Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Don’t take any notice of the mess!’ called Dazey. ‘Mazey had to go out in a hurry this morning. I’ll help her to tidy up when she gets back.’

  ‘She doesn’t mind me sharing with her?’ I called back.

  ‘So long as you don’t snore!’

  ‘No, I don’t snore. Leastways, I don’t think I do. Nobody has ever complained.’

  Rick lifted his skinny tattooed wrist and checked his heavy stainless-steel watch. ‘Listen, Wizard, you only just caught me. I have an appointment at eight. Why don’t you stay here and make yourself at home, and we can catch up when I get back. I’m checking out the Elite Suites just off of Franklin. It’s not too far away, so I won’t be long.’

  We went back into the living room, and the two dogs immediately came up to him, their tails wagging, panting with anticipation.

  ‘OK, Bobik – OK, Kleks! Let’s go sniff out those nasty bugs, shall we?’

  ‘I thought you had to talk to them in Polish,’ I said.

  ‘It works both ways. They’ve learned the word “bug”.’ Rick picked up a gray taffeta windbreaker from the back of one of the chairs. It had the silhouette of a giant cockroach on the back and the white letters ‘BBTB’. On his way out of the front door, with the dogs almost tripping him up, he lifted a gray baseball cap off the peg and pulled it down over his wiry gray pompadour.

  I looked around. Dazey was taking another deep drag on her joint, with her eyes half-closed.

  ‘Hey, Rick, why don’t I come with you?’ I said. ‘I’d like to see you in action.’

  ‘Sure. I thought you’d be too tired, is all.’

  He opened the back doors of his van so that Bobik and Kleks could jump inside, and then we climbed in, too.

  ‘I was going to get a night porter’s job at the Magnolia Hotel,’ Rick told me as we backed down his driveway and turned down North Edgemont. ‘I was early for the interview, so I went down the alley at the side for a smoke. These two exterminators had their van parked out back, and I got talking to them – me being in the bug business once upon a time. They said that the Magnolia had called them in because of bedbugs.’

  ‘Bedbugs? I thought the Magnolia was pretty upscale.’

  ‘It is. But bedbugs don’t make no social distinctions. So long as they can find a nice cozy box mattress to make their home in, they don’t care if it’s in some doss-house for down-and-outs or the Hotel Bel-Air. There’s no reverse snobbery in bedbug world.’

  ‘I guess not. But you don’t expect a hotel like the Magnolia to be riddled with bedbugs.’

  ‘Hey – like I say, there’s a plague of bedbugs sweeping across the country. They’re getting in everywhere you can think of – hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, people’s private homes. They don’t get put off by class.’

  ‘Jesus. So that’s why you decided to go back into the extermination business?’

  ‘Well, not really. It was the dogs, more than anything else. Those two guys at the Magnolia showed me their sniffer dogs and explained how brilliant they were at locating bedbug infestations. They said that they were making a fortune out of these dogs because they could sniff out any kind of bug you could think of, from roaches to termites to wood-boring beetles, and yet the only wages they ever needed were a pat on the snout and a daily can of Blue Buffalo.’

  He paused for a moment, screwing his head around almost 180 degrees so that he could follow a girl in a tight pair of white jeans cycling out of Sun Cleaners.

  Then he said, ‘I didn’t think nothing of it until about three weeks later when I was sitting in a bar on Sunset and this Polish guy comes in and asks the barkeep if he knows anybody who wants a couple of dogs. He has to go back to Poland because his mom’s sick or something, and he needs to find a home for them quick. We got talking, and it turns out his dogs were sniffer dogs – specifically trained to smell out unwelcome bugs. I said, “Bedbugs?” and he said, “Sure,” so I gave him a hundred bucks for the two of them, then and there. And that’s how I started BBTB.’

  ‘I still can’t believe you’re using dogs to smell out bedbugs.’

  ‘Come on, Wizard, they use dogs to check for drugs and explosives at airports, don’t they? Sniffer dogs can follow somebody’s trail for miles, just because they left a sock behind and the dogs can identify the scent. You can find bedbugs with high-speed gas chromatography, but the quickest and the cheapest and the most efficient way is still dogs. Dogs can smell a hundred thousand times better than we can, man. We only have about five million smell receptors, but dogs have anything up to two hundred fifty million. A dog can smell a human fingerprint that’s a week old.’

