Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  ‘It’s essential for this cleansing that I am completely naked, just as John the Baptist was naked in the Jordan when he baptized Christ. My nakedness shows the forces of malice that I am open and pure and that I have nothing to conceal. I am proud of myself as God made me, and nothing can shame me.’

  ‘OK …’ I said slowly. I was beginning to feel very dubious about this. I just hoped that my girlfriend Sandy wouldn’t turn up unexpectedly to find a stark-naked priest in my bedroom. Sandy got snippy enough when she saw me lifting my eyebrow approvingly at another woman. I couldn’t imagine what her reaction would be to Father Zapata in the buff.

  Father Zapata dropped his shorts and then sat on the unmade bed and tugged off his socks. I tried not to look at his purple curled-up penis in its rook’s nest of pubic hair.

  ‘Uh – what do you want me to do?’ I asked him. ‘Maybe I should go into the living room and leave you to it.’

  ‘No, no! It’s vital that you stay! I will be insisting that the demon leaves you alone from now on, and you must be here for it to recognize you.’

  ‘It’s a demon? You didn’t say before that it was a demon.’

  ‘It doesn’t have horns and a tail, Harry, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m only calling it a demon because I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s a deeply malicious presence, and so I think that “demon” is as good a way of describing it as any other.’

  ‘Well, you’re the expert. Can we get this over with? I have a whole lot of readings to do today, and I’m running late already.’

  ‘Harry, it’s more than likely that this nun appearing in your bedroom is the harbinger of some really terrible disaster. Something cataclysmic, either man-made or natural. It could be that scores of people will lose their lives. It may be even worse than that. Missing a few card-readings – by comparison, that’s very small beer.’

  ‘I just hope my Tarot deck hasn’t gone all black, too, otherwise I won’t be doing any readings at all.’

  ‘Please, Harry. This is a very difficult ritual, and I need to concentrate. Why don’t you sit down and witness this dismissal? That’s all I’m asking you to do.’

  Reluctantly, and with a creaking noise, I sat down in the wicker chair and waited to see how my bedroom was going to get exorcized.

  Father Zapata sat on the edge of the bed with the copper bowl on the floor between his feet. He took a box of matches out of his bag, and with a sharp scratch he lit the candle. Then he lifted up the bunch of dead roses in front of his face and stared at it intently. I thought: You couldn’t make this up. Just wait until I tell Bridget about it in John Martin’s pub. She’ll kill herself laughing.

  ‘I adjure thee, o vile spirit, to go out,’ said Father Zapata. ‘God the Father, in his name leave my presence. God the Son, in his name make thy departure. God the Holy Ghost, in his name quit this place. Tremble and flee, O impious one.’

  He slowly turned the bouquet so that the flowers were pointing downward, and then he lowered it into the copper bowl, with only the stalks protruding over the rim. He held the candle over the bowl, tilted at forty-five degrees, so that it quickly began to drip molten wax on to the pink, brown-tinged petals.

  ‘For it is God who commands thee. For it is I who command thee. Yield to me, to my desire by Jesus of Nazareth who gave his soul, to my desire by sacred Virgin Mary who gave her womb. By the blessed angels from whom thou fell, I demand thee be on thy way and never return. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ I added, as if that might help.

  ‘You will leave this place which you have fouled with your miasma. You will leave this place and never return to threaten this man or any of his kin or any of his loved ones.’

  ‘And amen to that, too,’ I put in.

  The candle wax was now pattering rapidly on to the roses, and Father Zapata started to mutter something under his breath that sounded like ‘go-and-never-go-and-never-go-and-never’ without actually adding the words ‘come back’.

  It was then, though, that I began to sense an altered atmosphere in the bedroom. At first I put it down to being tired, but gradually it felt as though the air was growing colder, although it was just as stuffy. It’s difficult to describe, but I began to feel that we had disturbed somebody. As if we had woken somebody up and they were listening to us – and weren’t at all happy that we were here.

