Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  Brian Grandier said nothing, but he shrugged as if to say, Well – you said it.

  Anna’s face was blotched with tears and mascara, and she was shaking. ‘I insist you open the casket. Jean – will you support me on this? I swear to God I heard him, and if you send that casket to be cremated without checking to make sure that he is really dead then you will be guilty of murder.’

  ‘Professor, a certificate of death has been issued, and anyhow it is illegal to open a casket once it has arrived at the crematorium.’

  Anna, still shaking, took her cellphone out of her shiny black crocodile purse, which she had bought especially for David’s funeral. She held it up in front of Brian Grandier and said, ‘If you don’t open up this casket now I’m going to call the state police and have them force you to open it, and that won’t do your business a whole lot of good, will it – if people believe that you sometimes cremate their relatives without making sure that they’re deceased? Or don’t you care about burning people alive?’

  When she said that, Brian Grandier’s face emptied of color. He opened and closed his mouth, and clenched his fists, and then he looked to the right, and then to the left. His chest rose and fell, as if he were finding it difficult to breathe. It was the kind of reaction that Anna would have expected if she had hit him very hard in the testicles.

  ‘Open it,’ he said, without looking at anybody in particular.

  One of his assistants took a step forward – a big bald-headed young man in a funeral suit that was two sizes too tight for him. ‘What did you say, sir?’

  ‘I said, open it! Take the lid off! Show her!’

  ‘But, Mr Grandier, sir, with all due respect—’

  ‘Open it, Kellerman. Open it now.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  While his assistant went off to find a screwdriver, Brian Grandier walked back to the lectern and picked up the microphone.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this funeral service. There has been a slight technical problem, I regret to say, but we are dealing with it promptly. If you would be kind enough to leave the chapel now, it will enable us to do so in privacy. Thank you.’

  The funeral guests began to file out. Above their heads, there was a rumble of thunder, and rain began to spatter against the chapel windows. Brian Grandier’s assistant returned with a screwdriver, accompanied by two of the pall-bearers.

  ‘Will you hurry?’ said Anna. ‘He won’t be able to breathe in there!’

  The bald-headed assistant looked across at Brian Grandier, as if he was questioning Anna’s sanity, but all the same he started to unscrew the lid of David’s casket. David’s mother kept a tight grip on Anna’s hand as he came to the last screw. Then he and the pall-bearers carefully took hold of the lid and lifted it off.

  Anna took a step toward it, and then stopped. She could tell from the smell that David was really dead. His eyes were open, but the pupils were milky, and his face was still stretched into that last death-mask of absolute terror. His mother said, ‘Oh … oh my God,’ and promptly collapsed.

  ‘Put it back on!’ ordered David’s father. ‘Put it back on!’

  Anna was already kneeling beside David’s mother, holding her head, but now his father knelt down, too, and said, sharply, ‘It’s all right, Anna! I can take care of her. I think you’ve caused quite enough mischief for one day.’

  ‘I heard him, Mr Russell,’ Anna insisted. ‘I distinctly heard him. Why would I make that up?’

  ‘I have no idea!’ said David’s father. ‘Maybe you just wanted to be the center of attention, even at our son’s funeral. David always said that you were never happy unless all eyes were on you.’

  ‘Mr Russell – I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t want to distress you. I truly believed that I heard him knocking and calling out to me.’

  ‘You’re a psycho, lady, that’s what you are. Now leave us alone, will you? You think David’s mother is ever going to forget this, for the rest of her life? You think I will?’

  Anna stood up and took a few steps back.

  Brian Grandier said, ‘I only did what you asked me to do, professor. I’m deeply sorry that it turned out like this.’

  ‘Well, no, it wasn’t your fault,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe I need to take some time off.’

  Jim Waso came up to her and put his arm around her. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m kind of shaken. Do you think you can take me home?’

  ‘There’s supposed to be a big get-together now, isn’t there, at Bixby’s?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very welcome, for some reason.’

  ‘OK then, I’ll take you home. But I’ll take you for a drink first. You look like you could use one.’

  He ushered her outside. It was raining hard, but as they hurried across the parking lot to his car, several of David’s friends and relatives stopped and turned to stare at her.

