Blind Panic

by Graham Masterton

  He turned around. “He is unable to reappear in his original form, as I am. But what he has done is to possess the spirits of some of the most powerful shamans who ever lived, such as Machitehew, the Wampanaug wonderworker who first taught him how to make magic. Machitehew, in the Wampanaug language, means ‘he who has an evil heart.’

  “He has also possessed the spirits of Wodziwob, who was known to the white settlers in Oregon as Infernal John; and Loco, who was a Chiracahua chief from Warm Springs; and Chief Jump Off, whose real name was Nantan Dole Tasso; and Chief Low Dog, Xunka Kuciyedano; and Nakaidoklini, a great medicine man who could bring dead warriors back to life.

  “Even though they are all long dead, these wonder-workers still inhabit the spirit world, and they can visit the world of touching flesh, just as I have. That is how Misquamacus has managed to come back.”

  “So he’s a spirit who has possessed other spirits? Borrowed their clothes, as it were, because he doesn’t have any clothes of his own?”

  Singing Rock said, “Borrowed their smoke, yes. Borrowed their dust. Borrowed their faces and their voices and their magic, too. And you can judge for yourself how powerful he still is, by the fact that he has possessed so many spirits all at once. When he was alive he could appear in many different places at the same time. In the same way, even though he has no substance of his own, he can occupy twenty or thirty different spirits and bring them back to life even though they are scattered all across the country, many hundreds of miles apart.”

  “What about Thunder Rolling in the Mountains?” asked Amelia.

  “Where did you hear that name?”

  “He was the one who blinded my sister when she and her husband and her kids were cycling up the side of Hell’s Canyon. I need to know how he did it and whether they can ever get their sight back.”

  “That was Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht, also known as Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. A wise leader and a noble warrior, but also a very powerful medicine man. In life, he never wanted to fight the white man, but in death it seems as if he has been persuaded by Misquamacus to change his mind, and to take his revenge.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “All this revenge crap. Why can’t people accept that the past is the past, and it’s over?”

  “Easy to say if you are on the winning side,” said Singing Rock sourly. “Easy to say if it was your culture that prevailed, and your entire way of life was not washed away forever, as if by some terrible storm.”

  “Okay,” I told him. “I’m sorry. But Hin-mut-thingy was definitely responsible for blinding Amelia’s sister. She and her husband and her two kids all told us that he had two figures with him.”

  “What kind of figures? Men, or ghosts, or demons?”

  “They looked like a couple of mirrors, apparently, or boxes, maybe, or puppets. Their faces were dead white, but their bodies were black or red.”

  Singing Rock was about to speak when there was a sharp, aggressive rapping at the door. It sounded like somebody knocking with a stick rather than with their knuckles. Amelia looked across at me anxiously, and I looked at Singing Rock.

  “Who is it?” I called out. Singing Rock raised his hand as if he were warning me to be cautious.

  There was no answer, but the rapping was repeated, louder this time.

  “Should I open it?” I asked.

  “No, Harry, don’t,” said Amelia. But Singing Rock said, “Whoever is standing outside, you will have to face them sometime.”

  “Maybe it’s the maid, come to put a chocolate mint on our pillows,” I suggested.

  There was another burst of rapping. I walked across to the door and called out again “Who is it?” Then, “What do you want?”

  Amelia said, “Harry, for God’s sake.” But I knew that Singing Rock was right. Whoever it was, I would have to face them sooner or later.

  I grasped the handle, took a deep breath, and then I opened the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Modoc County National Forest, northern California

  They shuffled cautiously over the loose volcanic shale, sometimes tugging at one another, sometimes bumping into one another. Thornbushes snagged their jeans and scratched their legs. Somewhere in the vast empty darkness beyond their blindfolds, a buzzard screeched, as if it already knew what was going to happen to them and couldn’t wait for them to be lying broken on the rocks, six hundred feet below them.

  Cayley couldn’t stop sobbing, Remo couldn’t stop cursing, and Charlie kept wheezing and gasping for breath.

