Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  Kleks looked up from his basket. Rick forked up the last of his omelet, pushed aside his empty plate and then went across to give Kleks a toweling on the head. ‘How are you doing, boy? You OK? It don’t look like you’re going to get sick, thank the Lord. You want to come hunting for some bugs? That’s it! Let’s go get them pluskwy, boy!’

  Rick went to smarten himself up while I helped Mazey to clear up the dishes.

  ‘Why are you so tense?’ she said. ‘You’re really worried about something, aren’t you?’

  I smiled at her and shook my head. ‘You’re doing that perceptive thing on me again, aren’t you? I’m supposed to be the one who can read people’s minds.’

  ‘Oh, I’m no mind-reader,’ she said. ‘But I’ve known enough men to know when something’s eating them, and I don’t mean me.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I admitted. ‘I am kind of edgy.’

  ‘You want to tell me why? Is it that priest thing you were talking about last night?’

  ‘Partly. But I don’t really understand what it is, not yet, and if the angels are looking after me I’ll never have to. Let’s put it this way: a few weird things happened to me in the not-too-distant past, and I’m worried there might be an action replay.’

  ‘Weird things like what?’

  I dropped the last of the knives and forks into the dishwasher, and then I looked up at Mazey and said, ‘Do you believe that people can come alive again, once they’re dead?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t.’

  ‘Well, neither did I. But they do.’

  Mazey looked at me sharply, as if she were making sure that I wasn’t making fun of her. ‘You’re kidding me. Dead people come alive again? And that’s what’s bugging you?’

  I nodded.

  Mazey came up to me and put her arms around my waist. ‘You remember what I said about us being friends? I meant it, Harry. You can rely on me, I promise. So if weird things do start happening, you can tell me about it. I promise I’ll believe you, even if nobody else does.’

  ‘I don’t think you quite get it,’ I said. ‘If the same kind of weird things start happening that happened before, you won’t need me to tell you about it. You’ll know. You think nine/eleven was a disaster? Well, it was. But imagine a thousand nine/elevens. Imagine ten thousand nine/elevens.’

  ‘Harry, you’re scaring me.’

  ‘I think you have good reason to feel scared. I know I am.’

  ‘I’m not scared of all of these nine/elevens, Harry. I’m frightened for you.’

  ‘You’re frightened for me? Why?’

  ‘I really, really like you, Harry. You know that. But I think you’re losing it. In fact, I think you’re nuts.’

  ‘It’s bedbugs again,’ said Rick, holding up his Android tablet with his right hand while he was steering with his left.

  ‘Looks like the bedbugs are taking over,’ I told him. ‘Watch out for that bus.’

  The Royaltie Inn was located about three blocks east of the San Diego Freeway at the intersection of Sepulveda Boulevard and Valerio Street. It looked as if it had been designed to resemble a half-timbered Tudor mansion from merrie old England, but by an architect who had never actually seen a half-timbered Tudor mansion and had only had one described to him over the phone.

  Rick parked around the corner to save the owners any embarrassment. We walked into the oak-paneled reception area with Kleks following behind us. There was a fake suit of armor standing in one corner and two crossed broadswords on the wall behind the desk.

  A thin woman in a pale-green suit came out of a side door. She looked nervy and underfed, as if she never had the time to sit down to a meal and when she did she didn’t have the appetite to eat anything. Her bleached-blonde hair was stuck up with hairspray, like a yellow chrysanthemum that was starting to shed its petals.

  ‘Rick Beamer,’ said Rick, handing her his business card. ‘We’ve come about the you-know-whats.’

  ‘Oh, yes, oh,’ she said, wringing her hands together so that her charm bracelet jingled on her skinny wrist. ‘You’d better follow me.’

  She led us along a paneled corridor to a suite at the back of the hotel. The bedroom was paneled too, with a Tudor-style four-poster bed, a huge tapestry couch and two huge armchairs. Diamond-leaded windows looked out over a sunlit balcony and the bright-blue hotel swimming-pool. On the wall hung portraits of Henry VIII and a plain-looking woman that must have been one of his wives before she and her head went different ways. I could smell floor polish and potpourri, but something else, too – that distinctive raspberry smell of bedbugs.

