Revenge of the Manitou

SEVEN

Mr. Saperstein met them in his office overlooking the back of the school. It was a cramped, converted storeroom, and it was heaped with music scores and books on composers and cellos with broken strings. Harry and Neil and Singing Rock could hardly crowd themselves inside, and Mr. Saperstein had to move a battered trumpet case and a bust of Beethoven with a chipped nose before Harry could sit down.

“I’m sorry I eavesdropped on your conversation with Mrs. Novato,” Mr. Saperstein said apologetically. “It was just that I was passing, and I really couldn’t help myself.

I’m afraid I’ve always been a bit of a busybody.”

“Good thing you were,” said Singing Rock flatly. “This is a desperate time.”

Mr. Saperstein unlocked his desk drawer and took out a paper folder.

“I should explain that I’m pretty keen on photography,” he said. “I take my camera around most of the time. It was quite natural for me to shoot a picture of the children in the school yard. I had a little exhibition of school photographs at Sonoma last year, and it was really quite successful.”

Harry put in impatiently, “Do you think we could just take a look at the shots?”

Mr. Saperstein raised one hand. “What you have to realize is that I came into Mrs.

Novato’s classroom, and she said she could see her children dancing in a strange way. I looked out of the window, too, and she was right. They were kind of shuffling around in a circle, with their arms on each other’s shoulders. I thought it could have been a Greek dance, you know, like in Zorba the Greek?”

Harry sighed. “The pictures, Mr. Saperstein?”

“Of course,” said the music teacher, opening the folder. “But before you look at them you must realize that all I saw in that school yard was children. Nothing else at all.”

One by one, Mr. Saperstein passed around the large black-and-white prints. There were five of them, each showing the school yard from Mrs. Novato’s classroom window, and the children shuffling around in a circle. In the first picture, Neil could pick out Toby and Andy and Daniel Soscol and Debbie Spun. But there was something else besides. Out of the center of the circle of children, mostly obscured by their bodies, a sort of whitish haze seemed to be forming, like a twisting column of smoke.

In the next picture, the haze was widening, and rising even higher above the children’s heads. It was beginning to form into tentacular coils, which in the third picture were writhing almost up to the lower branches of the maple tree at the edge of the school yard.

The fourth and the fifth photographs were the most alarming. They showed a towering beast, draped with scores of curling arms, like a kind of gaseous squid, high above the children. Although it was faceless and formless, it possessed a terrible and evil aspect, as if it was formed out of the essence of ancient malevolence. It seemed verminous and unhealthy, and riddled with diseases of the mind and the spirit.

“What is that thing?” asked Neil. “Is that some kind of photographic illusion?”

Mr. Saperstein replied, “No trick, Mr. Fenner. They were developed for me by Charlie Keynes down at the newspaper office. He does all my prints. He swears blind that this is the way they came out.”

“Maybe the light got into the film, you know, and fogged it,” suggested Neil.

Mr. Saperstein shook his head. “That’s not fogging, Mr. Fenner. Any amateur could tell you that.”

“You’re right, Mr. Saperstein,” concurred Singing Rock, quietly. “These pictures are not fake.”

“But how can you tell?” asked Neil. “It must be easy to take an airbrush or something and-”

Singing Rock smiled, and benignly silenced him. “No amount of airbrushing could ever portray what’s on this photograph, Neil, because no artist knows what this creature looks like or what it is. This creature is one of the shapeless ones who guard the threshold between this world and outside. They are messengers of the ethos in which the great old ones have dwelled for more centuries than I could count.

“This thing is a herald, if you can call it that, for Pa-la-kai the demon of blood, and Nashuna the demon of darkness, and for Quul the demon of insanity. Those three, in their turn, are servants of Rhenauz the demon of evil, and Coyote the demon of corruption. Above all these, though, and guarded by a pack of creatures called the Eye Killers, is Ossadagowah, the son of Sado-gowah, the demon who can be conjured up but can never be returned, except of his own free will.”

“Then what’s this thing?” asked Harry. “Just a minor-league stooge?”

“In comparison, yes,” said Singing Rock. “Its name is Sak, which simply means ‘the past.’ It is a beast that has existed on this planet for countless millions of years, or so the Algonquian say. Its chosen duty has always been to encourage humans to summon the elder gods, so that the elder gods may devour them as sacrificial gifts, and reward Sak with whatever a beast like that might want as a reward.”

“A gold ball-point pen?” asked Harry. “Who knows what demons want?”

Neil couldn’t even find it in himself to laugh. He kept looking at the pictures of Toby, and the face of Misquamacus was sharply clear in every one of them.

