Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  Still no answer. I strained my ears and thought I heard another rustle, but Marcos and his friends were making too much noise for me to be sure.

  I guess the most sensible course of action would have been to shut the door and lock it and call the cops, but for starters the key was on the inside. Not only that, but any intruder would have had to climb in through the window, so they could just as easily escape the same way. On top of everything, I was feeling tired and ratty and semi-hammered and the cards had shaken me badly, so I didn’t have the patience to be sensible.

  I didn’t give any warning. I kicked the door wide open and reached inside for the light switch. The light went on, but almost instantly the bulb popped, and the bedroom was plunged into darkness again.

  In that split-second, though, I had glimpsed who or what was standing in my room. It looked like a nun, in a black habit, but her face was completely covered, or else she was standing with her back to me.

  I stayed where I was, in the doorway, feeling as if my skin was shrinking. The nun didn’t move, or speak. She was standing right in the center of the bedroom, but it was so dark in there that I could only just make out her silhouette against the blind.

  ‘Come on – who are you?’ I said, trying to sound authoritative. In reality, I probably sounded as if I had three Johnny Walkers too many. ‘What the hell are you doing in my house?’

  The nun remained perfectly still and said nothing.

  ‘Do you want something?’ I asked her. ‘Is it money you’re after? What?’

  No reply. My heart was beating hard, and I still felt unnerved, but I was beginning to think to myself: Whatever she’s doing here, she’s only a nun, or somebody who’s dressed like a nun. She’s about six inches shorter than I am, and if she really is a nun then it’s very unlikely that she’s carrying a concealed weapon.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go over to the side of the bed and switch on the bedside lamp. I’m not going to harm you. I’m not going to call the cops. I just want to find out who you are and what you want. You understand me?’

  Gingerly, I stepped into the bedroom and edged sideways toward the bed. I kept my eyes on the nun the whole time, in case she decided suddenly to rush out of the door, or attack me, but she stayed where she was.

  I reached the nightstand beside the bed, groped for the lamp and knocked it over on to the bed. ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘That’s just me being clumsy. Everything’s cool.’

  I picked the lamp up, found the switch-toggle and pulled it. The bedroom was all lit up now, but the nun had vanished.

  Immediately, I went to the door, thinking that she must have run out of the bedroom when I was picking up the lamp. But there was no sign of her in the living room, or the bathroom, or the kitchenette, and the front door was shut, with the safety-chain still hooked up.

  I went back into the bedroom and lifted up the blind. The main window was shut, and only the narrow fanlight was open, so she couldn’t have escaped that way. Besides, she too would have had to lift up the blind, if she had wanted to climb out of the window. That would have let in the street light, and I would have seen her. My attention had only been distracted for milliseconds.

  I went back into the living room. I opened up the large pine closet where I hung my clothes, but there was no nun crouching inside it amongst my shoes. I checked the shower-stall in the bathroom and stuck my head around the toilet door. Not a sign of her.

  I unlocked the front door, went outside and shone my flashlight around the garden. The air was warm and fragrant, and Marcos’ guests were beginning to say buenas noches, laughing and shouting and slamming car doors. But there was no nun, anywhere.

  Looking up, I saw the moon above me, hanging unsupported in the light-polluted sky, like it knew something but wasn’t going to tell me. I stared up at it for a while, and then I went back into the cottage and closed the door and locked it, although I didn’t know how that was going to keep out a nun who could apparently walk through solid walls.

  I finished picking up the cards and sliding them back in their box. Earlier on today, I had felt like burning them or throwing them into the bay or finding some other way of disposing of them. Now, however, I put them away in one of the drawers underneath my closet and locked it. However much the cards disturbed me, maybe they were the key to what was going on. Because something was going on, and that was for sure. I’m not a genuine psychic, but I could feel it in the air.

  I went back into the bedroom, and sniffed, and I could smell it, too. A flat stale cinnamon aroma. I thought to myself: if nuns could really vanish into thin air, and leave a smell behind them, that is exactly what that smell would smell like.

