bottle, and then probed inside.

  ‘E.C.!’ I shouted. ‘For Christ’s sake! That thing’s lethal!’

  ‘Piece of cake, man,’ E.C. called back. He held the tip of his tongue clenched between his teeth, until the shadow had almost filled up the bottle. Then, without hesitation, he capped it, and screwed it tight.

  ‘Extra-a-a-a cool!’ he whooped, in triumph. ‘Extra-a-a-a-a cool!’ And he threw up the bottle and caught it again, and did a wild fandango on the sidewalk.

  Misquamacus rose out of the gloom, his face distorted with anger. ‘What have you done? What have you done? What have you done? Your blood will be spread across the sky, from Pole to Pole.’

  But Aktunowihio, the shadow god, the terrible one, was thrashing and writhing in confusion. Unless he was whole, he was unable to survive in the world of light, the world of the living; and now he was squirming in agony, like a slug dropped onto a hotplate.

  He coiled his tentacles and thundered and screamed; but he was like a deep-sea diver whose pressure-suit has been pierced. His darkness was shrinking; his blackness imploded. In a sudden welter of shadow and tentacles and clawing human limbs, he poured into the sidewalk and disappeared, leaving behind him a shower of dust and a rockslide of concrete rubble.

  E.C. Dude stepped back to join me, still holding up the shadow-bottle. ‘Did you see it?’ he crowed. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘How did you do that?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s like tickling a trout, man. That’s all. You lift up the bottle and you say the words and the words mean, ‘there’s all eternity, in here,’ and the stupid goddamned shadow-thing can’t resist checking it out, just to make sure that all eternity isn’t in there. Gets ‘em every time, that’s what William Hood tells me. Nice guy, but foreign.’

  He looked at me, grinning. But then, just beyond me, he saw the bloody remains of Papago Joe, and his grin gradually dissolved.

  ‘I’m going to grieve later — in private — okay?’ E.C. Dude challenged me.

  I raised my eyes toward Misquamacus. The wonderworker remained hovering over the sidewalk, his expression so dark that I thought that he was in danger of exploding.

  ‘You think that you have defeated me again,’ he told me, his voice tearingly harsh. ‘You think that you have seen the end of me. But I will take your heart with me, in my hand, my friend. I will take your heart and I will bury it deep, in the darkest corner of the Great Outside.’

  He slowly sank down towards me, his robes softly rumbling in the wind. His face was like a primitive mask. The god of human sacrifice. The god of pain. I stepped back two or three paces, but he continued to float after me, his feet almost scraping the roadway but not quite.

  E.C. Dude tried to make a snatch for his sleeve, Misquamacus swung his arm out without even looking and knocked him flat onto a heap of rubble. E.C. Dude came back again, winded, but Misquamacus swung at him again, and he was hurtled into the side of a wrecked Pontiac, hitting his head. He tried to claw himself up, but sagged, and coughed, and dropped to his knees.

  Now Misquamacus reached out and pulled at my shirt, catching me. He circled his hands around my throat like a necklace made of hardened horse-hair, and pressed my Adam’s-apple until I gagged. His breath thundered into my face. His breath that reeked of death and decay; of bodies buried on stilts; and of days that would never come back.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘You are all that is worst in the white man.’

  I couldn’t speak. My throat was too tightly constricted.

  ‘You are death,’ he said.

  There are one or two moments in everybody’s life when they’re convinced that they’re just about to die. For me, this was it. My whole life didn’t flash before me. All I could think of was: I can’t breathe, for Christ’s sake.

  Misquamacus pressed my throat harder and harder. He could easily have broken it, one twist, just like that. But he wanted to enjoy me dying and after all the problems I’d given him, I don’t suppose I could blame him.

  But just as I was beginning to see scarlet flashes in front of my eyes, I felt a gentle hand take hold of my right hand, and another gentle hand take hold of my left hand, and I felt two cold metal objects pressed firmly into my palms.

  Amelia. She’d come, and she’d found me.

  Amelia. She’d brought me the forks.

  Indistinctly, I heard Misquamacus saying, ‘Before you die, I’m going to pull your heart out, little brother, so that you can see it for yourself.’

  I couldn’t think of anything smart to say. I couldn’t speak.

  But I stretched both arms out wide, and bunched up my muscles, and then I rammed both fork-handles deep into Misquamacus’ sides.

