Manitou Blood (31 page)

“That is what frightens me,” said Jenica. “Supposing you have been leading us into an ambush, all along?”

“Well, I don't feel well enough to make an issue of it,” said Frank. “I'm just saying that if you want me to go first, then I will.”

“I trust him,” I said. In reality, I wasn't entirely sure that I did, but I was entirely sure that I didn't want to go first.

Gil shrugged. Then he took a pack of Fruit Loops out of one of the patch pockets on his pants, shook out a handful, and crammed them into his mouth. “All right by me,” he said, indistinctly.

I gave Frank my flashlight and he edged his way into the
niche. He had to go in sideways, and to hold his breath, too. The flashlight shone upward into his face, which made him look even more ghoulish than he did already. “It's not too bad,” he said, but then he started coughing, and he was forced to stop.

“Do you want to come back?” I asked him, but he managed to clamp his hand over his throat.

“I'm okay. I can make it.”

He inched his way toward the steps, and then gradually he disappeared out of sight. We could still see his flashlight dancing on the brickwork, and we could hear his shoes scraping on the steps, but that was all. Then the flashlight disappeared, too, and there was darkness, and silence.

“
Frank
!” I called out.

Still silence.

“Frank, are you there? What do you see?”

More silence, but then a distorted, echoing voice. “
It's incredible! It's incredible! You got to come down here!
”

“Frank? Is everything okay down there?”

“
Come see for yourself!
”

“Are there any
strigoi
down there?” asked Jenica.

“
Come see
.”

“It's a trap,” said Jenica. “I am sure that he is trying to trap us.”

“I still trust him,” I told her. “And he doesn't sound like he's in any kind of trouble.”

Gil lifted up his baseball bat. “I'll go down first. If you hear me shout, just get out of here as quick as you can.”

He squeezed himself into the niche, and worked his way sideways down the steps. I get panicky in confined spaces. My sister locked me in the linen closet when I was four years old, and I didn't stop screaming for three days. Well, my mom said that it
felt
like three days. This was even worse. First I had to exhale, and then I had to pull my stomach in, and even then it took a whole lot of effort to force myself along. The brickwork was scraping at my belt
buckle, and I seriously began to think that I was going to get stuck here, and starve to death. It didn't help that I was starting to hyperventilate.

“You can go faster,” Jenica scolded me. She may have been bosomy, but she was a whole lot slimmer than me.

“I'm going as fast as I can, okay?”

“And what if we have to escape?”

I didn't answer. I was too busy struggling round the corner. I had never felt so panicky in my life, even when Misquamacus had brought down hordes of giant rats from the Great Beyond, and I hated rats almost as much as I hated confined spaces.

After I had turned the corner, however, I found that the niche began to widen, and that the ceiling was higher. The last twenty steps were very steep, but they led down into a huge, dark vault, with massive cast-iron pillars to support it. Gil was there, and Frank, too, and they were criss-crossing their flashlight beams in all directions.

Between the pillars lay hundreds of coffins,
hundreds
, and they were all lying open, with their lids tilted. Further back, the flashlights picked up the glitter of water, where part of the vault was flooded, and some of the coffins were afloat.

“
Strigoi
,” whispered Jenica, as she came down the last step, and joined us.

Frank approached the nearest coffin. It looked like oak, and it must have been varnished black when it was made, but now the varnish was blistered and faded. Inside, the fabric lining was yellow and stained, and spotted with mold, and there was a clear impression of somebody's body. There were even a few dry brown hairs on the pillow, and Frank picked them up, and rubbed them between his fingers.

“Frank?”

He turned to me, and he looked totally shattered, even beneath that thick mask of sunblock. “It's true,” he said.
“They really exist. The undead. I haven't been dreaming, have I?”

I didn't know what to say to him. He turned away, and went from one coffin to the other, as if he were searching for evidence that this was all some kind of monstrous fake. Some of the coffins had nameplates on them, and he read them out.