  ‘So, how’s business?’

  ‘Not too bad. Not terrific, not yet. But it’s getting better all the time. My problem now is that I need to expand. Right now, I’m getting a whole lot of inquiries, but I have to turn them down. I need more staff, at least two more vehicles, and most of all I need some serious investment.’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ I told him. ‘I could barely rake enough money together to get here.’

  We turned off Franklin Avenue into North Wilton Place, a quiet street of small hotels and private houses. When we reached the Elite Eco-Suites, Rick called the front desk on his cellphone and they opened up the automatic gate of the underground parking facility.

  ‘That’s the first lesson: be discreet,’ said Rick as we drove down into the neon-lit gloom. ‘The last thing any hotel wants is to have an exterminator’s van standing outside.’ He parked, and then he said, ‘Why don’t you come upstairs with me – see me and the dogs at work? Maybe I can rope you into help. You know, like instead of rent.’

  ‘Did I ever charge you rent?’ I retorted. ‘Did I ever make you tell old ladies’ fortunes to pay for all those pizzas and beer you went through?’

  ‘Hey, Wizard, I’m only kidding. But come up, anyhow. What are you going to do – sit here playing Super Mario Brothers for the next half-hour?’

  We went up to the reception area in the elevator, with the dogs’ tails beating against our shins. We were greeted at the desk by a short tubby man with slicked-back black hair and a sweeping-brush moustache. He looked around furtively to make sure that there were no guests within sight, and then he beckoned us over to the elevator.

  ‘One of our guests came down this morning and complained that he got bit all over,’ he said. ‘He went to the pharmacy for something to stop the itching, and when he came back he said that the pharmacist had told him he had bedbug bites.’ As we reached the second floor, and the elevator doors opened, he threw up his hands and said, ‘Bedbugs! Here! I can’t believe it. We’ve never had bedbugs before. Roaches, sure. Everyone gets roaches. But bedbugs! We’re going to be ruined if this gets out.’

  He bustled along the corridor ahead of us and led us to a room at the back of the building. He unlocked the door and said, ‘Here – help yourself. I can’t go in there. Bedbugs! It makes me shudder just to think of them!’

  Rick let the dogs off the leash and said, ‘Hajda! Znalez´c´ kilka owadów dla taty!’

  The Labrador turned around and stared at him, as if it didn’t understand what he meant.

  ‘Bugs, you dumb dog!’ he snapped. ‘Go find daddy some bugs!’

  Both dogs immediately trotted off in the direction of the bedroom.

  Rick said, ‘It’s my crappy Polack accent. Maybe I should go to night school, but I don’t think they run any courses in Polish Canine Conversation.’

  While the dogs were sniffing around, I took a look at the apartment. It was a typical Hollywood self-catering suite, with a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom, and a balcony overlooking the lamplit back yard. It was designed to be eco-friendly, so it had bamboo towels and organic bath oils and a sound machine that made whale noises. It smelled of bamboo and incense, and to tell you the truth it may have been pretentious, but it was very peaceful, very Zen. It would have been ideal for me, if I had been able to afford $165 a night, every night.

  The d
ogs started barking in the bedroom, so we followed them in there. They were snuffling around the end of the king-sized bed.

  ‘Good boys,’ said Rick. ‘Dobrzy chłopcy!’

  I looked at the woven bamboo-green bedcover. ‘I don’t see anything.’

  Rick lifted the bedcover and tugged out the sheet underneath it, exposing the cream-colored mattress. At one end, it was speckled with dozens of minuscule brown dots. ‘There you are – bedbug shit. And if we dig a little further …’

  He lifted the seam of the mattress with his thumb, and I saw that seven or eight tiny bedbugs were scurrying along it.