Singing Rock stood up. “Sak will want more than that and, unfortunately for us, he’s going to get it pretty soon. When I talked to the elders of my tribe about this matter, they said that before the day of the dark stars could dawn, several essential rituals had to be completed. The penultimate ritual was the summoning of Sak, who would make the way ready for Ossadagowah. After that, ah1 the twenty-two medicine men have to do is join their strength together in the name of whatever spirits they choose-tree spirits or water spirits or rock spirits. Knowing what little we do about Misquamacus, I’d say they probably chose tree spirits.”

Harry said, “You think they’re already done that?”

Singing Rock nodded. “Almost certainly. If you want me to hazard a guess, I’d say they probably did it on Friday, before they all had to go home for the weekend. When they went out on that school trip this morning, they were ready for the day to begin.

The day of the dark stars, or the day when the mouth comes down from the sky.”

“You mean it could be today?” asked Neil, frightened.

Singing Rock checked his watch. “It’s almost noon. The day of the dark stars begins at noon and lasts through until the following noon. It’s supposed to be twenty-four hours of chaos and butchery and torture, * the day when the Indian people have their revenge for hundreds of years of treachery and slaughter and rape, all in one huge massacre.”

Mr. Saperstein took his photographs back and looked at them in bewilderment. Then he said to Singing Rock, “Is this true, what you’re saying? Or is it simply fantasy?”

Singing Rock pointed to the misty, wriggling shape of Sak. “Is that true?” he asked.

“Or is that simply fantasy?”

Mr. Saperstein took off his glasses. “It’s incredible. I don’t know why I didn’t even see it at the time. It’s enormous.”

“That’s one thing we’ve learned, Mr. Saperstein,” said Harry. “Demons and spirits can be seen through some photographic lenses, even when they’re almost invisible to the naked eye. It’s happened before.”

“I thought I was going crazy,” said Mr. Saperstein. “I took those pictures out and looked at them, and I was sure I was going crazy.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Neil softly. He held out his hand to Mr. Saperstein. “Join the club.”

Singing Rock said, “We have much less tune than I thought. If the day of the dark stars begins at noon today, that means OssadagoWah and the rest of the demons will be summoned when Nepauz-had, the moon goddess, appears.”

Mr. Saperstein opened another of his desk drawers, shuffled through it like a rat looking for eggs in a hayloft, and at last produced a battered maroon diary. He licked his thumb and turned the pages until he came to the one he wanted.

“Moonrise tonight is 10:02,” he announced. “I presume that’s what you mean.”

“Thank you, Mr. Saperstein, it is,” said Singing Rock. “And that means we have less than ten hours to prepare ourselves. Quite apart from that, we don’t even know where the children are.”

“They went to Lake Berryessa,” said the music teacher. “It was their school outing.”

“They were supposed to go to Lake Berryessa,” said Singing Rock. “But remember the legend speaks of twenty-two medicine men.”

“So? What does that have to do with it?” asked Harry.

“It could have everything to do with it,” said Singing Rock. “There are only twenty-one children in the class, and therefore the twenty-second medicine man must be emerging inside one of the adults aboard that bus.”

“There’s only Mrs. Novato and the driver,” said Mr. Saperstein, aghast. “You don’t think that Mrs. Novato-?”

Harry said, “I wouldn’t have thought so myself. She didn’t look like the type. Too homely, even for your average medicine man from 1830.”

“Who’s the school bus driver?” asked Singing Rock.

“Well, it’s usually Jack Billets, from Valley Ford,” said Mr. Saperstein. “But I think he’s been off sick lately. I don’t know who they used today. I didn’t see him.”

Neil picked up Mr. Saperstein’s telephone and dialed the operator. When he was through, he said, “Amy? Is that you? Listen, this is very urgent. Do you have Jack Billets’s number, down at Valley Ford? Sure. Could you put me through?”

He waited a little while, and then they heard a faint voice at the other end of the telephone.

“Jack?” asked Neil. “This Neil Fenner. Yes. Hi. Listen, I heard you were sick. That’s right. Well, I hope it improves. But listen, Jack, do you know who’s taking the bus up to Lake Berryessa today? It’s pretty important, you know?”

The faint voice replied, and then Neil said, “Thanks, Jack. I’ll buy you a drink for that.

Okay, fine. Thanks a whole lot.”

He set the phone down, and then looked at Harry and Singing Rock and let out a long, controlled breath. “The driver is an old retired sailor who sits around the dock at Bodega Bay. A guy named Doughty. I met him on Friday, and he did everything he could to persuade me not to go on with all the fuss I was making about the children.

He said Susan had told him to talk to me. Now I know it was a damn sight more than Susan. It was Misquamacus.”

Neil tapped his finger against his head, and snapped, “It was Misquamacus, inside of here!”