  ‘My housekeeper came to me yesterday afternoon,’ said the skinny woman. ‘This suite hasn’t been occupied for the past three days, but it was booked for tonight and Saturday, and so she wanted to make sure that everything was in order. She lifted the bedcover, and – well, you can see for yourselves.’

  Kleks was making that keening noise in the back of his throat, and his tail was thrashing from side to side. If Rick hadn’t had his leash wrapped around his fist, he probably would have leaped on to the bed and torn the sheets to shreds.

  Rick gave me a nod, and I gingerly lifted the heavy brocade bedcover. The blankets and the pillows underneath it were swarming with bedbugs, and the sheets were dotted all over with thousands of tiny brown droppings. It was like Bedbug City at rush hour.

  ‘My housekeeper had one of the girls vacuum-clean it,’ the skinny woman told us. ‘I thought that would have gotten rid of them, but no. It was only three or four hours and they were back again – even more than before. I was frightened to take the mattress and the bedding out of here in case they dropped along the corridor while we were carrying them out and spread to the other suites.’

  ‘OK,’ said Rick. ‘First of all we’ll fumigate this room for you, and while that’s taking effect we’ll check out the rest of the hotel, top to bottom. If there’s any more bedbugs anywhere at all, Kleks will sniff them out, won’t you, boy?’

  Kleks made that creaking noise in the back of his throat and thrashed his tail even harder.

  ‘Ever had an infestation here before?’ asked Rick.

  ‘No, never. Well, not that I know of. I only took over this place three months ago. My housekeeper would know, although she didn’t mention it.’

  ‘Is she here now?’

  The skinny woman shook her head. ‘She didn’t show up for work today. I don’t know why because she hasn’t called in. I tried phoning her, but I got no answer.’

  ‘Who was the last person to occupy this room?’ I put in.

  ‘The very last people in the world who would have been carrying bedbugs, I would have thought. They were nuns.’

  ‘Nuns? Where did they come from, do you know?’

  ‘I have no idea. A man brought them in and left them here, and the next morning he came back and settled their check. I never spoke to them, and in any case their faces were covered, so you couldn’t even see what they looked like.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to check your guests’ identity?’

  ‘They were nuns.’

  ‘The man who brought them in – what did he look like?’

  ‘Perfectly normal. Gray hair, gray suit, really quite smart.’

  ‘Did he have a beard?’

  ‘Yes, he did, now you mention it.’

  Rick said, ‘What are you getting at, man? You think he might have been carrying in bedbugs in his beard?’

  I ignored him. ‘Can you tell me the man’s name?’ I asked the skinny woman. ‘And any contact details, if you have them.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I’m sure you understand that we have to keep guest information confidential.’

  ‘Can you at least tell us where your housekeeper lives?’

  ‘What? Why do you want to know that?’

  ‘I think she may be very sick, that’s why. I think these bedbugs may be carrying some kind of disease and she’s caught it. You need to stay out of this room, and don’t let any of
your staff in here, either.’

  Rick said, ‘Aren’t you kind of jumping to conclusions here, man? As far as we know, the lady’s just pulling a sneaky Ferris Bueller.’

  ‘If I’m wrong, Rick, I’ll be the first to admit it. But why don’t you start fumigating this room, while I go around and check if she’s OK?’

  The skinny woman looked more bewildered than alarmed, but she said, ‘All right. Come with me and I’ll find her address for you.’

  We went back to Rick’s van so that Rick could take out his bottles of Vikane bug fumigant, Nylofume bags and the door seals that would prevent the gas from escaping out of the bedroom. Then he handed me the keys and Kleks’ leash and told me that if I damaged his van or lost his sniffer dog that he wouldn’t complain. He would just kill me without saying a word.

  The housekeeper’s name was Maria Escamilla, and she lived not too far away from the Royaltie Inn in a short dead-end street called Enadia Way. I took a couple of wrong turns, and it didn’t help my concentration to have Kleks panting dog saliva against the back of my neck, but I found it eventually.

