Blind Panic (28 page)

“Why would you wish to know such a thing?”

“Just tell me. You must.”

Dr. Snow turned and stared at me. His eyes gave me the creeps. They were totally
black,
as if the sockets were empty. Then he turned back to Amelia and said, “A spirit who has lost his substance can walk through to the world of touching flesh, but he can appear only in the shape of other spirits that
do
have substance. There is a way, though, in which he can take on his own shape.”

“Oh, yes? And what’s that?”

“He can summon together all of the spirits that he has possessed, and they can climb together into a Thunder Giant. It will
look
like the spirit who has no substance, but it will stand as tall as many trees, and it will possess all the strength of every spirit that the spirit who has no substance has brought together, and it will crush everything that stands in its path.”

Amelia was frowning. “The Thunder Giant…that’s only a story, surely?”

“Is that what you think? The Thunder Giants walked the earth many times, in the days before the white people came, when the spirits of one tribe were warring against the spirits of another. So much blood was shed that the rivers ran red for days on end, and it was agreed by the wise men of all tribes that it should never be allowed to rise again.”

“Is there any way to destroy it? Any way to bring it down?”

Dr. Snow was silent for a moment. Then he said, “An offering will appease it.”

“What kind of an offering?”

“An orphan who has recently lost both parents. Such an
offering will bring it two spirits—the child’s father and mother, male and female, and it can use these spirits to recreate its spiritual substance. Once it has substance, it will be able to visit the world of touching flesh again, in its own shape.”

Dr. Snow paused, and then he added, “It will be obliged to accept such a sacrifice.”

“We have to give him some kid?” I demanded.

Dr. Snow didn’t hear me, or else he pretended not to.

“Hey!” Isaid. “We can’t kill some kid! It’s out of the question! Who does he thinkwe are? Incas?”

Amelia raised her hand to shush me. Then she said, “What about the Eye Killers, the sun devils? How can we stop them from blinding us?”

“I will tell you no more,” said Dr. Snow. “You slew so many of us—why should I care if we slay
you
in return?”

“You
must
tell me. You have no choice. If you don’t, I will trap your spirit inside this table forever—or as long as this table lasts. Your reflection is in it already, Nihltak, so it won’t be difficult!”

There was a very long silence. Dr. Snow’s fingers fidgeted on the tabletop as if he were trying to remember some long-forgotten piano piece. Then he said, “The sun devils—they themselves will give you everything you need to destroy them. Their weapon is your weapon.”

“What the hell does
that
mean?” I demanded. “Come on, you have to be more specific than that!”

But almost as soon as I had said it, Dr. Snow stared at me and gave me a quizzical little shake of his head.

“I’m sorry, Harry. More specific about
what?
”

“‘Their weapon is your weapon.’ That’s what you just said.”

“Did I?
Really?
Hm, I wonder what I meant by that." Then he looked around and said, “Oh, dear! How clumsy of me! I seem to have spilled my wine.”

I looked across at Amelia. “Nihltak’s gone,” she said.

“Can’t you get him back?”

“Harry—he didn’t want to tell us anything at all. If I hadn’t threatened to keep him here, trapped in this table—”

“Then why didn’t you? At least we would have found out how to fight those goddamn Eye Killers.”

“Because I couldn’t. Because I don’t know how. I was only bluffing.”

“Oh, great.”

Dr. Snow was reaching across the table to pick up his tipped-over glass. As he did so, I noticed something moving on the back of his hand. At first I thought it was only an effect of the candlelight, flickering in the draft. But then I looked closer and saw that his veins were wriggling, almost as if they were long blue worms.

“Dr. Snow,” I said, and took hold of his wrist. He, too, looked down at his hand, and his veins
had
turned into worms.

“Oh my good God!” he choked out, and even as he did so, his entire hand collapsed into a mass of writhing worms, and through his shirtsleeve and his sweater I could feel his wrist collapsing, too.

“Amelia!” I shouted. “His hand!”

Dr. Snow lifted his arm, and the worms that had replaced his hand fell onto the tabletop and lay there, curling and uncurling as if they were in agony. He jerked his arm down, and out of his sleeve poured hundreds more worms, white and glistening in the candlelight, which rolled and twisted on the carpet in a heap.

Amelia shouted out, “
Nihltak! Nihltak! Let him go!
”

But whatever she was trying to do, it was too late. Dr. Snow turned to stare at me in silent panic, and he opened his mouth as if he were going to cry for help. But as he did so, worms fell from his lips, and then his entire face became a twisted mass of worms. Within seconds, his head dropped into his shirt collar and disappeared, leaving only a few worms scattered on the front of his sweater.

Both Amelia and I stood up and backed away. I don’t know about Amelia, but I was shaking as if I had the flu. Inside his
clothes, Dr. Snow’s whole body had turned into worms, which slowly crawled down the legs of his chair, and then made their laborious way across the carpet in all directions.

