Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  From the way that he had been screaming for help, there was no question that John Patrick Bridges had been desperate to the point of hysteria in the minutes before he had died. ‘Get it out of me! Get it out of me!’

  The mystery was – what was the ‘it’ that he had been pleading for them to get out of him? According to Bernie Fishman, a superficial post-mortem examination had shown that he had no external trauma, so he had no bullets in him, and he hadn’t been stabbed or pierced by any other kind of projectile which might have broken off inside him, like the tip of a knife-blade or an arrowhead. Maybe he had swallowed something – some caustic liquid like drain-cleaner or a fragment of broken glass. She had even heard of cases in Oregon where carpenter ants had crawled into people’s mouths when they were sleeping and stung the inside of their windpipes, so that they had suffered agonizing pain and almost suffocated.

  As she turned all this over in her mind, she began to recall a few fragments of that half-forgotten reference to unusually severe convulsions.

  The patient is convinced that another personality is trying to force their way into their body and take possession of it – that is why they convulse with such extreme violence.

  Tantalizingly, she still couldn’t be sure if she had read it in a textbook or heard it in a lecture, or if somebody had been talking about it at some medical convention that she had attended.

  They are not having a seizure in the normal sense of the word. They are involved in a life-or-death struggle to cling on to their very identity – to prevent themselves from being evicted from their own body.

  Anna opened her laptop and Googled those few sentences, as closely as she could remember them. All that came up were the titles of several fantasy novels like Haunted Bodies and Possessed! and a study of some Indonesian philosophy called Penyewa Yang Tidak Diinginkan (literally, Unwanted Tenants). This described how homeless spirits are continuously roaming the earth searching for a physical body to share, so that they can once again experience the pleasures of food, and drink, and sex.

  She tried David’s cellphone yet again. It was still switched off. It was past ten p.m. now, so there was no point in calling his office. She was beginning to grow anxious. Most days, David rang her so often to tell her he loved her that he was a nuisance.

  She poured herself another glass of wine, took one large swallow and then went through to the bathroom to take a shower. She left her cellphone next to the washbasin in case David called back, but it stayed silent. After her shower, she combed her short wet hair straight back from her forehead, like a man. She stared at herself in the mirror and thought that she was looking too thin. Her ribs were showing, she had hardly any breasts, and she had a triangular gap between her thighs. She knew that she was working too hard and not taking care of herself, but then she had always felt driven. What is the point of living in this world if you don’t achieve anything significant while you’re here? That’s what her father always told her, anyhow.

  She was walking back into the living area, wrapped in a thick white towel, when the front door opened and David came in, wheeling his suitcase behind him.

  ‘David! What happened? I’ve been calling you and calling you, but your cell was switched off!’

  David blinked at her, as if he didn’t quite know where he was, or what he was doing here. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t feeling too good this morning, and I missed my flight.’

  ‘Sweetheart, you look terrible! What’s wrong?’ Anna went across to him and put her hands up to his face. He was two or three inches taller than she was, wide-shouldered, with curly brown hair that came over his collar at the back and a broad, Irish-looking face, which Anna had always thought was handsome with a hint of mischief. Tonight, though, his hair was uncombed and he hadn’t shaved, and his pale-blue eyes were bloodshot.

  He was usually such a fastidious dresser, but his fawn linen coat was badly creased, one of his shirt-tails was hanging out, and his shoes were unlaced. He was swaying as if he were drunk, although he didn’t smell of alcohol. He did, however, smell of body odor and something dry and clinging and aromatic, as if he had been smoking pot.

  ‘Come in and sit down,’ she told him. She led him by the hand over to the nearest couch, and then she went back to close the front door. ‘How do you feel? Feverish? Nauseous? Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I guess I forgot. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You forgot? How could you forget?’

