Manitou Blood (35 page)

Jenica turned and stared at me but all I could do was shake my head. “It's not
me
,” I told her.

She stared up at the Vampire Gatherer. The shower of ice particles was already easing off, and the shadowy creature seemed to be edging away from us. Its face changed to an expressionless mask, like a Japanese
noh
player, and then it flickered through twenty or thirty different changes—so quickly that I could barely see them.

“It's no use trying to hide yourself,” I told him. “Now I know who you are, I know how to hunt you down, and defeat you. I have done it before and I will do it again—but this time I will make certain that you are banished from this earth for all eternity!”

The Vampire Gatherer let out yet another groan. It felt as if the fabric of the whole apartment block was being moved, brick grinding on brick, floorboards squealing against floorboards, joints straining against joints. Jenica was shaking her head from side to side and Gil was roaring “
Shut him up! For Christ's sake, shut him up!
”

But then there was silence. The Vampire Gatherer whirled around in a complicated counterplay of shadows, and stormed back through the mirror, onto the sand, and started to walk away from us. Above him, in the mirror world, the sky began to darken. Black clouds rolled over from the ocean, as quickly as a speeded-up movie, and seagulls were tossed in the wind like sheets of newspaper.

Behind me, I heard murmuring, and shuffling, and when I turned around, I saw that the
strigoi
were beginning to retreat back into the kitchen. Gil prodded them with his baseball bat, harder and harder, and they struggled back through the doorway, pushing and jostling each other. They were snarling at Gil with frustration, but for some reason they seemed to have lost their appetite, and their nerve.

Jenica took hold of my wrist. “
Look
,” she said. Back in the mirror world, the Vampire Gatherer had stopped, and was staring at us.

His shadows slanted sideways, away from the wind, at an increasing angle. Forty-five degrees, and then fifty, and then sixty. No human being could have stood at an angle like that. But as the shadows slanted, they revealed a figure standing in the middle of them—a figure who stood tall and upright.

“Oh God,” I whispered.

“What?” said Jenica. “What is it?”

I took a step toward the mirror, and then another, and then all I could do was to stand there, staring into a world that I could never enter, at the man who had turned my whole life into pain and turmoil.

He looked exactly like his photograph, the one taken at Pyramid Lake in 1865. His face was like chiseled granite, his cheeks embossed with magical scars. His eyes were as cold and glittering as ever. Now, however, he was wearing his full war bonnet, a huge headdress fashioned from the skull of a buffalo, and hung about with crow feathers and strings of beads, and crawling with shiny black beetles, thousands of them, which dropped onto his shoulders and scuttled over his cloak.

His cloak was sewn with hundreds of crow skulls, and dried ribbons of human flesh—pieces that his followers had cut from their own bodies and given to him in homage. There were ears, and strips of thigh muscle, and fingers, and even penises, all shriveled up and orange with age.

He stood very tall, but the fierce wind that was blowing across the sand seemed to make his figure sway slightly, as if he were standing two or three inches above the ground.

I was afraid of him. I couldn't pretend that I wasn't. I had seen how cruel and ruthless he could be, and I knew that his hatred for the people who had swarmed all over his land was deep and dark and utterly bottomless—as bottomless as the world of death that exists below our feet, the Happy Hunting Ground.

He said nothing. He didn't need to. Although I had no
idea how he had managed to resurrect himself, I knew why he was here, and what he wanted to do. He wanted to see the pages of history turned back six hundred years. He wanted to see every American city deserted, and strewn with dead, whether they were white or black or Hispanic or Oriental. He wanted the crows to circle, and pick our bones.

Above all, he wanted to see Indians riding across the plains again, so that they could come to the top of a rise, with the wind lashing the grass all around them and lightning dancing on the distant hills, and know that this land was theirs, all of it, forever.

He was probably the last remaining Native American who refused to admit that there was no such thing as “forever.” But then his name was Misquamacus, and he was the greatest wonder-worker who had ever lived, and died, and lived again, and been dispersed to the elements. And here he was again, and for all the pompous words that had magically come out of my mouth, I knew that we were royally screwed.

