Blind Panic (31 page)

The president said, “Wow. You know your stuff, Mrs. Carlsson.”

“She’s the best there is,” I told him. “If anybody deserves medals for what happened here this evening, it’s Tyler and Amelia.”

“But what does this mean? Do I have to go around the country, shaking the hands of every blinded person there is? There must be hundreds of thousands of them!”

Amelia shook her head. “The cure passes from one person to another. It’s what we call a chain spell. All you have to do is announce that every formerly blinded person in the country should shake the hand of another blinded person.”

The president nodded. “So we can heal ourselves?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President. We can heal ourselves.”

We spent most of the night telling President Perry about Misquamacus and his repeated attempts to destroy the invaders who had taken away his land and obliterated his culture. A little before dawn, he stood up, shook our hands, and said, “Thankyou for everything. I believe this country owes you. It’s going to take a hell of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of money for us to get back to business as usual, but we will. Then I think I have some Russians to talk to.”

It was raining again, but only lightly, when his motorcade drove off, and the red and blue flashing lights of his Escalades were reflected on the asphalt.

Amelia and I sat down at the kitchen table with Belinda Froggatt and had a breakfast of smoked ham and apples from the orchard. Afterward, we went outside and stood by the orchard gate. The rain had stopped, but the grass and the trees were still sparkling.

“Back to your Miami matrons, then, Harry?” Amelia asked me. She had washed and brushed her hair and it was shining in the morning light.

“I don’t know. That kind of depends.”

“On what? I thought you loved it down there. I thought you were Don Johnson with a pack of tarot cards and a pocketful of mystic mottoes.”

“It kind of depends on
you,
Mrs. Carlsson.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning do you want to go on being Mrs. Carlsson, or
do you want to find out what your fortune would be with me?”

She leaned her head against my shoulder. “Sometimes, Harry, when you’ve made a choice in life, you have to stick with it. Where would we be if we didn’t?”

“At the Delano Hotel on Miami Beach, sucking on a Nagayama Sunset?”

She smiled wistfully. She kissed my cheek.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back to civilization.”

“A mesmerizing storyteller!”

—Publishers Weekly

“One of the most consistently entertaining writers in the field.”

—Gauntlet

“Graham Masterton is the living inheritor to the realm of Edgar Allan Poe.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Graham Masterton is a first rate horror writer.”

—Midwest Book Review

“Graham Masterton is always a lot of fun and he rarely lets the reader down…Horror’s most consistent provider of chills.”

—Masters of Terror

“Masterton is a crowd-pleaser, filling his pages with sparky, appealing dialogue and visceral grue.”

—Time Out
(UK)

“Masterton is one of those writers who can truly unnerve the reader with everyday events.”

—Steve Gerlach, author of
Rage

“Masterton has always been in the premier league of horror scribes.”

—Publishing News

“In a genre that seems filled more and more these days with the outrageously violent, outrageously weird, or just plain old boring, Masterton’s books are a welcome addition, solid performers in an unsure world.”

—Fear Zone

A LEISURE BOOK®

January 2010

Published by

Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 2010 by Graham Masterton

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0791-3

The name “Leisure Books” and the stylized “L” with design are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Visit us on the web at
www.dorchesterpub.com
.