  It’s a deeply malevolent presence, and so I think that ‘demon’ is as good a way of describing it as any other.

  The candle-wax ran drip-drip-drip-drip, and Father Zapata continued to mumble ‘go-and-never-go-and-never-go-and-never’, and then I heard a high-pitched scraping noise. It was like somebody who didn’t know how to play the violin scraping a violin-bow – except that this went on and on without a break and grew more and more shrill with every second that passed.

  I didn’t like to interrupt Father Zapata in his ritual. I thought I might mess it up for him, so that he would have to start over, or maybe it wouldn’t work at all. I stayed where I was in my chair, although the scraping noise was growing so irritating that it set my teeth on edge.

  At first Father Zapata had been leaning forward, making sure that the candle wax dripped all over the rose petals. Now, however, he slowly sat up straight, staring directly at the wall on the opposite side of the bedroom. His eyes looked glassy, as if he had been hypnotized. Maybe he was in some kind of religious trance and that was why he kept repeating ‘go-and-never-go-and-never’. Years ago I tried LSD, and apparently I sang ‘Good – Good – Good Vibrations!’ over and over for nearly five-and-a-half hours non-stop. You don’t make a lot of friends that way, believe me.

  When Father Zapata sat up straight, things started to become stranger and more disturbing, as if they weren’t strange and disturbing enough already. Instead of tilting the candle at an angle, he held it so that it was upright. Because it was made of natural wax it was very fast-burning, and scalding hot droplets ran straight down the sides of it, all over his fingers. As if that wasn’t hurting him enough, he lifted his left hand and held it over the candle, so that the flame was actually licking at his palm. I stared at him in horror, but he kept his hand there without flinching, and he didn’t cry out.

  In fact – far from distressing him – the pain of burning his own hand seemed to turn him on. His penis uncurled itself and rapidly began to rise up from between his hairy thighs, purple-headed and prong-like – so stiff that it was actually curving.

  I had been a split-second away from springing out of my chair and snatching the candle out of his hand to stop him from hurting himself any more, but the appearance of this boner made me hesitate. Maybe the hand-burning was all part of the ritual. Maybe a priest needed to experience both pain and pleasure to dismiss a demon, as well as recite his prayers. Maybe it was all about mortifying the flesh in order to get through to God. I had read about monks eating gristly bits of meat to punish their palates and flagellating themselves with barbed-wire whips. Maybe Father Zapata needed to do something like that for his dismissal to be effective. I simply didn’t know. Me – I had a pretty good idea how to send a Native American demon back to the Happy Hunting Ground, but my only experience of a Roman Catholic dismissal was watching The Exorcist with some girl called Rona, and she had screamed in my left ear all the way through it.

  I was still hesitating when Father Zapata lifted his hand from the candle flame and pinched out the wick between finger and thumb. I looked down at the roses in the copper bowl. I didn’t get this at all. Hadn’t he told me that he was going to seal them completely with wax from this holy candle so that none of the evil left in them could escape? So far, however, they were spattered with fewer than a dozen drips.

  ‘Father Zapata,’ I said, although I didn’t think he could hear me over the continuous scraping sound, and even if he could, he chose to ignore me.

  ‘Father Zapata? Is this, ah – is this meant to happen this way?’

  Father Zapata still didn’t respond. Instead, he leaned backward until he
was lying flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling, his arms held out wide as if he were mimicking the crucifixion. When he let the candle roll off the bed on to the floor, I decided that I had nearly had enough of this, and now I stood up.

  As I did so, Father Zapata lifted his legs until he was bent over double with his feet beside his ears and his scrawny backside up in the air, all rolled up like a woodlouse. I couldn’t think what he was doing until I went up to the side of the bed and looked down at him. He had taken the head of his stiffened penis into his mouth, and he was staring up at me from between his thighs with an expression that I can only describe as desperate.

  Afterward, I thought that I should have simply pushed him straight off the bed. But there was that frozen moment when I stood there staring down at him performing what looked like a trick from some pornographic circus, all curled up like that, fellating himself, and that frozen moment was one moment too long.

