Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  I was so close to telling Father Zapata about the nuns and the two sons of Misquamacus, but he was coughing and heaving for breath, and I didn’t want to make him any worse than he already was. Not only that – I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to hear what his explanation might be.

  Then he said something that convinced me that it really was time for me to go – to get the hell out of Florida, and as soon as American Airlines could take me.

  ‘The young nun who gave birth … Sister Marysia, she swore on her deathbed to a Capuchin confessor, Father Tranquille, that she had never had sexual relations with anybody, neither human nor demon, neither asleep nor awake. Father Tranquille wrote this in his memoirs. He also wrote that the birth itself was highly unusual.’

  I didn’t say anything, but waited for Father Zapata to continue.

  ‘The child was not carried in her womb, apparently, as any normal child might have been.’

  Father Zapata’s breathing became even more labored, and he was having difficulty in getting his words out. He tried to lift his head from the pillow, but then he had to let it drop down again. He beckoned me to come closer, so that I could hear what he wanted to tell me.

  I leaned over the bed. His breath had that metallic smell of chicken when it has just started to turn bad.

  ‘She carried her baby, according to Father Tranquille—’

  He clutched my shirt collar with his bony hand, trying to pull me down even closer. As he did so, a runnel of blood slid out of the left-hand-corner of his mouth and on to the pillow.

  ‘Father – you’re bleeding! I need to call for the nurse.’ I tried to lift up my head, but his grip on my shirt-collar was relentless. It was like being gripped by some huge rancid-smelling bird of prey.

  ‘She carried it—’

  He coughed again, and this time he sprayed out blood. I felt warm wet droplets spatter against my the side of my face, and Father Zapata had scarlet bubbles of blood clustered between his lips.

  This time I managed to wrench myself away from him, ripping two buttons off my shirt. I picked up the emergency call button that was dangling beside his bed and pressed it. As soon as I had done that, I went to the door of his room, flung it open and shouted out, ‘Nurse! I need a nurse here! Emergency! I need a nurse here now!’

  I went back to Father Zapata’s bedside. He was shaking now, and the front of his hospital gown was covered by a dark-red bib of blood.

  He was staring at me, one hand still lifted, as if he was still desperate to finish telling me what he had started to say.

  ‘Harry.… ’ he whispered.

  He convulsed again and brought up even more blood. I could hear soft-soled nurses’ sneakers pattering down the corridor, and a woman’s voice calling out, ‘Sister!’

  I said, ‘Just keep still, father,’ but again he tried to lift his head off the pillow.

  ‘Her back,’ he whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her back, Harry. Not in her womb. She carried the baby on her back.’

  SIXTEEN

  I waited for another two-and-a-half hours at the hospital, standing outside the front doors with that black cat continually rubbing up against my legs and purring like a death-rattle. At a quarter after four I knew that I would have to go or I would miss my flight. I couldn’t afford to forfeit the fare – or get arrested and charged with fraud, for that matter.

  While I was waiting several clergy arrived in shiny black limos and taxis and went bustling into the building grim-faced, including the Reverend Deacon Jose Valdes from St Francis de Sales. None of them knew me so they didn’t acknowledge me, and in any case I must have looked pretty dubious hanging around outside a hospital where a priest was suffering from demonic possession with a black cat smooching around my ankles. Just as well I wasn’t wearing my black djellaba with the silver stars on it.

  Eventually, I went inside to collect my suitcases from the receptionist. ‘Could you call upstairs and ask how Father Zapata is doing?’ I asked her. ‘I’d like to stay longer, but I have a plane to catch.’

  She picked up the phone and talked for a moment to one of the nurses on the third floor. Then she said, ‘I’m so sorry, sir. Father Zapata passed about ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Oh, shoot. That’s terrible. Did they say how?’