  SEVEN

  Jim Waso called her a few minutes before seven a.m. the next morning. At first she tried to ignore the call, but he kept on ringing and ringing, so she eventually picked up.

  ‘Anna? They told me about David as soon as I came in. I’m so sorry. I really am. I don’t know what else I can say to you.’

  ‘Thanks, Jim,’ she said. ‘To be honest with you, I still can’t believe it yet.’

  She was sitting on the couch wearing one of David’s stripy shirts, with her tablet open on her lap. She hadn’t slept all night, and her eyes were so blurry that she could barely read the words on the screen. When she’d gotten home at about three a.m. she had called David’s parents and told them what had happened – one of the most harrowing conversations she had ever had in her life. Mr and Mrs Russell had promised to come down from Boise as soon as they could. Next Anna had called her own mother, but her mother wasn’t picking up so she had left a message.

  Since then, she had been trying to track down any references to violent convulsions and catastrophic hemorrhage, to pass the hours before she could go back to work. So far, though, her search had been fruitless. She had found no medical reports that exactly matched the symptoms that both David and John Patrick Bridges had exhibited before they died.

  She couldn’t ignore the striking similarities between their two deaths, but they were the only two cases that she could find. If a disease was rare enough, she knew that it could sometimes take only two cases for them to be officially classed by the Center for Disease Control as an ‘outbreak’. So far, however, she didn’t have enough information to be able to conclude that both David and John Patrick Bridges had contracted the same disease, or even if it was a disease that had killed them. It could have been some unusual allergic reaction, or food poisoning. Maybe their deaths weren’t related at all and were simply a bizarre coincidence.

  She had also been combing through more obscure websites for any recorded instances of dead people talking post mortem, such as Can The Dead Communicate With Us?, but again she had discovered nothing to match her own experiences.

  She had found plenty of examples of bereaved people claiming that they had heard the voices of their deceased partners in the weeks and months after they had died. However, almost all of them had admitted that this was nothing more than their minds playing tricks on them. ‘I heard my husband upstairs, calling me, but when I went to see what he wanted, of course there was nobody there.’

  Not one person said that they had stood beside their partners’ bodies immediately after death and heard them talk to them, out loud, as if they were still alive.

  Anna was aware that she was still in shock. She was quite prepared to believe that David’s death had overwhelmed her senses so much that she had imagined him talking to her. But if that were true, why hadn’t he said the kind of things that he normally used to say to her, or told her that he loved her and was going to miss her now that he was dead?

  Why had he warned her not to interfere and said that the end was coming? The end of what? The end of her life, too? The end of humanity? The end of the world?

  Jim said, ‘Listen, Anna, I don’t expect to see you in the lab today. Or tomorrow, either. Take the rest of the week off. Doctor Ahmet and Epiphany can finish up all of the tests you’ve been running on th
e Meramac School virus.’

  ‘No, Jim, really. I have to come in. I need to run my tyranivir program, and I also need to go through my results again. I’m sure that I’ve been missing something glaringly obvious.’

  ‘Anna, you just lost your partner. Give yourself a break, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘So what am I going to do? Sit at home every day for the rest of the week feeling sorry for myself? How do you think I’m going to feel if more children die and I haven’t been doing anything to save them? Finishing my program will keep my mind occupied, Jim, and that’s what I really, really need right now.’

  ‘Anna, I’m the CEO. It’s up to me to take care of my staff.’

  ‘But I need to be there for David’s autopsy, too. I have to know why he died.’

  ‘You won’t be permitted to participate, you know that.’

  ‘Of course not. But I can observe, and I can check the results. And for what it’s worth I can give you my opinion as to what might have caused his death.’

  ‘Well, it’s against my better judgment, but OK. But let me tell you this now – if you show any signs of distress, physical or mental, I’m sending you right back home, which is where I personally think you belong.’