  Only Mickey remained silent, because he was trying to remember what his parents looked like, and his house, and his younger sister. They say your whole life flashes in front of your eyes, before you die, but he had discovered that it wasn’t true. He couldn’t picture anything coherent, only flashes such as walking into the kitchen when his mother had her back turned to him, or running on the baseball diamond across the street, or kicking a bright red ball. It was as if his mind’s eye were a jerky handheld camera. His mother turned around from her baking and said, “Hi, honey,” but her face was nothing but a blur.

  “Keep walking!” called Wodziwob. “You have not reached your destiny yet!”

  Remo stopped and twisted around and shouted. “Fuck you, man, and fuck my destiny! You think we’re just going to walk off this cliff like a bunch of fucking sheep?”

  But Tudatzewunu jabbed him in the side of his hip with a spear, and Remo screamed out “Fuck!” and then “Fuck!” and staggered forward three or four paces before dropping to his knees and pulling Cayley and Charlie down with him. Mickey knelt down beside them.

  “You must keep walking!” Wodziwob ordered them. “This is the day when you start to pay my people back for what you have taken from them!”

  “We didn’t take nothing!” Remo screamed. “We didn’t take nothing! So we took a fish, okay? We’ll put it back in the river—how’s that? We’ll put it back in the river and then we’ll get back in our RV and we’ll drive off and we’ll never come back!”

  “Stand up, like a man!” Wodziwob shouted. “Stand up and walk!”

  Tudatzewunu and Tubbohwa’e jabbed them again and again, and they managed to climb back onto their feet. Cayley’s sobbing had turned into a thin, puppylike whimper, while Charlie’s whines were coming from the back of his throat. Mickey was praying—a prayer that his mother had taught him when he was little:

  I am placing my soul and my body in Thy safe keeping this night,

  O God,

  in Thy safe keeping, O Jesus Christ,

  in Thy safe keeping, O Spirit of

  perfect truth.

  The Three who would defend my cause

  by keeping me this night from harm.

  “Will you shut up?” Remo ranted at him as they stumbled forward. “Will you just shut the fuck up?”

  “I don’t want to fall!” wailed Cayley. “Please don’t let me fall!”

  Charlie said, “God, oh God. Oh God.”

  All four of them suddenly stopped. Although they were totally blind, they could sense from the wind and the sound of the river far below them that they had reached the edge of the precipice. Only a few steps in front of them was emptiness.

  “Walk on!” Wodziwob demanded. “Follow in the footsteps of Chief Si-e-ta! You will meet him soon enough!”

  “We’re not doing it, man!” Remo shouted. “This is murder! This is plain out-and-out murder!”

  But Tudatzewunu and Tubbohwa’e came forward and stabbed them again and again with their spears—in the shoulders, in their buttocks, in the backs of their thighs. The boys yelled hoarsely, while Cayley screamed.

  “Walk on!” Wodziwob ordered them. “This was always your destiny from the day you were born! Are you afraid of it?”

  Mickey could feel warm blood running down his legs, inside his jeans. He took a deep breath, and then he said, “Let’s do it!”

  “What?” said Remo.

  “Let’s do it! Let’s jump! They’re going to kill us anyhow!
Let’s show them that we’re not afraid!”

  “Are you fucking crazy?”

  But Cayley suddenly said, “Yes! Let’s jump! Let’s all go together!”

  “You’re out of your minds!” said Remo.

  “No,” said Charlie. “We can fly—I promise you.”

  Remo said, “This is going to hurt, man.”

  “No it’s not,” said Mickey. “Not if you think of the very best thing that ever happened to you. Not if you think that your life was really worth it.”

  “Walk!” roared Wodziwob. “This is no time for talking!”

  The two boxlike figures prodded them again. This time Tudatzewunu prodded Remo just behind his ear, so that the point of his spear penetrated right through the gristle.

  “Aaah! Fuck!” Remo cried out. Then, in a hysterical scream, “Yes! Let’s jump! Let’s just do it!”