  ‘Are you a relative, sir? If you’re not a relative, all I can tell you is that he passed.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I stood in the hospital’s reception area with my suitcases, feeling almost as if I was personally responsible for Father Zapata’s death. I shouldn’t have asked him for help and advice about that nun. I should have relied on my own experience of supernatural appearances and quit the cottage then and there and not mentioned the nun to a soul. Supernatural appearances are nothing like the ghosts you read about in ghost stories. Even the scariest ghost stories don’t come close. More often than not, they have some grisly and complicated agenda that is impossible for us to understand. They have no sympathy for us whatsoever, and they don’t give a rat’s ass how much they hurt us. Either they were once human, and now that they’re dead, they’re jealous of us because we’re still alive, or else they were never human: they were demons, or spirits, or loogaroos, or manitous, and they have no feelings for us at all. Do you expect a shark to go into mourning if it bites you in half? Do you expect a rock to feel sorry if it topples down a cliff and crushes you? Do you think a lake is going to cry if you drown in it?

  I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the airport.

  He checked me suspiciously in the rear-view mirror as we drove east on SW 22nd Street.

  ‘You know you got blood on you?’ he asked me. ‘I ain’t makin’ a mistake, am I? That is blood?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said. I lifted my hands and turned them this way and that. I had blood on my hands, too, in every sense.

  ‘Are you hurt? You want me to take you back to the hospital?’

  ‘No, I’m fine. Honestly. This isn’t my blood.’

  The driver passed me a pack of wet-wipes. ‘Here, one of these should clean it off.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, although I was thinking: Nothing will ever clean away this stain, ever. And as we turned northward toward the airport on SW 27th Avenue, I was thinking about the last words that Father Zapata had spoken to me: She carried the baby on her back. Not in the womb, as any normal child might have been. On her back.

  What he had said had chilled me right down to the soles of my feet, because I had come across this before, more than once, and each time scores of people had been killed or injured so badly that they had never fully recovered.

  Sometime in the seventeenth century, the Algonquin wonder-worker Misquamacus had committed suicide by drinking blazing oil. This was part of a magic ritual which he had carried out for the express purpose of being reborn hundreds of years later. He had believed that when he reappeared, he would be able to take his revenge on the colonists who had already slaughtered so many of his people and stolen so much of their land. I had confronted Misquamacus several times and managed to defeat him – but only by a combination of luck and modern technology. Mostly modern technology: in the centuries that had rolled by while Misquamacus had been waiting to be reborn, science had developed to the point where we could pretty much hold our own against ancient Native American magic, as powerful as it was. I don’t think I could ever have beaten him otherwise.

  I’m still not sure why, but Misquamacus had chosen a young New York woman named Karen Tandy to act as the host for his reincarnation. He may have selected her at random, or maybe he consulted some kind of Algonquin star chart, or tapped some magic bones together, who could tell. As his fetus had grown larger, though, he had not only fed himself on her blood and her bones but also her spinal fluid, so that he could leech out her intellect as well as her physical strength. That was why he had implanted himself on the back of her neck, and not in her womb.

  Now Father Zapata had told me that Sister Marysia from Loud
un convent had also carried a fetus on her back. OK – it could be nothing more than some freaky coincidence. But it was a possibility that Karen and Sister Marysia had both been chosen as surrogate mothers by sorcerers trying to be reincarnated – one Algonquin and one European. Maybe the magic ritual is essentially the same, whichever part of the world you came from.

  On the face of it, Karen and Sister Marysia seemed to have nothing in common. They came from totally different cultures and religions and totally different ethnic backgrounds. They had lived not just thousands of miles apart from each other, but centuries apart, too. Yet they had both carried parasitical babies on their backs, and they both shared one more thing. In different ways, no matter how distantly, they had both become connected to me.

  The flight to Los Angeles was bumpy and uncomfortable. I was sitting next to a nervous woman who kept twisting her scarf around and around and saying, ‘Oh! – oh my God! – ohhh!’ whenever the plane dipped or jolted, which was every two or three minutes.

  Myself, I’ve never been frightened of flying, but it didn’t help that when I went to the galley at the back of the plane to get myself another Jack Daniel’s, I passed by a nun sitting in one of the aisle seats with a silky black veil draped over her head.

