Manitou Blood (12 page)

Amelia hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “People
can
have similar nightmares, Harry, especially if they're
suffering from a common illness. I was reading about people with leprosy . . . they often have nightmares that their flesh is melting, like butter. And people with a high fever can see cockroaches crawling all over them.”

“Okay, sure . . . I'm sure that's true, so far as it goes. But we're talking about hundreds of people here, aren't we? And what Singing Rock summoned up, that wasn't a virus, or any kind of disease. That was a
thing
. A person, or a presence, I don't know how the hell I'd describe it.”

“So what you're trying to say is, this
thing
is responsible for everybody else's nightmares, too—and this whole epidemic?”

“You got it. This isn't a disease, this is a war. This is some kind of malevolent spirit, taking over people's minds, and then their bodies. And who the hell knows where it's going to stop? Today, New York City. Tomorrow, New York State. The day after, the whole eastern seaboard.”

“Harry, for God's sake! You're letting your imagination run away with you! I'm sure that isn't going to happen. Whatever it was that Singing Rock summoned up, that was probably one of Ted's phobias, nothing more. Some bogeyman from his childhood, who's suddenly surfaced out of his subconscious. That can happen when people suffer from stress.”

“Amelia, you're beginning to sound like Karen's shrink. Bogeymen from your childhood don't give you the identical nightmare to three hundred other people. Bogeymen from your childhood don't make you want to cut your children's throats and drink their blood, straight out of their carotid arteries.”

Amelia said, “Maybe they do and maybe they don't. But, like I say, I don't
do
this stuff any more.”

“Because of you, or because of Bertie?”

“
Bertil
. Because of both of us. And because—and because—every time I hold a séance, it opens up coffins that ought to stay closed.”

“Amelia . . . I honestly truly believe that this epidemic is being caused by some malevolent spirit—that same spirit that walked through my bedroom door.”

“Harry, have you heard yourself? You sound like somebody in a Marvel comic.”

“But I can
feel
it! I can feel it in the air! It's like an electric storm coming! You remember what it was like, just before Misquamacus came out . . . it was like dogs barking and cats creeping under the couch and your hair standing up on end! And this is the same!”

The other phone was picked up again. “Mr. Erskine, I don't want to be rude to you, but I would like you to cut this conversation short. You are causing my wife some distress.”

“Mr. Carlsson . . . Bertie . . . please, I wouldn't upset Amelia for the world. But I have to see her. I have to discuss this with her. We could be talking about the end of human civilization as we know it.”

I could hear Bertil Carlsson take a very deep breath. “Mr. Erskine, everything that my wife ever said about you is true. You are completely and absolutely doolally.”

Even though he knew she was dead, it was hard for Frank to believe that Susan Fireman wasn't staring at him, and that she wasn't about to speak to him. He felt as if his skin were shrinking, and it took all of his strength not to turn around and hurry out of the room.

He slowly approached the bed and bent forward to examine her—so closely that he could have felt her breath on his face, if she were still alive. But, no, she wasn't breathing, and although her eyes were wide open, they were focused on nothing at all.

All the same, she still had that small, secretive smile, as if it amused her that she was dead, and found it funny that she had unnerved him so much.

“Susan?” he said, and he shook her shoulder just to make sure.

At that moment Dr. Gathering came in, carrying an untidy sheaf of medical records. “Erm . . . she can't hear you, Frank.”

“No, George, I know.”

“Sister Perpetua told me she'd shuffled off the mortal coil. I thought you'd be here.”

“Yes,” said Frank. He tried to sound efficient, and practical, even though his heart was still hammering. “We're going to need a full postmortem, and we're going to need it pronto. Especially the bloods.”

George dropped some of his papers onto the floor and bent down to pick them up. “It's Dante's Inferno down in the ER.”

“I was down there. It looks as if it's going to get worse.”

“The Death Troll has a theory that this could be a Western variant of dengue hemorrhagic fever.”

