Revenge of the Manitou (25 page)

“Yes, sir.”

A little
distance away, ignored by the sergeant who was supposed to be escorting them
back to their pickup, Harry and Neil and Singing Rock watched the revelation of
what had happened to Mrs. Novato in silence.

Then Neil
turned away, and whispered, “My God.
Oh, my God.”

Harry said
softly, “How did that happen, Singing Rock?”

Singing Rock
watched another medic arrive with a stretcher, and cover Mrs. Novato’s body
with a red blanket

“They gave her
to
Sak
,” he said.
“The ancient
keeper of the gateway.
That smoky demon you saw in Mr. Saperstein’s
photographs. I suppose a human woman was one of the rewards he wanted.

He raped her,
as you probably saw. The only difference between that and any other rape was
that she would have suffered incredible mental horrors while it was happening,
and the gaseous form of
Sak
is probably three
thousand degrees below freezing.”

G
radually, the police officers and medics returned to their posts,
and the sergeant, although he was looking colorless and shaken, turned around
to usher Harry and Singing Rock and Neil back to their pickup.

“What did you
think of that, sergeant?” asked Harry. “Did you ever see anything like that
before?”

The sergeant
opened the door of the pickup for him and indicated that he should climb up.

“I’ve seen
hundreds of stiffs in this job,” he said harshly. “One more doesn’t make
no
odds.”

Singing Rock
looked at him carefully. Then he said: “I know how easy it is to become
blase
, sergeant, but let me give you one good word of
caution. Tonight, just for once, don’t be
blase
.

Look out for
unexpected attacks. Take a lot of care.”

The sergeant
wiped sweat from his forehead with his furry arm. “You talk like you know
what’s going on here,” he said.

“I do,” said
Singing Rock.

“Well, that
proves you’re nuts,” replied the sergeant. “Anybody who thinks they know how a
bus gets to shine like a dead mackerel, and how a woman gets herself frozen
solid in the middle of September, they have to be going bananas.”

Neil said
angrily, “Why the hell don’t you-”

“Neil”
interrupted Harry. Then, more quietly, “It won’t do any good.”

Neil took a
look back at the bus, still standing on the bridge with its windows frosted up.
He could hardly believe that Toby was inside there, taking part in some
unspeakable and unimaginable ritual. He could hardly believe that Toby had
summoned down the
squidlike
Sak
,
and had actually sacrificed Mrs. Novato to him. But he was here, on this gloomy
and fearful night, sitting in his pickup at Lake
Berryessa
with an Indian and a sarcastic mystic from New York, and he knew that it had to
be true.

He started the
motor, and they drove off back down the highway.

Singing Rock
fingered the amulets around his neck. ‘I think we’re going to have to bide our
time until it gets dark,” he said. “Then we’ll come back and see what we can do
to lay down a medicine circle.”

“How are you
going to lay down a circle when the bus is on the bridge like that?”

“It’s going to
be very difficult. That’s the reason
Misquamacus
chose to stop there. Nobody can come near without his knowing, and nobody can
surround the bus with all the magical paraphernalia that you’d need to keep him
permanently imprisoned there.”

“So what’s
going to happen now?” asked Neil.

Singing Rock
rubbed his eyes. “I’m not sure. I think we’re going to have to play this the
way it comes.”

They drove in
silence for a while along the darkening road. But after a few minutes, Harry
said,

“There’s one
small thing that’s been bothering me. Something we never checked out. I thought
about it last night, but then it slipped my mind again. I think if we’ve got
ourselves a couple of hours to kill, we ought to go look for it.”

“What’s that?”
asked Singing Rock.

“It’s something
that Toby mentioned to Neil real early on, when
Misquamacus
was first making himself known. He said something about the prophecy that is
still buried on the stone redwood.

Now, we never
took the trouble to check out what that prophecy was, or where it was, or
anything.”

Neil reached
the steep junction with Route 128, and turned right toward Chiles Valley. “It
was my guess
Misquamacus
was talking about one of the
trees up at the Petrified Forest in Calistoga,” he remarked. “I never went
there, but I heard there’s a huge stone redwood that’s still half-buried in the
hillside.”

