Manitou Blood (32 page)

I could
smell
them, too, in a nauseating wave of long-confined air. They stank of raw sewage and something a whole lot worse.

“I think we need to get out of here,” said Gil.

He didn't have to repeat himself. Jenica was already climbing the steps, and Frank was close behind her. “Go on, Harry,” Gil told me, lifting up his baseball bat. “I'll hold them off.” I hesitated for a moment, but then I turned and started to make my way back up.

“Come on, rodents!” Gil shouted. “Come and get your teeth knocked out!”

It took me only a few seconds to reach the bend in the steps, where they narrowed into a niche. When I glanced back, however, the rats had already poured over every coffin in the vault, and they were rushing toward Gil in a tidal wave of greasy gray fur.

Jenica had made it through the niche, but Frank was stuck. He had managed to squeeze himself a little way in between the bricks, but now he was coughing with pain and panic, and he couldn't go any further.

“Frank!” I shouted at him. “Try to relax! Take a couple of deep breaths!”

“I can't, I—
cough!
—I can't breathe—
cough!
”

I looked back down again. The rats had already reached Gil's feet and he was whacking at them left and right with his baseball bat. He had killed at least ten of them, but three of them were already clinging to his back, and more were starting to run up his legs. He swung his bat again and again, and pieces of bloody rat went flying across the vault, but one rat managed to jump up and grip his sleeve with its
teeth, and even while he was swinging at the other rats, it dangled from side to side, refusing to let go, and more rats kept jumping up to join it.

I turned back to Frank. “
Frank!
” I shouted at him. “If you don't dislodge yourself, dude, we're all going to die! For God's sake force yourself!”

Frank still couldn't stop coughing and his face in the jiggling flashlight was almost maroon. I put my shoulder up against him, and I pushed him—I literally forced him into that niche, and then I shouted up to Jenica, “Take Frank's hand! Take his hand and pull him through! He's having a panic attack!”

He wasn't the only one. My heart was banging and I could hear the blood rushing in my head. Gil was still furiously beating at the rats, but now he had four or five or them hanging from each arm, and they had climbed right up on top of his shoulders so that he looked like a hunchback. With each blow, rat blood sprayed everywhere, and a bristly rat head hit me in the cheek. But the vault was heaving with vermin now, from one wall to the other, and all up the cast-iron arches, and more were still pouring in, and I could see that they were going to bury us.

“
Gil!
” I screamed. “
Get back up the steps!
”

He turned around and saw me, beating two rats off his shoulders as he did so. But one of them had already savaged his left earlobe, and three more were climbing up his back and tearing at his T-shirt. He tried to climb the steps, but he staggered and fell sideways, and the rats immediately saw their chance. They seethed over him, until he was covered in rats, and the massed weight of their bodies made it almost impossible for him to stand up again. He tried. He was like a monstrous rat-man, covered entirely in gray fur and writhing tails. I heard him shout something indistinct, maybe it was “
mom!
” but then he dropped back down again, and so many rats scrambled over him that I couldn't even see where he was.

Now the rats came after me, too. Frank had disappeared into the niche and I could only pray that he had made it through to the other side, and wasn't stuck halfway.
Please God, if I never ask you anything, ever again
,
let Frank not be stuck halfway
. If he was, he and I were going to be trapped together between those two brick walls with scores of rats tearing us to shreds. Maybe Jenica had been right. Maybe this was Vasile Lup's way of destroying us, and ripping us into so many pieces that we wouldn't be worth burying, even if there was anybody in New York left to bury us.

A huge gray rat ran at my ankle, and bit at the cuff of my pants. I kicked at it, and kicked again, and then I swung the bone at it—the shinbone that Jenica had found in the Vampire Gatherer's coffin. I didn't even hit it, but the rat abruptly tumbled over. I was going to swing the bone again and smash its head in when I realized that it was already dead—or apparently dead. Its eyes were closed and it was lying sprawled on the step with its pale gray belly exposed. Blood was leaking from its anus.

