Manitou Blood (24 page)

Frank couldn't stop shivering. The thermostat on his air-conditioning unit said that it was 94 degrees in his bedroom, and he was basted in sweat, but he felt chilled to the very core, as if his skeleton had been taken out of his body and stored in the freezer overnight, and then put back. Even his teeth felt as if they were frozen.

He didn't know what time it was but he knew that something nightmarish had happened. Every time he swallowed he could taste metal, and the roof of his mouth felt as if it were thickly coated in congealed fat. He had a jumbled memory of somebody shouting, and blood, and struggling, but his brain refused to focus on it in any detail. It occurred to him that he might have been involved in a serious accident, and that he was suffering from shock.

It didn't occur to him that he was dying.

He tried to sit up. After two attempts, he managed to prop himself up on one elbow. It was then that he saw Susan Fireman sitting on the end of his bed watching him. It was
still dark outside, although the city sounded much quieter than it had before. No helicopters, and only an occasional siren.

“I feel cold,” he croaked.

Susan Fireman stood up and moved around the bed with a strange gliding walk. She looked down at him and she was smiling. “It won't be long now,” she told him. “You took care of me, and now I'm taking care of you.”

“I feel so cold. Why do I feel so cold?”

“You won't feel cold for much longer, Frank.”

He lay back down on the bed. “What's happening to me?” he asked her.

She stroked his sweat-beaded forehead with her fingertips, and then sucked them, one after the other. “The greatest adventure that can happen to anyone.”

“I don't understand.”

“You will, Frank, once you pass over. It will all become shining clear to you, as if the moon has come up.”

“The moon?”

“Of course. You can never see the sun again.”

Frank slept, and dreamed that he was running through the dunes at Hyannis, on Cape Cod, where he used to live when he was a boy. The wind was fluffing in his ears and the long grass was whipping his legs. In his dream he was aware that something was badly wrong but he didn't know what. He turned his head to see if anybody was running after him but there was nobody there. Only the dunes, and the clouds, and the slowly circling seagulls.

The sky was so blue that it was almost black, like night.

As he climbed the dunes toward the roadway, he saw a dazzling flash of light. It flashed again, and it was so bright that he had to lift his hand to shield his eyes. He struggled up through the deep, soft sand until he reached a white picket fence. An old black Mercury Marquis was parked about fifty yards away, its side panels smeary with wax. It
looked at first like the same car that had once belonged to his grandfather, but then he realized that it had been converted into a hearse, and that there was a gray metal casket lying in the back. His grandfather, Stephen, was sitting in the driver's seat, his white hair combed so that it was shining like a halo. He was staring out toward the ocean.

Not far away from the front of the car stood Susan Fireman. She was naked except for a strange hat that looked as if it had been folded out of stiff black paper. Beside her was the cheval-mirror that usually stood in the corner of his bedroom, and she was deliberately angling it into his eyes.

He reached the tarmac and started to walk toward her. The sand crunched under his shoes. “What are you doing here?” he shouted at her, although his voice sounded flat and muffled, as if he were shouting into a metal bucket.

She didn't answer, so he walked right up to her. She lifted her head and smiled at him, and both of her eyes were totally crimson.

“What's happening?” he asked her.

“You can't go out in the sun any more,” said Susan Fireman. “I thought you would like to see its reflection, to remember it by.”

Frank turned around. Behind him, it was nighttime. The sky was dark and the ocean was nothing but a thin, phosphorescent line of foam. Inside the cheval-mirror, however, it was still daylight, and the sun was shining on the sand.

“What's happening?” Frank repeated.

“Don't you know, Frank? You're passing over. The sun will be coming up soon. Why don't you step inside the looking glass, where it's bright? You can be safe there, until it's dark.”

“What do you mean, ‘step inside the looking glass'?”

“A looking glass is a
door
, Frank. It's not a wall. A looking glass is a way through.”

“I can't step inside, it's impossible.”

“Come on, Frank. You're one of the pale people now. You can do anything you want. Climb walls, step into mirrors.”

