Manitou Blood (18 page)

He made his way toward the storeroom, stepping over a row of seven or eight dead men as if he were log-rolling across a river.

“Hey—is anybody there?” he repeated. Maybe somebody
had
been brought into the morgue before he was ready for it. He accidentally stepped on a dead man's hand, and said, “Sorry, feller!” before he could stop himself. The man had white hair and a bulbous nose. He must have been a doorman, because he was still wearing his maroon uniform with gold-braided epaulets. He looked as if he were sleeping, rather than dead.

Frank heard another noise. He stepped cautiously into the storeroom but it was very dark, and he could see hardly anything, except for the window at the very far end, which must have faced the hospital air shaft, because it admitted only a faint, gray light from the night outside. He strained his eyes and he thought that he could a dark figure moving in front of the window, but he couldn't be sure.

“Hey!” he shouted, even though his throat was so sore. “Who are you? What the hell are you doing in the morgue?”

He groped for the light switch, and found it. The fluorescent tubes flickered, and for a split second the storeroom
was dazzlingly lit. But then all of the tubes popped at once, and Frank was left half-blinded, with swimming afterimages left in his eyes.

In that split second, though, he had seen something horrifying. The storeroom window was open, and a girl in a bloodstained nightgown was climbing out of it. She was turned toward him, so that he could see how white her face was, and the dried blood around her mouth. Her hair was long and black and wild, and it was flying
upward
, as if it were being blown by a furious wind.

A young man was rising up from the floor to follow her, his green-and-white baseball shirt blotted with blood. He was being helped up by a dark, attenuated figure, which Frank couldn't make any sense of. It was less like a person than a sloping shadow, with an elongated head that rose toward the ceiling, and high, diagonal shoulders. It was leaning at an impossible angle, in the way that only a shadow could.

Yet just before the lights went out, it had snapped its head around, and Frank had glimpsed two black, blurry eyes, and a stretched-open mouth that was more of a
grating
than a mouth. In the darkness, he heard an explosive, hate-filled hiss that sounded like air brakes, and then a high, piercing shriek—a shriek so terrible that he felt as if his brain was being blinded, as well as his eyes.

Laticia helped me to drag Ted Busch back up to my apartment. The heels of Ted's sneakers knocked on every stair, all the way up, and
bump-bump-bump
ed along the landing. I was amazed that nobody came out of their rooms to see what the hell we were doing.

We heaved him on to the couch and he lay there with his face all scarlet and blistered and his legs and arms at peculiar angles like a marionette with all of his strings cut. Laticia said, “If I trusted the cops, I'd call for the cops, if I thought they'd come.”

“Laticia, he tried to cut my throat.”

“Well, you need to wash that blood off of your face and put a BandAid on it at least. Let me do that for you. And if you get scared tonight, with this dead individual lying here, you can always come and share my bed.”

“Laticia, you were sent from heaven, FedEx.”

“A hundred and twenty-five for all night, mind. Gratuities extra.”

After Laticia had gone back to her apartment, I stood looking down at Ted Busch's body and I felt genuinely sorry for him, and guilty as hell.

“Those
Jeu Noir
cards were dead right about you, buddy,” I told him. “They warned you about Imminent Death, didn't they? But you didn't take any notice. Okay, Death was a whole lot Imminenter than either of us thought. But the cards warned you about water, too, didn't they, with the Water Woman? You should never have tried to cut my throat in the bathroom. Well—you should never have tried to cut my throat at all.
Nemo me impune lacessit
. He who steals my clownfish gets a kick in their puny ass.”

I opened another can of Guinness. It was my last one, but I needed it. I didn't know what to do next. Singing Rock had given me two letters, “s” and “t.” At least I
thought
that he had given me two letters, but I could have been allowing my fevered imagination to run away with me. I had no way of checking if he had really meant “s” and “t.” And what was even more confusing, I had no idea how many more letters he was going to give me, or if I'd understand what the word meant when I eventually got them all.

