Manitou Blood (22 page)

With a grunt of sheer greed, he clamped his lips over Lieutenant Roberts' wound so that his warm blood would jet directly onto the roof of his mouth. The flavor was astonishing. It tasted like iron, and molasses, and raw meat, and oysters, and the fresh juices of sexually aroused women. He swallowed, and almost at once his throat began to open up, and he felt an extraordinary cooling sensation, starting at the top of his head, and gradually sinking down his body, as if somebody with very cold hands was lightly teasing him from top to toe. He swallowed more, and more. He couldn't swallow enough of it. His penis was so rigid that it hurt, and when the blood flow from Lieutenant Roberts' carotid artery started to weaken, and he had to suck harder, he felt himself ejaculate, and his shorts fill up with sticky wet semen.

But he went on swallowing, and swallowing, and gasping for air, until he suddenly it was all too rich for him, and he retched, and vomited blood all down the front of Lieutenant Roberts' coat.

Slowly, he lifted his head. Susan Fireman was looking down at him with an expression that he had never seen on
any human being before. In a way, it reminded him of the slanting shadow-creature that he had seen in the morgue. It was a mixture of contempt, and pity, but relief, too, as if he were a wayward son who had at last decided to come home.

“I can't help you with this, Harry,” said Amelia. “This isn't your Uncle Walter trying to get his revenge on you because you sold off his precious stamp collection.”

“Amelia, I never had an Uncle Walter.”

“Of course you didn't. I'm simply trying to tell you that this is way out of my league.”

“But you're the best! You're the crème de la milk.”

Amelia emphatically shook her head. “When it comes to small-scale stuff, like people's dead relatives, I'm fine, Harry, I can handle it. A wife dies, her husband remarries. The wife's dead but she still feels jealous. She starts throwing pots and pans across the kitchen, or maybe she creates obnoxious smells in the bedroom, when her husband's trying to make love. I can
talk
to a spirit like that, negotiate with her, calm her down. I can make her understand that life has to go on, even though she's passed over. But this is something else altogether. This is one of the reasons I gave up clairvoyance. This is very deep water, Harry, and you could easily drown.”

I had picked up my beer bottle to take a swig but now I
put it down again. “Amelia—when Misquamacus was reincarnated—you were amazing. He was the greatest Indian wonder-worker in history, and you were more than a match for him, weren't you? We wouldn't even have known who Misquamacus
was
, or what he was trying to do, if it hadn't been for you.”

Bertie cleared his throat. “If my wife does not feel that she can help you, Harry, you will have to accept it.”

“But she
can
help us. She has to. I mean, who else is there?”

Amelia picked up the piece of paper with STRIGOI written on it. “Your friend Gil here is absolutely right. This is one of the Romanian words for ‘vampires.' I don't know very much about them, only what my friend Razvan Dragomir has told me, but I do know that these are supposed to be real, live vampires, not storybook vampires, and that most Romanians are still very afraid of them—not just peasants, city-dwellers, too—educated people, like doctors and university professors and lawyers.”

“So I was right, and we
are
being invaded by vampires?”

“This is absurdness!” Bertie protested. “Just because you can't understand something, you believe immediately that it must be supernatural! Wampires indeed! Are we
children
? There is no such thing as wampires!”

None of us said anything, but we all looked at each other, like students waiting for their angry teacher to finish ranting.

Bertie said, “In a few days, hopefully, the doctors will discover that this epidemic is caused by a pathogen that infects people with a very unpleasing thirst for human blood. The pathogen will be isolated and an antidote will be formulated. It will be straightforward science, my friend. Nothing to do with garlic and crosses and stakes through the heart.”

“You think so?” I challenged him. “In that case, how
come I saw Singing Rock and Singing Rock gave me the letters that make up the Romanian word for vampires? That wasn't straightforward science, was it?”

“No,” said Bertie. “It was your fevered imagination, running like a guinea pig in a little wheel.”

“Now come on, Bertie—” I began.

But Amelia said, “Harry . . . Bertil simply doesn't believe in ghosts and demons and things like that. He thinks that they're caused by a glitch in the human brain.”