“Oh, does he? Well—I suppose he has to find some way of justifying that all-expenses-paid trip to Bangkok.”

George peered over at Susan Fireman. “To be fair, this does seem to exhibit several similarities to DHF. It starts with a minor respiratory infection, doesn't it, and that could account for the nightmares. Then there's a period of extreme sensitivity to bright light, followed by total collapse, and a catastrophic drop in blood pressure.”

“Sure. But so far as I'm aware, people who get DHF don't feel an unquenchable thirst for other people's blood, and they don't go cutting their children's throats to get it.”

“True—but The Death Troll was careful to say ‘
variant
.' ”

“Well, he would. He's a politician, not a doctor.”

Frank turned back to Susan Fireman. He felt reluctant to leave her, because he knew that he would never see her again—not in one piece, anyhow. The pathologists would cut open her breastbone with surgical shears, and rummage through her organs; and then they would open up the top of her skull with an oscillating autopsy saw, and lift out her brain.

George said, “The reason I came up here, the Death Troll says that you should take the rest of the day off and get some rest. He'd like you back here at 2
A.M
., to help out the night shift.”

“I'm fine, George. I'd rather stay here.”

“Frank—you won't be any good to anybody if you're totally bushed, you know that. Go home, relax. We'll call you if there's a crisis.”

“This isn't a crisis?”

“Not yet. This is only your ordinary, everyday, garden-variety disaster.”

Frank reluctantly left the Sisters of Jerusalem and walked home. Midtown, the streets were still screaming with sirens, and medical helicopters were clattering overhead and people were hurrying in every direction as if the end of the world was coming.

It started to rain, and the rain was so warm that it felt like blood. He suddenly realized how tired he was, and how unsettled. There was nothing worse than having to deal with patients who couldn't be saved, no matter how hard he tried to keep them alive. He found himself praying that he wouldn't come across somebody throwing up blood in a doorway, because he would have to stop and take him back to the emergency room. George had been right: He badly needed to rest, and to think, and to get himself ready for a very arduous night.

He heard a woman screaming, somewhere on the next block, and a man shouting, “
Get away from me! Get away from me!
” Then he heard breaking glass, and two loud bangs that could have been gunfire. He had seen disaster movies in which the social fabric had torn apart, almost immediately, but he had never believed that it would really happen, not until now.

Sixth and Fifth avenues were both blocked off by police barricades, so it took him nearly twenty minutes to reach the tree-lined street in Murray Hill where he lived, and by the time he got there his pants were chafing with sweat and his shirt was clinging to his back. It was almost 5:00 now, 91 degrees, with 87 percent humidity. The afternoon had turned a dull bronze color, as if it were going to thunder.

He climbed the white stone steps to his front door. Halfway up, he caught sight of a middle-aged man kneeling by the mailbox on the corner of the street. He stopped, and took off his sunglasses so that he could see better. The man's face was crudely smeared with bright blue paint, so that it looked like an African tribal mask, and his T-shirt had ridden up under his arms so that his big white belly hung down. He was gripping one leg of the mailbox with both hands, as if he were terrified that he was going to fly off the face of the earth. As Frank watched him, his belly convulsed, and convulsed again, and a fountain of dark ruby vomit gushed out of his mouth and splattered onto the sidewalk. Frank took out his cell phone and punched out 911, but it beeped and beeped and nobody answered. He hesitated. He was a doctor. It was his moral duty to go to the man's assistance. But he knew there was absolutely nothing he could do to help him, and the man had probably murdered two or three people to drink so much blood. The man slowly turned his head toward him, and he looked utterly desolate. Frank hesitated a moment longer, but then he put his sunglasses back on, climbed up the last three steps, and opened up his front door. He went through and closed it behind him. Click.

The apartment building was stuffy and hushed and dimly lit. It was like living in an Edward Hopper painting. There were dusty silk lilies in a tall green vase beside the umbrella stand, and a tall rectangular mirror in which one only seemed to be able to see half of oneself, or the back of somebody disappearing through a doorway. Somewhere up at the top of the building, someone was vacuum-cleaning; and as he climbed up to his second-story apartment, Frank heard sad, reflective piano music, Debussy maybe, or Satie.