“
Jesus
,” I said. “What happened to him?”

Amelia’s eyes were wide with shock. “Nihltak took his spirit back with him, to the other side. It was his way of punishing me, for making him help us. He took his spirit, and all that was left was grave worms.”

Meredith called out, “Dad? Are you all right in there? Would you like me to bring you something to eat?”

“What are we going to tell her?” I hissed.

“
Dad?
”

But at that moment there was a devastating rumble of thunder, so loud that we could feel the entire house shake. This was immediately followed by another, and another.

Amelia said, “We’ll have to explain this to Meredith later. Right now, we have something a whole lot worse to worry about. He’s here. Misquamacus. This is the moment he’s been waiting for, ever since he first reappeared.”

“But how are we going to stop him? We can’t give him some orphan, can we? Do we even
have
an orphan?”

“There’s Peter, that little guy that Jasmine brought with her.”

“And you’re going to hand him over to Misquamacus? Only over my dead body. Besides, you really think that Misquamacus is going to be satisfied with one measly baby? He wants to kill all of us, and he probably can.”

“Not if I can help it. Come on.”

Meredith opened the dining room door. “Dad?” she said. “Is everything okay?”

Amelia stepped forward, put her arm around Meredith’s shoulders, and practically forced her out of the room.

“What’s going on?” Meredith asked her. “Has something happened to my father?”

Amelia said, “Please, Meredith. You mustn’t go in there.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Just don’t go in there. Your father’s dead. Lock the door
and keep it locked. Harry and I have to go out now, urgently. You heard that thunder. But we’ll be back.”

“He’s
dead?
What’s happened? Was it his heart? Amelia—please let me past. I need to see him.”

But I stood in the doorway and I wouldn’t let her go back in. I didn’t have to say anything. I think she could tell by the expression on my face that if she insisted on seeing her father, she would have nightmares about it for the rest of her life. Not that the rest of her life would be very long, if Misquamacus had anything to do with it.

We battled our way back along the street to the main square. The wind was gusting so strongly that several times we had to stop and hold on to a picket fence, or a tree, or a lamppost, just to get our breath back. It was raining even harder, and the lightning and thunder were almost continuous.

“This Thunder Giant,” I shouted. “What the heck is that?”

“I always thought it was nothing but a legend,” Amelia shouted back. “Back in the days when many of the Plains Indians were fighting one another, some tribes were supposed to have called on the spirits of their dead wonder-workers to help them defeat their enemies.”

We crossed the litter-strewn street. We had nearly reached the main square now and we could see the Aspen Café. Its crowded interior was lit by dozens of candles, almost like a church.

Amelia shouted, “The wonder-workers would all join together in a human pyramid—you know, like acrobats in a circus. They would make themselves into one giant man, maybe seventy or eighty feet high. The stories say that it could cross the prairies faster than a horse could run, and it could tear up tepees and wikiups as if they were toys.”

“And Misquamacus is going to do that now?”

Amelia looked up at the sky. “Nihltak seemed to think so. And all of this thunder and lightning—that’s a pretty good indication. The Thunder Giants used to have so much magical
power that they were followed by thunderstorms wherever they went.”

We reached the café and tumbled in through the door, soaking wet and panting. Tyler came up to us and said, “You made it back! We were starting to think that you’d gone for good!”

Auntie Ammy was rocking baby Peter in her arms. “Did you talk to the spirits?” she said.

The red-haired girl behind the counter handed Amelia a bar towel, and she roughly rubbed her hair dry. “Yes, Auntie Ammy. We talked to the spirits. A medicine man from the Hupa tribe, one of the Indians who was massacred here by General Lawrence and his men.”

“I see grief in your eyes,” said Auntie Ammy.

“Yes,” said Amelia. “During the séance, we lost a very dear old friend.”

“Somebody
died?
” asked Ranger Edison.

I nodded. “This is very heavy-duty magic, Jim. Life-and-death stuff.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that. Did you find out how to stop this Misquamacus?”

“I don’t know. We’re really not sure. There’s supposed to be one option: give him an orphan as a sacrifice. Not that we would. But at least we have a better idea of what we’re up against.”

Outside the café windows, the main square was lit up by a sheet of lightning so dazzling that it left a green afterimage in our eyes. But it didn’t only illuminate the buildings, the trees, and the parked cars. It illuminated a long straggling line of figures, more than a hundred of them, walking steadily toward us. They were still too far away to see them clearly, but most of them appeared to be wearing hats or headdresses of some kind. Some of them were dressed in coats and suits, but many of them had blankets draped around them.

“
It’s the wonder-workers
,” said Amelia.

