Blind Panic Read Online Free PDF

as they had, in times long ago.”
    I didn’t say anything, not right away.
    Amelia said, “Harry? Are you still there?”
    “I’m still here. How good are these beads, as a general rule? Misguided, fairly misguided, pretty accurate, or smack on the nose?”
    “They’ve never been wrong in all the years that I’ve beenusing them. They predicted nine-eleven, almost to the minute.”
    “Okay. You’d better book me a ticket, then.”
    I hung up the phone. The One Who Went and Came Back . I hadn’t heard that in a long time and I had hoped that I would never hear it again. It was one of the many names for the most fearsome Wampanoag medicine man of all time, Misquamacus. The prospect of a newly resurrected Misquamacus was seriously unfunny.
    Misquamacus had been born nearly four hundred years ago. Native American legends say that when he was a very young adept, under the guidance of the notorious shaman Machitehew, he discovered a way to make spiritual contact with the Great Old Ones. These were the gods who had ruled the North American continent in the so-called Empty Time—in the days before days even existed—but had eventually been banished by Gitche Manitou to the farthest reaches of time and space.
    From the Great Old Ones, Misquamacus was said to have acquired the power to bring on a thunderstorm just by shouting at the sky. He could fell hundreds of pine trees in a single day or bring down whole herds of deer with nothing more than an incantation and a tapping of medicine sticks. It was also said that he could appear in several different places simultaneously—sometimes thousands of miles apart.
    In the seventeenth century, he had fought more ferociously against the English colonists than any other Native American, but in the end the Wampanoag had been cheated of their land and sold into slavery, and even He Who Brings the Terror of Eternal Darkness had been forced to throw in the towel. In the spring of 1655 he had made a solemn oath that he would drive out every last colonist, if not then, some time in the future, and he had taken “the way of the oil”—swallowing blazing oil to burn himself alive.
    When he did that, he was able to be reborn in the body of any unsuspecting woman who happened to be in the localityof his self-immolation—either in the past or in the future, whichever he chose. And the reason why I had gotten involved with him was because he had started to grow inside the body of a young woman in Manhattan called Karen Tandy, and Karen Tandy had started to have terrifying nightmares. Because of that, her mother had brought her to the only clairvoyant she knew—which was me—desperately asking for help. In turn, I had called on Amelia. I knew all of the patter and I could shuffle the tarot cards faster than Wild Bill Hickok could shuffle a poker deck, but Amelia was the genuine article.
    With the reluctant help of a Sioux medicine man called Singing Rock, we had managed to use cutting-edge technology to send Misquamacus back to the spirit world. We had discovered that everything has a spirit, or manitou. Not just a tree or a rock or a turkey vulture, but a laptop, a Blackberry, and even a Wii. And the modern manitous were far more powerful than the ancient manitous.
    But Misquamacus had constantly struggled to return, and every time he did so he caused destruction and death on a greater and greater scale. He took his revenge on Singing Rock, and killed him. And if you lived in Manhattan at the time, you’ll remember the so-called “seismic event” that brought down so many buildings. You’ll also remember the “blood disorder” that affected so many New Yorkers in the summer of 2002. Both are euphemisms for the destructive rage of Misquamacus.
    About five years ago, I came across a picture of Misquamacus on the Internet, on some obscure website devoted to Keiller Webb, a nineteenth-century frontier photographer. There he was, Misquamacus, standing in the background of a