Harry turned to
Singing Rock. “You want to go take a look? I think we ought to. If there’s
something on that tree that we don’t know about, and
Misquamacus
springs a nasty surprise on us, then we’re going to regret it for the rest of
our lives, which might be for five or ten minutes or so, if we’re lucky.”

“How are you
doing for gas?” Singing Rock asked Neil.

“I’m fine.
Let’s head on up there. Even if we don’t find anything, it’s something to keep
my mind off Toby.”

The Petrified
Forest was closed when they arrived. Although it was only a little after five,
the sky was thunderously dark, and the rumblings and shakings of an approaching
storm were growing steadily louder. They parked the pickup outside the gates,
and then Harry walked around to the office and gift shop
,,
where a single light was still burning. He rapped on the window, and mouthed,
“Let--me-in.” A pretty brunette in a brown overall came to the door and
unlocked it. She said, “I’m sorry, mister, we’re all closed up. But we’re open
again tomorrow if you want to drop by. The place is really worth a visit.”

“Look,” said
Harry,
“is the manager in?”

The girl shook
her head.
“Not this evening, he isn’t.”

“Is there
anybody here who knows something about this place, apart from you?”

She shook her
head. “There’s only Professor
Thoren
. But he’s not
really a tree professor. I should drop by in the morning if I were you.”

“Who’s
Professor
Thoren
? What does he do?”

She frowned.
“I’m not too sure. I’m only looking after the place while the manager’s out.
He’s up at the Tunnel Tree right now.”

“The Tunnel Tree?
What’s that?”

She smiled. “I
don’t know why you don’t come see for yourself when we’re open. It’s real
impressive. There’s this stone redwood and it’s more than three hundred feet
long, lying on its side, if you understand me. It was buried deep in the rocks,
and ever since about the turn of the century they’ve been tunneling alongside
of it so that people can walk down the tunnel and take a look. It’s real neat.”

“And that’s
where Professor
Thoren
is right now?”

The girl
nodded. “He’s been here a year or so, trying to work out the Indian writing.”

Harry stared at
her. “I don’t believe it. There’s Indian writing on that tree? You mean that?”

“Sure there is.
It was in all the local papers. They found it round about two years ago, when
they were digging the tunnel along further. It’s only scratches. What they call
picture writing.”

Harry said, “Of
course. In
Misquamacus’s
time, it must have been
still hidden under the rocks.”

“I beg your
pardon?” asked the girl.

“It’s granted,”
said Harry. He felt ridiculously excited. For the first time since he’d flown
over to help Neil, he felt he was making some headway. It wasn’t much, but it
was something. It was an advance against
Misquamacus
,
instead of another terrified retreat.

“I want to ask
you a favor,” he said. “I know you’re closed, and everything, but I really need
to speak to Professor
Thoren
.”

The girl looked
suspicious. “Do you know him personally? I mean, are you a friend of his, or
something?”

“No, I’m not. But
that picture writing he’s looking at is something my friends and I have to
see.” “Well, I’m sorry. You’ll have to come back in the morning.”

Harry gave the
girl his deepest, most sincere expression, the expression he reserved for
elderly lady clients who threatened to cross his palm with insufficient silver.

“You have to
believe me,” he said, “this is the most important thing in my whole life. I’ve
been searching for ten years to see picture writing like this.
Across Alaska.
Down through Arizona.

Everywhere.
Ten years of hardship and struggle. And you’re
telling me to come back in the morning?”

The girl
frowned at him, sympathetic but confused. “Well, I guess you could take a quick
look,” she told him. “But you’d have to pay the regular admission.”

“I’ll do it,”
said Harry. “And I’ll pay for my friends, too.”

“Friends?” she
queried, but he was already peeling off six dollars.

