Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  A hoarse-voiced woman answered the phone. ‘Yes?’ she said. Then, ‘Billy – take your dirty sneakers off of that chair!’

  ‘Is Rick there, by any chance?’

  ‘Rick? No. Nobody of that name here.’

  ‘Rick Beamer. Skinny guy, gray hair.’

  ‘Oh, him. Sure. I always knew him as Sharky.’

  ‘That’s right. Sharky. Is he there? I really need to speak to him.’

  ‘No, he’s not. Billy – how many goddamned times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Will he be back later?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sharky. Could you ask him to give me a call?’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t do that.’

  ‘All you have to do is leave him a note. I’ll give you my cell number, and he can call me any time.’

  ‘He went to LA. That was maybe six or seven months ago. I don’t think he’ll be coming back, ever.’

  ‘Oh, OK. You don’t have a number for him, by any chance?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Billy! This is the last time I’m going to tell you! If you don’t take your sneakers off of that table I’m going to break your goddamned legs in three places, and then see how you like it!’

  ‘Thanks, anyhow,’ I said to the woman.

  ‘What for?’ she asked me. But just as I was about to hang up, she said, ‘Hey – wait up a second. Sharky did say that he was going to start his own business in LA. Maybe you can find him in the Yellow Pages.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘Exterminator. He was going to call it something like Beamer’s Bug Blitzers. I told him what a crappy name that was.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That sounds like him. He did that kind of work before.’

  ‘Well, I hope you find him,’ the woman told me. ‘If you do, tell him that Lauretta still thinks of him.’

  ‘Lauretta? OK.’

  ‘Tell him he’s a pig and if I ever meet him again I’ll spit in his eye. Tell him I’ll spit in both of his eyes. Tell him I’ll spit up his nose.’

  ‘Oh. OK. Thanks, Lauretta.’

  It took me another couple of calls before I located Rick. I found the number of Beamer’s Bug & Termite Blitzers through 411-NDA, but Rick wasn’t in his office when I called. Some grindingly slow-voiced Hispanic guy took about five minutes to write down my name and number, and he promised to have Rick call me back, but then he told me that he was probably at the Tiki-Ti tropical cocktail bar on Sunset with his girlfriend Dazey.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?’

  ‘Because … you don’t ask me in the first place.’

  I called the Tiki-Ti, and the bartender answered. ‘You have a customer called Rick Beamer with you?’ I asked. ‘Sometimes known as Sharky.’

  ‘Sharky? Sure. Who shall I say is calling?’

  ‘Tell him it’s the Wizard.’

  ‘Sharky! It’s the Wizard!’

  I could Rick over the hubbub of customers. ‘You’re kidding me! The Wizard? I haven’t heard from that sumbitch in years! Thanks, Michael!’

  I waited for a few seconds, listening to the laughing and chattering in the Tiki-Ti bar, and then Rick picked up the phone. ‘Harry Erskine, by all that’s unholy! How’d you track me down here, man?’

  ‘Lauretta put me on to you. She says hi, by the way.’

  ‘Lauretta, that ratchet pussy.’

  ‘Rick, every woman you’re no longer involved with is a ratchet pussy. You know that. But you’re still with Dazey?’

  ‘Dazey appreciates my noo-ances. Always has. Besides, she has the greatest gazongas of any woman I ever dated. What do you want, Wizard? Haven’t just called me to pass the time of day, have you?’

  ‘No, Rick. I’m in Coral Gables in Florida right now, and among some other stuff I’ve gotten myself into some minor tangle with the law. They’re insisting that I vacate the state, and I was hoping that I could crash with you for a day or two.’

  ‘They want you to leave the entire state? Jesus! What have you done, man? I always thought you were one of life’s saints. Telling old ladies all that optimistic shit about their futures and everything, just to make them feel happy. That’s almost a public service!’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I get there – that’s if it’s OK for me to stay with you for a while.’

  ‘Sure. Of course it is. You and me, Wizard, shit, we go way back. Just so long as you don’t mind sharing a room with Dazey’s sister Mazey.’