  For nearly ten seconds, I thought it hadn’t worked. He stared at me and I stared at him. But then suddenly he began to convulse, and sparks began to crackle around his face, and static-fried insects started to drop from his headdress. Blue electricity jumped and twitched out of his body, and into the forks, until the forks were smoking with built-up charge.

  He opened his mouth and let out a scream that they must have heard in hell.

  Gradually, Misquamacus disassembled himself in front of my eyes. Face, hands, body, arms, like a speeded-up movie of a jigsaw-puzzle, in reverse. In front of me, instead, stood Karen. She was white, and wide-eyed, and almost mad with shock; but then who wouldn’t be, if an ancient Indian wonder-worker had possessed them?

  I took two paces back, holding up the forks. My wrist-tendons were twitching with shock, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold them.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Martin Vaizey, inside of my head. ‘All you have to do is put them down. He can’t escape now, You’ve trapped him for ever.’

  Gingerly, I laid both forks on the sidewalk, and stood watching them as they crackled and smoked. Karen came up to me and clung on tight, and then Amelia came up, too, with E.C. Dude limping beside her.

  ‘Amelia,’ I said, swaying with exhaustion; my throat still sore.

  ‘Harry,’ she replied.

  ‘I owe you, Amelia. I owe you for ever.’

  Amelia shook her head. ‘I don’t want anything from you, Harry. I never really did.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked her.

  She smiled wanly. ‘I’m going to take this
friend of yours home, and bathe his wounds. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Stand and think.’

  At that moment, however, E.C. Dude said, ‘Look?

  I didn’t know what he meant at first. But then he said again, ‘Look,’ and I turned around.

  Over Papago Joe’s torn-apart body stood Singing Rock. His image was pale and unsteady, but I could see that he had one hand lifted in triumph; or maybe it was simply farewell.

  Behind him, though, arranged in grey and orderly ranks, stood scores of young men. They wore faded uniforms and gloves and boots. Their faces were as white as history.

  While we stood and watched, they recited their names. A roll-call of honour; a roll-call of names that had at last been avenged, and laid to rest. Their voices were scarcely audible above the fluffing of the wind and the crackling of burning buildings; but I knew who they were. The five companies of the 7th Cavalry who had been killed at the Little Big Horn by Aktunowihio, and by Misquamacus who had raised him.

  We stood and watched and I’m not ashamed to say that I had tears in my eyes.

  ‘Corporal Henry Dallans … Corporal A. G.K King … Lieutenant-Colonel W.W. Cook … Blacksmith P. Manning … Acting Assistant Surgeon J.M. DeWolf … Private F. Gardiner … Private F. Hammon … Private F. Kline … Arthur Reed, civilian … Chas. Reynolds, civilian … Mark Kellogg, civilian …’

  Two hundred and sixty-one names, recited in the night. And one by one, as they spoke their names, the men faded into the darkness. Soon there was only one man left visible, and he spoke the last name of all, ‘Major-General George A. Custer.’

  I wiped my eyes, and when I looked again, Singing Rock had vanished, too; and there was nothing to be seen but the faintest flicker of light. I heard distant sirens in the night sky. I felt strangely detached from myself, as if I were someplace else. Dead, perhaps. I don’t know.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Karen. ‘Why don’t we go back to my place and see if it’s still standing?’

  I looked around and found a red insulated rubber glove, property of ConEd, lying in the gutter. I picked it up and came back to the sidewalk with it, with the intention of dropping the forks into it, and taking them home. Someplace where I could keep a close and constant eye on them.

  As I leaned forward to pick them up, however, there was a blitzing crackle of discharge, and six dazzling fingers of electricity jumped from the tines of the forks, and touched the steel window-frames on the side of the Empire State.

  I said, ‘Shit?’ and jumped forward, but I was seconds too late. The electrical sparks ran up the sides of the building, six of them running in parallel up the decorative strips of chrome-nickel steel. They vanished for a moment when they reached the fifth-storey setback, but then they reappeared again, and I saw them sparkling up the tower to the eighty-sixth-floor observatory, until they were nothing but the faintest of twinkles.

  There was a moment’s hesitation, and then an ear-splitting crack of lightning from the mast on top of the Empire State. This time, however, the lightning jagged away from the building, and into the sky; and all we were left with was the half-ruined city, and the faint smell of burning, and the first pricklings of drizzle.