  I climbed out of the van, and the street was hot and quiet. Maria Escamilla’s house was a small single-story property painted lemon yellow, with a dusty green Equinox parked in the driveway. As I mounted the steps to the porch, I noticed that the flowery living-room drapes were closed. If Maria Escamilla was at home, it looked like she was still asleep, or maybe she had a migraine and wanted to keep out the sunlight. I pressed the doorbell and heard it chime inside the house.

  No answer. I pressed it again and waited. Kleks was sitting in the driving seat of the van staring at me with his tongue hanging out. I gave him a wave, and he barked. I was almost growing to like that dog.

  I tried the bell a third time and gave a sharp postman’s knock, but another minute went by without an answer, and if Maria Escamilla had heard me, she obviously wasn’t going to come to the door. I thought about giving up and driving back to the Royaltie, but those tightly drawn living-room drapes worried me – that, and the fact that a vehicle was still parked in the driveway.

  I looked up and down the street. There was nobody in sight apart from a small boy circling around and around on a tricycle, so I stepped down from the porch and made my way around the side of the house. A narrow concrete path led to the back yard, which was mostly paved over with brick. It was crowded with purple flowering shrubs in barrels, six white plastic garden chairs and a clothes dryer with three blue Royaltie Inn aprons hanging from it, as well as a cream linen dress and two very large white brassieres.

  Three concrete steps led up to the kitchen door. The door itself was half-open, so Maria Escamilla must still be at home. I went up to the door, knocked on the window and called out, ‘Maria Escamilla! Maria Escamilla! Anyone at home?’

  I pushed the door open a little further, and now I could hear a TV. It must have been tuned to a comedy show, because every now and then I could hear a muffled burst of laughter.

  ‘Maria Escamilla! Are you at home? I’ve come from the Royaltie Inn, just to check that you’re OK!’

  It was then that I heard another sound, apart from the laughter. A persistent zizz-zizz-zizz noise, as if one of the neighbors was trimming a hedge. I opened the door as far as it would go, so that I could see through the kitchen into the corridor that led to the front door. The air was filled with a blizzard of blowflies. They were swarming in and out of the living room and crawling up the walls and clinging to the light-fitting so that it was glittering black.

  I stood at that open kitchen door, and I didn’t know what I should do next. I could guess what I would find if I went inside and took a look into the living room, and you can’t even begin to imagine how much I didn’t want to. But I knew that I had to. I had been visited by the nuns and the sons of Misquamacus and told to warn the people of America that they were going to get sick, but of course I hadn’t even attempted to, and now they were getting sick. I felt guilty and helpless, both at the same time. How can you convince people that the end of the world is coming, even when you’re sure that it really, really might be?

  I hesitated a few moments longer, but then I thought: just do it. I stepped into the kitchen and crossed over to the door that led to the corridor. As I reached it there was another burst of studio laughter from the television, but the buzzing of the blowflies was so loud that I could barely hear anything else. I had to bat them away with my hands as I approached the living room, but they kept flying into my face and into my hair and crawling down the back of my neck.

  Because the drapes were drawn, the inside of the living room was gloomy and airless, and it was filled with a rotten, sweet smell that made my stomach contract. My mouth was flooded with warm orange juice and half-digested omelet.

  For at least ten seconds I stood in the doorway, swallowing and swallowing and trying my best not to bring up my breakfast. On the other side of the living room a repeat of Two And A Half Men was flickering on the television, and I made myself stare at Charlie Sheen until my stomach had stopped heaving. Several blowflies flew right into my eyes, and two or three of them tried to land on my lips, so that I had to spit them away.

  Brushing even more of them off my shirt and my pants, I finally summoned up the nerve to look around the door and see what had attracted so many of them.

  Lying on the couch under the window was the figure of a woman, who appeared to be made entirely of shiny green and blue blowflies. They were crawling all over her in an endless rippling motion, so that she appeared to be stirring like a dreamer in some hellish kind of sleep from which she could never wake up. At the same time, her facial expressions appeared to be constantly changing as the blowflies clustered around her eyes and her mouth. I could almost have believed as I first looked around the door that she was smiling at me, as if to say, look, death and putrescence aren’t nearly so bad as I thought they were going to be … in fact, I’m enjoying it. But then she looked as if she was frowning and growing angry at being dead.

