“What happened to them?” said Mickey.
“They did,” I said, and pointed toward the mirrors.
But without warning, the café windows imploded, and we were blasted by a hailstorm of shattered glass. Men shouted; women screamed. The mirrors were sprayed with blood. Amelia had a deep cut across her chin, and I felt blood running down my left cheek. There was another deafening burst of thunder, and the interior of the café was lashed with wind and rain, as well as a whirl of cinders from the burning Eye Killers.
Standing in the main square, the Thunder Giant looked down at us, its horns crawling with caterpillars of static electricity.
“You have defied me again, little brother,” he said, and his voice was the combined voices of all the wonder-workers who made up his arms and his legs and his body and his head. It was like listening to a hundred people all chanting at once. “You have defied me and you have destroyed my demons. For this, I will punish you with more than darkness. I will give you everlasting agony, and I will give your loved ones and your children everlasting agony. I will do to you what you did to us—I will give you the pain that never ends, for all eternity.”
“Oh God,” said Charlie. “It’s going to be a massacre, isn’t it? He’s going to throw us all around, just like Tyler’s dad and mom.”
“No such luck,” I told him. “He’s going to do something very much worse than that.”
“Then why are we standing here, man? Let’s make a run for it!”
“There’s absolutely no point. We couldn’t run fast enough.”
Little Peter lifted both hands toward the Thunder Giant. He didn’t seem to be afraid of him at all. “A gah!” he shouted. “A mm-mm!”
Again I looked at Amelia, but both of us shook our heads. Whatever Misquamacus was threatening to do to us, however much we were all going to suffer, little Peter’s life was sacrosanct.
The Thunder Giant lifted his arms again, and again lightning leaped from the clouds and into his fingertips. But even above the spitting of the lightning and the rumbling of the thunderand the shrieking of the wind, I heard the harsh, buzz saw sound of a motorcycle engine.
I looked around. At first I couldn’t see where the sound was coming from. But I heard the motorcycle rev, and rev, and rev again, and then it appeared from the parking lot beside the café—a big black Kawasaki with Tyler sitting astride it.
He came burbling up to us and stopped.
“What are you doing?” I shouted at him. “How the hell did you get that started?”
“I was taught by the best motorcycle booster in the business!" Tyler yelled back. “He was a great stuntman, too!”
“Look—if you’re making a break for it, how about taking Amelia with you, and baby Peter?”
“I’m not making a break for it!” He pointed up to the Thunder Giant. “I’m going to stop him!”
“What?”
“You said we could stop him if we gave him an orphan!”
“What?”
“An orphan—that’s what you said! Well, I’m an orphan now!”
“I don’t understand!”
“Just watch me!”
He didn’t give me the chance to say anything else. He revved up the Kawasaki again and ripped away, circling around the main square faster and faster, as if he were riding the wall of death. In the center of the square, the Thunder Giant was slowly bringing down his arms. I put my arm around Amelia and held her tight, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to her—not even good-bye.
The Thunder Giant took a step toward us. We could feel the ground shake, but we all lifted our heads and looked back at him defiantly.
“Misquamacus!” I screamed at him. “Whatever hell you believe in, you bastard, may you rot in it forever!”
At that moment Tyler came tearing across the main square, with the Kawasaki’s dazzling quartz headlight on high beam. He was standing up in the saddle, and he was shouting something, although I couldn’t hear what it was. He roared straight toward the Thunder Giant, and he must have been touching seventy by the time he reached him. Then he suddenly braked, and the motorcycle’s rear wheel kicked up like a bucking bronco. Tyler let go of the handlebars, and he flew upward, with his arms held out in front of him, like some superhero.
“Take me!” I heard him shouting. “Take me!”