Neil went to the window and looked out over the back of the school, at the green, rounded hills beyond the fence, at the distant grayness of ocean mist. He said softly,

“It all makes a lot more sense now. It was Doughty who suggested I go visit Billy Ritchie, and that was how I found out about Misquamacus in the first place. If I hadn’t have known about Misquamacus — if I hadn’t have believed in the day of the dark stars — then I wouldn’t have called you or Singing Rock to help me.”

Singing Rock, from his chair in the comer of the office, smiled and nodded.

“You’re beginning to understand the deviousness of Misquamacus, aren’t you? He wanted both of us here in California, Harry and me, so that he could take his revenge on us before any other white man or mercenary Indian. It would have used too much energy, too much magic, to bring us by any mystical means. So he simply had Doughty put you on to Billy Ritchie, who was the only person around who could tell you the truth.”

Neil tiredly rested his head against the window. “And when it was all over, he made sure that Billy Ritchie was killed.”

“Harry told me about that,” said Singing Rock. “It was a favorite method of quick death, the lightning-that-sees. It strikes like an occult guided missile. Misquamacus once used it against two of Harry’s closest friends.”

“All this accounts for something else, too,” said Neil “The appearance of Dunbar’s ghost in the bay. He was there because Doughty was there. He was warning me, just like he kept trying to warn me everyplace else.”

Singing Rock looked at his watch again. “The first thing we have to do is find out where that school bus is. Then, before it gets dark, we have to get those children together somehow, so that I can arrange a medicine circle around them. One of the elders has given me a spell that was supposed to have kept Coyote away from the daughters of Roman Nose, and that should keep their activities confined for a little while. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than taking their first attack in the chest.”

Mr. Saperstein said, “Is there anything I can do? I’d like to help. I don’t quite understand what’s going on, but H you don’t mind that, you’re welcome to whatever I can do.”

Harry suggested, “Why don’t you call the Highway Patrol? Tell them that some of your kids went off on a day trip to Lake Berryessa, and that a mother just telephoned to say that her son took her Librium pills in his lunch box, thinking they were candies.”

Singing Rock stood up. “That should do fine. If you want us, Mr. Saperstein, we’ll be over at Neil Fenner’s house. And thank you.”

The teacher gave a nervous, self-deprecating grin. “It’s been a pleasure, I guess. It’s such a relief to find out you’re not going out of your mind.”

“Mr. Saperstein,” said Singing Rock, resting a gnarled hand on the music teacher’s arm, “there may be times in the next twenty-four hours when you wish that you were.”

Singing Rock worked over the kitchen table until midafternoon, the blinds drawn to keep the light from distracting him, and an angular desk lamp over his papers and magical artefacts. While Harry and Neil paced the veranda waiting for Mr. Saperstein to call with news from the Highway Patrol, the South Dakota medicine man laboriously prepared lists of the enemies they were about to face, and gathered together as many spells as he could to hinder and obstruct those enemies. Out of his suitcase came bones, hanks of hair, and earthenware jars of powder. Just after three o’clock, when the sky was low and heavy with metallic gray clouds, he came out of the kitchen door and stretched.

Harry asked him, “Are you finished in there?”

Singing Rock shrugged. “As finished as I’ll ever be.”

“I never knew Indians were such pessimists,” retorted Harry. “No wonder you lost the West.”

“We were pessimists because we’d already lost the East,” Singing Rock reminded him.

Harry lit another cigarette and coughed. “I sometimes wonder whether you’re fighting on the right side. With an attitude like yours, you and Misquamacus would make a fine pair.”

Singing Rock raised his head a little, and looked across at Harry with eyes that were bright and penetrating.

“One day, in one of my lives, I hope to be far greater than Misquamacus,” he said.

Harry raised an eyebrow. “You’re trying to tell me that you've lived before, too?”

Singing Rock smiled. “It always used to amuse the Indians, before they began to understand how callous the white men.actually were, how much the white men knew about living, and how little they understood about life.”

“You’re in a very philosophical mood.”

Singing Rock pulled across a weather-bleached chair and sat down, resting one booted foot on the veranda railing. “Maybe I am,” he said quietly. “But I believe we’ll be facing Misquamacus again tonight, and this time he’ll be ready for us.”

Harry walked to the edge of the veranda and rested his hands on the railing. He felt unpleasantly sticky and hot, and the afternoon seemed completely airless. Even out here, it was like being shut in a cupboard. The smoke from the cigarette drifted lazily away in blue puffs.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose it’s a great honor to be first on the zapping list of the greatest Indian medicine man who ever lived. Just think, I may never have to eat at the Chock full o’ Nuts again.”

Neil said, “Have you worked out who most of the medicine men are?”

