Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You wouldn’t listen, would you?’ he said, as loudly and clearly as if he thought that she was still alive. ‘I asked you nicely, but you wouldn’t freaking listen. Well, what could I expect? You always were a stubborn bitch.’

  She stayed where she was, motionless, breathing as imperceptibly as she could. Her neck felt horribly bruised, and she hoped that he hadn’t damaged her larynx. She had known several patients whose larynges had been crushed in car accidents and who hadn’t been able to speak above a whisper for the rest of their lives, if at all.

  After what seemed like hours, but was probably less than a minute, she heard David walk out of the bedroom. She took six or seven really deep breaths, which clawed at her throat, but they gradually stopped her heart from palpitating and made her feel calmer. From the sound of it, David was dressing. She heard him sit down on the couch, presumably to lace up his shoes. After that there was silence from the next room, and she wondered if he had gone, although she hadn’t heard the door.

  You wouldn’t listen, he’d said. I asked you nicely, but you wouldn’t freaking listen. It seemed as if he’d come here with the express purpose of stopping her working on the BV-1 virus. But a dead man, sent by a mortician and by two Native American spirits? It all seemed like complete madness. On the other hand, she knew from her long experience with epidemics that viruses were exactly how David had described them – demons – and when demons appear, real or imaginary, they always bring madness in their wake. Illusions, or delusions, or psychosis, or utter insanity.

  She carefully lifted herself off the bed and tiptoed over to the bedroom door. She couldn’t see David in the living room, so he must have gone. Thank God – not that she believed in God. She didn’t think that God would have allowed her dead lover to come back to life and try to strangle her. Or maybe he would. Maybe that was why God had created us: to fight his demons for him.

  She needed to find an emergency room and have her larynx checked out. If David had damaged her vocal cords, she was in serious trouble. She crossed the living room to pick up her purse from where she had left it last night, beside the coffee table.

  She was halfway across the room when she froze. The doors to the balcony were open, and there was a cool early-morning breeze blowing in. Standing on the balcony in his dark suit was David, watching the sky gradually becoming lighter as sunrise approached. He had his back to her, so he hadn’t seen her, and even at this time of the morning there was traffic noise outside, so she was fairly sure that he hadn’t heard her, either.

  Very carefully, she picked up her purse and then began to tiptoe back toward the bedroom. She had only taken two or three steps, however, before David said, ‘Anna?’

  She stopped still. She waited. Maybe he had spoken her name simply because he was thinking about her. But when she took another step, he turned around and smiled at her and said, ‘Anna? You’re supposed to be dead.’

  So are you, she thought, although couldn’t say it out loud. All she could do was cough, and that was so painful that it brought tears to her eyes.

  ‘I can’t let you spoil everything, Anna. There’s too much at stake here. I’m sorry.’

  She glanced to her left, back toward the bedroom door. She wondered if she could reach it and slam it shut before David could catch up with her. Probably not, she thought. There was a large red armchair between her and the bedroom, and he would be able to cut her off before she had made her way around it.

  She quickly turned and looked behind her. She doubted if she could reach the front door, either. It was heavy, and the security chain was fastened, and it would take too many precious seconds to open it. He could easily seize her before she had managed to get away.

  David was leaning back against the balcony rail, almost casually, still smiling at her. ‘I’m giving you a choice, Anna, the same way I was given a choice. Life or death, that’s what they offered me, and I chose life. You can do the same.’

  Anna opened and closed her mouth, but she couldn’t answer him. What could she have said to him, in any event? I thought you loved me, but you tried to strangle me? Look at you standing there, so calm and confident and sure of yourself. You know that I can’t escape you. You’re not David. You may look like him on the outside, but there’s somebody else inside you.

  Get it out of me, you begged me, in the mortuary. Even in your casket you were pleading with me to get it out of you. But I couldn’t, and now it’s taken you over. And whoever you are, or whatever you are, you’re not the David I was in love with.

  ‘What’s it to be, then, sweetheart?’ said David.