For a split second I thought that he was going to tumble back down to the ground, and that the Thunder Giant would toss him bodily across the square like his parents and his sister. But Tyler grabbed two of the wonder-workers who were linked together to make up the Thunder Giant’s torso, catching hold of their blankets and their buckskin jerkins to stop himself from falling backward, and as he hung there, he found himself a precarious foothold on the shoulders of the wonder-workers in the next tier below. All of the wonder-workers had their arms intertwined, as if dancers in Zorba the Greek, so there was nothing they could do to stop Tyler from forcing his way in between them. He disappeared in-side the Thunder Giant’s chest like a man plunging into a cave. It was the most incredible display of gymnastics I had ever seen.
There was a long pause—ten seconds, twenty. The Thunder Giant stood very still, and then he swayed slightly. He stared down at us with those eyes that were actually human faces, as if he were confused. Then very slowly he raised his arms again.
With a coarse spitting noise, all of the lightning that he had drawn down from the clouds came pouring out of his fingertips and back up into the sky. At the same time, he let out a deep, frustrated roar. A hundred voices, all roaring at once.
Asingle wonder-worker began to disengage himself from the Thunder Giant’s right shoulder and spread his arms wide. At first I thought that he was going to climb back down to the ground. But he hesitated for only a moment, and then he stepped off into the air.
“Oh my God,” said Amelia. From the Thunder Giant’s shoulder to the sidewalk, it was at least an eighty-foot drop.
Instead of falling, however, the wonder-worker rose up vertically into the low-hanging clouds and disappeared. Another wonder-worker freed himself from the Thunder Giant’s arm, and he rose upward, too. Then another, and another. We stood and watched in silence as the entire Thunder Giant disassembled itself. His head gradually broke apart, and then his shoulders, the rest of his arms, and the wonder-workers floated up into the sky as silently as balloons.
We crossed the street and looked up at the Thunder Giant in awe.
“They is all spirits,” said Auntie Ammy, shaking her head. “They is all spirits, an’ they is returnin’ to the world of the spirits, which is where they belongs.”
As the Thunder Giant’s torso started to break up, however, we heard the beginnings of a deep, soft rumbling sound. It grew louder and more vibrant as the last of the wonder-workers rose up into the clouds. Within seconds the ground beneath our feet was quaking, as if a monstrous locomotive were approaching, a hundred times larger than life, and we were almost deafened. More lightning flickered all around us, and on the other side of the main square an oak tree abruptly burst into flames. I felt drizzle in the wind, but it was warm drizzle.
“Holy shit,” said Remo, right behind me.
I looked up. At first I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. But then a crackling fork of lightning lit up the sky and in a thousandth of a second I saw where the drizzle was coming from. Where the Thunder Giant’s chest had been, a huge mass of bloody debris was suspended high above us. It was like some grisly airship, made up of a tangled mass of human and animal body parts, as well as twisted metal and saplings and pieces of fencing. Even in that thousandth of a second, I could see decapitated men and women, and cattle carcasses, and disemboweled dogs. They were all parceled together by crisscrossed lengths of barbed wire and telephone cable, and skewered with iron railings.
The warm drizzle that was sifting across the main square was blood, which was falling from this floating abattoir and drenching the grass all around us. It even began to drift across the road, until
the sidewalks were glistening red, and it spattered the windshields of the cars parked all around the main square, and slid along the gutters.
“What is that thing?” I yelled at Amelia. “Look at it—it’s beating, like somebody’s heart!”
“That’s exactly what that is!” Amelia shouted back at me. “It’s the Thunder Giant’s! His body has gone, but his heart is still here! All of the cruel deeds that Misquamacus has ever done, in all of his lifetimes, all wrapped up into one! Dead, but still living and still beating, and still pumping blood, like a real heart!”
We looked at one another in horror and disgust. All of us were soaked in blood now: our hair, our faces, our clothes. It looked rusty-colored, and it smelled rusty, too.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” I yelled, and reached out for Amelia’s hand. But then Amelia said, “Look!”