“Yes,” said Singing Rock. “They come from the times before the white men arrived on our shores, in those ancient days when Indian magic was at its height. In those days, the gods themselves were supposed to have walked America, and these medicine men worked out their apprenticeships as shamans and wonderworkers with the gods themselves to guide them. Their power is inestimable. Together, under the direction of Misquamacus, they will be devastating.”

“Do you have a plan?” asked Neil.

“Sure,” put in Harry. “We promise them beads and firewater, just like we used to do in the old days. Then, when they’re trying on their beads and drinking their firewater, we steal their sacred medicine circle and build a downtown shopping mall on it.”

Singing Rock took out a pack of chewing tobacco and grinned. “I’m sorry, Harry. It won’t work a second time.”

Neil bit his lip. “Listen,” he said, “that’s my son out there. My son and all my son’s friends. Wheat’s going to happen to them?”

With a measured bite, Singing Rock took a mouthful of tobacco and chewed it steadily for a moment. Then he spat out onto the dust.

“That’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” he said, in his deep, serious voice. “You have to understand that if Misquamacus successfully emerges out of Toby’s mind and takes on physical shape, then the drain on energy which Toby suffers will almost certainly be fatal.”

Neil felt as if someone had hit him from behind. “What?” he said weakly.

Singing Rock lifted both his hands. “I am telling you that because you must be prepared for the very worst. There is very little chance that once the medicine men have used those children to reincarnate themselves, they will allow them to live.”

“Then what’s the use?” asked Neil. His face was very white. “What’s the use of trying to save them at all?”

“It’s not just the children,” said Harry. “We’re trying to prevent this whole state from being torn apart. But there’s something else, too, isn’t there, Singing Rock?”

Singing Rock hesitated, then nodded. “I guess you have a right to know the best as well as the worst. If by any slim chance we do manage to defeat these medicine men, and send them back to the outside, then the children will be restored unharmed. It is hard to explain to a white man why this should happen, but there is an eternal natural principle in Red Indian magic of balance and redress. A sort of occult Newton’s Law.”

Neil turned away and walked to the end of the veranda. Harry glanced at Singing Rock with an expression that suggested he might go after him and try to reassure him, but Singing Rock shook his head.

“Leave him. If he’s going to help us, he has to face up to the truth.”

Neil heard Singing Rock’s words, but he didn’t turn around. He looked out over the small yard that, until last week, had been his plain but happy home. With a feeling that brought tears to his eyes, he noticed that Toby had left his Tonka bulldozer out by the woodshed. He would have been annoyed normally, in case it rained and the bulldozer got rusty. But now it didn’t matter. Toby was never going to play with it again. It might as well stay there.

Inside the house, the telephone was ringing. He guessed it was probably Mr.

Saperstein, but somehow he couldn’t summon the energy to move from where he was. He heard Harry go inside and bang the kitchen door. His senses seemed to be dulled, and all he wanted to do was find a bed someplace and go to sleep.

Out of the corner of his eye, though, he was sure he could see something wavering in the grass beyond the fence. He peered more intently, and shaded his face against the dull, coarse light that filtered through the heavy clouds. There was something out there that was shifting and flapping like a pale transparent flag. Then it began to grow clearer, an instant photograph developing on plain paper. It was the figure of Dunbar, in his wide-brimmed hat and his coat, and with his gun belt slung low around his hips.

“Singing Rock!” said Neil, breathlessly.

Singing Rock raised his eyes, and then quickly looked to the place where Neil was pointing.

“It’s Dunbar!” said Neil. “That’s him-the man in the long white duster coat!”

The Indian medicine man rose to his feet. As he did so, Dunbar lifted his hat from his head and waved once. Then, gradually, like the morning mist from the ocean, he faded away again.

“Did you see him?” asked Neil, almost frantic. “Did you see him out there?”

Singing Rock said, “Yes, I saw him.”

“Thank God. Thank God for that. I was beginning to think I was imagining him.”

“I don’t know that his warnings can do anything to help us,” said Singing Rock. “It looks to me as though he’s just some disturbed spirit, vaguely manifesting himself around the fringe of all this astral activity.”

Neil didn’t take his eyes away from the grassy slope where Dunbar had vanished.

‘I’m not so sure,” he said softly. “I believe he helped me when the wooden man was after me, and I believe he’s going to try to help me now. Whenever he appears, I have this feeling of reassurance.”

Singing Rock looked briefly over at the hills beyond the fence. “Don’t rely too much on spirits,” he said. “Some of them are very treacherous. We have stories in South Dakota of demons who would take the shape of friendly dogs, and lead hunters into rivers and over the edge of cliffs.”

“Dunbar isn’t like that,” Neil said.

The kitchen door opened and Harry came out, holding a torn piece of brown envelope in his hand.

