Burial by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Eleven

He wheeled himself across the library and pointed to the top shelf. ‘Fetch me down that old black book, will you, the one that looks like a Bible?’

I reached up and tugged the book off the shelf. It smelled sour and musty and very old. Inside the black leather cover thick deckle-cut pages had been hand-sewn to make a new book altogether.

Dr Snow leafed through it slowly, and sneezed. ‘It must be thirty years since I looked at this. It was written in 1863, by Bishop Henry Whipple, the Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota. See — An Account of the Recruitment by U.S. Military Forces Of Spiritualists & Mediums In Their Conflicts Against the Santee Indians 1862.

‘It’s quite fascinating,’ he said. ‘The Commissioner of Indian Affairs was aware that the Indians had strong magic powers and took them extremely seriously. In fact, I’d say that the only reason the Indians were eventually defeated was not so much because the white men overwhelmed them but because they lost faith in their own supernatural skills.

‘In Minnesota, when he was leading troops and local militia against the Santee, Colonel Henry Sibley employed the services of a celebrated medium called William Hood.

‘There are several accounts of William Hood’s career in the Old West, but regrettably no pictures of him. Some stories say that he was originally a Serbian vampire-hunter named Milan Protic, and that he had been shipped over to America by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in secret.

‘In O.L. Ward’s Gunslingers, I discovered a verified report that William Hood lived for some time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and that he was involved in several gunfights. They nicknamed him the Shadow Boy, because none of his opponents ever succeeded in hitting him.

‘He was called in to help Colonel Sibley after the Minnesota Massacre in August 1862, when Santee Indians killed four hundred and fifty white settlers. William Hood went to the scene of the very first killing — the cottage of a settler called Robinson Jones — and carried out days of “spiritual investigations”.

‘Here, Bishop Whipple writes, “Mr Hood turned out to be a very taciturn young man, with the wildest hair, and dressed in curious leathers and rags. He carried about his belt numerous bells and bones and several pear-shaped bottles, which he called ‘shadow-bottles’. His only explanation for the use of these bottles was that warring Indians would often be possessed by a shadow or darkness from the Great Outside, which I took to mean the Indian equivalent of Purgatory. If he could capture any traces of this shadow — even the slightest fragment of it — the shadow would lose its spiritual integrity. It would be wounded … it would hemorrhage darkness. If it didn’t return at once to the Great Outside it would literally bleed to death.

‘“The Indian would be exorcized; and would no longer have the power or the magical abilities which the spirit had lent him.

‘“I was sceptical of Mr Hood’s abilities, I must confess, but equally I

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