I was pretty damn sure, though, that the blood lust that was affecting so many people in Manhattan was the same blood lust that had led Ted to attack me and try to cut my throat. I was also pretty damn sure that it wasn't caused by any kind of disease, or virus, not in the way that the authorities were talking about it. It was some kind of mass possession, like
The Exorcist
times 8,008,278. This wasn't just one girl talking like Louis Armstrong and throwing the occasional Jesuit out of the window. This was a tidal wave of possession, a spiritual
tsunami
, and it was swamping the city and everybody in it.

And it was genuinely terrifying, on a grand scale. It was September eleventh squared. If so many people had died in a single day, how much longer could the rest of us survive?

I made up my mind. No matter how much Bertie
protested, I would have to talk to Amelia. She was the only person who would believe that Singing Rock was trying to help me from the Happy Hunting Ground, and she was the only person who might be able to persuade the city authorities that I wasn't a fraud or a certifiable lunatic.

At the bottom of my closet I found the old plaid blanket that my dog used to sleep on, and I took it into the living room to cover up poor old Ted. As I unfolded it, I caught the glint of silver around his neck. It was the medallion which he said that the Russian-type girl had given him—the medallion with the spooky face and the eyes that looked as if they opened. I lifted the medallion up and turned it over. The face was still staring at me, grimly, as if it resented my interfering. I hesitated, but then I unfastened the clasp, and took the medallion off. I wasn't intending to steal it, but for some reason I felt that it was some kind of clue, in the way that the letters “s” and “t” were clues.

I drew the blanket over Ted's head and then I turned the AC right down, so that he wouldn't start smelling too ripe. Then I knocked on Laticia's door.

“You change your mind, Harry? You want to stay the night?”

Under normal circumstances I might even have been tempted. Laticia was wearing a purple see-through bra and purple see-through panties with dangling ribbons at the side, and she wasn't unattractive if you didn't mind Prince without the moustache.

“Not tonight, Laticia. I have to go out. I just wanted to tell you that I had to leave Ted on the couch.”

“Okay . . . he's not going to bother me, is he?”

“I hope not. If he does, just keep him talking until I get back.”

I walked down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street. Khaled's Pakistani Provisions was closed, and its steel shutters had been pulled down. This was highly unusual. Khaled religiously stayed open till 1:00
A.M
. at least,
seven days a week, in case anybody had an irresistible urge to start cooking
murgh masala
in the wee small hours of the morning.

The night was sweltering hot, and there was an acrid smell of burning in the air, like the days after 9/11. The sirens were still screaming and in the distance I could hear somebody yelling through a bullhorn, something along the lines of “wo-wah-wah-WAH-wah-ba-booh-booh-BAH!” I kept walking westward, turning around from time to time to make sure that there was nobody following me.

As I turned south into Seventh Avenue, I saw two skinny young women with spiky hair crouching on the sidewalk about fifty yards up ahead of me. My first instinct was that they needed help, and I started to walk toward them more quickly. But as I got nearer, I saw that a heavily built man in jeans was lying between them, with his arms and legs spread wide. I also saw that something dark and glistening was running across the sidewalk, like blood. I U-turned smartly and headed back where I had come from.

Just as I reached the corner of Seventeenth Street, I glanced quickly back over my shoulder. One of the spikyhaired young women was getting up onto her feet, and as she did so she turned around and looked in my direction. She must have said something to the other girl, because
she
stood up, too. The heavily built man in the jeans stayed where he was, and I took an educated guess that he wasn't having a nap. The girls hesitated, and then they started walking toward me, and I could tell from the quick, determined click of their heels that they were after me.

I turned into Seventeenth Street and then I sprinted along to Sixth Avenue, and took a right. I could have kept on running, but those girls were at least ten years younger than me and they hadn't been drinking Guinness. Instead, I took another right into Sixteenth Street, and ran as far as the alley next to Feinman's Antique Carpets, and hid myself behind a Dumpster. I waited, and waited. Two people
walked past, talking and laughing, but they were both men, and they both seemed as jumpy as I was.