  ‘Jim – I’ll send myself home if I think I can’t cope. Believe me, I need to be thinking one hundred percent straight to get this virus nailed. And to find out what happened to David.’

  ‘All right, then. Come see me when you get in. And Anna?’

  ‘Yes, Jim?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Anna. You have my condolences. Really.’

  She walked into the back room of her laboratory and said, ‘Right. Let’s see if we can nail this nasty little gremlin, shall we?’

  Stacked up against the left-hand wall were thirty cages of galvanized wire, with almost every cage housing a pink-eyed albino rat. The room smelled strongly of rat urine and formaldehyde. Yesterday afternoon, she had injected each of the rats with a sample of the Meramac School virus, and she had checked them as soon as she’d come into the laboratory this morning. She’d found three of them dead and nine of them lying on their sides, trembling and gasping desperately for breath.

  The surviving rats she was going to inject with varying doses of tyranivir, which had recently been developed to kill off the newer mutations of the H5N1 flu virus.

  H5N1 caused many more fatalities than H1N1, the common swine-flu virus, but it usually spread much more gradually. In the Meramac School outbreak, however, the virus had inflamed the children’s lungs with such speed and ferocity that within minutes they’d found themselves unable to breathe and had dropped on the spot.

  She injected three rats, which appeared to be close to asphyxiating. They twitched as she stuck in the needle, but they didn’t try to wriggle out of her hand, as healthy rats would have done. As she took out the fourth rat, she glanced back into the main laboratory and saw that Epiphany was watching her with a sad, sympathetic look in her eyes, even though her face was covered with a surgical mask. Anna turned her attention back to the rat. Right now, she didn’t want sympathy. She didn’t want sympathy because she wanted to concentrate on her work, and to isolate this virus, and outwit it, and destroy it. She wanted to save those children’s lives and to protect any more children who might contract it.

  Most of all she didn’t want sympathy because if anybody gave her sympathy she would break down in tears.

  It took her about forty minutes to give each rat a varying dosage of tyranivir. When she had finished, she asked Epiphany to keep her eye on them. ‘I just have to go up and see Jim Waso,’ she said, taking off her surgical mask and hanging up her lab coat. ‘I think he wants to send me home.’

  ‘Maybe you should go home,’ said Epiphany. ‘If I was you, girl, I’d be in pieces right now.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ Anna told her. ‘I won’t be too long. I can give Jim a progress report.’

  ‘Do you really think we’re making any progress? This little menace seems to be able to shrug off everything we throw at it.’

  ‘We’ll get it in the end,’ said Anna. ‘All we have to do is out-think it.’

  Jim occupied a large office on the fifth floor, with a royal-blue carpet and a huge mahogany desk and a whole wall of leather-bound medical textbooks, as well as all his medical certificates, framed. Out of the windows he had a view of the red-brick spire of the School of Medicine at the end of the street, which resembled a Gothic church, and beyond that, the hazy suburban clutter of The Gate district. Beyond The Gate lay the Mississippi.

  He was talking on the phone when Anna came in, and he indicated that she should sit down. He was a neat, handsome man with short black hair that was graying at the temples. In his white short-sleeved shirt and his red-and-yellow striped necktie he looked more like a politician or a senior advertising executive.

  ‘Anna,’ he said, when his phone call was finished. She stood up, and he came across and hugged her. ‘My God, what a tragic thing to happen! What a terrible, terrible shock!’

  ‘It was very sudden,’ she said. ‘He had just come back from Chicago, and he complained that he was feeling shivery and feverish and that he’d been sleeping all day and missed his flight.’

  ‘Did he have any idea where he might have picked it up? Had he eaten anything that upset him? There’s been a whole rash of organophosphate poisonings this week. Three children dead in Cleveland, and six or seven more in Atlanta.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘If it was food poisoning, he couldn’t think where he might have gotten it from. He didn’t seem too bad when we went to bed, but he woke up and he was convulsing and vomiting blood and screaming, too. He kept telling me that he’d been fighting it all day but he couldn’t fight it any longer.’