“In particular, an aberration of the amygdala,” said Bertie, “the center of human fear.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “Amelia hasn't told you about Misquamacus?”

“Of course. Amelia has told me everything about the life she lived before we met.”

“Bertie—Misquamacus was no aberration of the Dalai Lama, or whatever it is. He was an Indian wonder-worker from three hundred years ago and he was reincarnated in a woman's neck. Not just any woman, either, but the woman I married. We saw it for ourselves. I saw it, Amelia saw it. Misquamacus almost managed to summon up some of the greatest forces that the ancient world had ever known. Storms, lightning, earthquakes, it was unbelievable. He could have reduced the whole of Manhattan to rubble. If it hadn't been for Amelia and Singing Rock . . . well, God knows what would have happened. But that was real.”

Bertie nodded and kept on nodding. “I am quite sure that you
perceived
it to be real.”

“You want me to introduce you to Dr. Hughes? He was there, at the Sisters of Jerusalem, when Misquamacus was reincarnated, and he lost three fingers to some invisible lizard. Why don't you tell
him
that he only perceived it? Eleven cops got killed. Why don't you tell their families that they only perceived it? Pity their kids can't perceive them coming home again.”

Bertie stood up. “Harry, I am not going to argue with you about the nature of reality. I am simply telling you that Amelia is not going to get involved in this insanity, whether you are right or wrong.”

I looked at Amelia. There was an expression on her face that I had only seen once before. It was sadness for something that had gone and that could never be recovered. Maybe it was youth, or happiness, or courage. Maybe it was all three.

“Okay,” I said. I was tempted to ask Amelia what
she
thought, but it wouldn't have been fair. Once upon a time she might have been Amelia Crusoe, psychic and clairvoyant, with wild curly hair and jingly earrings, but now she was Mrs. Amelia Carlsson, and I had no right to ask her to be disloyal to her husband, even if he was an asshole.

“Go see Razvan,” she said. “He can probably help you. He's written half a dozen books about Romanian witchcraft, and he's probably the greatest expert on vampire legends outside of Bucharest. He's also very sensitive. I met him at a psychic fair in White Plains.”

“This is such nonsense,” said Bertie, with an abrasive laugh. “Why are you wasting Harry's time like this?”

Amelia wrote down a name and address on the notepad, tore it off, and handed it to me. Bertie gave a dismissive
pfff!
but he didn't try to stop her.

“Thanks,” I said. Then, to Bertie, “Sorry. I shouldn't have come around here. I didn't mean to rub your fur up all the wrong way.”

“Well, it's forgotten,” said Bertie. “It's just that I was brought up to be pragmatic, and to believe in scientific evidence rather than superstition.” He put his arm around Amelia's shoulders. “When I met Amelia, I considered it the challenge of my life to show her that no matter how strange events may be, they cannot be explained by magic, or by cards, or crystal balls.”

He showed us to the door. Gil said, “Thanks for the beer,
sir,” and nodded to Amelia. “Thanks, ma'am. Thanks for trying, anyhow.”

Outside, on the street, he turned around to face me. “Harry,” he said, with great solemnity, “I believe you.”

“You do?”

“This epidemic. It
is
vampires, isn't it?”

“Well, I believe so. Or some kind of supernatural force.”

“You bet. Did you see her face when you showed her that piece of paper? That was the face of a woman who is truly, genuinely scared shitless. I know. I've seen faces like that before, in Bosnia.”

“I'm sure I could have persuaded her to help us, if hubby had let her.”

“Well, I don't know about that. But I do know that she wasn't just play-acting. She saw that word and she went
white
. And that's why I believe you. It would have been much easier for her if she had lied to you, because her husband doesn't believe in vampires, and he was bound to give her a hard time about it. But she didn't, did she? And if
she
thinks this epidemic is being caused by vampires, and
you
think it's caused by vampires, then I do, too.”

At that moment my cell phone warbled. It was Amelia.

“Harry? Listen, I'm so sorry I couldn't do anything more to help you out. Bertil—well, he's very protective, and he's a little jealous, too, of the people I used to know before we met.”