  Oh, and each other, of course.

  Twenty-one

  Well — as you know, the experts are still blaming geological plate-shifting and cyclonic weather-conditions for what happened; and it’s probably better that they do. If everybody believed in Indian spirits and shadow-demons and the black infinite lake that lies beneath our feet, I guess the whole country would be chaos. Even more chaotic than it is already.

  Better to be pragmatic. Better to bury the dead and clear up the rubble and build new buildings, in the good old pioneer tradition.

  America, after all, belongs to us now, and not to the shadow-demons.

  It’s seven months now since all of this happened, and I think I’ve gotten most of it straight in my mind … although I still ask myself questions like, what happened to little Samuel? And what happened to David, my younger brother? I’d like to believe that, somewhere in Heaven, or whatever you want to call it, they got together, and made friends.

  I wonder what happened to Trixie, in Chicago. I wonder if Mama Jones is still alive. I tried to call but she never answered.

  I had a postcard six or seven weeks ago from Wanda, in Denver. There was a picture of Minnie Mouse on it. Wanda lives with her uncle and aunt now, and so does Joey. A demolition crew found Joey asleep in a wrecked car, two miles outside of Pritchard, hungry and dehydrated, but safe.

  Amelia still teaches. I call her now and again, and we talk for a while, but as time goes by we have less and less to say to each other. I like Amelia. I probably love Amelia. But I’m no good for her. We both know that.

  E.C. Dude went back to Apache Junction. Cybille came and took all her panties back and went to live with Gary instead. Now he and Linda and Stanley live together in that dented Airstream trailer and sell second-hand Jeeps.

  I still tell fortunes. Come on up one day and I’ll peer at your tea-leaves. I’ve been known to be pretty accurate, now and again. I told Mrs John F. Lavender to ‘Beware of the ground sinking from within,’ and what happened? On All Shadows’ Day, the ground had opened up, right underneath her chauffeur-driven Mercedes, and that was the last that anybody saw of her.

  Fifty-one thousand died in Manhattan. Seventy-three thousand died in Chicago. Nine thousand died in Las Vegas; six-and-a-half thousand in Phoenix. Altogether, countrywide, more than two million. Talk about an eye for an eye.

  On my bookshelf in my consulting-room I still keep the Heinz ketchup-bottle which E.C. Dude used to catch Aktunowihio’s smoky tentacle. Occasionally, I peer inside it, but it’s as dark as bonfire smoke inside; as dark as the Great Outside. The only thing I don’t keep on that shelf any more is books. I found that — after they’d been standing next to the shadow-bottle for a week or so, the print would fade, and after a month the pages would be totally blank. Karen thinks it’s sinister. I think it shows that I’ve still got Aktunowihio where I want him.

  As for Karen — Karen’s very pretty, and Karen’s fine. We’ve been living together since it happened, and we manage to rub along pretty well, most of the time anyway. We’ve actually been talking about the m-word, you know, marriage.

  Karen’s a little iffy about it, but I think we ought to — and as soon as possible, too, before the baby’s born.

  ‘When I was a kid, I’d go and visit the reservation in the summertime, and I had these cousins whose senses were finely tuned, senses that we don’t use: they could smell in the air that it was going to rain later on that day, they could feel the ground and tell things.

  ‘And whereas in the outside world people would talk about God and the devil, these Indians said, we have no concept of the devil — what is it, a man in a red suit running around? We have no devil — the devil came over in a boat with Columbus!’

  Robbie Robertson

  A Note on the Author

  Graham Masterton (born 1946, Edinburgh) is a British horror author. Originally editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, Graham Masterton’s first novel The Manitou was published in 1976 and adapted for the film in 1978.

  Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar award by the Mystery Writers of America for Charnel House and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for Mirror. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel Family Portrait, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

  Masterton’s novels often contain visceral sex and horror. In addition to his novels, Masterton has written a number of sex instruction books, including How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed and Wild Sex for New Lovers.

  Discover books by Graham Mastertonpublished by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/GrahamMasterton

  Burial

  Corroboree

  Feelings of F
ear

  Holy Terror

  House of Bones

  Lady of Fortune

  The Hell Candidate

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, LondonWC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain1992, William Heinemann

  Copyright © 1992 GRAHAM MASTERTON

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  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  eISBN:9781448210138

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