As he was about to unlock his apartment door, his key raised, he thought about the blue-faced man in the street.
He was tempted to go back. After all, if the man was suffering from the same condition that had killed Susan Fireman, he hadn't
wanted
to murder anybody: He had been driven to do it by his raging thirst for human blood. But the same could be said of crackheads who murdered innocent people to feed their addiction, or drunk drivers who knocked down schoolchildren. Frank had told Susan Fireman that he didn't judge his patients, but he had been lying. He had nothing but contempt for people who injured themselves or others through willful stupidity, or lack of self-control. Once he had sat all night by the bedside of a twenty-seven-year-old woman who had been so drunk that she had swallowed concentrated drain-cleaner, and he had never been able to find it in his heart to forgive her for what she had done to herself.

He hadn't forgiven Susan Fireman either, for murdering her friends instead of trying to get medical help. All the same, he regretted that she was dead. For some reason, he felt that she had the answer to something that he needed to understand.

His apartment was high-ceilinged and austere, with dark brown carpets and cream-colored walls and a few abstract paintings in varying shades of brown and cream. The furniture was Italian, mahogany-colored leather, very square and very expensive. In one corner there was a Bang & Olufsen CD player. In the opposite corner stood a 1920s-style cabinet which contained bottles of liquor and Jazz Age cocktail glasses.

Frank was thirty-seven in January and he was still married, although he and Christina had already talked about divorce. The starkness of this apartment was in direct contrast to their house in Darien, Connecticut, which was crammed with antique colonial furniture and embroidered cushions and china dogs. Frank had felt that
Christina was cluttering up his head with so many knickknacks and frills that there wasn't any space left for serious thinking. One day he had gone to the Sisters of Jerusalem and stayed late in gastro-entorology and never returned home. Even today, seven months later, he couldn't really explain why, not to anybody else. He spent long evenings alone, reading; or listening to music; or staring at the wall and doing nothing at all.

Maybe, like many doctors, he had secretly begun to wonder what he was doing, saving lives that were nothing but a waste of everybody's time, including the people who were living them. He stripped off his chilly, sweat-soaked clothes and climbed into his black glass shower-cubicle with the volcanic stone base. As he soaped himself, he could see half of his face in the circular shaving mirror next to the black marble basin, as if he were being spied on from a parallel existence. He toweled himself with a dark brown towel and rubbed his chest with Dolce & Gabbana body lotion.

Afterward, with a fresh towel wrapped around his waist, he went into the stainless-steel kitchen and took a bottle of Perrier water out of the icebox. He would have preferred a Heineken, but he was going to need all of his concentration when he went back to the Sisters of Jerusalem in the early hours of the morning. He supposed he ought to eat something, even if it was only a cheese sandwich, but he didn't feel hungry. He kept thinking about Susan Fireman, staring at him with those china-blue eyes, and the blue-faced man vomiting blood in the street outside.

He lay back on his king-size bed. In the corner of his bedroom was the only antique in the whole apartment: an oval cheval-mirror that was reputed to have belonged to Ulysses S. Grant, and which Grant had taken with him on his campaign in Chattanooga. Frank didn't particularly like it, but it was worth more than a quarter of a million dollars, and he didn't want Christina to get her hands on it.

He switched on the wall-mounted plasma-screen television. Almost every channel was still running minute-by-minute news of the “vampire epidemic.” Cases had been reported as far uptown as 125th Street, and Mayor Brandisi had ordered police checkpoints set up on all bridges and tunnels, although he had to admit that he didn't really know what they were supposed to be looking for, apart from people who appeared to be sick, or who had covered themselves with sunblock.

So far, more than two hundred victims had been found with their throats cut, and the mayor estimated that there could be “twice—maybe three times—more.”