“Don't worry,” I reassured her. “Gil and I are going to see your Romanian friend right now. I'll tell you what—I'll keep you up to speed, so that you know what's going on. Maybe you can give us some helpful hints.”

“Harry?”

“What?”

I don't know why I said “what?” I knew from the tone of her voice exactly what she meant. It was like meeting an old girlfriend from your teenage years, and picking up her big fat kid and saying, “he's terrific, isn't he?” when what you're really trying to say is, “remember those times, lying
on the grass, with the sun shining through the trees, and we didn't care about anything but us?”

Gil looked at his watch and said, “Listen—I should go check back with the other guys, tell them what I'm doing.”

“You can use my cell phone if you like.”

“I have my own,” said Gil, holding it up. “But I think this is something I have to explain to them face-to-face. Besides, I need to see my family. My wife, my little girls. I ought to make sure they're safe.”

“Okay, then, sure. Why don't I go see this Romanian character, and you catch up with me?” I peered at the piece of paper that Amelia had given me. “Sixty-one Leroy Street, that's only three blocks from here. You should recognize Leroy Street—that's where they shot the exteriors for
The Cosby Show
. Put my number into your phone, so that we can keep in touch.”

Gil started to make his way back toward Houston Street. He had only walked half a block, however, when I heard whooping and screaming, and the rushing noise of dozens of pairs of feet. Around the corner came fifty or sixty people, their eyes staring, their arms waving, their clothes drenched in blood. They were mostly men, but I saw at least six or seven women, one of them with her ginger hair stuck up with dried blood like a Native American headdress, and another one bare-breasted with scores of crisscross cuts all over her breasts.

They ran toward Gil and Gil immediately turned around and started running back toward me. I saw the flashing of knives and I knew exactly what they wanted, and so I started running, too.

“
Harry!
” Gil yelled at me.

It didn't take long for Gil to catch up with me. He was at least five years younger than me and I doubt if he drank seven cans of Irish porter every day. Together we pounded back along Christopher Street, with the screaming crowd
close behind us, and believe me I was so panicky that I could hardly catch my breath.

We turned south on Bedford Street, crossing Grove Street and Barrow Street, still running flat out. But as wild and disheveled as it was, the crowd was catching up with us. I didn't want to look back but I could hear the
slap-slap-slap
of their feet echoing from the buildings close by, and I guessed that they were only half a block behind.

“Maybe—we should—split up!” I panted.

“No!” Gil retorted. “We're going to have to face them!”

“Are you—nuts? They'll cut us up—like—carrots!”

“There!” said Gil. “Building site!”

“
What?
”

But Gil didn't answer me. Instead, he headed diagonally across the street to the corner of Houston and Morton, where the front of a nineteenth-century warehouse was being restored. The front of the building was covered in scaffolding and placards announcing a new TradeWinds Fashion Store, and there were two builders' Dumpsters parked in the street outside.

Gil jumped up onto one of the Dumpsters and pulled out a short length of scaffolding pole. “Here!” he said, and threw it to me. Then he dragged out a six-foot length of timber, with razor wire wrapped around one end.

“We have to stand back-to-back!” he told me. “And don't think about them as people! They want to kill us, and they will, unless we kill them first!”

We stood back-to-back in the center of Morton Street as the crowd ran up to us. I swung the scaffolding pole from side to side, and did some fancy figure eights with it, like Tom Cruise in
The Last Samurai
. Gil stood still, with his feet planted wide apart, gripping that length of timber in both hands, and looking as if he were ready to take on the combined hordes of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.

“Whatever you do, stay close,” Gil told me. “Don't allow those freaks to get in between us, or we're finished.”

The crowd had slowed down now, and they were approaching us very cautiously. All of them were carrying knives or machetes or sickles, and all of them had a starey-eyed expression on their faces. They were all very white, too, as if all the blood had drained out of them. Some of them were moaning, and others were sobbing in pain, and I realized that they must all be feeling the same burning sensation that had driven Ted Busch so crazy, as if they were being cremated alive.