  Anna took a step toward him, and then another. She lifted both her arms as if she were going to embrace him. He smiled even more broadly and lifted up his arms, too.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d see sense.’

  A car horn beeped below him in the hotel forecourt, and he turned his head to see who it was. Maybe he was expecting Brian Grandier to show up.

  Whatever it was that had distracted him, Anna took her chance and started to run toward him as fast as she could, as fast as she used to get off the starting-blocks for her high school athletics team. David turned back again as he realized what she was doing, but he was too late. She collided with him at full pelt and pitched him backward over the balcony rail.

  He frantically scrabbled at the air, but there was nothing to hold on to, nothing to stop him from dropping three stories down to the marble steps in front of the hotel. He hit them with a dull thud, like a sack of flour, and when Anna looked down she saw to her astonishment that he had burst apart. His dark suit was lying spreadeagled on the steps, but it appeared to be flat and almost empty, while out of the collar of his white shirt, a fine gray powder had fanned out into a star shape.

  She saw two of the hotel receptionists come out on to the steps and look down at David’s remains in horror. Then they looked up, toward her balcony. She knew that they had seen her, but she stepped backward into the living room, her heart beating hard, her hand held up to her aching throat.

  She had been right. That might have looked like David, but it was no more than David’s ashes brought back to life, by some incredible trickery, and the soul that had spoken out of his mouth had not been David’s soul.

  There was frantic knocking at her door. ‘Professor Grey! Professor Grey! Are you all right in there? Open the door, please, professor!’

  Anna turned around and went to the door. She managed to squeak, ‘I’m coming,’ although she doubted that they could hear her. She slid off the security chain and let them in.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The traffic on Sunset crawled along unbearably slowly. We didn’t get back to Rick’s house until early in the evening, and the sky had already turned that orangey-purple color. We were both tired and sweaty and out of sorts, and the first thing that Rick did was go to the fridge and take out two cans of Coors.

  We stood in the kitchen drinking them and saying nothing. Dazey came out of the bathroom and found us standing there and said, ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ said Rick.

  ‘Of course I want to know! What’s happened? You both look like somebody died!’

  ‘Somebody did,’ I told her. ‘Two people, in fact. The housekeeper from the Royaltie Hotel and her five-year-old son. They both contracted this infection that’s going around. We’ve spent most of the afternoon waiting around for the cops to talk to us, to make sure that we weren’t responsible, and then we had to go to the hospital to have a blood test, just to make sure that we hadn’t caught it.’

  ‘But you haven’t?’

  ‘Haven’t what?’ asked Rick, burping and punching his solar plexus with his fist.

  ‘Haven’t caught it! It’s terrible. Have you seen the news? People are falling down in the streets, and they’re barfing up blood all over the sidewalks. The last I heard, more than seven thousand people have gone down with it. Seven thousand! I mean, they’re dying like – I don’t know, what do you
call those flies that die?’

  ‘Flies, Daze, that’s what you call them,’ said Rick. And then, wearily, ‘Me and the Wizard, we were at the Valley Presbyterian Hospital. They was bringing in so many of those people, they had to lay them down on the floor, along the corridors. The nurse who took our blood samples said she didn’t know why she was bothering. That they wouldn’t be able to test them for weeks, and if we had caught it, we’d be dead by the time we found out the results.’

  ‘Maybe we should get out of town for a while,’ Dazey suggested. ‘You know, until it’s all over.’

  ‘It’s happening everywhere, Daze, from what the cops was saying to us. They got it in Portland, and Denver, and New Orleans, and St Louis. It’s sweeping through the whole goddamned nation. The way I see it, there’s no fucking point in getting out of town.’

  ‘So how do we keep ourselves from catching it? Did they say?’

  ‘I think the best thing you can do is stay here at home and sleep in your own bed,’ I told her. ‘I’m ninety-nine percent sure this disease is being spread by bedbugs.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure of that, too,’ said Rick. ‘I told you, didn’t I, that eight or nine years ago they was almost extinct. Now there’s billions of them. They didn’t used to give you nothing more than a whole lot of itchy bites, but now it looks like they’re carrying this infection.’