  I went up to the couch and stood over her. I didn’t have much doubt that she was Maria Escamilla, the housekeeper, but I picked up a dog-eared copy of Fama magazine from the coffee table, folded it up, and used it to flap away the blowflies that masked her face. A small cloud of them irritably rose into the air, and sure enough, I was looking at a plump, fortyish Hispanic woman with heavy curved eyebrows. She seemed to be looking back at me, although her open eyes were filled with scores of blowfly eggs, like grains of rice, and her lips were speckled, too.

  I stopped swishing the Fama magazine from side to side and stepped back. As soon as I did so the blowflies immediately came back and covered her face. My stomach tightened up again, and I turned to leave the living room, but when I did I saw a leg protruding from the space between the couch and the wall under the window. A child’s leg, with a small blue sneaker on its foot.

  I leaned sideways so that I could see into the narrow gap behind the couch. A small boy was lying there – at least, I assumed he was a boy because his sneaker was blue. It was impossible to tell for sure because he, too, was thickly blanketed in blowflies. It looked as if Maria Escamilla had brought some of the bedbugs home with her, or maybe the sickness that they had given her was infectious.

  I left the living room and went outside. Kleks was waiting for me in the driver’s seat, and he barked impatiently when I reappeared around the side of the house. I had the feeling that if I had left the keys in the ignition, he would have driven off without me.

  I took out my cell and punched out 911.

  ‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’ the operator asked me.

  If only I could have told her. The spirits of two Native American wonder-workers are spreading a disease that could wipe out thousands, maybe even millions. Instead, I said, ‘I’ve found some dead people. A woman and a child. Fifteen-fifty-five Enadia Way.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re dead?’

  ‘Oh, yes. They’re dead all right.’ I looked at Kleks, and
he looked at me. ‘Where’s this going to end, Kleks?’ I asked him, but he didn’t answer. Didn’t even whine. Then I remembered that Kleks didn’t speak English.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Anna was annoyed because Jim had allowed her to sleep until well past nine in the morning.

  ‘I told you wanted to make an early start,’ she told him as he poured her coffee in the kitchen. ‘Before I do anything else, I have to arrange for an exterminator to get rid of those disgusting bedbugs.’

  Jim had just taken a shower and was wearing a silky black Japanese-style bathrobe with a red dragon emblazoned on the back. ‘You had a hell of a day yesterday, Anna, and your night was even worse. A couple of hours isn’t going to make any difference.’

  ‘Jim, those creatures are not just revolting. If they’re carrying the same kind of pathogen that infected David, they could be highly dangerous, too.’

  ‘Sure. I know. I’ll call Sandra, my PA. She can fix it for you. We had roaches in the hospital kitchens last summer, and she found some really good pest control company.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Anna. ‘But it’s not only that. I urgently need to get back into the lab. We’re right on the brink of finding out why the Meramac School virus behaves the way it does, and it’s critical that we isolate this bedbug virus before it starts spreading any further.’

  She paused while she poured cream into her coffee and stirred it, and then she said, ‘I know you think that I’ve been letting my imagination run away with me, but I still think that this bedbug virus is more than just a couple of random outbreaks.’

  Jim sat down next to her. ‘Anna, what did I say to you yesterday? I’m not going to insist that you take any time out. I need your expertise, and I need it badly. But I don’t want to see you cracking up. Nuns, Indian medicine men. I mean, you’re getting very close to the edge here, sweetheart.’

  ‘Maybe I am. But maybe it’s not stress at all. Maybe it’s my intuition, trying to show me something that my rational self might have been blind to.’

  Jim shrugged. ‘OK … You could be right. When I first started here in St Louis I diagnosed a patient as having multiple sclerosis. I was convinced it was MS. But the same night I had a nightmare that I was crossing a desert with this guy and we were dying of thirst.’