Susan Fireman walked around so that she was facing the mirror. She turned to look at Frank and then she stepped straight into the glass, so that she joined up with her own reflection, like two brightly colored shapes in a kaleidoscope. The next thing Frank knew, she was standing
inside
the mirror, in the sunshine, and she was no longer beside him, in the dark. She laughed, and he could hear her, but she sounded as if she were laughing on the other side of a closed window. Alarmed, he looked around. The wind was rising and he was alone. His grandfather had gone, too. The black hearse stood empty, its chrome spotted with rust and its windows all milky.

“Come on, Frank,” said Susan Fireman. “It only takes a single step.”

“I'm not coming,” he told her.

“You have to, Frank. You don't have any choice.”

“I told you, I'm not coming!”

It was then that he saw something on the shoreline, about a half-mile behind Susan Fireman, right at the ocean's edge. It was tall and dark and angular, and it was striding toward her. It reminded him of the mirage in
Lawrence of Arabia
, the black-robed Arab gradually approaching Lawrence across the desert, except that it was so stretched-out and disproportionate that it looked more like an ungainly combination of horse and man, or something else altogether, something totally monstrous.

As it came nearer, he saw that it was the same creature that he had encountered in the storeroom at the Sisters of Jerusalem. He saw its face, first leaning one way, and then the other, and its eyes, constantly shifting and changing, from the stone eyes of a garden statue to the glassy amber eyes of a tigerskin rug.

It approached Susan Fireman at extraordinary speed,
growing larger and larger, and as it came nearer a high trail of sand was whipped up behind it, and whirled away by the wind.

“Hurry up, Frank!” Susan Fireman urged him. “He'll come after you anyhow, whatever you do!”

Frank turned around. He thought about running, but he knew that he was dreaming and that he could never run fast in dreams. The dark attenuated creature was so close now that it would probably catch him before he could reach the dunes.

There was only one thing he could do. He took three steps back, and picked up a broken brick from the parking lot wall. Gripping it tight, he walked right up to the mirror and hit it, hard, right where Susan Fireman's face was. The mirror cracked from side to side—but he smashed again, and again, and again, until there was nothing but a glittering heap of glass and an empty oval frame.

He dropped the brick, and stood back. He was so cold that he could barely think, but he felt that he had saved himself, at least for now. He was still standing there when the moon rose, and shone through the empty oval frame like the face of a long-dead friend.

He opened his eyes. His bedroom was filled with blurry sunlight. He lay staring at the wall for a very long time, feeling so cold that he was unable to move. If he moved, he felt that his knees and elbows would probably break, and his finger bones would crackle. But at least he was sure that he wasn't dead.

Eventually the sun inched its way across the lower part of the bed. It burned his toes, blistering the skin and actually sending up wisps of smoke, but at least his feet felt warmer.

He knew now that everything that had happened to him was real. Susan Fireman, the blood-drinking epidemic, the
morgue filled with corpses. The people in winding-sheets climbing out of the hospital window and over the rooftops. The dark, angular figure with eyes that changed from glass to stone. It had really happened, and it had happened to him.

It was then that he remembered last night's dream—the beach at Hyannis and the shattered mirror. Slowly, with a grunt of pain, he managed to lift up his head, and look toward the far corner of the room.

“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered. General Grant's cheval-mirror was nothing but an empty oval frame, with a heap of sparkling fragments all around it. Close to the wall lay a heavy black onyx box that Christina had given him for his thirty-second birthday, the only gift that he had ever liked.

He shifted himself around, so that he could see through the open doorway, into the corridor. At first he couldn't understand what he was looking at, but then he realized that somebody was sprawled on the carpet. He could see a pair of shiny black shoes, and a pair of legs, dark-trousered, and a hand, with a heavy signet ring on it. He lifted his head a little more and saw that it was Lieutenant Roberts, whose blood he had swallowed, warm and thick, directly out of the spouting wound in his neck.