“Have they found them?” asked Neil. “Have they told you if Toby’s all right?”

Harry squinted at his scribbled notes. “They’ve found them. The bus is up at Lake Berryessa, where it was supposed to be. A Highway Patrol car spotted it parked on the bridge over Pope Creek.”

“Parked on the bridge? What was it doing there?” asked Neil. “Did they say where the children were?”

Harry nodded. “The children are inside the bus. When the Highway Patrol officers tried to drive up close to see what was wrong, their patrol car caught fire and exploded. One of the officers is suffering from serious burns.”

“Oh God,” said Neil. “It’s started.” “You’re damn right it’s started,” said Harry. “That must have been Master Andy Beaver at work. The automotive arsonist.”

Singing Rock said, “The boy called Andy Beaver is harboring the Paiute medicine man Broken Fire. I think so, anyway. He was the only child who referred to the day of the dark stars as the day of the mouth coming from the sky, which is an expression that only the Paiutes ever used. And, of course, he has Broken Fire’s talent for setting things ablaze at a distance.” “Broken Fire?” asked Harry. “Was he strong?”

Singing Rock laid a hand on his shoulder. “One of the strongest, I’m afraid. The only possible weaknesses he had were an inability to appease the demons of cholera and disease, and no talent for slaving the souls of his people who had been sent to the great outside by drinking too much whiskey, or by falling under iron horses. In other words, he was a master of every occult event except those which stemmed from things the white men had done-like spreading diseases, and building railroads, and distilling alcohol.”

Neil said, ‘Tor Christ’s sake don’t let’s stand here discussing the situation. Let’s get out there.”

“Neil’s right,” put in Harry. “If the Highway Patrol starts getting upset, they’re going to bring their guns out, and that’s going to be no fun for anyone. Especially them.”

“Very well,” nodded Singing Rock. “Can you bring my suitcase, Harry? And Neil-if you have any beer or soft drinks, and any cookies or cold cuts, then bring them along. It’s going to be the hardest night you ever went through.”

“Let’s just hope it isn’t the hardest and the last,” said Harry, pushing open the kitchen door.

Inland, as they drove in Neil’s pickup through the Valley of the Moon, the afternoon was densely hazy and hot. They negotiated the curved, cultivated hills that rose between Sonoma and Napa counties, past hillside farms of tan-colored cattle and furrowed fields, and then they were sloping down Into the broad flats of the southern Napa Valley. Ahead of them, blue and forested against dim sky, was the rugged outline of the Vaca Mountains. It was up there, beyond those peaks, that Lake Berryessa lay. A long rectangular sheet of ruffled water, twelve miles long and two miles across.

Singing Rock, steadily chewing tobacco, said, “In certain parts of New England, the Indians called rounded mountains uncanoonucks, which simply translated means

‘women’s breasts.’”

Harry, joggling up and down comfortably in his seat as Neil sped the pickup along the blacktop, commented, “What name do they have for medicine men who try to keep you amused by telling you trivial oddities of Indian lore?”

His elbow resting casually on the pickup’s window ledge, Singing Rock turned to Harry and smiled. “The same name they have for irritable paleface mystics.”

Neil leaned over and turned on the pickup’s radio. He twiddled the dial through blurts of country-and-western music, snatches of evangelism, burbles of laughing. He said,

“Maybe there’s some news about the school bus. The story should have gotten out by now.”

Singing Rock asked, “How long is it going to take us to get up to the lake from here?”

“Maybe another twenty minutes at most,” Neil told him. They were speeding along the freeway through Napa now, and he was switching lanes to leave the main road and head east through the city and up to the mountains.

He added, “I hope to God we’re not too late. If anything happened to Toby now, I tell you-”

Harry said reassuringly, “You heard what Singing Rock said. Nothing’s going to break until the moon goddess appears. It’s-what-four o’clock now. We’ve got six hours to go.”

They drove through the outskirts of Napa, along Lincoln Avenue. The traffic was heavy and flowing at a slow, sedate twenty miles an hour. There was nothing that Neil could do except hold his speed down and wait until they were clear of the city.

At each red traffic signal, he sat biting his lip and drumming his ringers on the steering wheel.

“Come on, come on, you bastard,” he muttered under his breath, as they finally crossed the city limit behind a rusting Matador. He put his foot down, and they pulled ahead, roaring along the eucalyptus-shaded avenue that led to the mountains.

A couple of miles east of Napa, the road began to rise sharply, and twist and turn itself between scrub and rocks. The pickup’s tires howled and whinnied as Neil kept his foot flat on the floor and spun them around one tight curve after another. They passed by fields of dry grasses, fences, and dusty roadside pull-offs. They crossed bridges and culverts. And up above them, the sky grew heavier and darker, thick with inky clouds. A branch of lightning flickered momentarily in the distance, and dried leaves rushed across the road in the draft of the oncoming storm.