Another rat scurried up, and then another. I swung the bone again, and both rats flopped over and rolled back down the steps. I couldn't believe it. I swished the bone from side to side, and as I did so the rats fell dead, in their dozens. Swish, and they collapsed to the right. Swish, and they collapsed to the left. They dropped into the empty coffins, with hundreds of muffled thuds. They dropped from the cast-iron arches, into the water.

I advanced on them, swinging the bone, and it was a massacre.

By the time I reached the heap of rats that was wriggling on top of Gil, I was squashing and sliding over so many dead and half-dead rats that I could hardly keep my balance. But I managed to swing the bone right over the top of them, one way and then the other. The rats toppled off him in heaps, until he reappeared. He was crouched down on his knees and elbows, his hands clamped over his face. His
scalp was bloody and both of his ears were ripped. But he was still alive, and he was gasping for air.

“Gil! Gil, it's Harry! You can get up!”

“
Harry?
” He slowly took his hands away from his face and looked up at me in disbelief. His upper lip had been bitten and he could barely speak. “Harry, what happened?”

I held up the bone. I didn't have to swing it any more. All around the vault, the rats were rushing away, running between the coffins and into the water. In only a few minutes, almost all of them had disappeared, except for their hundreds of dead. The vault was silent, although the musky smell of rats made my eyes water.

“I think I got the power of the voodoo,” I told Gil.

Jenica did her Girl Scout bit and patched us up. She stuck Band-Aids all over Gil's scalp, in criss-cross patterns, and she even managed to sew back a torn flap of flesh that was dangling from his right earlobe, using nylon button thread. Throughout the operation, Gil sat on the dining chair, whistling tunelessly between his teeth, but when she was tying the thread into a knot, he allowed himself a single, “
Shit
.”

Gil and I had suffered not much more than scratches and bruises and rat bites. But Frank was growing steadily worse. He had retreated to one of the Dragomirs' spare bedrooms, and he was lying in the dark, shivering and mumbling with pain. His temperature was way up, and his eyes kept rolling up into his head, and we were beginning to worry that he wasn't going to last out the night.

The power was completely out now, so we couldn't even make ourselves anything hot to eat. I opened up a can of
frankfurters and served them with crackers and cheese and overripe bananas. The water supply was still working, and the water seemed to be clean, but all the same I filled up the bathtub, just in case the faucets ran dry.

After we had eaten, we sprawled in the overstuffed armchairs in Jenica's over-decorated living room and Jenica poured us another huge glass of death-breath Romanian red wine. The sun was beginning to sink over the Jersey shore, and her face was illuminated in bright orange, so that she looked like a medieval painting of herself. St. Jenica of the Vampires.

“I hate to speculate on this,” said Gil, “but what do we do if Frank buys the farm?” I hadn't liked to say so, but that was exactly what I was wondering, too.

Jenica shielded her eyes from the setting sun. “If he dies from this infection, then of course he will become one of the
strigoi
. We will have to dismember his body and burn it and we will have to keep his heart in a jar filled up with holy water.”

“We have to cut him up?” I asked her. “Jesus, I can't even skin a chicken without barfing.”

“We will have no choice, Harry—not just for our own protection, but for
his
sake, too. To become one of the undead . . . that is the greatest curse that anybody can suffer. What Frank said about emptiness . . . that is all the undead can ever feel, because they have no loved ones any more, nor homes to return to, and as each century goes by, they grieve ever more deeply for the life that they have left so far behind.”

Gil sipped his wine and sniffed. “You're almost making me feel sorry for the bastards.”

“Well, don't,” said Jenica. “They feel sentimental for themselves, but not for you or me. You think the dead hate us? The undead hate us even more. They resent us beyond anything you can imagine, and they never have any guilt about drinking our blood.”