“
Errkk
,” he choked. The sudden recollection of it made his stomach muscles cramp up, and he retched, again and again, until his throat was so sore that he couldn't retch any more.

His head dropped back and he lay on the bed for almost another hour, exhausted and feverish. Then he thought to himself:
I have to get up, I have to get out of here. I have to find help
. Otherwise another day would pass by and darkness would return and he didn't have any doubt that Susan Fireman would be coming back for him. And she would bring that angular shadow-creature, too, whatever that was.

Slowly and painfully, like a man twice his age, Frank
managed to sit up, and ease his legs off the bed. His bed was like some grotesque piece of modern art. The sheets were covered in hardened blood and twisted into strange shapes, like tortured faces. He gripped the head of the bed and pulled himself up, so that he was standing. For a moment, he felt as if all the blood had dropped out of his head and he was going to faint, but he took five or six very deep breaths, and steadied himself.

He walked stiffly out of the bedroom, stepping over Lieutenant Roberts' body on the floor. The wound in Lieutenant Roberts' neck was gaping so wide that Frank could see into his open windpipe. Lieutenant Roberts was staring at nothing at all, and his face was gray, as if had been dusted with ash from a crematorium. Frank looked down at him, and said, “Sorry, pal. Rest in peace.” He didn't know what Lieutenant Roberts' religion had been, and he couldn't think what else to say.

Further along the corridor, on his back, lay Detective Mancini. His eyes were closed but he still looked terrified. His arms and legs were sticking out at awkward angles and his mouth was caught in mid-gag, as if he were choking on a fishbone. His neck was cut wide open, too, like Lieutenant Roberts', and it was obvious from the pallor of his face that he had been exsanguinated. There were only a few brown squiggles of blood on the carpet, so Frank guessed that Susan Fireman had drunk the rest of it.

The thought of that made him feel nauseated again. He walked through to the kitchen and hung over the sink, and vomited lumps of half-digested blood. It was black, like raw liver, and it slid down the drain as if it had a life of its own. He hunched there for almost five minutes, his stomach muscles clenching and unclenching, but at last he managed to straighten himself up, tear off a sheet of paper towel, and wipe his mouth.

God
, he thought,
physician heal thyself
. He didn't want to die, especially if it meant that he was going to be reincarnated
like Susan Fireman, or any of the other people who were roaming the city, thirsty for human blood. He knew he was very sick, but if this was an illness, there had to be a cure for it.

He dragged out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table. His tongue felt as if it had been sandpapered, and he desperately needed a drink, but even the thought of running water gave him the dry heaves.

The Death Troll was wrong. This disease wasn't at all like hemorrhagic dengue fever. It was much more like rabies. Just like rabies, it started with irritability and feverishness, and soon afterward, the sufferer started to have nightmares, and irrational terrors. Just like rabies, it was characterized by an irrational dread of water, which was why rabies was often called “hydrophobia.”

Unlike rabies, however, this disease didn't seem to be transmitted by animal bites, or by bites of any kind. If Frank's own experience was anything to go by, it was communicated through the exchange of bodily fluids, like HIV.

He didn't know how Susan Fireman had persuaded him to have sex with her. His memory of it was nothing but a jumble of pornographic images. But she had done it somehow, and dug her nails into his scrotum while she did it, and so the chances were that he had contracted the disease through his open scratches. Just to make sure, she had made him swallow a drop of his own infected semen.

He guessed that a man could probably pass the disease to a woman in much the same way—through vaginal lacerations, or maybe by ejaculating into her mouth.

One thing was plain: once they were infected, victims quickly began to feel an unbearable burning sensation all over their skin surface, and a raging thirst for human blood. They also showed symptoms that violent and radical changes were taking place in their metabolism. They became “pale people,” so highly charged with adrenaline that they could climb near-vertical walls and contort their
bodies—as Susan Fireman had done—into near-impossible knots. They started to have suffocating nightmares of being shut up in boxes, and speak in foreign languages, although Frank couldn't even begin to understand how this could happen.