Harry said, “The goddamn sky’s threatening enough, let alone the situation.”

Singing Rock raised a hand to hush him. “We’re getting close now. Very close. I’m going to need all my concentration.”

They drove around a curving downward grade, and the lake at last appeared. Its waters were almost black, even darker than the lowering clouds up above it. A surface wind lifted the waves in plumes of white spray, like the scattered feathers of a fallen bird. They looked sinister and unsettled, impenetrable depths that were waiting for the dead and the drowned.

“The Pope Creek bridge is around here,” said Neil, driving them along the rocky shoreline. Hardin and Maxwell and Burton creeks all run in together with Pope and they make quite an inlet.”

They rounded the corner toward the bridge, and they were confronted by a roadblock: half-a-dozen Highway Patrol cars, with their red lights flashing, a contingent of police from Napa, and a barricade of red-and-white sawhorses.

A cop in aviator sunglasses waved Neil to the side of the road.

“I’m sorry, fellow. You’re going to have to turn around and go back. The road’s going to be closed here for quite a white.”

Neil said, “My boy’s on that bus. I’m Neil Fenner. His name is Toby Fenner.”

The cop said, “You got some proof of that?”

Neil handed over his driver’s license. The cop scrutinized it, nodded, and gave it back. Then he pointed to the rough pull-off just before the bridge itself. “Park your vehicle there, please, off the highway. Then cross to the other side of the road and make yourself known to that officer with the bullhorn.” Neil said, “Are they okay so far? The kids?” The cop tugged at the peak of his cap. “As far as we know, sir. But nobody’s been able to get within fifty feet of the bus, and we can’t raise any answers with the bullhorn. A couple of officers got themselves hurt real bad.”

“I heard,” Neil told him.

Turning off the road, Neil parked the pickup where the cop had directed him. Then he and Harry and Singing Rock climbed out, and surveyed the place that Misquamacus had chosen for his battleground.

The creek was deep and wide here, and the bridge spanned almost three hundred feet. It was a straightforward, two-lane bridge, with a crisscross steel balustrade running along each side. A sign warned that it was forbidden to dive from the bridge into the creek, but Neil could remember seeing kids jumping off the railing into the water below just for the hell of it. It was a fifty-foot drop, but if the creek was flowing well, it was safe enough.

On the other side of the bridge was a wide dusty area which visiting tourists used as a motor-home park. The Highway Patrol had cleared it now and fenced it off. A police helicopter had landed there, and Neil could see a very senior police officer climbing out.

Halfway across the bridge stood the yellow school bus. It was parked diagonally across the highway, so that only a motorcyclist could have passed by on either side of it. It was still and silent, and its doors were closed. What was strangest of all, though, was that its windows were all blank white, and it was impossible to see what was going on inside it.

Neil said, “What’s that stuff on the windows? I can’t see a damn thing.”

Singing Rock shaded his eyes, and then nodded. “As I thought. It’s ice.”

“Ice? In this heat?”

“Almost certainly. Within that bus, they have opened a gateway to the outside, and the outside is colder than anything you could possibly imagine.”

“If it’s colder than my apartment on a February night, then it’s cold,” said Harry.

Neil shaded his eyes, too, and examined the bus more carefully. Apart from the whorls of frost and ice on the windows, the ventilators on the roof were encrusted with ice, and even the highway itself sparkled with frozen crystals for ten or fifteen feet around.

“They must be dead,” he whispered. “No human being could survive in that kind of temperature.”

“No, they’re not dead,” Singing Rock told him. “They’re in a trance, of a kind, because they’re preparing the gateway for the arrival of their gods and demons. If you could look inside that bus now, you’d probably see them sitting quite still in their seats, and the whole place would be totally dark and cold. You’d think they were dead, but they’re not. This is what they have to do before Nepauz-had appears, in order to make it possible for Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah to manifest themselves.”

Neil said, “Hadn’t we better go talk to that officer in charge? Tell him what we know?”

Harry lit a cigarette and shrugged. “I don’t suppose he’ll believe us for one minute. I vote we do what we have to do without telling anybody.”

“But how can we? They may be planning to use weapons, and then what’s going to happen?”

Singing Rock rested his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “NeiFs right,” he said. “There could be terrible consequences if the police decide to use their weapons. At the moment, they don’t know what they’ve got on their hands. A mysterious busload of children with frozen windows, and a police car that’s blown up. They’re going to tread wary. But when the medicine men start bringing down the first of the demons, then it’s going to be all hell around here, and we could just as easily get ourselves killed as anybody else. Bullets, as a New York taxi driver once told me, ain’t got eyes.”