  I didn’t say anything about the nuns, or Matchitehew and Megedagik, and I very much doubt that Dazey would have understood me if I had. I didn’t really understand it myself, except that it was a way for the sons of Misquamacus to pay us palefaces back for killing their people and taking their land. Understandable, but you know the old saying about people who go looking for revenge? They need to dig two graves: one for their enemy, and one for themselves.

  ‘So maybe that was what killed Bobik?’ said Dazey. ‘That hotel you went to yesterday – that was crawling with bedbugs, wasn’t it? And Bobik was barfing up blood. Maybe he was bitten by bedbugs, but we couldn’t see the bites because of his hair.’

  ‘I don’t know, Daze,’ said Rick. ‘It could have been. Meantime, what have we got to eat? I’m starving.’

  ‘Nothing. We’ll have to have something delivered. How about Thai?’

  ‘Anything.’

  We collapsed in front of the TV, with Kleks sitting between us and noisily panting. We watched the news for a while, but it was all about the sickness that was causing people to hemorrhage and throw fits, and then die. A grim-faced spokesman for the Center for Disease Control said that nearly a quarter of a million Americans had already succumbed to it, and he expected to see thousands more deaths before they could bring it under control.

  ‘We have a highly qualified team of epidemiologists working on it right now, at our research laboratory in Downey, California. I can tell you that individual experts in public disease control have already made considerable progress toward understanding how this infection spreads, and how we can prevent it from spreading any further. We are confident that this team can soon come up with a cure.’

  Just then, Mazey came home, slamming the front door and walking into the living room blinking. ‘Hi, everybody! I’m back!’

  She was wearing a tight yellow sleeveless T-shirt with a picture of a tiger on it and a short white denim skirt that had creased to make it even shorter. She smelled of perfume and pot, and she was carrying her platform sandals over her shoulder, with her finger hooked into the straps. She dropped down next to me on the couch and wrapped her arm around my neck and breathed alcohol into my face – mojitos, at a guess. ‘Oh, Wizard, you’re so wizardly, did you know that?’

  ‘So where have you been, Maze?’ asked Rick, although he didn’t sound particularly interested in hearing the answer.

  ‘Sancho’s, on Santa Monica. But it was like a goddamn morgue in there. There was only about six customers in the whole place, and everybody was glued to the TV news. And it’s crazy out there! Ambulances speeding every which way. Olly didn’t show, like he’d promised, and Sylvia didn’t show either, and there was only this one guitarist singing all these miserable Mexican songs, so I called it a night.’

  ‘You want Thai food?’ asked Dazey. ‘I’m phoning our order right now.’

  ‘Urrgh, nothing, thanks. I’m feeling too pukish. I think I’ll just hit the sack for now.’ She leaned over, pressing her breast against my arm and giving me a sticky crimson kiss. ‘See you later, Wizard,’ she said, and then she pulled herself upright and walked across to our bedroom as if she were trying to keep her balance on a speeding train. She slammed that door behind her, too.

  ‘How about another brewski?’ asked Rick.

  ‘No – no thanks,’ I told him, nodding toward the bedroom door. ‘Tonight, I think it might be wise to stay reasonably sober.’

  ‘Hey, Daze! Didn’t you get through to the restaurant yet?’ Rick asked her. ‘Who you been calling?’

  Dazey was frowning at her phone. ‘Pink Pepper. That’s twice I’ve called them now, but nobody’s answering.’

  ‘How that can be?’ said Rick. ‘Are you sure you got the right number? Pink Pepper are usually so goddamned fast, they’re ringing the doorbell with your food before you’ve decided what you want to eat.’

  ‘No, no answer,’ said Dazey. ‘We’ll have to have Chinese instead.’

  She tried Kung Pao and Asakuma Rice and Sushiya, but again nobody picked up. Then she tried California Wings, but it was the same. It was like every delivery restaurant in Hollywood had gone dead.

