Manitou Blood (14 page)

He spat again, and sat up, and furiously wiped his mouth on one of the pillows. “What the hell did you do that for?”

She laughed, and pirouetted away from him, across the bedroom. She
flickered
, as she danced, like an old hand-cranked movie.

Frank hobbled into the bathroom, feeling as if he had been fighting in an alley, and lost. He switched on the light and stared at himself in the mirror and he had never seen himself looking so haggard. He twisted around so that he could see his buttocks, and they were criss-crossed with bloody lacerations. How could he be dreaming, when he felt so sore? His penis was reddened and his scrotum was smeared with blood where Susan Fireman had scratched him. How could he be dreaming, when he could twist the faucet and splash his face with warm water?

He pressed his face into a towel.
I can feel this, and I can't wake up. I'm going to have to accept that it's real. As crazy as it is, as scary as it is, it's
real.

He dropped the towel onto the counter and went back into the bedroom. “Okay,” he said, “supposing this
isn't
a nightmare—why don't you tell me what the hell is going on?”

But there was no answer. Susan Fireman wasn't there.

“Susan?” he demanded. He stalked through to the living room but there was no sign of her. Not only that, the security chain was still fastened, so she couldn't have slipped out through the front door. He switched on the fluorescent light in the kitchen but that was empty, too. The only sound was the humming of the icebox.

He returned to the bedroom. “Susan? This is ridiculous!”

He opened the closet. She wasn't hiding in there. There was only an inch clearance under the bed, so she couldn't be hiding
there
, either.

He searched his apartment again. He even looked in the dirty clothes hamper. She was gone, and there was absolutely no trace that she had been here, except for the rumpled-up bed. He looked up at the window, but it was five feet up from the floor, and it was only open three or four inches. Even if she had managed to climb
in
that way,
he very much doubted that she could have climbed out. There was nothing around that she could have stood on to reach it.

“I'm losing my mind,” he told himself. He stared back at himself from the mirror in the hallway, and his reflection didn't even try to deny it.

After Bertil hung up on me, I sat in my Alexander Woollcott chair for a while, drinking and thinking. Even though I had turned down the volume, the TV news channels were still filled with flickering images of people plastered in blood, and the numbers of dead and murdered were clocking up higher and higher, like the score on a pinball machine, with no sign of them slowing down.

If I couldn't persuade Amelia to talk to the city authorities, I had to try to talk to them myself, didn't I?—even though I knew how skeptical they would be. I couldn't just sit here in this tatty old chair drinking Guinness and watch all of these people die. But what if the authorities simply refused to believe me, which they probably wouldn't?

Maybe I should make another attempt to contact Singing Rock. He probably wouldn't agree to bring the malevolent thing back to my bedroom, so that I could see it for myself, but maybe he could tell me something about it, and why it was spreading this blood-drinking epidemic. Even a name would help: I could look it up on the Internet. You'd be surprised
what malevolent things you can find on the Internet. I once looked up Misquamacus, the Algonquin wonder-worker who had killed Singing Rock and had almost killed me and Karen, too, and I found an actual picture of him, on some obscure Web site devoted to Keiller Webb, a nineteenth-century frontier photographer.

There he was, Misquamacus, standing in the background of a daguerrotype taken at Pyramid Lake in 1865. He was a wearing a tall black stovepipe hat and he was glaring at me, as if he had
known
when this picture was taken that I would be looking at it one day, in a hundred and forty years' time. He was stony-faced, his cheeks scarred with magical stigmata, and his deep-set glittering eyes looked like cockroaches nestling under a window ledge.

There hadn't been very much text to accompany the picture, except a brief excerpt from
Native American Magic
, by Roland Hunsiger and Merriam West. “Misquamacus was said to have possessed the power to appear in several different places simultaneously, sometimes thousands of miles apart. He was also credited with the ability to travel through time by swallowing blazing oil and being reborn in the body of any unsuspecting woman who happened to be in the locality of his self-immolation—either in the future, or in the past, whichever he chose.