I gave myself five more minutes. The alley was airless and it smelled of weeds and damp brickwork and pee. Across the street, in the window of a discount camping store, I could see the letters RIG in red neon. It flicked on, and then it flicked off. The strange thing was that sometimes it stayed on for almost fifteen seconds, while at other times it flicked on and off almost instantly. RIG. Blank. RIG.

RIG. Maybe Singing Rock was sending me another signal—three more letters for my mystery word. ST plus RIG spelled S-T-R-I-G. But what the flaming Falujah did that mean? I couldn't think of any word that began with STRIG. Maybe it was part of an anagram, like “ostrich.” Maybe it was an anagram of a biological term, like “streptococci.” But Singing Rock had never had any sense of humor, and he had always been totally contemptuous of white man's medicine, so it was more likely to be something else altogether, like somebody's name.

Eventually, I emerged from the alley and looked left and right to make sure that the spiky-haired girls had gone. From somewhere over by Washington Square, there was a tremendous bang, almost like a bomb, followed by echo after echo. Jesus, this was seriously scary. I could deal with the normal perils of a New York City night—drunks, muggers and assorted freaks—but this didn't feel like New York City any more. I started half-walking and half-jogging toward TriBeCa, staying in the shadows as much as I could, and staying highly alert for people who looked as if they might be hunting for fresh human blood.

I was only a few blocks away from Christopher Street, where Amelia lived, when a man stepped out of a darkened doorway, right in front of me. He had a shaved head and dark glasses and a neck like a section of trans-Atlantic cable, and he was built like a Marine. He was wearing a
khaki T-shirt and camouflage pants and about a hundred chains and dog-tags and keys around his neck, and probably a few human ears, too, I wouldn't have been surprised. He was eating a Snickers bar and his mouth was full.

“Hey,” he said.

I tried to skirt around him but he double-shuffled to one side and blocked me.

“Excuse me, do you have a problem?” I demanded. “I'm in kind of a hurry here, if you don't mind.”

“You know what they say, man. More haste less speed.”

I tried to sidestep, but he sidestepped, too. I backed off a couple of paces and he backed off, too, but when I took one step forward, so did he.

I tried to look cool, and bored by all of this waltzing, but my heart was thumping like a basketball and I was beginning to feel very frightened.

He swallowed, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I gotta know if you're one of them,” he said.

“What are you talking about, ‘one of them'?”

“Me and my friends, see, we're protecting this neighborhood, and if you're one of them you're not welcome beyond this point.”

I looked across the street, and for the first time I saw three other men, waiting in the shadows. At least one of them was holding a rifle.

“My name's Harry Erskine, I'm an herbal visionary.”

“You're a
what?
”

“An herbal visionary. I tell your future and then I give you herbal remedies to improve your life prospects.”

“Are you trying to be smart?”

“Of course not. It's not your usual nine-to-five job but somebody has to do it.”

“Got any ID?”

I showed him my driver's license. “I was also on the front page of
Psychic Weekly
, if you want to know. I'm on my way to visit a friend of mine who's another psychic. And if by
‘one of them' you mean who I think you mean, then I'm not ‘one of them.' In fact I've been trying to keep well clear of them.”

“Okay, Harry. You won't object if I frisk you, then?”

“Frisk me? For what?”

“For anything that you can use to cut somebody's throat.”

I lifted both arms. “Go ahead, frisk away.”

He didn't hesitate, and he frisked me like an expert. While he was patting my crotch, I said, “The only reason I'm down here tonight is because I think I might be able to stop this epidemic.”

“You? What can
you
do?”

“This person I'm going to visit—she and me, well, we've handled some stuff like this before. You remember all those buildings that collapsed, in the nineties? We stopped that.”

“Sure you did.”

“You don't have to believe me, but it's true. This epidemic, it's not a physical disease, like chicken flu or cholera or anything like that. It's not a terrorist attack, either, like anthrax or ricin.”