I turned around. Walking through the steady torrent of blood to ward us was Misquamacus. He was much taller than I remembered him, and he was wearing his buffalo-horn headdress, decorated with beads and feathers and birds’ skulls, all of which were dripping with blood. Around his neck hung six or seven necklaces, as well as the silver medallion that depicted the tentacles that grew from the face of the greatest of the Great Old Ones. He wore bracelets, too, and anklets, and he was carrying his silver-skull medicine stick. Apart from these ornaments, he was completely naked, although when he came closer I saw that a mummified rat dangled from his penis, its teeth embedded in his glans. His skin gleamed like polished copper.
He came within twenty feet of us, and then stopped. More lightning danced across the square, and three or four times it struck the huge, slowly beating heart which hung above our heads, obviously attracted by the barbed wire that was wrapped around it. Sparks came spraying down on top of us, so that we were all standing in a shower of blood and fireworks. There was a strong smell of charred wood in the air, as well as burned, bad meat.
Misquamacus stood there for a long time, saying nothing. Amelia tugged at my hand, trying to pull me away, but I knew that Misquamacus couldn’t hurt me, not anymore. At least I hoped that he couldn’t.
“You!” he called out, pointing his medicine stick at me. “You think that you have defeated us, little brother!” His voice was deep and echoing, as if he were shouting at me down a long tunnel.
Lightning spat and sizzled around the heart yet again, following the crisscross pattern of the barbed wire that held it all together. This time the sparks fell down on us so thickly that it was almost as if we were standing under a blowtorch. One of the wires snapped, and four or five heavy pieces of timber and fencing dropped to the ground only a few yards away from us. They were followed by two mangled bodies—a headless, armless man, and a torn-open goat’s carcass.
“Harry, come on!” Amelia insisted, and pulled at my sleeve.
“Don’t worry about it!” I shouted back at her. “He can’t touch us!”
I might have sounded confident, but I was praying that Dr. Snow had been one hundred percent sure about his Native American mythology, and that if Misquamacus had accepted Tyler’s self-sacrifice, he would have to back off and return to the Happy Hunting Ground and stop trying to wreak his revenge on us.
Misquamacus came even closer. The blood was coursing down his angular cheeks, and it made him look as if he were weeping with rage. “I will destroy you one day!” he said. “Now that I can return to the world of touching flesh, I can promise you that!”
“Oh, really?” I yelled back at him. “I’d like to see you try!" I was exhausted, and seriously pissed. “The only reason you can stand here and threaten me is because we gave you the soul of a white man, and you took it! A friend of ours, somebody we respected and cared for! Without us, you’d be nothing but a cold draft, blowing up some old Wampanaug woman’s nightgown!”
Misquamacus was breathing deeply. Above our heads, there was yet another lightning display, and this time even more debris came thumping onto the bloody grass all around us.
Misquamacus shouted, “How many times did your people make promises to my people, and how many times did they break their promises? This is my people’s land! These are my people’s mountains, and lakes, and hunting grounds! But where are my people now?”
He paused, and then he said, so quietly that I could hardly hear him, “I will say one thing to you. You think you are a false shaman. You do not believe in yourself. You think you have no power but the power of trickery. But I will say to you that you are a true wonder-worker, as I once was.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. But I wasn’t going to stay around to ask Misquamacus what he meant, because now the lightning had burned through most of the wires that held the floating heart together, and the blood was pouring down in a warm red blizzard, and all kinds of hideous remains were bouncing onto the ground. A woman with only one leg and no face at all. The forequarters of a black-and-white cow. A garden bench. A tangled-up slew of dead cats.
Misquamacus raised his voice again, and waved his medicine stick from side to side. “I make you this promise! Now that I can return to the world of touching flesh, I will return! And I will burn this land from one ocean to the other!”
Amelia screamed, “Harry! Leave him! Come on!”