  ‘It don’t look like this particular infestation has been here too long,’ Rick remarked. ‘You can smell ’em, though, can’t you, now that you’re close? Bedbugs always smell like rotten raspberries, except when they’ve really taken a hold for a while, and then they smell like old men’s piss.’ He reached into the pocket of his jeans and took out a clasp knife. Sticking the point into the seam of the mattress, about halfway along, he made a deep cut all the way back to the corner. Bobik and Kleks grew even more excited, and Kleks began to jump up and down.

  ‘They love their bugs, these two boys,’ said Rick. ‘They know that if they find bugs, they’re going to get a dog choc.’ He opened up the incision he had made in the mattress and held it apart as wide as he could. Inside, it was teeming with hundreds of bedbugs, maybe even thousands. They swarmed all over each other, trying desperately to escape from the light and to bury themselves in the depths of the fluffy kapok stuffing. ‘Shee-it,’ said Rick. ‘This is a whole lot more than I thought we’d find. One heck of a whole lot more.’

  ‘What now?’ I asked him.

  He let the mattress drop back down. ‘Cypermethrin. It’s a pretty standard neurotoxin, kills most bugs, and it’ll kill off these little bastards. But we also need to fumigate the rest of this apartment, not just the bedroom. Whoever brought these in here, they could have dropped their eggs just about anyplace. Out of their clothes, out of their luggage. We’ll have to check the other apartments, too, on either side.’

  He went back out into the corridor. The manager was still standing there, looking anxious. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Do we have them, or don’t we?’

  ‘Oh, you got them, sir,’ Rick told him. ‘You got them in spades.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. Where did they come from? Our guests are always very clean, very respectable. We never allow no vagrants in here.’

  ‘That makes no difference,’ said Rick. ‘Your common bedbug will hitch a ride on anyone and anything. I once found bedbugs in a Louis Vuitton keepall, which probably cost more than two-and-a-half thousand bucks. Tell me, sir – did you receive any complaints about this suite before this last guest?’

  ‘No, never. None at all.’

  ‘I guess you have a record, though, of everybody who stayed here? The point is, if we’re aware that somebody is likely to be carrying bedbugs on their person, we have an obligation to notify the LA Department of Public Health.’

  The manager looked uneasy. ‘I don’t see how it’s possible.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Rick. ‘Anybody can carry bedbugs on them, adult bedbugs or eggs. The President could be carrying bedbugs; he sleeps in enough different hotels. The pop star Miley Cyrus could be carrying bedbugs, although God knows where.’

  ‘We never had Miley Cyrus stay here,’ said the manager.

  ‘I know you didn’t. But who was the previous guest, before the guy who got bit?’

  ‘Like I told you, it’s not possible. You couldn’t have gotten more respectable than these two. They were nuns.’

  SEVENTEEN

  It was another hot, thunder-grumbly morning when Anna arrived with Jim Waso for David’s funeral service. Toward the east, storm clouds were hanging over the city, thick and gray and ragged, but the Gateway Arch and the downtown skyscrapers were all picked out by a few stray rays of sunlight, like shining memorials.

  Outside the Grandier Funeral Chapel, the parking lot was crowded. David’s family had all arrived from Iowa, as well as his colleagues from St Louis Design Solutions and twenty or thirty college friends. As Anna walked toward the entrance, the hearse arrived outside, speckled with raindrops from the storm that hadn’t reached here yet. She stood with Jim Waso by her side as the casket was rolled out and on to a gurney, and then lifted by the pall-bearers and carried inside. The casket was heaped with white lilies, and also carried a message that Anna had written. Too Soon, My Darling.

  Inside the chapel’s reception area, Brian Grandier was waiting to meet her, his hands clasped piously together. He was dressed in the same gray suit as before, although now he was wearing a black armband. ‘A sad day, Professor Grey,’ he told her. ‘You have my deepest sympathies.’

  Anna nodded, but said nothing. There was still something about him which made her feel irritated and unsettled. Maybe it was the way that the look in his eyes appeared to be so much at odds with the words that came out of his mouth. She had seen men look at her like that before: men who thought that they could have her, in spite of her standing in the medical profession. So she’s a professor? She’s still a woman and I’m still a man and I could make her scream for more.