  ‘I don’t know, Anna, and that’s the God’s honest truth. When I woke up this morning I couldn’t even remember what my name was. I only remembered because Charlie Bowdre came to my room to find out why I hadn’t showed up for breakfast. I told him I was sick and I was going to go home, but then I fell asleep again and I didn’t wake up until the maid came in to make up my room. I guess the rest of the team must’ve thought I’d gone ahead of them.’

  ‘You should have called me! Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Anna. I just can’t seem to think straight. I only remembered where I lived because it was written on my suitcase tag.’

  Anna placed her hand against his forehead. ‘Your temperature is way, way up,’ she told him. ‘Listen, why don’t you get undressed and I’ll run you a bath to cool you down.’

  ‘I never felt as bad as this before, ever. I don’t know what in hell’s wrong with me. One minute I’m so hot that I’m sweating like a pig, the next minute I’m feeling so cold that I can’t stop shaking.’

  ‘You’ve picked up some infection, that’s all. Your body automatically heats itself up to try to kill the hostile bacteria, and that’s why you’re running a fever. Just hold on a second. I’ll go fetch the thermometer.’

  She went into the bathroom and turned on the faucets over the bathtub. Then she took their mercury thermometer out of the medicine cabinet and came back into the living area to place it under David’s tongue. She sat next to him, holding his hand.

  ‘Apart from catching this bug, whatever it is, how was the conference?’ she asked him. ‘Good, or just the usual waffle?’

  He couldn’t speak with the thermometer in his mouth so he simply nodded.

  ‘I’m still trying to pin down this Meramac Elementary School virus,’ she told him. ‘I think I’m getting close to identifying what it is, and how it replicates so darn quickly, but who knows what it’s going to take to control it. I’ve tried just about every antiviral ever invented. Nada.’

  ‘Mmmfff-mmmhh,’ said David.

  Anna took out the thermometer and peered at it.

  ‘Come on, what does it say?’ David asked her. ‘You’re frowning already! How long have I got to live?’

  ‘It’s thirty-seven point nine. You’re hyper pyretic, but you’re not in the death zone yet.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief!’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. It depends how long your temperature stays up this high. If it doesn’t go down in the next a day-and-a-half, I’m going to have to call Doctor DuFray. Meanwhile, you need some really aggressive cooling. Have yourself a long cold soak in the bath, drink plenty of water and try to relax. I’ll bring you some ibuprofen. That should help, too. How hungry are you?’

  ‘Something inside of me says that I’m ravenous, but I don’t think I could keep anything down.’

  ‘Maybe later, then. You get yourself out of those smelly old clothes, and I’ll fetch you a glass of water.’

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I love you, Anna. But Jesus I feel rough.’

  ‘Get undressed. The bath’s almost ready.’

  At midnight, she was woken up by David whispering. He was speaking so quietly that at first she couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t just the wind blowing west from the river along Locust Street, and she had to sit up in bed and listen hard before she realized that he was talking to himself.

  ‘David?’ she said. ‘David, are you OK?’

  He continued to whisper, al
though she couldn’t make out what he was saying. It sounded like the same words over and over again.

  ‘David?’

  He still didn’t answer her. She reached across the bed, but he had his back to her and he was tightly bound up in the sheet, as if he were wrapped in a shroud, so that all she could feel of him was his tangled curly hair. His scalp was sweaty, though, and the sheet was soaking, so he was clearly still running a fever.

  She shook his shoulder and said, loudly, ‘David, wake up! David!’

  Their bedroom was never completely dark because the blinds were natural calico and all they did was give them privacy from the apartments on the other side of the intersection and subdue the street lighting outside. But when David didn’t respond to her shaking, and continued to whisper, Anna switched on her bedside lamp.

  She knelt up and tried to pull him over on to his back, but every muscle in his body was tense and he was much too heavy. She felt as if he were deliberately resisting her and simply pretending to be asleep.

  ‘David! Listen to me, darling, your temperature’s still way too high. Come on, baby, you have to cool yourself down. I don’t want you going into a coma!’

  David abruptly stopped whispering, but when she tried again to roll him over on to his back he still wouldn’t budge.