  The four of them jostled themselves closer together. They shuffled a few more cautious paces forward, and now the rock began to slope down sharply, and their feet sent loose shale sliding into the void ahead of them. They could hear the shale clatter for a few seconds. Then there was silence as it dropped into empty space, followed after a lengthy pause by a distant knocking sound far below.

  “Ready?” said Mickey.

  “Ready,” said Remo. Then, “I love you guys—all of you. The Emperors of IT!”

  “Geronimo!” shouted Charlie in his thin, asthmatic voice.

  They stumbled forward until they felt the rock drop away from under them, and then they jumped into nothingness. They twisted and tumbled and turned, and the ropes that bound them together kept yanking at their wrists, so that they collided together in midair, knocking their heads and their knees together.

  They fell and they fell and Mickey thought, I can’t believe it. I’m actually going to die now. This is the end of my life. But then Charlie’s sneaker caught the side of his forehead and jolted his head back, and all four of them were brought to a sudden and devastating halt, banging into one another so hard that they were almost knocked unconscious, and then they hit the rock face.

  “Christ Almighty,” said Remo.

  They were so bruised and winded that it took them a few seconds to realize what had happened. Being blind, they couldn’t tell how far down they had fallen, but it didn’t feel as if it had been more than thirty or forty feet. All the same, Mickey felt as if he had been beaten all over with a baseball bat, and his wrists felt as if they were on fire. One of his knees was wedged between two sharp rocks, but almost all of his bodyweight was hanging by the rope that bound them together.

  He tried to grab hold of the rope, so that he could raise himself up a little and ease the burning in his wrists. As he did so he began to understand where they were.

  “Remo?” he gasped. “Charlie?”

  “Are you okay?” Remo asked him. “I think I’m okay. Charlie?”

  “I’m okay,” said Charlie. “Twisted my ankle, maybe. Hurts like hell.”

  “Cayley?”

  “What happened to us?” asked Cayley. Her voice was slurred, like someone in deep shock. “Are we dead?”

  Mickey said, “No, we’re not dead. We didn’t fall too far. We got caught by a tree.”

  “What?” said Remo.

  “I can’t be sure, but it feels like you and Charlie are on one side of it and me and Cayley are on the other. If they hadn’t roped us all together we would have been dead by now.”

  Remo was silent for a moment. The tree creaked, and a few loose stones rattled down the precipice. Below them, they could hear the Pit River as it rushed through its narrow canyon, and it sounded as if it was still a very long way down.

  “My wrists hurt,” said Cayley. “My shoulder hurts.”

  “We need to get ourselves free,” said Mickey.

  “You think?” Remo retorted. “We’re blind, man, all of us, and we’re halfway down a mountain, and we’re wrapped around a fucking tree. What exactly did you have in mind?”

  “Come on, there must be a way. If only one of us could work his hands loose.”

  “Well, I don’t know about your hands, but mine are trussed up so tight I can’t even feel them.”

  “Maybe we could rub the rope against the rocks.”

  “Dude, I can’t even move. I have Charlie hanging off the end of my rope, all half a ton of him.”

  “This is worse than us hitting the ground,” said Charlie, and went into a coughing fit. “We’re going to die of exposure up here, hanging off this tree, and it’s going to take us days.”

  “Let’s wait for sunup. Maybe Wodz-his-face will see us and put us out of our misery with a couple of well-aimed spears.”

  “Listen,” said Mickey. “We’re not dead yet. I said a prayer for God to keep us safe, and so far he has.”

  “Oh great, I knew we could rely on good old God.”

  “Are you dead?”

  “No, I’m not. Do I sound dead? But I think I’ve broken a couple of fingers.”

  “We’re going to get out of here. There has to be a way.”

  Cayley started to sob again. “My shoulder hurts. It hurts so much, Mickey. Please get us down from here. I can’t bear it.”

  “We’re going to get out of this,” Mickey insisted. “We got saved for a reason.”