“Misquamacus and his followers fought several notably bloody battles against the earliest Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam, and the wooden palisades for which Wall Street was named were specifically built to keep out his marauding warriors. Although Misquamacus' tribe was scattered in the spring of 1655, he made a solemn oath that one day he would drive out every last colonist. It is seriously thought by many Native American elders that the catastrophic collapse of several buildings in Manhattan in the 1990s was a last attempt by Misquamacus to destroy the
white ‘invaders' and drive them from American soil. They even believe that he might have succeeded, had not his destruction of high-tension power cables led to a massive discharge of electrical energy, which vaporized his
manitou
(spirit), and dispersed it amongst the four elements. He is now condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the earth, the fire, the wind and the rain.”

The name
Misquamacus
still gave me a rusty taste in my mouth, even after all these years. He had first come into my life when he had chosen Karen as the host for his first reincarnation. Once he was reborn out of Karen's body, he had tried to summon the Great Old Ones, the Indian gods of total destruction, the ones who lived in the Empty Time (before time as we know it had actually begun.) He had almost succeeded, but Singing Rock had helped me to stop him.

Misquamacus had tried to be reincarnated again, and again, and Singing Rock had been killed as we struggled to send him back to the Happy Hunting Ground once and for all. Misquamacus was an incredibly powerful wonder-worker, no doubt about it, but in the end it was no contest. His magic might have been pretty damn devastating in the days of rain dances and war parties, but he didn't stand a chance against twenty-first-century technology. Who's going to be bothered to blow magic powders into the wind to find herds of buffalo, when there's a Wal-mart only ten minutes down the road, with pre-packed USDA-grade steak? Who needs to go to a sweat lodge in search of visions, when they can buy ecstasy, and DVD players with cinema-quality sound? The Indians were simply left behind, standing with their pipes and their feathers and their beads beside the highway, while the rest of the world went careening onward, into the future. Even Singing Rock used to say:
It's no use crying about Native American magic, my friend, it's one of those things we don't need anymore, like cotton diapers and typewriters
.

I picked up the bracelet that Singing Rock had given me, and slipped it back on. Its black stones looked very dull now, for some reason, as if all the life had gone out of them. I clasped my right hand around it, and closed my eyes.

“Singing Rock . . . I really need your help right now. I admit that we didn't have the guts to look when you first tried to show us what was causing Ted's nightmares . . . we were cadmium yellow, I admit it. But that doesn't mean that I don't deeply appreciate what you did for us, and that I don't admire your bravery. Singing Rock . . . I'm begging you now. I'll make any sacrifice you want me to. Anything. People are dying out there, hundreds of people, and it seems to me that this
thing
that's been causing Ted's nightmares . . . well, it could be responsible for killing these people, too.”

I waited, listening for some kind of response—a tap on the window, or a whisper, or a scratch on the wall. All the time the day gradually grew darker, and the sirens went on whooping and wailing. I heard screaming, and a catastrophic crash of glass, like a storefront window being smashed, and shots. Helicopters were beating over Central Park like distant tom-toms.

“Singing Rock, please. I know that I must have appeared ungrateful for what you did for me, but believe me I thought it was very,
very
amazing. If you can't conjure up that actual thing a second time, or if you don't feel in the mood, at least just give me a clue. Tell me what that thing is, or what it's called. Tell me where it comes from, or what it wants.”

I heard people running along Seventeenth Street, scores of them. I stood up and went to the window just in time to see them crossing Sixth Avenue. There must have been over two hundred of them, men mostly, but some women, but I had no idea why they were running. They weren't crying, or shouting—only running. It was one of the scariest things
that I had ever witnessed. They turned northward and they were gone, although I could still hear the clattering sound of their feet, for almost fifteen seconds afterward.

“That's it, Harry,” I said, out loud. “Doomsday scenario.”