The shinbone that Jenica had found in the Vampire Gatherer's casket was lying on the coffee table in front of me. I picked it up and waved it from side to side. “So what do we think this is, apart from the best rat-exterminating device known to man? I'll tell you something, if we get out of this in one piece, I'm going to patent this sucker. Erskine's Amazing Rat-Zapper, two for $14.99, and I'm going to sell them on the shopping channel. I wonder if they work for mice. Or roaches, even.”

Jenica said, “It is not Romanian. I have never seen anything like it before.”

“But what was it doing in the The Wolf's coffin? I mean, it looks kind of ritualistic, doesn't it? Maybe it was part of the ceremony that brought him back to life.”

“I don't think so,” said Jenica. “In the book of
svarcolaci
, it says that the way to revive a dead vampire's spirit is to use salt and silver and drops of your own blood, and to recite the Seven Red Prayers. There is no mention of bones, or feathers.”

I finished my glass of wine and then I went into the bedroom to see Frank. We had wiped off the sunblock, but his face was so white that I thought for a moment that he was already dead. When I sat down on the bed next to him, though, he opened his eyes and tried to focus on me.

“Think I'm passing over, Harry.”

“No way, Frank. You stick with us.”

He gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. I was convinced that I could see smoke seeping out of the collar of his shirt. “I'm burning, Harry. I'm burning alive. Now I know why they jumped, those people.”

“Who people?”

“Nine-eleven. Those people who jumped from their offices. It's unbearable, Harry. I never knew that pain like this could even
exist
.”

I tried to touch his hand but he twitched it away. “You'll
get through it, Frank,” I told him. “All you have to do is grit your teeth and hold on.”

“I don't think so. Maybe I'm getting what I've always deserved.”

“What are you talking about? Nobody deserves this.”

“I don't know. I've always been so—arrogant, and self-opinionated. I've always behaved like I'm God.”

“Well, you're a doctor, Frank. To some people, you
are
God.”

He licked his lips, and coughed up blood. “I'm going to make you a promise,” he said. “No matter what happens to me, I took an oath to preserve human life. If you need me, and if it's possible that I can help you, then I will.”

“I appreciate that, Frank. But the only thing that's going to happen to you is that you're going to get better. We'll have you back on your feet before you know it.”

Frank almost managed a smile. “Don't try to kid a kidder, Harry. I've used those very same words more times than you can imagine. A doctor says you're going to get well—you mark my words, that's the time to start panicking.”

While Frank slept, Jenica and I searched through Razvan Dragomir's bookshelves, trying to find anything informative on mirrors and vampires. All the time the sun was hurrying down, until the living room was so gloomy that we could hardly see each other. Jenica lit dark red candles that smelled like spices.

The
strigoi
might have abandoned their coffins at St. Stephen's, but there was nothing in any of Razvan Dragomir's books to suggest that Frank might be right, and they were able to hide inside mirrors instead.

I used to be pretty skeptical about the supernatural. After all, I peddled it for a living. But once I realized that there
is
a spirit world, and there
are
such things as demons, I guess I accepted every strange phenomenon without too much critical thought about it. Jenica, on the
other hand, believed in vampires only because her father had given satisfactory proof of their existence, and on the whole she was much more skeptical than I was, and much more analytical. She thought that the vampires could have concealed themselves in cellars, or down in the subway, anyplace that the sun could never penetrate. She even suggested that they might have gone to funeral homes, and shut themselves in unsold coffins during the hours of daylight.

But mirrors? “In all of Romanian legend, there is nothing about
strigoi
hiding in mirrors.”

I was finished with
Legends of Moldavia
and so I started leafing through a musty old book on
Romanian Folk Beliefs
, 1886. It had dozens of engravings of naked women in it, which led me to believe that it hadn't been published entirely in the interest of anthropology. In fact it was more of an academic stroke book. But halfway through I came across a picture of a deathbed with a woman's empty nightgown lying on it. The nightgown was beautifully arranged, as if its owner had managed to take it off without disturbing it at all. Its embroidered sleeves were neatly crossed over the bodice, and white lilies were spread on top of it.