  Without warning Remo started to sob, too. It was a desperate, lonely, childlike sobbing, like a small boy who has lost his mother in a supermarket. It frightened all of them more than Wodziwob could ever have done, because it meant that the brash, arrogant, confident Remo had lost all hope that they were going to survive.

  “For Christ’s sake, Remo,” said Charlie, gasping for breath.

  But Remo said, “You’re right. We’re just going to hang here until we die of exposure, or thirst, or the buzzards peck our eyes out. If we’d have hit the ground, man, at least it would’ve been over. Blam, oblivion. But not this, man. I can’t take this.”

  They hung suspended like four dead polecats tied to a fence while the tree creaked and the river splashed and the wind blew around them, and for almost twenty minutes they suffered in silence. Remo tried to bend his head sideways and bite through the rope that held them together, but he could only manage to touch it with his left cheek.

  Mickey said, “Maybe we can bounce up and down. Tear the tree out of the ground. Like, it’s halfway up a rock face, right? It can’t be rooted very deep.”

  “Oh, I see,” Remo retorted. “And then we all fall the rest of the way down to the ground and get smashed to smithereens?”

  “You said you couldn’t take it, hanging here like this.”

  “I can’t. But that still doesn’t mean that I want to die.”

  “You jumped, didn’t you, just like the rest of us?”

  “Sure, yes, but that was different. When I did that, I still thought that something might save us. Like angels, or a freak updraft. Some kind of miracle. I don’t know.”

  “A tree saved us, man. A tree. That was a miracle. Now all we have to do is work out how to untangle ourselves. This didn’t happen by accident. God saved us, and we’re going to live. I promise you.”

  “Keep your damn whining down,” said a twangy voice, very close to them.

  They listened, although they were still grunting in pain.

  Charlie panted, “Who said that? Was that you, Remo?”

  “Uh-uh. That wasn’t me, man.”

  “Mickey? Did you hear that?”

  “I don’t know. Is anybody there? Hello? Is anybody there?”

  “I said keep your damn noise down,” the voice snapped at them. “Clem, you throw me that rope, boy. Jethro, you climb across there. That’s right. And stay out of sight. Those Payoots could still be up on that rimrock.”

  Mickey said. “Who’s there?”

  “Who d’you think’s here, feller? Thirty-ninth Mounted Infantry.”

  “We can’t see you,” Charlie told him. “These Indians struck us blind.”

  “Those no-good sonsabitches. You
just hang on there, feller, and we’ll get you off of that tree. But stay real quiet. Those Pay-oots, they can hear a beaver breakin’ wind five miles off.”

  Dangling in agony from their tree, they heard the scraping of boots on the rock face and the clatter of metal implements. The next thing they knew, they were being grasped by strong, calloused hands, and lifted upward. Mickey could feel rough serge coats and buttons, and smell whiskey and very strong body odor.

  Being blind, it was impossible for them to work out exactly what was happening, but Mickey and Cayley were heaved up the side of the tree trunk, and then rolled over the top of it to the other side, where Remo and Charlie had been hanging. The four of them staggered and collided with one another, their feet sliding on the steep and slippery slope, but their rescuers held onto them and prevented them from falling farther down the precipice.

  With great care, they were guided down a narrow scrub-choked gully. Mickey had the impression that they had been rescued by at least six or seven men, because every time he lost his footing there were two or three hands that were quick to hold on to him and keep him upright.

  When they were deep in the bushes, their bindings were cut, and they were separated. Mickey rubbed his wrists and he could feel the deep indentations that the ropes had scored in his flesh.

  “They sneak up on you, those Pay-oots? They got themselves a habit of doing that. Those Modocs, too. Come out of noplace, like ghosts.”

  “We weren’t doing anything,” said Mickey. “We were just fishing, that’s all.”

  “Fishing? That was kind of foolhardy, considering.”

  “We didn’t know that the Native Americans would take it so bad.”

  “The who?”

  “The Indians,” said Remo. “They said that we were messing up their land. They said that white men had blinded their chief and forced him to walk off the top of this rock. That’s why they made us do it, too.”