I turned back into my gloomy room, and jumped with shock. Singing Rock was standing in the darkest corner. I could see the light reflected from his glasses, and his greased-back hair, and the black suit that he had been buried in. He wasn't entirely substantial: I could still see the bookcase behind him, and even the titles of the books.

“Hallo, Harry,” he said. His voice had a crumply quality, like tissue paper, or the wind blowing into a sports-reporter's microphone.

“Singing Rock. I was beginning to think that you weren't speaking to me.”

“There are some friends and some enemies on whom we can never turn our backs.”

“So I'm which? Enemy, or friend?”

“You have to ask me?”

“No, of course not. I'm sorry. If I wasn't your friend, you wouldn't have drummed up that thing for me, whatever it was.”

“If that's what you wish to believe.”

I circled cautiously around the table, but the closer I got to Singing Rock, the dimmer he became, until I could barely make him out at all, only his lips moving. I stepped back, and he became clearer. He would have been nearly seventy-five now, if he had lived, but he hadn't changed. I guess that's the only positive thing you can say about death: It doesn't age you.

“How are you doing?” I asked him.

“I am dead, Harry Erskine. I exist only in the great world of blackness beneath your feet. That's how I am ‘doing'.”

“But you know what this thing is, don't you? You know why all of these people are having nightmares and drinking
blood? I mean, they're
killing
each other out there, Singing Rock, they're cutting each other's throats. Women, children, anybody. It's a massacre.”

“Yes, I am aware of that. I can see those innocents who have been murdered. Their spirits are falling into the blackness below like the snow falls in winter.”

“You can't show me that thing again? That presence, whatever it was? I saw it out of the corner of my eye . . . it was kind of dark, and
stretchy
. And I heard it whispering, too.”

Singing Rock shook his head. “I would show you, Harry Erskine, if I could. I don't blame you for your lack of courage. It is a creature of the darkest dark, from a very ancient heritage of which I know nothing. I caught it by surprise, and led it here with an old Lakota spell, but it soon broke free, and it will not be surprised a second time.”

“Do you have any idea what it is, or where it comes from?”

“I can tell you its name only by suggestion. If I were to speak it, or to write it, I would instantly attract its attention, and it would come after you faster than a ravenous bear in the forests from which it first emerged. Let me warn you, Harry Erskine: This spirit is greedy and cruel and it will stop at nothing to spread its kind as far and as fast as it can.”

“Okay, then, if you can only tell me its name by suggestion—suggest away.”

“Not now. But you will know the name when I give it to you.”

“Singing Rock, this is
urgent!
Mothers are drinking their babies' blood, even as we speak!”

But Singing Rock firmly said, “
No
. Don't you understand? You are special. By chance, you are the only one who has guessed that the plague has been caused by a spirit, and not by a virus. If
you
were to be killed, who else would guess? Your white doctors have long ago lost touch with the spirit world, and with the powers of nature. If they cannot
see their enemy wriggling under their microscopes, they refuse to believe that he exists.”

“So how do I convince them?”

“I cannot say. You are a white man and you know better than I do how to talk to other white men.”

“For God's sake, you used to be a realtor. You can convince anybody of anything.”

Singing Rock turned to me, and I thought that he looked weary and sad, as if he were tired of being dead. “I will tell you the name, Harry Erskine. What you do with that knowledge is up to you.”

I tried to give him an encouraging smile, but it wasn't easy. He began to fade, and after a few moments he had vanished altogether, and the only evidence that he had visited me was the faint aroma of lavender hair oil.

But at least he had agreed to help me. I didn't know
how
he was going to give me the name of the malevolent thing, but I knew that he would keep his promise.

It occurred to me, though, that he still hadn't told me if I was his friend or his enemy. Maybe he regarded me as a little of both.

I took a shower, standing in the tub with the shower fixture rattling and shaking and letting out explosive sneezes of hot water. Without drying, I wrapped myself up in the thick navy-blue toweling robe that Karen had given me, with my monogram embroidered on the pocket, and I sat by the open window perspiring and drinking Guinness and listening to the terrible sounds of the night.