  Inside the chapel, David’s casket had been placed on a catafalque, with a framed photograph of him standing beside it. The sound system was playing the soothing second movement from Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Anna walked to the front of the chapel to take her seat. The piano music was punctuated by occasional sobs.

  She was barely aware of the service passing, or the tributes that David’s family and friends paid to him. She stood to sing the hymn, but the words in the order of service were too blurred for her to be able to read them. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the casket, and she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that David was inside it, her David. He was lying there so close to her, and yet he was dead.

  At the end of the service, Brian Grandier had told her that the catafalque would slowly roll back, and that heavy blue velvet drapes would be drawn across, like the end of a theatrical performance. ‘It represents the end of the drama that was somebody’s life.’ However, she had asked him to give her a few moments beside the casket before this happened, so that she could say a last goodbye.

  Organ music played softly in the background as she stood up and walked across to the casket, her heels clicking on the chapel floor. David’s face was smiling at her from the framed photograph that stood beside it. She could even remember the morning when that photograph was taken.

  ‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ she said, laying her hand on top of the casket, among the lilies. ‘What am I going to do without you?’ Her eyes filled up with tears, but she did nothing to stop them sliding down her cheeks. Her throat was clenched so tightly that she could barely speak. ‘We were going to be married. We were going to have children. We were going to do so much together. All those days of dancing and laughing … they’re gone now, all of them, but they never even arrived.’ She closed her eyes. She couldn’t think of anything more to say to him, except goodbye.

  As she stood there, she heard a sharp rapping sound. Two knocks, then a single knock, then another three knocks. The last three sounded almost frantic.

  She opened her eyes and looked around. There was nobody standing within twenty feet of her. But then she heard the rapping sound again – knock, knock – knock – knock, knock, knock!

  Surely, she thought, surely it can’t be coming from the casket.

  She looked across at Brian Grandier. He was standing beside the lectern from which David’s relatives had been reading from the Bible and paying their personal tributes. He had the same expression on his face. You may think you know something, lady, but you know nothing at all.

  She opened and closed her mouth. She was about to call him over and ask him if he could hear the rapping sound, when there was another flurry of knocks.

  Then, faintly but distinctly, she heard David’s voice. It sen
t a cold crawling sensation all the way up her back.

  ‘Get it out of me! Please, I can’t stand it! Get it out of me!’

  Anna turned back to Brian Grandier, aghast. ‘He’s alive!’ she said.

  ‘Anna! Get it out of me! Please!’

  ‘He’s alive!’ screamed Anna. ‘He’s still alive!’

  She swept her arm across the top of the casket so that all the lilies were scattered across the floor. She gripped the edge of the lid and tried to lift it up, but it was firmly screwed down.

  ‘David! David!’ she cried. ‘It’s all right, darling, I can hear you! I can hear you!’ Then – to Brian Grandier, ‘Open this casket! Get it open, quick! He’s still alive!’

  The chapel echoed with gasps and chairs shuffling and mourners saying, ‘What? What’s happening?’ Brian Grandier came stalking across from the lectern, while David’s father and mother left their seats and came up to the catafalque, too. David’s mother Jean put her arm around Anna and said, ‘You heard him? I can’t believe it! You actually heard him?’

  ‘He was knocking!’ sobbed Anna. ‘He was knocking! He knocked again and again, and then he called out to me! Quick! Open it up! Open it up. He’s still alive in there, and he could be suffocating!’

  Brian Grandier said, ‘My dear professor – please – I can assure you one hundred percent that he has passed! I oversaw the preparation for his cremation myself. There is absolutely no question that he can still be alive.’

  ‘I heard him!’ Anna screeched at him. ‘I heard him! He’s alive! Open this casket now!’

  Brian Grandier turned to David’s father. ‘Sir – I appeal to you. This is most distressing, but your son is dead. Professor Grey saw him herself in the morgue at SLU, and she knows that there has been a full post-mortem. It is impossible that he is alive.’

  ‘Oh, so I’m going mad, am I?’ Anna demanded. ‘I was hearing things, just now? I imagined I heard knocking inside of that casket, did I? I imagined I heard David calling out to me?’