"Again," said Jack.
Michael and Wolf stepped back again, and smashed against the door once again. This time, they wrenched it right off its hinges, and it twisted open. Dr. Hughes stepped in and went straight up to Karen, where she was bobbing and hopping on the rug. The great swollen hunch on her back was wobbling and jiggling with every step. It looked so obscene I felt sick.
"Come on, Karen," said Jack Hughes soothingly. "Back into bed now."
Karen turned on one bare foot and stared at him. Again, they were not her eyes. They looked fierce and bloodshot and powerful.
Jack Hughes came toward her with his hands held out. She backed away from him slowly, with the same glare of hatred in her eyes. The hump on her back twisted and squirmed, like a sheep imprisoned in a sack.
"He — says — you — must — not — " she said haltingly in her own voice.
Dr. Hughes stopped. "He says I must not what, Karen?"
She licked her lips. "He — says — you — must — not — touch — him."
"But Karen," said Dr. Hughes. "If we don't look after you, he will not survive either. We are doing our best for both of you. We respect him. We want him to live."
She backed further away, knocking a tray of instruments on to the floor.
"He — does — not — believe — you."
"But why not, Karen? Haven't we done everything we can to help? We're not soldiers, or warriors. We are medicine men, like himself. We want to help him."
"He — is — in — pain."
"In pain? Why?"
"It hurts — him. He — is — hurt."
"Why is he hurt? What hurt him?"
"He — does — not — know. He — is — hurt. It was — the light."
"The light? What light?"
"He — will — kill — you — all —"
Karen suddenly started swaying. Then she screamed, and screamed, and dropped to her knees, clawing and clutching at her back. Michael and Wolf rushed up to her, and carried her swiftly back to bed. Jack Hughes fixed a hypodermic of tranquilizer, and shot it without hesitation into Karen's arm. Gradually, her cries diminished, and she sank into a nervous sleep, twitching and shaking and flickering her eyes.
"That settles it," said Dr. Hughes.
"Settles what, Jack?" I asked him.
"You and I are going straight to her parents and we're going to tell them exactly what's wrong. We're going to get that medicine man in from South Dakota and we're going to fight that beast until he's dead."
"No guilt?" I asked. "No sympathy?"
"Of course I have guilt, and I have sympathy, too. And it's because I have sympathy that I'm going to get it done."
"I don't follow."
"Harry," said Jack, "that medicine man is in pain. He didn't know why, but he said it was the light. If you know anything about gynecology, you'll know why we never X-ray fetuses unless we believe they are already dead, or they're a threat to their mother's lives. Every time a human being is X-rayed, the rays destroy cells in the area where the X-ray is directed. In an adult, that isn't too important, because they're fully developed, and the loss of a few cells isn't harmful. But in a tiny fetus, one cell destroyed can mean that a finger or a toe or even an arm or a leg will never develop."
I stared at him. "Do you mean that —"
"I simply mean that we've poured enough X-rays into that medicine man to see through FortKnox on a foggy day."
I looked down at the vein-laced bulge that squirmed on Karen Tandy's back. "In other words," I said, "he's a monster. We've deformed him."
Jack Hughes nodded. Outside, it was snowing again.
CHAPTER FIVE
Down in the Gloom
I don't know what I expected a modern-day medicine man to look like, but Singing Rock could just as well have been an insurance salesman as a practitioner of ancient Indian magic. When I met him the next morning at La Guardia after his arrival from Sioux Falls, he was wearing a glossy gray mohair suit, his hair was short and shiny with oil, and there were heavy-rim spectacles on his less-than-hawklike nose.
He was dark-skinned, with black glittering eyes, and there were more wrinkles on his fifty-year-old face than you would expect on a white man, but otherwise he was as mundane and unspectacular as all the other businessmen on the flight.
I walked over to him and shook his hand. He only came up to my shoulder.
"Mr. Singing Rock? My name's Harry Erskine."
"Oh, hi. You don't have to call me Mr. Singing Rock. Singing Rock on its own is okay. Was that a terrible flight? We had blizzards all the way. I thought we were going to have to put down in Milwaukee."
"My car's outside," I told him.
We collected his baggage and made our way to the car park. A watery sun was melting the slush, and there were the beginnings of a spring-like feeling around. A row of drips splashed on to the sidewalk from the terminus building, and one of them caught me on the neck.
I looked up. "How come they don't hit you?" I asked.
"I'm a medicine man," said Singing Rock urbanely. "You think a drop of water would dare to hit me?"
I stowed his cases in the trunk, and we climbed into the car.
"Do you like the Cougar?" asked Singing Rock.
"It's pretty neat," I said. "I like it."
"I have a green one," he told me. "I use it for fishing weekends. For work, I have a Marquis."
"Oh," I said. It didn't sound as though the medicine business was too bad down on the reservation these days.
As we drove out of La Guardia toward Manhattan, I asked Singing Rock how much he knew about the Karen Tandy case.
"I was told that some ancient medicine man was about to make a reappearance inside her body," he said.
"And you don't find that hard to believe?"
"Why should I… I've seen stranger things than that. Learning to escape into another time is pretty strong medicine, but there have been recorded cases of it happening. If you say it's true, and Dr. Snow says it's true, then I'm inclined to believe that it's true."
"You know this has got to be kept a strict secret?" I asked him, overtaking a truck, and switching on my windshield wipers to dear away the spray thrown up by its wheels.
"Of course. I wouldn't want to publicize it anyway. I have a steady investment business back in South Dakota, and I wouldn't want my clients to think I was reverting back to savagery."
"You also know that this medicine man is extremely powerful?"
Singing Rock nodded. "Any medicine man who can project himself through three centuries has got to be very powerful. I've been looking up the whole subject, and it appears that the greater the time span the medicine man is able to cross, the more powerful his magic can be."
"Did you find out anything more about it?"
"Not a great deal, but enough to give me a clear idea of what approach I'm going to have to take. You've heard of Gitche Manitou, the Great Spirit? Well, what we're dealing with here is the spirit, or manitou, of this particular medicine man. He is obviously very strong, which means that even in his previous lifetime in the 1650s, he was into his fourth or fifth reincarnation. You see, each time a manitou lives on earth as a human being, he gains more knowledge and more strength. By the time he is into his seventh or eighth reincarnation, he is ready to join Gitche Manitou forever as a permanent spirit. It's like graduation."
I changed lanes. "There's a similar kind of concept in European spiritualism. What I want to know is, how do you defeat a manitou like this?"
Singing Rock fished in his pocket for a small cigar and lit it.
"I'm not saying it's easy," he said. "In fact, the whole business is touch-and-go. But the basic principle is this. Every magical spell, according to its strength, can be diverted. You can't nullify it. You can't stop it in its tracks. It has its own spiritual momentum, and to arrest that momentum would be like trying to stand in front of an express train. But you can divert that express train and send it back the way it came. All you need then is enough strength to alter its course through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees."