Manitou Blood (11 page)

So that's why the sirens were whooping. I turned up the volume and I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A senior official from the Centers for Disease Control appeared on screen, a balding man who looked like the medical hologram from
Star Trek: Voyager
. He was saying, “. . . insatiable thirst for fresh human blood, which has led them to kill acquaintances, friends and even their own children. Once they have satisfied their thirst, however, they seem to be overtaken in a few hours by violent nausea and cardiac arrest. Seventeen of those afflicted have so far died, and I'm afraid that we're expecting many more.”

A black woman reporter pushed a microphone into his face. “Sir—do you think you're getting any nearer to isolating the cause of this outbreak?”

The official shook his jowls. “All I can tell you at this time is that it bears absolutely no resemblance to any known disease, and in fact it may not even
be
a disease, in the generally
accepted sense of the word. We have CDC and Medcom specialists working flat out to identify it, with the assistance of senior pathologists at every major hospital in New York.”

“So what can the public do to protect themselves?”

“Our advice is for people to continue about their business as normal, but to watch closely for any signs in yourself or others of a burning sensation of the skin, or of hypersensitivity to sunlight, or of strong or unusual thirst.”

I swallowed Guinness, and burped. In spite of the sirens outside, I was starting to think,
this has to be a put-on, surely?
An updated spoof like
The War of the Worlds
. Like,
vampires?
Oh, right.

But then the CDC official glanced down at his notes and said, “I am also told that a reliable early indicator of the so-called ‘vampire' condition is nightmares. These frightening dreams usually start three or four days before the crisis, and are associated with a feeling of claustrophobia, or being shut in a box, as well as a strong sensation of motion sickness, as if the sufferer were on board a ship.”

I slowly sat up. I heard another ambulance, speeding up Sixth Avenue; and then another; and another. A handheld news camera showed a young woman on her knees on the sidewalk outside FAO Schwarz, vomiting blood. Then they showed a man being rushed through the doors of the Sisters of Jerusalem hospital, his clothes smothered in scarlet, like the victim of a bomb blast.

Jesus, I thought.
Nightmares
. That was exactly what Ted had been suffering from—and the same kind of nightmares, too. Shut up in a casket, on an oceangoing ship. Then I thought: What if this
was
an infectious disease? Ted had been standing only two feet away from me, and I had been
breathing the same air
. I had shaken hands with him, and the chances were that microscopic droplets of saliva had sprayed out of his mouth when he had talked to me.

I hurried through to my bathroom, soaked my facecloth
in scalding water, then squeezed it out and pressed it over my face. I shouted out
ahh
! when I did it, because it was so goddamned hot, but if there were any viruses on my skin, this would fix them. If
I
couldn't bear it, neither could they.

After a few moments, however, I thought: Just a minute, if my séance with Singing Rock had shown us anything at all, it had shown us that Ted's nightmares hadn't been caused by a virus at all, but by some malevolent spiritual presence. A presence that I had actually seen for myself, tall and dark and stretched-out, and sliding through my bedroom door. I peeled off the facecloth and stared at myself in the mottled mirror that hung over my basin. I looked hot. I looked very hot.

What the hell was I supposed to do now? Call Ted, and warn him that he was just about to turn into a bloodthirsty vampire? Call the CDC, and tell them that all of their experts were wasting their valuable time, because the “vampire” epidemic wasn't caused by a virus, but by some kind of spiritual manifestation?

I could imagine myself trying to explain it. “Like, I contacted this dead Sioux medicine man I used to know, and asked him to lure this malevolent spirit into my bedroom, which he did. Unfortunately my client was too chickenshit to open the door, so I never really got to see what the being looked like, not properly. So I gave my client some mugwort and sent him home.”

Bellevue? My feet wouldn't touch the ground.

I sat for almost an hour in front of the TV, watching as the epidemic grew steadily worse. Each successive newsflash showed more and more people regurgitating blood and more and more bodybags being wheeled away on coroners' gurneys, and with every passing minute I felt increasingly guilty and frustrated. By 3:39
P.M
. the death toll had risen to 119 so-called vampires and 147 homicide victims.

I called Karen, to make sure that she and Lucy were
okay. All I got was her answering service, and she didn't respond to her cellphone number, so I called Herman, the doorman. “Mrs. Erskine left about an hour ago,” he told me. “She took Lucy to visit her grandmother in Albany.” Karen's mother wasn't answering, either, but I left a message that when Karen and Lucy reached Albany, they should stay there until this epidemic was over. That would be one less problem for me to fret about.

I was desperate to tell somebody in authority about Ted's nightmares and Singing Rock and the tall stretched-out figure that had walked through my bedroom door, but I knew exactly what would happen if I tried. At best, they would dismiss me as a publicity-seeking charlatan. They had only to look up my court record. In October of 1978 I was convicted of dishonestly acquiring a five-year-old Chevy Malibu by persuading an elderly lady from Englewood Cliffs that I could only communicate with her recently dead husband through his car stereo. Not only was this a lie, the car turned out to be a total lemon, so that didn't say much for my psychic abilities, either.

That's it, I thought. I need a psychic to speak on my behalf—a
believable
psychic. Somebody respectable, somebody with
gravitas
—somebody who's going to be taken seriously.

I knew two psychics like that: Leon Borderman, from the New York Institute of Psychic Research, who claimed to have regular conversations with Benjamin Franklin—although I doubted if he would even deign to talk to me, the patronizing old gasbag. Then of course there was Amelia Carlsson, née Crusoe—but I was pretty sure that Amelia had probably had enough of me for one lifetime. I'm not saying that she didn't
like
me any more, but I always seemed to turn up on her doorstep with a motley entourage of Grief, and Complications, and all kinds of Shadowy Terrors from God Alone Knew Where, even when I didn't intend to.

Not long after, however, the TV news showed a respectable middle-aged woman on her hands and knees, vomiting blood all over the floor of Bloomingdale's shoe department. That's when I thought
wotthehell wotthehell
I have to try this even if Amelia won't talk to me. I picked up the phone and punched out Amelia's number.

As it rang, I rehearsed what I was going to say.
Amelia, don't put the phone down, it's Harry. Amelia, I desperately need your help. New York needs your help. Amelia, I don't know how to tell you this, but
—

The phone rang and rang, and I was beginning to think that I would have to leave another message. But then a man with a Scandinavian-sounding accent picked up and said, crossly, “Bertil Carlsson.”

“Oh, hi! You must be
Mister
Carlsson.”

“That's correct. Bertil Carlsson. Who's calling?”

“This is Harry Erskine.” No answer. “Harry . . . Erskine?”

Still no answer. I was just about to repeat myself, when Bertil Carlsson said, “Well?”

“Ah—I used to be a friend of your wife, Mr. Carlsson. I'm
still
a friend of your wife, I hope. We didn't have a falling-out or anything, it's just that we haven't touched base in quite a while. Quite a few years, as a matter of fact. Well, two, anyhow, maybe three.”

“I know who you are, Mr. Erskine. My wife has mentioned your name.”

“Oh, right! Glowingly, I hope.”

“Glowingly? No.”

“Right, well she wouldn't, I don't suppose. Not that there was anything—I mean the last time we saw each other, it was all quite amicable.”

“What do you want, Mr. Erskine?”

“Have you been watching the news? This epidemic thing?”

“Yes, we're watching it now. Or trying to.”

“So Amelia's there, with you?”

Another long pause. Then, “I don't think I want you to talk to her, Mr. Erskine. Perhaps she may not have told me about everything that you and she were involved in, but I would rather that she didn't get involved with you again.” He pronounced it “inwolwed,” which made me wonder how he would say “Volvo.”

“Listen, Mr. Carlsson, I can understand how you feel. I really can. If I were you, I wouldn't my wife to be inwolwed with me, either. But you've seen this epidemic on the news. I really think I know what's causing it, and I think I could save a great many people's lives.”

“Well, Mr. Erskine, I'm certainly not stopping you.”

“I know. Of course you're not. But my problem is that I have to find somebody in authority who's prepared to believe me, and for one reason or another people in authority tend not to believe me.”

“I can't for the life of me think why.”

“Mr. Carlsson, I wouldn't have dreamed of calling Amelia if I'd been able to think of any other way. But you've seen how many people are dropping dead, and you've seen how many people have been murdered. I mean, we're talking
hundreds
, and where's it going to stop? I mean—supposing
you
catch it? Supposing Amelia catches it?”

“Mr. Erskine—”

“Please, Mr. Carlsson, call me Harry. And please don't think that I would let anything happen to Amelia, ever. You're the luckiest man on the planet, being married to her. But I need to talk to her, at the very least, even if she tells me to take a running jump.”

At that moment, an extension phone was picked up.

“Harry?”

I felt as if a punching bag had swung back and hit me square in the chest. “
Amelia
.”

“What's happening, Harry?”

For a moment, I couldn't speak. My throat tightened up, and I couldn't do anything but open and close my mouth
like a recently caught codfish. Amelia and I had never been lovers, except in my dreams, but somehow I had always felt that our destinies were tangled together. I had made the wrong choice, all those years ago, like I always make the wrong choice, and it was almost unbearable, talking to the person I could have shared my life with, if I had only been humbler, and kinder, and less of a smart-ass, and seen her for what she really was.

“I didn't really
want
to call you,” I garbled. “No—that came out wrong. I didn't want to involve you in anything, that's what I meant. I should have called you years ago, shouldn't I? But—you know—there was always a reason not to.”

“I saw your ad in the
Village Voice
,” she said. “That's how I knew you were still alive. Are you and Karen still together?”

“Not exactly, no. I think it was a case of I say potatoes and you say
pommes dauphinoise
.”

“That's a pity. I always thought you and Karen were so good together.”

“Karen was always good with me. I guess I was always better on my own.”

“I'm sorry, all the same. By the way, I got your message. That young kid came round to see you, didn't he? The one with the nightmares?”

“Ted Busch like in Anheuser. Oh, yes, young Ted came to see me. That's the whole reason I'm calling you.”

“Harry, don't even ask. I don't do that stuff anymore.”

“I know. Ted told me. The thing is, though—” and I got this in quick, before she could stop me “—I read his fortune with the
Jeu Noir
, right, and his Predictor Card was The Water Woman.”

“Harry! I don't want to know that! I really don't!”

“But The Water Woman, Amelia” I persisted. “That's a pretty goddamned scary prediction, wouldn't you say?”

Amelia hesitated, and then she had to admit, “Yes. It's a pretty goddamned scary prediction.”

“It's worse than that, though. Ted persuaded me to call up Singing Rock.”

“I'm sorry, was that a problem? That was my idea. I thought maybe Singing Rock could help you to discover what was wrong.”

At that moment, I heard the other phone being cradled, very discreetly. Bertil Carlsson obviously didn't want to listen anymore. It's bad enough, hearing another man chatting to your wife, without hearing him chatting about things that you know nothing about. I sympathized, I really did, but I had to talk to Amelia. There was no other way.

“I asked Singing Rock to open up the doors, and to show me what was causing Ted's nightmares.”

“And did he?”

“Oh, yes. I saw it with my own eyes, and it was frightening, believe me. It was tall and it was dark and it was
stretched out
, you know, like somebody's shadow when the sun gets low. It went right through my bedroom door without opening it, but the problem was that Ted was too scared to see what it was. By the time I opened the bedroom door, it was gone. Vanished.
Disparu
.”

“I'm sorry, Harry, but I don't see how I can help you.”

“Amelia—did Ted tell you what
kind
of nightmares he's been having?”

“No, he didn't. Only that he was having them night after night, and he was frightened to go to sleep.”

“You've been watching the news, right? Did you hear the guy from the CDC, talking about this epidemic? Before they get this terrible thirst for drinking human blood, people start having nightmares. They keep dreaming that they're shut up in a coffin, or a box, and that they're being tossed around in a ship. They
all
dream it, all of them! And Ted was dreaming it, too—that exact same scenario. Coffin, ship, the very same thing. So what does
that
tell you?”