In the mirror, the sky grew blacker and blacker, until I found myself staring at nothing but my own reflection. I turned round and Jenica was standing close to me, with about six different expressions on her face.

“Who was that?” she asked. “Do you know him?”

Gil came out of the kitchen and laid his baseball bat down on the hallway table. “They've gone,” he said. He had wound a tea towel around his hand, but it was already soaked with blood.

Jenica said, “Here . . . let me see that.”

“It's not too bad. At least it's clean.” He looked back into the kitchen as if he couldn't believe what he had witnessed. “You should have seen them hightailing it out that window . . . like roaches when you switch on the light. And they climbed right down the wall, like,
headfirst
, man. How do you climb down a wall headfirst?”

“Count Dracula did it, in the original novel,” I told him.

Jenica said, “They defy gravity, the
strigoi
, because they are no longer alive.”

I lifted up the decorated bone and looked at it again. I had no idea what its origins were, or what the symbols on it might have meant, but it definitely contained some extraordinary power, and not Romanian-type power, either.

“I could sure use a drink,” said Gil. “How about opening another bottle of death-breath?”

“There is one thing I must do before that,” said Jenica. She picked up Gil's baseball bat, went up to the mirror, and hit it as hard as she could. Her first blow only starred it, but then she swung the bat again, and this time the glass dropped onto the floor in a sparkling heap, and there was nothing left in the frame but a plain wooden backing. “I think I owe Frank an apology,” she said. “And you too, Harry, for doubting you.”

“Little bit late for Frank, I'm afraid.”

We went into the living room and sat down. Jenica said, “I think my father would understand if I open his
palinca
.”

“Excuse me?”

She held up a clear glass bottle. “Plum brandy, from Transylvania. Very strong.”

She poured us each a large measure, and we took a swallow without making a toast.

“Jesus wept,” said Gil, gasping for breath. “You could dissolve diamonds in this.”

“My father says that every person who drinks
palinca
becomes in their heart a Romanian, whatever their passport says.”

I took another swallow. I don't know what it was doing for my nationality, but it was certainly doing my
cojones
good. I reckoned that after half a bottle of
palinca
I could probably fight a whole legion of
strigoi,
and any
svarcolaci
you cared to bring on.

“So what exactly happened out there?” said Gil. “I don't understand why those
strigoi
suddenly turned tail.”

“I am not so sure, either,” said Jenica. “I spoke the ritual for disenchanting the Vampire Gatherer, and at first I thought that it had not worked. Yet suddenly he turned around and returned to the mirror world, and when he did that, all of the
strigoi
left, too.” All the time she was looking at me, because she wanted to know who that figure in the war bonnet was, and she knew that I knew.

“That creature . . .” I said, “that shadow thing . . . that
looks
like the spirit of Vasile Lup, and it
is
the spirit of Vasile Lup, mostly. But he's like somebody who gets possessed by a demon . . . you know, like Regan in
The Exorcist
? Outwardly, you know, they
seem
to be the same person. Their appearance is the same, but they're not in control of their own personality. It's the demon who's taken charge of everything they say and everything they do.”

“So what are you telling us?” said Gil. “That Vasile Lup's spirit is possessed by another spirit? How does that work?”

“Spirits are just the same as living people. Some of them are leaders and some of them are followers.”

“Vasile Lup must be a pretty dominant character, though, if he was able to rouse up all of these vampires. And he not only roused them up, he got them to spread themselves all over the city in less than forty-eight hours. Think about it. A couple of hundred vampires have managed to do in two days what even al Qaeda could never have done, even with a nuclear bomb. They've killed thousands of people and they've recruited thousands more to do the same, so the killing is spreading, like, exponentially.”

“Sure,” I said. “But Vasile Lup didn't start this epidemic himself. Somebody had to rouse
him,
didn't they? That's why I think that he's been possessed by some spirit that's even more powerful than he is.”