Once the girl
had reluctantly handed over three tickets, Harry walked quickly back to the
pickup and rapped on the window. Neil and Singing Rock had been listening to
the radio news, and they hushed him for a moment. Then, when the news was over,
Singing Rock said, “They tried to get to the bus with half-a-dozen specially
trained men. As far as they can tell, all six of them were struck down and
killed. They’re just lying in the road.”

Neil said, “It
sounds hopeless. How the hell can we fight against something as powerful as
that?”

“I think I’ve
got a clue,” said Harry. “There’s a Professor
Thoren
working up here, translating some Indian picture writing they found on a
petrified tree about two years ago. Apparently it was all in the papers when
they discovered it, but I don’t remember reading it myself. Mind you-that was
before I met
Misquamacus
. I wasn’t much interested in
Indians then.”

“But
Misquamacus
said the writing was still hidden,” said Neil.

“What did he
know?” asked Harry. “I don’t suppose they get the San Francisco Examiner in the
great
otherside
. And this
petrified
forest
was only discovered around 1860, after his last reincarnation.”

“How do you
know that?” asked Singing Rock.

Harry turned
and pointed. “It’s painted on a sign right up on that tree over there. I
thought Indians were supposed to have sharp eyes.”

Singing Rock
grunted in amusement. Then he climbed out of the pickup, and the three of them
walked through the turnstile, under the shade of an ancient oak, into the park
itself.

To reach the
Tunnel Tree, they had to walk around a sloping path, up past a hilly meadow,
and along the edge of a ridge. It was silent in the forest, except for the
rustling of leaves and the scurrying of squirrels, and their footsteps sounded
loud on the dry, leaf-strewn ground. Neil had brought along the flashlight from
the pickup, but the woods were still dark and shadowy under the cloudy sky.
Halfway along the ridge, they came to an enormous fallen redwood, fenced off
with chain link.

Neil shined his
torch on it, and the wood glistened and sparkled. Like all the petrified trees
in the forest, it had been infiltrated with
silicas
from volcanic lava, which had turned it gradually into stone. The massive
trunk, over four feet across and hundreds of feet long, disappeared into the
rocky hillside, and beside it ran a narrow tunnel cut into the limestone and
shored up with planks.

From within the
tunnel, they could see lights.

“Okay,” said
Harry. “I think I’d better lead the way.”

They entered
the tunnel, heads bent, and walked along the boarded floor until they reached
the end. There, sitting on a campstool in front of the petrified tree, with a
battery of flashlights and cameras and drawing equipment, was a middle-aged man
in jeans and a lumberjack shirt, peering closely at the bark through magnifying
spectacles.

Harry stood
beside him and waited. But the professor was so engrossed in what he was doing
that he stayed where he was, his head bent, his heavy eyebrows drawn together
like aggressive caterpillars, his hairy hand poised to draw a line of India ink
on his drawing pad.

It was clammy
and warm in the tunnel, and Harry tugged at his collar.

“Excuse me,” he
said. “Are you Professor
Thoren
?”

The professor’s
body flinched. Then, very slowly, he sat back on his campstool and turned
toward them. His eyes were so grossly enlarged by his magnifying lenses that
Harry felt a ridiculous momentary shock. But the professor took the glasses
off, and replaced them with a pair of normal eyeglasses.

“Do you have
any idea of the concentration it takes to make sense of these hieroglyphs?” he
said, in a deep, New England accent.

Harry grinned and
shrugged, and the professor sighed, “No, you obviously wouldn’t. But your
interruption, let me assure you, has cost me two hours’ train of thought.”

Singing Rock
said, “We wouldn’t have interrupted you at all, professor, but it’s desperately
urgent. Many lives are at stake.”

“Urgent?”
queried Professor
Thoren
. “How can anything to do
with these hieroglyphs be
urgent!

They’ve been
here for two thousand years, or even longer. This tree has lain here for six
million years. In this sort of business, nothing is ever urgent. How can it
be?”

Singing Rock
said, “I can’t explain, professor, and I think if I did you would find the
situation too difficult to grasp. But I must assure you that we are serious,
that we are perfectly sane, and that we must know urgently what it says in that
prophecy.”