Auntie Ammy handed Peter to Jasmine and stood up. She
stared into the darkness with her nostrils flared. “Bad spirits," she said. “May Changó protect us.”

More lightning flashed, and now we could see the wonder-workers much more clearly. A few of them wore wide-brimmed hats; others wore beaver-pelt caps or antlers or elaborate woven headdresses that made them look like pirates. Behind them, as the lightning flickered yet again, more figures appeared, at least another hundred, with dead white faces.

One second these figures appeared to be quite far away, on the opposite side of the square. The next they looked as if they had almost reached us. They had boxlike bodies and stiffly jointed arms and legs, and they lurched as they walked like marionettes—an extraordinary combination of marching and dancing.

“Eye Killers,” said Amelia. “If their eyes start to flash, whatever you do, don’t look at them.”

The crowd of people in the café started to back away from the windows. Most of them stayed apprehensively silent, but two or three of the children started to whimper with fear, and one woman shouted out, “Do something! Somebody
do
something! Doesn’t anybody have a gun?”

Amelia turned around and said, “Guns won’t help! These things are Native American spirits! They’re all dead already!”

“What are you talking about, lady?” said the woman’s husband. “They’re not dead! Look at them! They’re all walking toward us, and it don’t look like they’re going to stop, either!”

But Auntie Ammy raised her hand and said, “It is true. The ones who look like humans—they are spirits who have been brought here from the other side. The ones who look like coffins are demons. They have come here to take away our eyes, and to make us their slaves, or to kill us if we try to resist them.

“My ancestors were in West Africa when other devils with white faces came and made us their slaves, or killed us if
we tried to resist. I know how angry these spirits feel, how vengeful. And tonight, it is
their
turn to bring fear and destruction and death to you! Tonight it is their turn to tear down your whole civilization.”

One young man said, “You’re talking crap, lady! Indian spirits? Demons? What the hell is that all about? Somebody give me a gun. I’ll show you ‘dead already’!”

Now the lightning was flashing so rapidly that the main square was lit up as brightly as if it were day. The wonder-workers had crowded in the middle of the square, with the Eye Killers surrounding them. A half dozen of them gathered close together, facing one another, with their arms on one another’s shoulders. Another half dozen did the same, only twenty feet away.

“What are they up to?” asked Ranger Edison. “Having some kind of powwow or something?”

“They’re making a Thunder Giant,” said Amelia. “We’re probably the first white people who have ever seen one.”

“They’re making a
what?
”

Once the two groups of wonder-workers were firmly braced together, more wonder-workers began to climb onto their shoulders, and then more climbed onto their shoulders. With frightening speed, they formed two legs, and then a body, and then two arms. At last, five of them swarmed up the torso and entwined themselves together to give the giant figure a head. They raised their arms so that it looked as if it were wearing a headpiece made of horns.

The Thunder Giant was nearly a hundred feet tall. I could see the individual faces of each of the wonder-workers that made up its body and its head, but at the same time it had its own distinctive face, and there was no mistaking who it was. Misquamacus had returned at last. I couldn’t mistake those angular cheeks, that slab of a forehead, and that lipless slit of a mouth. Most of all, though, I recognized his eyes. They had been re-created by the faces of two wonder-workers, but somehow they were still filled with all the black fury that Misquamacus could muster.

Lightning crackled around the Thunder Giant’s horns, and it started to walk toward us. Its first steps were ponderous, but gradually it began to develop a fluid, humanlike stride. My eyes saw it but my brain couldn’t take it in. Even when I had fought with Misquamacus before, I had never been numb with fright, but I have to admit that this time I just stood there with my mouth open, watching this apparition coming nearer and nearer, and I couldn’t even work out how to run.

The Eye Killers surrounded the Thunder Giant on all sides, walking toward us with an unnerving up-and-down motion like scores of sewing-machine bobbins. Their eyes began to glitter with blue and white light, and Amelia said, “
Don’t look at them! Don’t look at them! If you don’t want to be blinded, look away!
”

But looking away from the Eye Killers and the Thunder Giant was almost impossible. Especially when Tyler suddenly shouted, “
Look! Look over there!”

He was pointing toward the right-hand corner of the square. When the lightning flashed again, I saw five people running diagonally across the square toward us, only a few yards in front of the advancing Eye Killers. For some reason they were holding hands.

“It’s my dad!” said Tyler. “It’s my dad and my mom and my sister!”

He wrenched open the café door and ran outside. I heard him screaming out, “
Mom! Dad! Maggie! It’s Tyler!
”

One of the five people stumbled, but the others pulled him to his feet and they kept on running. Tyler started to run toward them. The Eye Killers were less than fifty yards away now, and coming jerkily closer.