  Jim dragged over another chair and sat down close to her. ‘We’ll be carrying out autopsies today on both David and the guy they brought in yesterday.’

  ‘John Patrick Bridges.’

  ‘Was that his name?’ Jim looked surprised that Anna had remembered it. ‘Well, let’s hope that David and Mr John Patrick Bridges can give us some answers. I talked to Michael Lim this morning, but he said he couldn’t even guess what the cause of death might have been, not for either of them.’

  Anna was tempted to tell Jim that she had heard David and John Patrick Bridges both talking to her, after they were dead, and what they had said. But Jim was a pragmatic, professional, serious man, and she knew what his reaction would be: ‘Anna, you’re still in deep shock.’ It was true, she was. She could hardly believe that this day was real. That David was dead, and she was sitting here talking to Jim Waso about what might have killed him. But her medical experience told her that she could cope with the symptoms of shock, and that eventually she would get over it. She needed to be here, for David’s sake, and for the children at Meramac Elementary School, and the last thing she wanted was for Jim to order her to go home.

  ‘You’re absolutely sure that you can deal with this?’ he asked her, laying his hand on her arm. ‘If you do want to take some time off, or if there’s anything you need, you only have to ask. You’re the best epidemiologist we have. You’re probably the best in the state of Missouri, or even the whole damned country, but you’re a human being, too, Anna. I don’t expect you to be a martyr.’

  ‘Thanks, Jim,’ she said. Again, she tried to smile, but she couldn’t stop her mouth from puckering up with grief, and her eyes blurred with tears.

  Jim went over to his desk and brought over a box of tissues. ‘Peter Kelly and Rafik Ahmet are quite capable of deputizing,’ he said as he watched her dabbing her cheeks. ‘And Epiphany – well, I think we have a rising star in Epiphany.’

  ‘No – no, I can manage,’ said Anna. ‘I have the feeling that I’m really close to nailing this Meramac School bug. Like I told you, I’m trying out tyranivir which I don’t think is completely going to prevent the virus from replicating, but its reaction will show me how it mutates. No matter how it changes, I can track it down easily enough with
filament-coupled antibodies, but it seems to me that it adapts very quickly to new antivirals and what I have to do is find out exactly how. It has eight segments to its genome like any other RNA virus, but it can shuffle them like a Reno poker player, only faster.’

  ‘So long as you’re holding up,’ said Jim. ‘You have my cell number, don’t you? You can call me twenty-four/seven if there’s anything you need, or even if you only want to talk. I’m here for you, Anna, OK?’

  She nodded. She really liked Jim, in spite of his seriousness – or perhaps because of it – and she could tell that he was attracted to her. There was just something about the way he held her gaze when he spoke to her, as if his eyes were trying to give her a message that his lips weren’t allowed to. At the moment, though, there was only one person she wanted to talk to, and he was lying downstairs in the Pathology Department, chilled and dead, and she didn’t think that he would ever speak to her again.

  Later that afternoon, Doctor Rutgers paged her and asked her to come up to pathology. By now, Doctor Ahmet had arrived and was making minute-by-minute checks on the rats that Anna had injected with tyranivir. Six or seven of the rats appeared to be a little more animated than they had been earlier, although their movements were twitchy and erratic and they seemed to be confused. They kept jumping, as if they had been given a mild electric shock.

  The rest of the rats were deteriorating fast. Three of them had their pink eyes closed and were lying on their backs, their lungs clogged up, and their breathing sounded like crackling cellophane.

  ‘Come check this out, professor,’ said Doctor Ahmet, beckoning Anna over to his microscope monitor. He pointed to the green sea-urchins bobbing and circling around the screen. ‘See – you were right. As soon as the virus realizes that it cannot attach itself to a host cell, because of the tyranivir, it starts to mutate almost instantly. I never saw anything like it. You would have to invent a new antiviral every day to keep up with this baby, instead of once a year. Talk about a shape-shifter.’