  ‘Mazey? Are you pulling my chain?’

  ‘No way. Dazey has a sister called Mazey. Blame their parents, not me. Mazey’s a beautician. You’ll like her. I mean, you always went for really stupid women, didn’t you, Wizard?’

  ‘Stupid women don’t hurt you, that’s why.’ I was thinking of Amelia Crusoe. Unlike me, Amelia Crusoe was a genuine clairvoyant. I had always hankered after Amelia, not only because of her fortune-telling abilities, but because she was so pretty that she practically gave men an ischemic stroke whenever she walked into a room, and she had brains. But it had been one of those relationships that for one reason or another had never worked out. And it had hurt.

  But – ‘Here’s the problem, Rick,’ I told him. ‘My current girlfriend Sandy wants to come with me.’

  ‘Sorry, Wizard. There just won’t be the room.’

  ‘OK, Rick. I guess I’ll just have to put her off.’

  ‘I’m sorry, man.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I told him, but to tell you the truth I was relieved. It gave me a legitimate excuse to put Sandy off from coming with me.

  ‘OK, Wizard … here’s my address … four-eight-eight-one Ambrose Avenue, Hollywood. If there’s nobody home when you arrive you’ll find a spare key under the concrete statue of an underdressed woman beside the front door.’

  ‘Thanks, Sharky. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Hey, Wizard – before you go, you got me one of your mystic mottoes?’

  ‘Sure, Sharky. “No matter how much caviar you pile on a baked potato, it will never turn into a seagull.”’

  I booked a seat on American Airlines leaving Miami for Los Angeles at 18:10 that evening. I didn’t call all of my clients to tell them that I would probably never see them again, but that would have taken time and money and I didn’t have much of either, and for all I knew it might have given some of them a cardiac arrest. Some of them seemed to be under the impression that if they couldn’t find out what their future was going to be, it was because they didn’t have one.

  I closed the door of my cottage behind me for the last time, and I can’t say that I didn’t feel bitter about it. Up until yesterday, I had enjoyed every day I’d spent in Miami Beach. At the same time, though, I couldn’t help picturing how those three nuns had materialized in my bedroom, and two of them had risen right up to the ceiling and turned into Matchitehew and Megedagik, with their horns and the beetles that swarmed all over their shoulders. I didn’t ever want to come face-to-face with those three again. Like, ever.

  The taxi that I had called was waiting for me in the street outside. When I climbed in, I asked the taxi driver to take me to Coral Gables Hospital on Douglas Street. It was still too early for my flight, and I had a critical call to make before I went to the airport.

  Outside the front doors of Coral Gables Hospital there is a resident black cat, which always rubs itself up against visitors’ legs. I had been there a few times before to visit friends who were either giving birth to triplets or who had gotten their noses broken in bar fights, and I always used to think that the black cat rubbing itself up against me was a sign of good luck. This afternoon I wasn’t so sure. I lugged my two battered old suitcases into the lobby, and a cute African-American receptionist with big hoop earrings allowed me to leave them behind her desk. She was not just cute, she was very cute, but I couldn’t ask her if she’d like to go marlin fishing with me on my friend’s sixty-five foot fiberglass Viking. By early evening, Pacific Time, I’d be tou
ching down in LA.

  Father Zapata was asleep when I entered his room. He was so ashy that he looked as if he was dead and they had already made a start on cremating him. There were charcoal-black circles around his eyes, his cheeks were sunken and his white teeth were bared in a skull-like snarl. He was breathing, though, whistling through one nostril, and he wasn’t on any kind of a drip, so presumably the deep dorsal artery in his penis had stopped bleeding. I sat next to his bed for a while, watching his silent TV and eating his grapes. After about ten minutes there was a clatter outside the door as a nurse dropped a tray, and he opened his eyes and stared at me.

  ‘Harry,’ he croaked.

  ‘Hi, father. Just dropped by to see how you were doing.’