Harry blew out smoke. It seemed to hang where he had exhaled it, a motionless cloud in the still, humid air. Across the lake, it was now so dark that it was impossible to distinguish the hills on the opposite shore, and the water itself seemed to be heaving and foaming in unhealthy excitement.

“Okay,” he agreed. “But if you can convince the Highway Patrol that there are twenty-two medicine men in there, you’re a better man than I am, Singing Rock.”

The three of them walked across the road to where a group of seven or eight policemen were watching the bus and talking among themselves. One of them had a map spread out on the roof of a patrol car, and he seemed to be discussing the possibility of bringing skyhook helicopters in across the lake to lift the bus bodily off the bridge.

“The trouble is, we have a cold factor which is unknown,” he was saying, “and we also have no idea what’s going on in that vehicle. The last thing we can afford is to injure children unnecessarily.”

Neil introduced himself. The police captain was an officer of the old school, with a uniform that looked as if it had only just come back from the dry cleaner, and shoes polished to the brilliance of fresh-poured tar. His face was ruddy and blemished with liver spots, but his eyes were small and intense, like a polecat’s, and his mustache was neat and prickly.

“I’m Captain Myers, Highway Patrol,” he said, extending his hand. “Are these two gentlemen parents, too?”

Harry said, “I wish I was, but you know how it is. My date got the chicken pox.”

The captain frowned. “We’re trying to keep unauthorized people away from this area.

We have a serious and delicate problem here, with a great many young lives at stake, and we really don’t need civilian interference.”

In his quietest, most dignified voice, Singing Rock said, “Captain Myers, we believe we know what’s happening here, and we believe we may be able to prevent a disaster, if you let us try.”

“Who are you?” demanded Captain Myers.

“They call me John Singing Rock. I am a medicine man from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. A Sioux.”

“You’re an Indian medicine man?” asked Captain Myers, in disbelief.

“That’s correct.”

“Well,” said the captain, with a barely suppressed smile, “I’ve had some offers of help from all kinds, of people. Firemen, wrestlers, circus people, you name it. But you’re the first Indian, medicine man.”

“Captain Myers,” said Harry, “he’s serious. What’s going on here is directly concerned with Red Indian magic. If you’re going to get those children out of there alive, then you’re going to have to listen to what he’s got to say.”

“Who are you, his caddy?” asked Captain Myers.

“No, sir. I just happen to be one of the only living people who’s ever seen what the hell it is you’ve got in that bus there.”

“You’re one of the only living people who’s ever seen children? What are you trying to tell me?”

“Not children,” put in Singing Rock. “Not children at all. But the reincarnated bodies of twenty-two ancient Indian medicine men.”

Captain Myers paused for a moment, looking from Neil to Harry to Singing Rock and back again.

“Sergeant,” he said coldly, “I want these men escorted away from here. I want them to get the hell out. I also want you to take their names and their addresses, so that I can bust all three of them for obstructing the police at a critical and dangerous time.”

He looked back at Singing Rock. “I don’t know who you people are, or what kind of a stunt this is, but I warn you I’m going to find out, and then I’m going to put your ass in a sling. Twenty-two ancient Indian medicine men! They don’t even talk that crazy in the nuthouse.”

Singing Rock said earnestly, “I know how you feel, captain. It does sound crazy when you first hear it. But it’s the absolute truth. It’s happened before in New York, and if s happening again here. The spirits, the manitous of all those ancient wonderworkers have infiltrated the minds of the children. Right now, they’re preparing to summon down one of the greatest of their ancient gods.”

Captain Myers fixed his eyes on Singing Rock for a long moment. Then, without a word, he turned his back and continued to check over his map.

Harry shouted, “Are you pigheaded or are. you just pigheaded? Didn’t you hear what the man told you?”

“Yes!” snapped Captain Myers, jerking his head around. “And it makes me heave!

Every time there’s a murder, or a kidnapping, or an officer hurt in the course of his duty, the goddamned sewers open and people like you come crawling out! People who try to capitalize on human suffering and sensational crime! Now, get out of here before I have you arrested and locked up! You’re wasting my time!”

Harry looked at Singing Rock and gave a shrug that meant, well, we did try. Then the sergeant came forward, a big man with furry red forearms and a belly as big as a baby hippopotamus, and said, “Come on, you guys. Back in that truck and get moving.”

Under escort, they walked back across the roadway to Nell’s pickup. It had grown so dark now that Captain Myers was calling for spots and floods. From out of the west, another police helicopter came fluttering, its lights flashing against the oppressive clouds. There was a heavy metallic odor in the air, and lightning was walking across the far peaks of the Vaca Mountains. Every now and then, they felt a deep, rumbling vibration through the ground, as if an earthquake was threatened.