“Naum Ciomu, Valeriu Erhan, Ioan Stefanescu . . .”

Jenica was over on the other side of the vault with Gil, but when she heard Frank reading out the names she called out, “Harry! Tell him to stop! Some of the
strigoi
might be able to pick him up!”

“Frank,” I warned him, and he held up his hand and said, “Okay. I heard her.”

He came back and stood next to me. “She really doesn't trust me, does she?”

“No. But she knows a whole lot more about vampires than we do, and maybe they
can't
be trusted, as a rule.”

“I'm not a vampire, Harry, and I don't intend to become one.”

I watched Jenica climbing over a row of empty coffins, with Gil close behind her. “Maybe she had a bad experience with vampires, who knows?”

“
She
had a bad experience with vampires?”

I looked at him. I didn't know what to say. I could only guess what agony he was suffering.

“Who would have thought that this was all true?” he asked me. “All those horror comics we used to read when we were kids . . . all of those Dracula movies. All of that stuff about the vampire Lestat. And all the time, it was true.”

It was then that Gil waved his flashlight in our direction, and Jenica called, “Harry! Harry, we've found it! The Wolf's casket, it's over here!”

The Vampire Gatherer's coffin was enormous, like a 1940s sedan, and it had been propped up on bricks to keep it
clear of the water. Just like the coffin that Frank had described in his dream, it was forged out of iron, and it was thick with overlapping scales of dirt and corrosion. It had six huge handles in the shape of shaggy wolf heads, holding rings in their jaws, and its edges were thickly decorated with intertwined snakes.

In common with all the other coffins, its lid had been lifted off and tilted aside, although it was raised up so high that we couldn't see if there was anybody lying in it.

Gil immediately genuflected in front of me and cupped his hands. “Here—I'll give you a boost up.”

“Just a goddam minute,” I protested. “What if he's
in
there?”

“If he's in there, I don't know. You hammer a stake through his heart.”

“We don't have a stake.”

“It would do no good, anyway,” said Jenica. “The Wolf is already dead. His heart is buried in Wallachia.”

“So if he's in there, what
do
I do?”

“You say nothing. You stay silent. I will cross him with holy water, and read the dismissal from the book of
svarcolaci,
and then we will close his coffin with wax.”

“And that will seal him up again, for good?”

“As you say, Harry, this is the supernatural. It does not arrive with a manufacturer's warranty.”

I put my foot into Gil's cupped hands, and gripped his shoulders. He said, “Ready?”—but before I could tell him that I wasn't, he was heaving me upward, with my arms wildly waving to keep my balance.

I managed to catch a glimpse inside The Wolf's casket before I teetered sideways and had to jump back down to the floor, but only for a split second. He wasn't in there, thank all the saints of Wallachia. I saw a filthy gray pillow, and lace ruffles that had turned yellow with age, but that was all.

“You want to try again?” asked Gil.

“Forget it, it's empty.”

“He's probably hiding in a mirror someplace,” said Frank. “In fact, I'll bet
all
of them are.”

“I would like to look in the casket for myself, please,” put in Jenica.

“Okay,” said Gil, and knelt down again. Jenica placed her booted foot into his interlaced hands, and I stood next to her, holding her elbow, to help her to keep her balance. Gil lifted her up, and we both made a serious effort not to look up at her thin white lacy thong. She peered over the edge of the coffin, and confirmed, “Yes, he is gone.” But just when Gil was about to lower her back down, she said, “Wait—wait up a second! There is something here!”

When she climbed down, she was wielding something that looked like a thick brown stick, a little over a foot long, with a knob at each end. It was only when Gil shone the flashlight on it that we realized what it was. A very old bone, heavily decorated with all kinds of zig-zag patterns, and with a hole drilled through one end, with feathers attached.

Frank coughed, and said, “That's a shinbone. A human tibia.”

“You sure about that?”

“Trust me, I'm a doctor.”