  ‘I’m dying for a drink of water. My throat’s so dry, I could strike a match on it.’

  I passed him a plastic mug of water, and he lifted up his head from the pillow and drank it all down in five noisy gulps.

  ‘You want some more?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, no, that’s fine,’ he said, handing back the empty mug. He looked me up and down, and then he said, ‘You’re all dressed up. Going someplace special?’

  ‘I’m leaving for LA in about two hours. Permanently, and for ever.’ I told him all about Detective Blezard running me out of Florida. However, I didn’t mention that three more nuns had appeared in my bedroom, or how two of them had turned themselves into Matchitehew and Megedagik, the sons of Misquamacus. I thought he’d probably had enough of supernatural manifestations for one lifetime, especially nuns who made you bite your own dick off.

  ‘So – what do the doctors say?’ I asked him. I nodded toward the hump under his blanket – the supporting cage which protected his nether regions while his sutures healed.

  ‘Oh – they said that normal functions wouldn’t be impaired. If I was planning on starting a sexual relationship, though, I might like to consider an extension. John Wayne Bobbitt did it, after all, and he went on to be a porn star.’

  ‘Jesus, father!’

  ‘No, no, of course I’m not thinking of copying John Wayne Bobbitt!’ said Father Zapata, coughing so hoarsely that he had to stop for a moment and gasp for breath. ‘I just consider myself lucky to be alive, and it’s thanks to you that I didn’t bleed to death. What happened to me – that proved beyond question that I need to return to the ministry as soon as I can and devote myself with even greater fervor to the struggle against Satan.’

  ‘To be honest with you, father, I don’t really understand what did happen to you. I mean, what made you bite yourself like that? Do you even know?’

  Father Zapata looked at me with those glittery, near-together eyes. ‘Harry – would you believe me if I told you that it was a demon?’

  ‘Father, you know what I do for a living. I’m a fortune-teller, even though I don’t know how it’s possible to predict what’s going to happen to us in the next five minutes, let alone the next five days. Well, I can’t, anyhow. I know at least one person who’s pretty good at it, but me – I can only make educated guesses. But – listen – if you say that it was a demon that made you do it, then I believe you.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Sure I do. I know for a fact that there are other forces in this world, not just us. We can’t always see them, and I don’t think we’ll ever understand what they actually are, but I do know from my own experience that they exist.’

  ‘Really? That’s almost a relief to hear you say that.’

  ‘Oh, for sure. I’ve come up against them more than once, and it wasn’t any fun, I’m telling you. Whatever they are – spirits, ghosts, presences – sometimes they want to help us, yes. But most times they want to drive us out of our minds or rip us into pieces or bury us alive.’

  ‘It was a demon, Harry, I swear on the Bible. I felt it inside me.’

  ‘Do you have any idea which demon it was, or where it came from, or why it wanted you to bite yourself like that? Was that a punishment, because you were trying to exorcize that nun? Some kind of a warning? What?’

  Father Zapata nodded. ‘I’m almost sure I know which demon it was, and why it forced me to mutilate myself like that. I think I mentioned to you when you first came to see me that I thought the nun’s appearance was an example of what the church calls Loudun Syndrome.’

  ‘That’s right. You didn’t really finish telling me what it was.’

  ‘Well – in 1632, in Loudun, in France, the nuns in the Ursuline convent came to believe that they had been possessed. They claimed they had been taken over by a whole swarm of different demons, including Astaroth, Celsus, Uriel and Cham.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Did they know why these demons had chosen to possess them?’

  ‘Not entirely. A nearby parish priest was arrested and found guilty of having initiated their possession. He was said to have done it partly in defiance against the local church hierarchy, and partly for his own sexual pleasure. They tried to make him confess by breaking his legs, among other hideous tortures, and then he was burned alive at the stake. The nuns themselves had their demons driven out of them by two expert exorcists.

  ‘Even after this, however, the mother superior Jeanne des Anges claimed that she was still possessed – not just by one but by seven different demons – so the church authorities sent a Jesuit preacher called Jean-Joseph Surin to carry out a special exorcism on her.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t. How could some religious mumbo-jumbo that had taken place in France in the seventeenth century have any relevance to me, or my life, or the people I was fond of?

