"What happened?" he snapped, rolling out of bed and pushing quickly out of the room into the corridor.
"There was a face there — at the window — just for a second. Then there was nothing but all this blood."
"He's out," said Singing Rock. "Or nearly. That must have been the male nurse you saw at the window."
"The nurse? But what the hell has Misquamacus done to him?"
"Old Indian magic. He's probably invoked the spirits of the body, and turned him inside-out."
"Inside-out?"
Singing Rock ignored me. He went swiftly back to his room, and opened up his suitcase. He took out beads and amulets, and a leather bottle full of some liquid. One of the amulets, a fierce green copper face on a rawhide thong, he hung around my neck. He sprinkled some reddish powder over my hair and shoulders, and touched me above the heart with the tip of a long white bone.
"Now you're reasonably protected," he said. "At least you won't end up like Michael."
"Listen, Singing Rock," I said. "I think we ought to have a gun. I know that it would kill Karen Tandy if we shot Misquamacus, but as a last resort, we might have to."
Singing Rock shook his head firmly. "No. If we shot Misquamacus, we would have his manitou pursuing us in vengeance for the rest of our lives. The only way we can defeat him forever is through magic. That way, he can never return. And anyway, in any kind of sorcery, a gun is more dangerous to the person who uses it than it is to the person who's being fired at. Now come on, we don't have much time to lose."
He led me back to the door of Karen Tandy's room. The blood had thinned on the window now, but all we could see inside was the dim glow of the bedside light, scarlet through the gore.
"Gitche Manitou, protect us. Gitche Manitou, protect us," muttered Singing Rock, and turned the door handle.
There was something wet and messy behind the door, and Singing Rock had to push hard to slide it all out of the way. There was a nauseating smell of vomit and feces, and my feet skidded on the floor as I stepped in. Michael's remains were lying in a raw red bubbly heap, strung with pipes and veins and intestines, and I could only glance at it. I felt as if I was going to puke.
There was blood spattered everywhere — all over the walls and the bedsheets and the floor. In the middle of this gory chaos lay Karen Tandy, and she was wriggling under her coverings — wriggling like a huge white bug trying to work its way out of a chrysalis.
"It's very soon," whispered Singing Rock. "She must have been struggling and Michael went to help her. That's why Misquamacus killed him."
Forcing my stomach to stop heaving, I watched in horrified fascination as the enormous bulge on Karen Tandy's back began to heave and twist. It was so large now that her own body seemed like nothing more than a papery carnival ghost, and her thin arms and legs were flopped about by the fierce squirming of the beast that was being born on her back.
"Gitche Manitou, give me power. Bring me the spirits of darkness and power. Gitche Manitou, hear my call to you," muttered Singing Rock. He traced complicated patterns in the air with his long magic bones, and threw powders all around. The scent of dried herbs and flowers mingled with the vivid stench of blood.
I suddenly had a singing, metallic sensation in my head, like breathing nitrous oxide at the dentist. The whole scene seemed peculiarly unreal, and I felt detached and strange, as though I were looking through my eyes from the darkness of some other place. Singing Rock grasped my arm, and only then did the feeling begin to fade.
"He's casting spells already," whispered the medicine man. "He knows we're here and he knows we're going to try and fight him. He will do many strange things to your mind. He will try and make you feel as though you do not really exist, like he did just then. He will also try and make you feel afraid, and suicidal, and desperately alone. He has the power to do all that. But these are only tricks. What we must really look out for are the manitous that he summons, because they are almost unstoppable."
Karen Tandy's body was thrown this way and that across the bed. She was dead already, I thought, or almost dead. Her mouth opened every now and then and she gave a little gasp, but that was only because the wriggling medicine man on her back was pressing against her lungs.
Singing Rock caught hold of my arm. "Look," he said quietly.
The white skin at the upper part of the bulge was being pressed from inside, as if by a finger. The finger worked harder and harder against it, trying to claw its way through. I stood frozen, and I could hardly feel my legs. I thought I might collapse at any moment. I watched, almost without seeing it at all, as the finger squirmed and wriggled in a desperate effort to break out.
A long nail pierced the skin, and a watery yellow fluid suddenly gushed from the hole, streaked with blood. There was a rich, fetid smell, like decaying fish. The sac on Karen Tandy's back sank and emptied as the birth fluid of Misquamacus poured out of it on to the sheets.
"
Call Dr.
Hughes — get him here as quick as you can," said Singing Rock.
I went to the phone on the wall, wiped the blood off it with my handkerchief, and dialed the switchboard. When she answered, the girl's voice seemed so blank and unconcerned that she seemed to be speaking from another world.
"This is Mr. Erskine. Can you get Dr. Hughes up to Miss Tandy's room — as soon as you can. Tell him it's started, and it's urgent."
"Okay, sir."
"Call him right away. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
I turned back to the hideous struggle on the bed. From the slit in the skin, a dark hand had emerged, and was tearing a larger and larger hole in the bulge with a sound like ripping plastic.
"Can't you do anything now, " I whispered to Singing Rock. "Can't you put a spell on him before he gets out of there?"
"No," said Singing Rock. He was very calm, but I could see by the strain on his face that he was also very frightened. He held his bones and his powders ready, but his hands were trembling.
A long tear, about three feet deep, had now appeared in Karen Tandy's back. Her own face now lay pale and dead against the bed, smothered in clotted blood and sticky fluid. I couldn't believe that there was any way to revive her now. She seemed so mutilated and torn, and the thing that was coming out of her seemed so strong and evil.
Another hand emerged from the rip in her flesh, and the skin was parted wide. Slowly, greasily, a head and shoulders rose from the hole, and I felt a deep dark chill when I saw the same hard face that had appeared on the cherrywood table. It was Misquamacus, the ancient medicine man, coming alive again in a new world.
His long black hair was flattened against his broad skull with oil and fluid. His eyes were stuck closed, and his coppery skin glistened with the fetid muck of his womb. His cheekbones were high and flat, and his prominent hooked nose was occluded with fetal fats. Strings of mucus hung from his lips and chin.
Both Singing Rock and I stood totally silent as Misquamacus peeled Karen's flaccid skin away from his bare greasy torso. Then the medicine man raised himself on his hands, and worked his hips free. His genitals were puffy and swollen, the same way that a boy child's are at birth, but there was dark pubic hair smeared against his scarred belly.
Misquamacus heaved one leg out, with a sickening suction sound, like pulling a rubber boot out of thick mud. Then the other leg.
And it was now that we saw what damage the X-rays had done to him. Instead of full muscular legs, his lower limbs both ended above the knee, in tiny deformed club feet, with pulpy dwarfish toes. Modern technology had crippled the medicine man in his womb.