The manitou Read Free

Hughes
shrugged. “Don’t thank me. I’m only doing my job. But, listen I don’t think you
have anything to worry about. I won’t pretend that your condition is not
unusual, because it is. But part of our profession is dealing with unusual
conditions. You’ve come to the right place.”
    Miss Tandy
stubbed out her cigarette and gathered her things together.
    “Will I need
anything special?” she asked. “A couple of nightdresses, I suppose, and a
wrap?”
    Dr. Hughes
nodded. “Bring some slippers, too. You’re not going to be exactly bedridden.”
    “Okay,” she
said, and Dr. Hughes showed her out. He watched her walk quickly down the
corridor to the elevator, and he thought how slim and young and elf-like she
looked. He wasn’t one of those specialists who thought of his patients in terms
of their condition and nothing else – not like Dr. Pawson, the lung specialist,
who could remember individual ailments long after he’d forgotten the faces that
went with them. Life is more than an endless parade of lumps and bumps, thought
Dr. Hughes. At least I hope it is.
    He was still
standing in the corridor when Dr. McEvoy poked his moonlike face round the
door.
    “Dr. Hughes?”
    “Yes?”
    “Come inside a
moment, take a look at this.” He followed Dr. McEvoy tiredly into his office.
    While he had
been talking to Miss Tandy, Dr. McEvoy had been looking through his medical
reference books, and there were diagrams and X-rays strewn around all over his
desk.
    “You found something?”
asked Dr. Hughes. “I don’t know. It seems to be as ridiculous as anything else
in this case.”
    Dr. McEvoy
handed him a heavy textbook, opened at a page covered with charts and diagrams.
    Dr. Hughes
frowned, and examined them carefully, and then he went over to the light-box
and peered at the pictures of Miss Tandy’s skull again.
    “That’s crazy,”
he said.
    Dr. McEvoy
stood there with his hands on his hips and nodded. “You’re quite right. It is
crazy.
    But you have to
admit, it looks pretty much like it.”
    Dr. Hughes shut
the book. “But even if you’re right – in two days?”
    “Well, if this
is possible, anything is possible.”
    “If this is
possible, the Red Sox will win the next series.”
    The two pale
doctors stood in their office on the fifteenth floor of the hospital and looked
at the X-rays and just didn’t know what to say next. “Perhaps it’s a hoax?”
said Dr. McEvoy. Dr. Hughes shook his head. “No way. How could it be? And what for?”
    “I don’t know.
People dream up hoaxes for all kinds of reasons.”
    “Can you think
of a reason for this?” Dr. McEvoy grimaced. “Can you believe it’s real?”
    “I don’t know,”
replied Dr. Hughes. “Maybe it is. Maybe it’s the one case in a million that’s
really real.”
    They opened the
book again, and studied the X-ray again, and the more they compared the
diagrams with Miss Tandy’s tumor, the more resemblance they discovered.
    According to
Clinical Gynaecology, the knot of tissue and bone that Miss Tandy was harboring
in the back of her neck was a human fetus, of a size that suggested it was
about eight weeks old.

Chapter One – Out of the Night
    I f you think it’s an easy life being a mystic, you ought to try
telling fifteen fortunes a day, at $25 a time, and then see whether you’re
quite so keen on it.
    At the same
moment that Karen Tandy was consulting Dr. Hughes and Dr. McEvoy at the Sisters
of Jerusalem Hospital, I was giving old Mrs. Winconis a quick tour of her
immediate prospects with the help of the Tarot cards.
    We were sitting
around the green baize table in my Tenth Avenue flat, with the drapes drawn
tight and the incense smoldering suggestively in the corner, and my genuine
simulated antique oil lamp casting pretty mysterious shadows. Mrs. Winconis was
wrinkled and old and smelled of musty perfume and fox-fur coats, and she came
around every Friday evening for a detailed rundown of the seven days ahead.
    As I laid