  Father Zapata coughed and cleared his throat, and then he said, ‘One of the demons that possessed Jeanne des Anges was a demon who had never shown himself to humans before, ever, and was previously unknown in the hierarchy of hell. Because of that, Surin had absolutely no idea what ritual was needed to exorcize him.

  ‘This demon was by far the most powerful of all the presences inside her. Years later he was identified as Gressil, the demon of impurity and infection, third in the line of thrones. But at the time Surin could think of no other way to exorcize him but to invite him into his own body – like Father Karras does with Pazuzu, in The Exorcist. I suppose that’s where the author got the idea from. So – although Surin saved the mother superior, he spent the next twenty-five years in a state of sickness and psychosis, and tried to kill himself more than once.’

  ‘So what exactly is “Loudun Syndrome”?’ I asked him.

  ‘Please, be patient, I’m trying to explain it to you,’ said Father Zapata. ‘The demonic possessions in Loudun between 1632 and 1637 were very well documented. This was because the exorcisms were carried out in public, in front of seven thousand people. The life that Jean-Joseph Surin lived afterward – that’s very well documented, too. For more than twenty years after he exorcized Jeanne des Anges, his behavior was violent and irrational. One of his closest colleagues, Père Jacques Nau, wrote that Surin frequently lashed out with his fists, trampled on the sacraments, and walked around naked, filthy and covered with sores, screaming at people.

  ‘In the summer of 1658, though, the church authorities called on him and ordered him to go back to the convent at Loudun. A young nun called Sister Marysia had become pregnant, and the mother superior was convinced that only a demon could have impregnated her, since the convent was so secure. She wanted Surin to carry out an exorcism as soon as the child was born, because it was the child of unholy seed. She trusted nobody else but Surin to do it, and according to church records, he did. We don’t know what happened to the child, although we know that it was a boy, but it is recorded that Sister Marysia herself died shortly after giving birth.

  ‘It was only a few months later that the first mysterious nun appeared to the mayor of Angers, as I described to you before. Then more nuns appeared to other townspeople, and soon afterward those people who had seen them began to get acutely sick and die. The rumor was that these nuns came from the convent in Loudun and were all carrying
some virulent infection, such as bubonic plague, although nobody could ever find any evidence of this. So – even today, if nuns inexplicably appear before the outbreak of any major epidemic, or indeed any other disaster, the church still calls it “Loudun Syndrome”.’

  ‘But where did the nuns get this sickness from?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t see the connection between this child being exorcized and the nuns getting infected.’

  Father Zapata said, ‘So far as the Vatican researchers have ever been able to find out; there is no written record of this. After the child was exorcized, however, it is on record that Jean-Joseph Surin’s behavior returned almost to normal. He recovered his self-control and wrote many books and inspirational letters, although he never prayed again or went to Mass. His later writings are still revered today.’

  ‘I still don’t get it.’

  Father Zapata said, ‘Some members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have suggested that the child was not a demon’s child at all. Some have said that it could simply have been the illegitimate offspring of some local boy, which is not at all unlikely. If Sarin realized this – which he would have done – he could well have taken the opportunity to coax the demon Gressil out of himself and transfer him into the newborn baby. The demon would have been very tempted by such an innocent, spotless soul, after all. Gressil was the source of filth and disease, and in the first few months of the baby’s life, the nuns took care of him – suckling him even, those who could – and that could have been how nearly all of them became infected.’

  ‘That’s all pretty circumstantial,’ I told him. ‘Like – there’s no documentary proof of that, is there?’ But I’ve seen the nuns for myself, I thought. I’ve seen them turn into Matchitehew and Megedagik, too, and they warned me that a dreadful sickness is going to spread among us, just like it happened in the seventeenth century. Maybe the idea of a ‘Loudun Syndrome’ is not so far-fetched as it sounds.