  He closed his eyes, and he bit. He bit so hard that he completely took the head off his penis, and suddenly the bitten-off shaft sprang up with blood spraying everywhere. Father Zapata’s face instantly became a scarlet carnival mask, and there were loops and spatters of blood all over the sheets and pillows and all over the front of my shirt.

  Father Zapata didn’t scream or cry out, but his legs dropped back on to the bed, and he lay flat on his back in that crucifix posture, like he had been before, his arms spread out wide. He was quaking violently and snorting through his nostrils. His topless penis kept on pumping out blood, and there was only one thing that I could think of to do. I took the dead roses out of the bowl, tugged loose the fraying thread that held them together, and knotted it tightly around the shaft of Father Zapata’s penis as a tourniquet. By the time I had finished doing this, my hands and arms were smothered with blood up to the elbows, and both of us looked as if we had been the victims of a pump-gun attack at close range.

  I took my cell out of my blood-soaked shirt pocket and punched out 911.

  ‘Nine-one-one,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘What is your emergency?’

  ‘I need an ambulance, quick, seven-seven-three Orduna Drive, Triangle Park. I’m in a cottage in back. I have a man here who’s lost the top off his penis.’

  ‘He’s done what, sir?’

  ‘He’s suffered a serious injury to his private parts. He’s bleeding really bad. I’ve tried to stop it, but he needs paramedics, and fast.’

  ‘Please stay on the line, sir. We’ll be sending an ambulance right away.’

  There was nothing much more I could do. I stood there watching Father Zapata twitch and snort and shiver. I had managed to stop the blood from shooting out like a fire hydrant, but it was still flooding copiously all over the sheets.

  It occurred to me then to look for the top of his penis that he had bitten off. Maybe the surgeons could sew it back on again. I ran my hands all over the wet bloody bed, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked at him. His eyes had rolled up into his head, and he was gray with shock. He certainly wasn’t in any state to be able to tell me if he had swallowed it.

  Minutes went past, and then at last I heard the scribbling and whooping of the ambulance siren. Father Zapata was lying still now, with his eyes closed and his mouth open, and I couldn’t be sure if he was still alive.

  I turned around to go to the front door, but as I did so something dark and shadowy flickered across the hallway, from the kitchen to the living room. I stopped, and called out, ‘Who’s that?’ It couldn’t have been the paramedics because the front door was still closed.

  There was silence for a long, long moment. Even that scraping noise had stopped. I waited and listened.

  ‘Anybody there?’ I called out. I thought I glimpsed another flickering shadow, in the living room. ‘I said, is anybody there?’

  Still silence. And then – so softly that it was barely audible – I heard a quick, urgent tapping sound. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap! Then silence. Then tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!

  Oh God, I thought. Not that. Don’t tell me it’s that. It can’t be.

  But then the doorbell rang, and a voice said, ‘Paramedics!’

  TEN

  Anna was crossing the hospital reception area when a man’s clear voice called out, ‘Professor Grey?’

  She turned, trying to focus against the dazzling evening sunlight that was reflected from the polished marble floor. It had been a long and difficult day, and she could already feel a migraine developing behind her eyes.

  Early in the afternoon Jim Waso had come down to her laboratory and pleaded with her again to go home, but she had refused. Apart from the fact that she’d needed to keep working in her laboratory to keep her mind off David, she’d started to make significant progress in her understanding of how the Meramac School virus could mutate so rapidly. She was confident now that she could soon find a way to isolate it. Much of her success as an epidemiologist was that she always treated viruses as if they were sentient beings – alien beings, maybe, but very intelligent aliens, and very devious. As far as she was concerned, understanding viruses was an essential part of cornering them, and then destroying them. She liked to think that she worked in the same way as criminologists – painstakingly striving to unlock the minds of serial killers, and then using their own behavior patterns to outsmart them.