  ‘David, please, you have to help me here. I’m not strong enough to fight you. If you won’t help me, then I’ll have to call for an ambulance. You feel dangerously hot.’

  There was a long pause, but when David whispered next, a fire truck briefly whooped in the street below them as it crossed over Washington Avenue and she couldn’t catch what he said.

  ‘I didn’t hear you,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t fight it much longer, Anna. I don’t have the strength.’

  ‘What? What is it, darling? What can’t you fight?’

  ‘I’ve been fighting it all day,’ he said. His voice was louder now, and hoarser. ‘I can’t fight it much longer. I can’t.’

  There was another long pause. Anna waited with her hand resting lightly on his shoulder to see if he would say any more, but then he began to tremble, more and more violently. That’s it, she decided. I’m calling for the paramedics right now.

  She picked up her cellphone from her nightstand and was about to punch in 911 when David rolled over toward her. She was so shocked that she dropped the phone on to the bed and jumped up on to her feet. His eyes were bulging, and his whole face was distorted. He looked as terrified as John Patrick Bridges. The only difference was that he was alive, and whatever pyrogen had invaded his body, he was still fighting it.

  ‘Anna,’ he whispered. ‘Anna, I can’t.’

  Anna scooped up her cellphone again and dialed 911.

  David suddenly sat up and screamed at her, ‘For God’s sake, Anna! It’s inside me!’

  ‘Nine-one-one,’ said the operator. ‘Where is your emergency?’

  Anna was about to answer when David vomited a tide of warm blood all over the bed and into her lap. Then he pitched on to his back and started jerking and jumping and wrestling with the bloodstained sheets.

  He seemed to be battling against himself, repeatedly punching his cheekbones and his chest and seizing himself around the throat. All the time he was doing this he was grunting and gargling and bringing up even more blood.

  Anna said, ‘The Lofts at OPOP, number thirty-seven. Ambulance, please, and fast!’ Then she threw herself on top of David, slathered as he was in blood, and tried to pin him down so that he wouldn’t hit himself any more. He stared up at her, his face a mask of shiny scarlet, like a demon out a medieval play.

  ‘I can’t,’ he bubbled. ‘I can’t.’

  The paramedics arrived only eleven minutes later. Anna answered the door to them in nothing but her T-shirt and her thong, smeared all over with blood. Even her blonde hair was pink with blood, and stuck up like a cockerel’s crest.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said the leading paramedic when she let them in.

  ‘I’m not hurt,’ Anna told her, in a shaky voice. ‘It’s my partner, on the bed. He’s suffered a hemorrhage. He’s dead.’

  FOUR

  After the paramedics had taken David away, Anna went into the bathroom to wash off his blood. She was almost reluctant to do it, because that would mean that she was washing away the very last trace of him. Some mornings, after they had made love, she had gone to work without washing so that she could smell him on her all day.

  When she faced herself in the mirror she was surprised how emotionless she looked. She felt as if the ground had opened up underneath her feet, but her hazel-brown eyes were giving nothing away.

  ‘David has just died,’ she said to her reflection, but her reflection didn’t answer and continued to look completely deadpan.

  She took off her T-shirt and her thong and left them in the washbasin to soak. Then she took a quick shower and toweled herself, although she left her hair wet. Afterward she went into the bedroom and dressed in a plain white blouse and a gray pencil skirt, the same skirt that she had worn to her grandmother’s funeral last October. She had called Laclede Cabs to pick her up and take her to the hospital because she didn’t trust herself to drive. She knew what the effects of delayed emotional shock could be, and she didn’t want to go driving into a storefront or three lanes of oncoming traffic just because she had lost her sense of reality.

  As they drove to the hospital, the taxi-driver kept glancing at her in his rear-view mirror. After a while he said, in a clogged-up voice, ‘If you don’t mind me askin’, something bad just happened?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Hey, if you want me to shut up, all you have to do is say so.’