Auntie Ammy and Remo and Charlie and the rest of them had already left us, and were hurrying away down the side street. But I couldn’t turn away. Not now, not again. Not after all these years. I was no goddamned hero, but I had lost too many friends and witnessed too much pain and too much death and too much goddamned destruction.
A long cast-iron fence pole had fallen onto the grass only a few feet away from me. It had a spike on the end, like a medieval spear. I sidestepped my way toward it, keeping my eyes on Misquamacus all the time.
Misquamacus began some kind of chant. I don’t know what it meant. I don’t even know what language it was in. But I guessed that it was a curse, or a promise, or maybe a bit of both. There was no way that Misquamacus was ever going to accept what the white men had done to his people, whether he was alive or dead or half dead.
He was still chanting and waving his medicine stick when I bent down and picked up that fence pole. It was much heavier than I had thought it was going to be. In fact I could hardly lift it. But I hefted it up in both hands and without any hesitation at all I swung around and ran at him. I think I shouted, “Geronimo!”
I saw Misquamacus stretch his mouth wide-open in a silent scream. He probably did scream, out loud, but I didn’t hear him. I saw his eyes, too. They were utterly black, and empty, as if there were nothing inside his head but infinite space. It’s hard to describe, but it was a hair-raisingly intimate moment. We had never come so physically close to each other before, but now here we were, like two lovers rushing into each other’s arms.
The point of the fence pole penetrated his chest with only the faintest plock! and I felt barely any resistance as I pushed it right through him. He wasn’t flesh and blood and bone, after all. He was ectoplasm, the cloudy substance of spirits: visible and audible, but as insubstantial as gauze. When I let go of the fence pole, however, and stepped away from him, he remained impaled. He gripped the fence pole with both hands, trying to tug it out of his chest, and all the time he stared at me with an expression of cold and absolute rage.
Above us, lightning struck the floating heart again—or what bloody bits and pieces were left of it—and it suddenly collapsed. A last cascade of body parts and timber and broken concrete dropped down on top of us, and I was struck on the shoulder by a severed arm. All the barbed wire unraveled, too, and fell on us. A twisted length of wire caught in my hair, but I managed to untangle myself, although I cut open the pad of my right thumb while I was doing it. I was already plastered in blood, so it didn’t make too much difference.
Misquamacus staggered around and around, wrenching the fence pole from side to side. He started to roar with frustration and pain, but I suddenly realized that he didn’t have the strength or the substance to drag it
out of himself.
“You!” he bellowed at me. “You! I curse you forever!”
But at that instant, a blinding bolt of lightning struck the point of the fence pole, which was protruding from his back. Misquamacus exploded, so violently that I was thrown almost ten feet backward. There was a deafening bang of thunder, so loud that I couldn’t even think.
A thousand sparkling fragments burst into the air above us. But this felt as if it were more than an explosion. The earth felt as if it were twisting, underneath me, and even the sky seemed to be distorted. There was an echo, and then another echo, and then I heard a high shrieking sound coming toward us. For a few seconds, we were buffeted by a screaming wind, and it was then that I saw how powerful Misquamacus had been, and how much he had nearly changed the course of history.
I felt as if time itself had collapsed, and I heard drumming and shouting and a thousand voices chanting. I saw buffalo, thousands of them. I saw fires and dust and snow and men dressed as demons. I saw the sun rise and immediately go down again. I saw the moon circling the sky. I saw what might have been if Misquamacus had been able to take us all back to the days when America belonged to his people, and the Great Old Ones still ruled the world.
There was another shattering bang, as if a huge door had been slammed shut, and then the main square was quiet again. I lay on my side, stunned. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I raised my head and saw Amelia hunkering down next to me. I couldn’t hear what she was saying at first, but she was nodding, and smiling, and then she kissed me on the forehead, even though both of us were sticky with drying blood.
I managed to sit up. There was no sign of Misquamacus, only a few remaining sparks that drifted down on us, and then winked out. The fence pole was lying on the grass, bent double like a giant bobby pin.
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