Neil said, “Do you want something to eat? I could fix some eggs.”

“Unh-hunh. Leave it till the morning. You’ve done enough tonight without short-order cooking.”

Neil sat down at the table. “You say you’re a mystic?” he asked Harry. “I didn’t think anyone could make a living at being a mystic.”

“I don’t,” Harry told him. “I do free-lance work for my old advertising agency to make ends meet. But I prefer to be my own boss, you know, and I’m good at mysticism. I read old ladies’ fortunes with the tarot cards, and I hold young ladies’ hands and tell them what their palms foretell. Usually, they foretell a cheap Italian dinner with me, followed by a nightcap at my apartment.”

“You don’t seem to take it too seriously.”

Harry looked at him. “I take Misquamacus seriously. What I do for a living, that’s just fooling about. But Misquamacus, and the spirits that Misquamacus can raise up, now that’s a whole different ball game.”

Neil poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped it. “What I don’t understand is, if you’ve already destroyed Misquamacus once, how he can possibly come back again.”

“You’ll have to ask John Singing Rock about the finer details of that,” said Harry. “But the way I understand it, a manitou is indestructible, like a spirit. It lives forever, and not even the greatest of the gods can destroy it. All you can hope to do when you’re fighting a reincarnated manitou like Misquamacus is break the spells that bind it to its physical form. When we first faced Misquamacus, he was reborn in the body of a girl I knew. Actually reborn, like a fetus. But we were able to use the electrical power of a computer to destroy him. Least, that’s the easiest way I can explain it.”

“What about now?” asked Neil. “What’s he going to do to Toby?”

Harry shook his head. “I just don’t know. I talked to Singing Rock about it, and he was going to consult some of the elder medicine men of his tribe. You see, whatever Misquamacus is doing, he seems to have learned some lessons from the last time. Last time, he was reborn from the seventeenth century, and it must have been his first leap through time. He was alone, and he was caught off-balance, and once we worked out a way to get rid of him, then the struggle wasn’t too unequal. But this time—well, God only knows. He seems to have found himself a whole bunch of friends, and a way to reincarnate himself without having to grow like a fetus.”

Neil said, “He’s growing inside Toby’s mind. I can see it. I can look at Toby, and Toby isn’t Toby at all.”