  ‘This is like some end-of-the-world movie,’ said Rick. ‘Next thing we know, there’s going to be zombies dragging their feet through the streets.’

  It was dark now, and the feeling that the apocalypse had arrived was heightened by the endless shrieking of ambulance and police car sirens, and these were soon joined by the honking of fire trucks, too. It sounded like the whole city was in a panic.

  ‘I have pepperoni pizzas in the freezer,’ said Dazey.

  ‘OK,’ Rick told her.

  Dazey went through to the kitchen. She hadn’t seen his expression, but I could, and he was frowning. I don’t think I had ever seen him look so worried before, not about anything. Not even when some shaven-headed debt-collector twice his size had threatened to punch his teeth down his throat.

  He pushed Kleks off the couch so that he could lean over and talk to me sotto voce. ‘The fuck’s going on, man? This is getting scary. When you found that housekeeper and her kid, I thought, whoa, if she did get this from bedbugs, I’m going to do great business. Like, everybody’s going to want their home fumigated, aren’t they? But when we went to the hospital and saw all those scores of people jerking around like Mexican jumping-beans and bringing up all of that blood, and nobody knowing what the fuck to do to save them – I thought, man, this isn’t funny. If that’s what happens to you when you get bit by those bedbugs, I don’t want to be going anywhere near them.’

  He paused for a moment, shaking his head, and then he said, ‘Dazey could be right, and that’s what happened to Bobik. I think I’m going to go through Kleks’s hair with a flea comb, just to make sure that he didn’t pick any up.’

  ‘How about waiting until we’ve eaten our pizzas?’ I asked him.

  That night, Mazey snored even more loudly than she had before. Not only that, she kept twisting herself up in her sheets and muttering to herself. I didn’t go to sleep right away. I was too stressed after my discovery that morning of Maria Escamilla’s body, crawling with blowflies, and I couldn’t erase the picture from my mind of her young son’s blue sneaker protruding from behind the couch. His name, it had turned out, was Feliciano, which means ‘lucky’.

  I sat up in bed for an hour with Rick’s laptop, trying to find out more about Matchitehew and Megedagik and all of that stuff that Father Zapata had told me about the nuns of Loudun being possessed by demons.

  According to the legends, Matchitehew was a young hunter who shared some of his meager bag of deer meat with a hungr
y stranger he met in the forest. The stranger was actually Wisakachek, a shape-shifting spirit who could transform himself into a wolf. In return for Matchitehew’s generosity, Wisakachek endowed him with the same shape-shifting power that he had, so that on his hunting expeditions Matchitehew could become a wolf and catch many more deer than he could with his bow and arrows. The only condition was that in his wolf-like form he was not allowed to harm any humans.

  It was the same old story, however. One day Matchitehew lost his temper with a friend, turned himself into a wolf and tore his friend apart. Wisakachek was furious and not only banished Matchitehew into the forest, but also took away his shape-shifting powers, so that he was an ordinary man by day and a mindless wolf by night. Some Native American tribes call Matchitehew the Father of Wolves – in fact, the very first werewolf.

  I found out, too, that the name Matchitehew means ‘evil-hearted’, which didn’t surprise me – what with the b.s. he had told me about his father, Misquamacus, not being such a vengeful old wonder-worker after all.

  I couldn’t discover too much in the way of mythology about his brother Megedagik, except that he never gave his enemies any mercy and slaughtered them as painfully and viciously as he could. In Algonquin, his name simply means ‘kills many’. One of his specialties was chopping off his victims’ genitals and stuffing them down their throats until they choked. Now I began to understand what had happened to Father Zapata.

  Whatever the legends said about them, both Matchitehew and Megedagik were the sons of Misquamacus, and whatever shamanistic powers they had, they had inherited them from him. Misquamacus had been in direct touch with the Great Old Ones, who had ruled the world in the time before time, and it was those ancient gods who had made him the most fearsome wonder-worker ever.