  The sight of her seriously gave me what Louisiana people call ‘the freesons’. Not only that, but as I passed her the plane suddenly dropped and I was flung sideways toward her so that I bumped against her shoulder. When I did that, however, she lifted up her veil to reveal a pink, plump face with bulging blue eyes and ginger freckles across her nose.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Turbulence.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you fret, boy,’ she said, in a strong Irish accent, patting my arm. ‘If the Good Lord had really wanted us to fly, he would have given us propellers.’

  A second nun was sitting three rows behind her in a window seat, with her blind drawn tightly down and a veil covering her head, too. I just had to assume that she was normal under that shiny black silk and not another ‘appearance’. As I passed the end of the row in which she was sitting, I glanced sideways and noticed that her hand was lying on the armrest of her seat, and that she was wearing gray suede gloves. I didn’t know if that signified anything. Maybe she suffered from poor circulation, that was all.

  I saw this nun again while I was waiting for my suitcases at the baggage carousel. She was standing alone on the opposite side of the baggage hall, her head still covered. I couldn’t work out if she was waiting for her luggage to appear; or if she was lost; or if she was specifically standing there to remind me that I was supposed to be warning my fellow Americans about the plague that was soon going to strike us all down, unless we upped sticks and all went back to Lithuania, or Nigeria, or wherever the hell we’d come from. Maybe she was here to do all three, or maybe none of the above.

  My own suitcases appeared, and I was just heaving them off the carousel when I saw a gray-bearded man in a high-collared gray suit weave his way through the crowds in the baggage hall and walk directly up to the nun. I could see that he was saying something to her, and he raised his arm as if to guide her out of there, although he didn’t actually touch her. She didn’t move at first, didn’t even nod her head as if she was talking to him. But she must have said something, because he turned around and looked in my direction – or what I thought was my direction.

  I humped my two cases on to a baggage cart and made my way toward the exit, although I couldn’t stop myself from looking back to see what the nun and the gray-bearded man were doing. She was probably a bona fide nun, and he was probably a priest who had come to collect her, and it was more than likely that they hadn’t even noticed me. Most likely I was suffering from nun-o-phobia, whatever the technical name for that is.

  As I pushed my way through the door, though, I saw them cross over to the information desk in the very far corner of the baggage hall. Already gathered around this desk were six or seven more nuns, also with their heads covered. As soon as they were joined by the gray-bearded man and the second nun that I had seen on the plane, they all hurried off together, as if somebody had clapped their hands to shoo away a flock of crows.

  I stood by the curb for a while with the sun in my eyes, wondering if I ought to forget about LA and book a flight straight to New York. At least I knew more people there. Maybe I could persuade Amelia to put me up a few days, if her husband didn’t object too vociferously. Amelia’s husband didn’t trust me with her, and frankly I don’t blame him.

  On the other hand, I was here now, and I was dog tired, and I wasn’t sure that my credit card could stretch to it. I also reasoned that if nuns were appearing in Coral Gables and nuns were appearing in Los Angeles, then it was perfectly possible that nuns were appearing in Manhattan, too. Maybe there was no getting away from them.

  Ambrose Avenue is three blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard, and Rick Beamer’s single-story house was on the right-hand side of North Edgemont Street, where the avenue starts to twist its way uphill.

  Chez Beamer was a shabby-looking building with loose shingles on the roof and a dilapidated porch. The faded gray paint on the clapboard was flaking, and the window frames were rotten. The front yard was overgrown and weedy, but the van that was parked on the sharply sloping driveway was immaculate, with shiny alloy wheels. It was a late-model Ford Transit painted metallic silver with pictures of hundreds of assorted bugs running up the sides – cockroaches and termites and wasps and fleas and bedbugs. In black lettering it announced ‘Beamer’s Bug & Termite Blitzers’. So it looked like the exterminator was at home.