“You know who this spirit is, don't you?” said Jenica. “It was that man with the headdress on. The one you saw in the mirror.”

“You actually know who that was?” said Gil.

I nodded. “He's a Native American wonder-worker called Misquamacus. He was the greatest medicine man of his time—or any other time, for that matter. I've had a couple of run-ins with him before. I thought I managed to destroy him. Well, I thought I managed to destroy him four times over. Three times he came back, but the last time I thought was for keeps.”

“A Native American wonder-worker,” said Gil, haltingly, as if he was trying to say “Please direct me to the nearest restroom” in a foreign language. “And how exactly did you come to get yourself involved with a Native American wonder-worker?”

I swallowed another mouthful of
palinca
. “It was partly by accident, but mostly through the fortune-telling. I don't have any kind of natural ability for it, not like Amelia, but even the dumbest person in the world has
some
psychic sensitivity. Even though I never really believed in it, I guess I dealt out so many Tarot cards and read so many tea leaves, I started to make contact with the spirit world.”

“And this Misquamacus? What's his beef?”

“His beef is that he doesn't like America occupied by white people, or any other kind of people for that matter, only Indians. He tried to call down his ancient gods to get rid of us, but that didn't work, so he tried to demolish all of our buildings, but that didn't work. So this time it looks as if he's using one of our own superstitions to get rid of us. It's like spiritual karate—use your enemy's own strength against him. Like al Qaeda used our own airplanes, only this is going to be a million times worse.”

“But he went back into the mirror,” said Jenica. “He was about to seize me, but then he turned away. If he is a Native American, and not Romanian, why could I send him back with a ritual that was meant for
svarcolaci?
”

“Well, I guess your ritual must have weakened his host,” I suggested. “But I'm pretty sure that this bone had a lot to do with it. I waved it at him, and all of these words came out
of my mouth and it wasn't even me speaking. And it
buzzed
, you know. I felt like Luke Skywalker with a light saber.”

Gil took the bone, and waved it from side to side. “Maybe it's some kind of magic wand.”

“Of a kind, yes, it probably is. My guess is that Misquamacus used it to wake up Vasile Lup, and that he left it in his casket for a reason.”

“If you are right,” said Jenica, “perhaps we can do to this wonder-worker what he is trying to do to us, and use his own weapon against him.”

I took the bone back. “First of all, I think we need to find out exactly what it is, and how to use it.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?”

“We ask the expert. My spirit guide, Singing Rock.”

Gil stared at me. “You're serious, aren't you?”

I lit three of Jenica's spicy candles and arranged Singing Rock's bracelet around the biggest of them. We had finished almost the whole bottle of
palinca
between us, and although Jenica had opened a tin of Romanian tea cookies, I was feeling slightly unsteady, to say the least, like crossing over to Staten Island on a choppy day.

While I was preparing the table, Gil went around the Dragomir apartment and broke every mirror he could find, although he hesitated when he came to the gilt-framed antiques. Jenica took the baseball bat away from him and smashed them herself. “Better that my father comes home to find a few broken mirrors, rather than a dead daughter.”

“That's the spirit,” I told her. “How about one more shot of
palinca
, to give us some Romanian courage?”

“I'll grant you one thing, Harry,” said Gil. “You can sure put it away.”

“I've had a disappointing life, Gil, that's why.”

“You know what your trouble is, buddy? You expect too much. Me, I've never expected nothing, so everything that's ever come my way, it's like a bonus, you know?”

“Gil—I've never expected nothing, either, but that's precisely what I got. Nothing.”

We sat around the table. I thought that we were all looking exhausted. All of the adrenaline that had charged us up while we were fighting the
strigoi
had drained away now, and none of us had slept well. But I needed to talk to Singing Rock, if only to confirm that it was Misquamacus who was wreaking so much havoc in New York City, and to tell me if this decorated bone was really as powerful a weapon as I thought it was.