I took the bone from Jenica and peered at it closely. I couldn't think why, but I found it oddly evocative, like some smell that you haven't smelled in years, or some song that you can't quite remember. “Do you know what this is used for?” I asked Jenica. “I mean, is it part of any vampire ritual?”

Jenica shook her head. “It is not Romanian, I don't think.”

“So what's it doing in the Vampire Gatherer's casket?”

Frank approached the casket and touched it with the fingertips of both hands. “You know, I can almost feel this guy,” he said, hoarsely. “That
emptiness
I was talking about.
It's very, very strong.” He traced one finger across the corroded plaque on the end of the casket. “I think I can see some letters here.”

I said, “Here,” and shone my flashlight onto them, and Frank slowly read them out. “N—U—M . . . E—L—E . . . M—E—U—E—S—T . . . and then there's an E . . . what does that mean in English?”

Jenica said, “Can you repeat that?”

“N—U—M—”

“That's all right, I understand it,” Jenica interrupted him. “ ‘
Numele meu este
.' It simply means ‘my name is—' ”

“
Vasile Lup
,” Frank whispered.

We stared at him, stunned. “You
said
it,” said Gil.

“What?” said Frank, blinking at us.

“You
said
it, man. You said the fucking name! You're not supposed to say it, otherwise he can pick it up on his radar and he can tell that you're looking for him.”

Frank looked distraught. “I know that, I know. But I didn't mean to, I swear it. I just—”

“You didn't
mean
to?” snapped Jenica. “Harry! Didn't I
warn
you that he couldn't be trusted! Now he has spoken the Vampire Gatherer's name and the Vampire Gatherer knows that we are trying to find him! He will find us first, believe me, and he will kill us all!”

Frank said, “Listen! I really didn't intend to say it out loud. I don't know . . . it just kind of came out.”

“Oh! So you think we are fools? You are already one of the
strigoi
! You wanted to stay with us just to make sure that we were all trapped, and torn into pieces!”

Frank started to cough. “I didn't mean to say the goddam name, okay? I want to see this son-of-a-bitch get his comeuppance even more desperately than you do!”

“You will have your wish, sooner than you know!”

I said, “Hey, come on, Jenica, take it easy. You said yourself that most of this vampire stuff is only myths and legends.
So all this stuff about saying the name, maybe that's just mythical, too. Gil thought you only had to say the word
strigoi,
didn't he, and the vampires would come and hunt you down? And like, think about it. How could this Wolf character hear Frank whispering his name, when
we're
right down in this cellar, right, and
he's
probably twenty blocks away, in some multi-story parking lot, hiding inside somebody's rearview mirror?”

But Jenica wouldn't lighten up. “There is so much historical evidence,” she said, stalking backwards and forwards. “People have spoken the name of a
strigoi
or a
svarcolaci
, and next day their bodies are scattered over the fields, for the crows to feed on! The famous historian Alexandru Dutu, that happened to him in 1954, in Bucharest! He gave a speech at the university, and he said out loud the name of a
svarcolaci
. That night, they say that his blood came down on Presei Libere like rain!”

“Okay,” I acknowledged. “But even if Frank did say the name deliberately, which I don't believe he did, maybe he's saved us all the trouble of looking for this character. Come on, Jenica. We have to face up to him sooner or later.”

“In the daylight, yes, when we have the advantage! But later—”

“I know.
In the night, in the dark
.”

“You mock me, Harry.”

“Jenica, I wouldn't dare.”

At that moment, however, we heard a splash, and then a quick, sharp patter. Over in the far corner of the vault, three or four of the floating coffins started to knock together, like canoes. Gil raised his flashlight and tracked it slowly from side to side. There was another patter, and another splash. Then more coffins began to sway.

“Oh my God,” said Jenica. “Look!”

I lifted my flashlight, too, and it was then that I saw them.
Rats
—there must have been thousands of them, swarming
over the coffins like giant gray lice. Some of them were struggling in the water, drowning, while scores more of them were running over their backs. Their eyes glittered bright yellow and the vault was suddenly filled with their chittering and squeaking.