Tyler had almost reached his parents when the Thunder Giant took a long stride forward and bent down over the heads of the Eye Killers. With a huge hand that was made up of interlocked wonder-workers, it seized the five running people and hurled them upward, high into the windy sky. I heard them screaming as they were thrown over the tops of
the trees that surrounded the square. They landed on the roadway close to Jasmine’s truck, and lay there broken and unmoving.

Tyler dodged to one side. He was obviously trying to outmaneuver the Thunder Giant so he could run across the square and help his family. But the Thunder Giant bent down again and tried to scoop him up. Tyler double-somer-saulted across the sidewalk, and dived back in through the café door. His eyes were wild and he was gasping with shock and exertion.

“It killed them!” he panted. “It
killed
them!”

He leaned up against the counter, his head bowed. Tina came up to him and put her arm around him.

“It killed them,” he repeated. He turned around and stared at me. “It’s going to kill all of us, isn’t it?”

I looked across at Amelia. Then I looked down at Peter, in Jasmine’s arms.

“We can’t,” said Amelia.

“I know. But what about all of these people—and all the people that Misquamacus has killed already?”

I looked out the café window. The Eye Killers were standing right outside, staring in at us with those expressionless white clay faces. Their eyes weren’t flashing yet, but I knew they would. It was my guess that Misquamacus wanted to frighten us as much as he could before he blinded us. He wanted to terrify us, and taste our terror on his tongue.

“I wish I could work out what Nihltak meant by using the Eye Killer’s weapons against them,” said Amelia.

“They don’t
have
any weapons,” I told her. “Only their eyes. How do you use somebody’s eyes against them?”

For almost a minute it seemed to be a standoff. We looked out the windows and the Eye Killers looked back in at us, and behind the Eye Killers the Thunder Giant stood motionless, as tall as a tree, with lightning dancing around its head. Little Peter suddenly woke up and looked blearily out the window and started to cry.

As he did so, we heard a sharp rattling sound from outside
in the square somewhere. One of the Eye Killers staggered, and I saw that a large hole had been punched in the middle of its wooden body. Then another Eye Killer rocked backward, with a large semicircular chip blown away from its cheek. The rattling sound grew louder, more ferocious, and the Eye Killers were thrown into confusion.

“That’s rifle fire,” said Tyler. He stepped up to the window and looked across to the left-hand side of the square. “What the heck? Somebody’s
shooting
at them.”

Bullets flew into the Eye Killers like a swarm of hornets. None of the Eye Killers fell. They were demons, and you can’t kill demons with bullets. But the impact knocked them off balance, and for a few moments they were milling around as if they were drunk, clattering against one another and disjointedly waving their arms.

“There,” said Remo. “Look over there, by the trees.”

We looked. Underneath the trees, kneeling in a long ragged line, were more than seventy soldiers in slouch hats, with long-barreled rifles. Behind them was a contingent of cavalry, maybe twenty of them, their horses pacing impatiently from one end of the line to the other. The soldiers fired, reloaded, and fired again, and fragments of wood and clay flew from the Eye Killer’s bodies and faces and were scattered across the sidewalk.

“It’s the army,” I said. “But
which
army? It sure doesn’t look like the National Guard to me.”

“The same army that fought the Battle of Memory Valley the last time,” said Amelia.

“What?”

“General Lawrence’s men, from 1891. It’s just like I said. Misquamacus opened the portal so all his wonder-workers could come through. But General Lawrence and his men followed them.”

I watched with a growing feeling of unreality as the soldiers climbed to their feet. They fixed their bayonets, and then advanced toward the main square, with the cavalry trotting up close behind them. All of the Eye Killers were
still on their feet, and as the soldiers came closer they started to flicker their eyes on them, faster and faster, until it looked as if the soldiers were being photographed by scores of paparazzi. The lights were so dazzling that I had to cup my hand over my eyes.

“They’re not being blinded!” I said. “Look at them—they’re not being affected at all!”

Auntie Ammy was standing close beside me. “They walk, they fire guns, they fight, but they are long-dead,” she said. “There ain’t nothin’ that can blind a man who is long-dead.”

But as the soldiers came closer, the Thunder Giant stepped in. He walked toward them, and reached them with only five long strides. The soldiers stopped, but they held their line and fired volley after volley at the Thunder Giant until the main square was whirling with windblown smoke. Behind the riflemen, the cavalrymen had brought up a packhorse with some kind of primitive-looking machine gun strapped onto its back, and two of the cavalrymen were struggling desperately to unload it.

The Thunder Giant raised both arms upward. As he did so, lightning forked out of the clouds above him and into his fingertips, so that thick showers of sparks fell to the ground below. The soldiers were firing so furiously now that pieces of the wonder-workers’ clothing were being blown like a blizzard into the air—blanket, fur, buffalo hide. But then I heard a noise that was so loud that it was almost beyond all hearing: a clap of thunder that made the earth shake and cracked all the café windows.