  As soon as I climbed the creaking front steps to the porch, two dogs started furiously barking somewhere inside. A few seconds later the screen door opened and Rick appeared, with a Labrador Retriever and a German Shepherd both straining at their leashes. Rick was skinny as ever, although he looked much older and more wizened than when I had last seen him. As always, he was dressed in a skinny-fitting black shirt and spindly black jeans, with lots of silver junk around his neck, on chains.

  ‘Hey, Wizard, it’s you, man!’ he said, and then, to the dogs, ‘On jest przyjacielem! Przestan´ robic´ ten głupi hałas!’

  The dogs immediately stopped yapping and sat down beside him, their tongues hanging out like red flannel facecloths.

  I lugged my suitcases on to the porch. ‘Great-looking dogs, Rick. What did you just say to them?’

  ‘I told them to shut the fuck up. I bought them from this Polish guy. He trained them fantastic. They can sniff out anything. You could fart in a Tupperware box in Eureka and they’d smell it in San Diego. They cost me hardly nothing, but that was because he trained them in Polish, and I had to learn Polish dog commands. Przestan´ szczeka! That means, “Stop barking!”’

  ‘You haven’t changed, have you?’ I told him, patting the dogs on the top of their heads and tugging their ears. ‘Always find the most incredible bargains, don’t you, but there’s always some ridiculous snag. Remember those sneakers?’

  ‘Good to see you, too, Wizard, Don’t remind me of that, if you don’t mind. That was a freak of nature. Nobody could have foreseen that, not even you and your Tarot cards.’ He pronounced ‘Tarot’ to rhyme with ‘carrot’.

  Rick had bought into a scam whereby several thousand right-footed sneakers were imported from the Far East into New York, while their left-footed counterparts were imported into New Orleans. Both shipments had remained unclaimed until US Customs sold them off at auction, and Rick had bought them dirt cheap and without paying import taxes because none of them ostensibly made up a pair. The idea was to match them together and sell them at their usual retail price. That was the idea, anyhow, except that Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans and the container with all the left-footed sneakers had been washed out to sea, never to be seen again.

  ‘I got in touch with the Veteran’s Hospital, to see if they needed right-footed sneakers for guys who had lost their left leg in Afghanistan. They took two.’

  Rick helped me
to carry my suitcases inside. The living room was small and cramped, with a sagging brown couch that looked like a half-starved donkey and five ill-assorted plastic chairs that had probably been expropriated from various diners and college classrooms. The olive-green carpet was threadbare although it was partially covered by a rumpled red Navajo rug. Two framed posters hung on the walls – one for the Grateful Dead and another for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 election campaign.

  What hit me most of all, though, was the pungent smell of skunk and the woman who was sitting with her bare feet up on the couch smoking a joint. She was bleached-blonde and pretty in a strangely dated, puffy-faced way, like a 1960s’ movie starlet. Her enormous breasts were crowded into a tight red satin vest, and she was also wearing the shortest red-and-white striped shorts that I had ever seen.

  As I followed Rick into the living room she gave me a smile and wiggled her fingers and said, ‘Hi! You must be the Wizard! Welcome to LA, Wizard! I’m Dazey!’

  I went across to shake her hand, but she took hold of my sleeve and pulled me down toward her and gave me three lipsticky kisses, one on each cheek and then one on the mouth.

  ‘Are you going to tell my fortune for me?’ she asked, breathing marijuana breath right into my face. I could have gotten stoned just talking to her. ‘Rick says you can read Tarot cards. That is so cool.’

  ‘For sure, yes, I’ll tell your fortune for you, Dazey. Just give me a little time to settle in.’

  Rick showed me through to the room that I would be sharing with Dazey’s sister, Mazey. There was barely enough room for the two single beds, closet and dressing table underneath the window. The dressing table was cluttered with nail polish and powder compacts and jars of foundation and half-squeezed tubes of depilatory cream. One of the beds was unmade, with its pillow punched in and its sheet twisted, while the other was heaped with skirts and jeans and T-shirts and black lacy underwear.