  A broad-shouldered young man in a dark suit came over to her. His face was handsome but unusual. His eyes were set wide apart, and his cheekbones were high, but his features were flat, as if he had some Native American blood in him. His glossy black hair was tied back in a ponytail. He held out his hand to her, but she didn’t take it, so he lowered it again.

  ‘Professor Grey? My name’s Robert Machin. I just want to tell you that I’m very sorry for your loss.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Anna. ‘I hope you won’t think I’m being rude, but do I know you? We haven’t met before, have we? Were you a friend of David’s?’

  Robert Machin shook his head. ‘We haven’t met before, and I didn’t know your partner personally, I’m afraid. I represent the Grandier Funeral Chapel.’

  Anna swallowed hard, more to stop her throat from tightening up with emotion than because she was annoyed with him. ‘You do know that my partner passed away only last night? He hasn’t been dead for a full day yet.’

  ‘Yes, I do, professor, and I hope I’m not upsetting you by approaching you so soon. All I want to tell you is that we at Grandier have only recently established ourselves in St Louis and because of that we can handle all of your funeral arrangements at a very special price, compared with other funeral directors in the area.’

  ‘All right,’ said Anna. His directness had taken her aback, but at the same time she surprised herself by feeling relieved. After she had witnessed David talking and licking his lips, when he was supposed to be dead, it would be a blessing if his body was disposed of as soon as possible. At least she could be sure then that he was at peace, and if there was something inside him, something that had tormented him to death, that would be disposed of, too.

  She took a deep breath and said, ‘I haven’t seen his will yet, but he did once tell me that he wanted to be cremated.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Robert Machin. ‘We can take care of absolutely everything for you. A funeral service, of any denomination. Cremation or interment, whichever you prefer. Music, live or recorded. Cars, a memorial plaque. Flowers. We fully understand what a painful time this is for you, professor, and you can trust us to give you the very best care and attention.’

  ‘I’ll have to talk to David’s parents,’ Anna told him. ‘They live in Boise, and they may want to hold the funeral there.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be a problem,’ said Robert Machin. ‘We could handle all the arrangements from here and use one of our affiliated funeral directors in Boise to take care of things from that end.’

  ‘Let me think about it,’ said Anna. ‘Do you have a card?’

  Robert Machin took out his wallet and gave her his business card. In embossed b
lack italics, it read: Grandier Funeral Chapel, 1001 Gravois Road, St Louis. Service With Sympathy. Underneath the lettering there was a miniature picture of a spray of pink roses, also embossed.

  ‘Please, call us,’ said Robert Machin with a smile. ‘You won’t regret it, I promise you.’

  With that, he walked away, toward the elevator bank. When he reached it, he turned around to her and gave her a salute, as if she had agreed to use his company already. She didn’t wave back, but watched as he stepped into one of the elevators and the door slid shut behind him. She looked at his card again. She couldn’t logically think why, but she felt that if she called Robert Machin, and agreed to use Grandier Funeral Chapel, her life would take a completely new course.

  She had always been intuitive. That was another reason why she was so good at hunting down viruses, even when they mutated themselves into almost unrecognizable variants. But she had never felt so strongly that a very different future could be waiting for her now, depending on what decision she made about David.

  She was still standing in the middle of the reception area, looking at the card with its embossed pink roses, when she heard high-heeled footsteps click-clacking up behind her, and then Epiphany touched her on the shoulder. She knew it was Epiphany even before she turned around because she could smell the Sarah Jessica Parker perfume she always sprayed on herself after work.

  ‘Anna?’ said Epiphany anxiously. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Oh, what? Yes – yes, I’m fine. I was miles away there for a moment.’

  ‘What are you doing this evening? You won’t be on your own, will you?’

  ‘I will, yes, but I want to be. I’ll be fine, don’t worry. I just need to get my head around everything that’s happened.’

  ‘You’re sure? You can come round to my place if you like. It’s only risotto for supper, but you’re more than welcome.’

  ‘That’s OK. I’d rather just sit on my own and think.’