  It was dark, and it was still warm, but it had started raining about an hour ago and the streets were deserted and shiny with reflected light.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Anna. ‘You can talk if you want to. Talking’s not going to change anything.’

  ‘That’s my motto, too,’ said the taxi-driver. ‘Whatever you do, whatever you say, it ain’t never going to make a donut’s worth of difference.’

  When she arrived at the hospital, she walked straight along the empty, echoing corridor to the morgue. David’s body had already been wheeled in and was lying under a pale-green sheet in the corner. The room was chilly and dimly lit, with a stainless-steel autopsy table in the center. A young Asian-American doctor was standing beside David’s gurney, filling out the forms which confirmed his body’s time of arrival, and his condition, and that life was extinct. In the morning, when the ME turned up, his body would be examined to establish if a full autopsy was called for.

  ‘Professor Grey, isn’t it?’ said the doctor, in obvious surprise. He was bald and bearded, even though he looked as if he was only in his middle twenties. ‘Can I help you at all?’

  ‘I’m here because this – this is my partner,’ Anna told him, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘This was my partner.’

  ‘You mean—?’ said the doctor, pointing at the body with his ballpen. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, professor. Really. My condolences.’

  ‘He passed away very suddenly,’ said Anna. ‘I need to take some samples.’

  The young doctor looked dubious. ‘Oh. I’m not so sure about the protocol for that, professor. Strictly according to the book, Doctor Lim should be the first to examine him.’

  ‘I realize that. But Doctor Lim isn’t here right now.’

  ‘It’s not only that, professor. If you have a personal connection to the deceased, you should not really be carrying out any medical procedure on his remains. What you do might affect Doctor Lim’s assessment of the cause of his demise, and then we’d have to call in the coroner. I’m not trying to being obstructive, I promise you, but I’m sure that you’re aware of the rules.’

  ‘Of course I am. But this is the second case of hemorrhage that we’ve had to deal with in a matter of twelve hours, and the two cases are so similar that I think they could be connected. Catastrophi
c bleeding, severe convulsions. I’m concerned that this might be the beginning of something very serious. The sooner I find out what, the better.’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘I apologize, professor, but I cannot allow you to take any samples at this time. If Doctor Lim gives you his permission, of course there will be no problem. But I do not have the authority.’

  ‘I only want to take blood and urine samples. What harm can that do?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘All right. I understand. But you don’t object if I sit with him for a while?’

  ‘Not at all. Here.’ The doctor carried over a blue plastic chair and positioned it next to the gurney. ‘All I ask is that you please do not touch him.’

  ‘Would you …?’ said Anna, and gestured that she wanted the doctor to lift the sheet from David’s face.

  ‘Of course.’ He folded back the sheet, and there was David. His mouth and chin were still caked with dried blood, but unlike John Patrick Bridges his eyes were closed and he looked only vaguely troubled. Anna stood beside him for a long moment. She would have done anything to be able to clean the blood away and kiss him, but she knew that already his lips would be cold.

  ‘I can only tell you how sorry I am for your loss,’ said the doctor uncomfortably.

  Anna looked at him and nodded her appreciation, although she couldn’t find it in herself to smile. The pain of seeing David like this was so intense that she could hardly breathe.

  Somewhere outside the hospital they heard the whip-whip-whoop of an ambulance siren, and a few seconds later the doctor’s pager buzzed.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Please – stay for as long as you like. Doctor Lim will be here at seven thirty, maybe even before that. He likes to make an early start.’ He left the morgue and the heavy door closed behind him with a hiss.

  Anna remained standing beside David’s body for a while, and then sat down with her hands covering her face. She felt empty. She had witnessed so many people dying, and yet this was completely different. With every other death she had felt a strength rising within her – strength to offer sympathy and reassurance to those bereaved. But now that David was gone, she had no comfort to offer herself, no words that could help her through it. She couldn’t even cry yet, although she knew without doubt that she would.