Suddenly, they heard a voice shout out: “Sir! Captain Myers, sir! Look at the bus!”

They had almost reached the pickup, but they turned, and then they ran back to the crown of the road. Beyond the police barriers, one hundred and fifty feet away in the middle of the bridge, the bus was faintly shimmering with a green fluorescence. It had the same kind of ghoulish glow as a painted skull on a ghost-train ride, dim and pulsing. The wheels, the bodywork, the windows, were all outlined in light.

There was a noise, too, a rising noise. It was so high-pitched that they could scarcely hear it, but it had a whining, grating edge to it which set their teeth on edge and made them feel as if their very bones were vibrating.

The noise grew louder and louder and harsher and harsher until NeU and Harry both clamped their hands over their ears. Only Singing Rock remained unmoved, staring at the glowing bus with a stoic, concentrated expression. The police took cover behind their cars and drew their guns, and Captain Myers called over his bullhorn for a rifle marksman.

Soon, the noise was an unending, tortured, screaming sound, all at the same high pitch, and it seemed to blot out any sensible thought. Harry could vaguely hear shouting and the running of feet, but even his vision seemed to be blurred by the noise.

Another policeman called, “Look! The door’s opening!” and a spotlight was immediately whipped across to light up the bus’s front entrance. With a hissing noise, barely audible over the endless screeching, the doors jolted apart and slid back. The policemen raised their guns, and trained them carefully on the darkened exit.

One officer called, “Hold your fire!” and then they saw who was there. Down the steps of the bus, white-faced in the spotlights, stumbled Mrs. Novato.

Captain Myers stood up with his bullhorn and shouted: “Mrs. Novato? Mrs. Novato?

Walk this way, please, Mrs. Novato. Keep walking and don’t look back. When you reach the barrier, you’ll find officers there to protect you.”

He didn’t know whether she’d heard him over the screaming noise, so he repeated the message slowly and carefully. Mrs. Novato, in her white pleated skirt and her green blouse and her sensible shoes, stood there swaying and didn’t acknowledge him at all.

“Walk this way, Mrs. Novato!” called Captain Myers. “Please, walk this way!”

When she remained where she was, he turned and called: “I want two volunteers to go out there and get her. On the double!”

Two officers scuttled across from behind the protection of their parked cars, and Captain Myers rapidly briefed them. But as he was talking, he suddenly paused and lifted his head. Mrs. Novato had taken an unsteady step toward them. Then she took another. Then another. Then she pitched forward and fell on her face.

“Get out there!” ordered Captain Myers, and the two officers, guns drawn, skirted around the police cars and sprinted out toward the bus. They weaved from side to side as they ran, and kept their heads low. When they reached the teacher, they took an arm each and ran back, trailing the heels of her sensible shoes along the road surface. They made it back to the protection of the barriers without any sign of interest or hostility from the cold, radiant bus.

They laid Mrs. Novato down on a plaid rug. The police medic knelt down beside her and took her pulse and blood pressure, and checked her eyes for response to light. It was only a few moments more before he stood up and said quite simply, “She’s dead.”

“How did she die?” asked Captain Myers. “Any quick ideas?”

The medic, a pale young officer with a six o’clock shadow and a pointed nose, said,

“Feel her for yourself. The abdomen.”

Captain Myers squatted down beside the body and gently touched the stomach with the flat of his hand.

“It feels pretty cold,” he said. “But that’s natural if that whole damn bus is frozen up.”

“Feel harder,” said the medic flatly. Captain Myers looked at him with a slightly aggrieved frown. He didn’t like people who acted funny.

He tried to squeeze the flesh of the stomach in his fingers, but he couldn’t. He looked up at the medic again, and said, “She’s solid, like rock. She feels like a piece of frozen beef.”

The medic bent forward and stripped back Mrs. No-vato’s white pleated skirt. From the knees upward, her thighs were pale blue, and they were as rigid and hard as marble. Her pubic hair was frosted white, and her lower stomach was solid but, worst of all, her vagina had been frozen so that it gaped obscenely wide, revealing blue-ribbed flesh inside.

Mrs. Novato’s body, from the thighs to the breasts, had been subjected to such intense cold that it was totally solidified.

Captain Myers, horrified, couldn’t resist touching her again, to feel how flesh that should have been soft and yielding had turned into something as cold and smooth as a stone pillar.

He stood up, and then he said in a dry, shaken voice,” “We’re going to treat this as homicide. I want you to get this body down to the autopsy people and I want you to tell them that they have to find out how this was done if it takes them all night and all day and all the next night. You got that?”

“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. Sap-erstein’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.”