  On their way back toward the city center, with the windshield wipers thwacking wildly from side to side, Anna said, ‘I’m not going crazy, Jim. I know I’m not. I heard him.’

  ‘Well, maybe people do speak to us after they’re dead. You should find yourself a medium.’

  ‘You’re not laughing at me, are you?’

  ‘You think I’m in the mood for laughing, after seeing your David like that? Holy Christ, Anna, what makes somebody die with a look like that on their face?’

  Jim took her to the Morgan Street Brewery at Laclede’s Landing, and they sat outside under umbrellas while the rain continued to hammer down all around them.

  ‘So, how do you feel now?’ Jim asked her. There was a strong smell of electricity in the air, and behind him Anna could see mist rising from the river. Now and then, lighting flickered in the distance, but the storm was gradually beginning to pass.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Anna. ‘I think I’m losing my sanity. I keep hearing dead people talk. I keep seeing people who can’t possibly be there.’

  Jim reached across the table and held her wrist. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Tell me about it. I promise I’m not going to laugh at you.’

  She took two swallows of her vodka-tonic. Then, haltingly, she began to describe her experiences in the morgue, when she had heard John Patrick Bridges and David talking to her, and how she had seen their expressions change. She told him how she had gone to look at Mary Stephens, and how the nun had appeared, apparently from nowhere.

  She was reluctant at first to tell him what the nun had said, or what she had made her do, but it was such a relief to talk to somebody who was prepared to listen to her with such sympathy that she told him everything.

  When she had finished, he was silent for a while, looking down into his beer glass, but then he looked up at her and said, ‘Did you call security?’

  ‘Jim – they wouldn’t have believed me. I don’t even know if I believe it myself.’

  ‘We can’t really tell for sure. Not yet, anyhow. Henry Rutgers reported to me that all three victims exhibited signs of severe facial contortions after death. I saw your David today for myself. All I can say is that he looked scared out of his wits. I think if I had realized how severe those contortions were, I would have ordered him to carry out some further tests.’

  ‘Facial expressions, Jim, that’s one thing – that could have been nothing more than extreme rigor mortis. I heard them speak.’

  ‘OK … maybe this particular strain of virus has the effect of shutting down brain functions one after the other, so that patients can still speak and change their facial expressions, even when they’re way beyond any hope of resuscitation.’

  ‘So what about the nun?’

  Jim sat back in his chair. The rain had eased off now, and the sun was shining so brightly on the wet paving-stones behind him that Anna could barely see him. It was like talking to an angel, rather than a real person.

  ‘I don’t know, Anna, to be truthful. You were educated at the Ursuline Academy, weren’t you? I mean, you haven�
��t had any bad experiences with nuns in the past?’

  ‘No, Jim. The worst they ever did was make me write out lines for wearing my skirts too short.’

  ‘The nun … I don’t know what to say. I can only think that you must be badly stressed out, which is not surprising after all the pressure you’ve been under in the lab and the way that David died so suddenly. Under normal circumstances, I’d tell you to take some time off. In fact, I’d insist on it. Right at this moment, though, with the Meramac School virus to cope with … and this virus, too, whatever it is … what I’m asking you is, do you think you can manage to keep it together? We need you right now, more than ever.’

  ‘I could taste her, Jim. I could actually taste her.’

  Jim said, ‘I’m always here for you, Anna. You know that.’ He didn’t have to add that they could have been lovers, if life had turned out differently.

  ‘Thanks, Jim. And thanks for taking care of me today. I’ll be back in the lab tomorrow, I promise you.’

  The sun suddenly faded, and it began to rain again.

  Jim told her that she was welcome to stay at his apartment that night, no strings attached, if she wanted to. She was tempted, but she knew that she needed to return to her loft and face up to her demons, or her nuns, or whatever was triggering off all of these delusions.

  She was convinced that she had heard David knocking and calling out to her in his casket, but at the same time she knew that it was impossible. She remembered her alcoholic cousin Vincent. When he came off the drink he had hallucinated that firefighters were playing cards in his bedroom at night and loudly discussing how they were going to burn down his house.

  Jim walked her to the door of her loft. ‘Just call me if you need anything,’ he told her. ‘Call me if you don’t need anything, except somebody to talk to.’

  He kissed her, and for a moment they held each other tightly, although they both knew that they had to let go.

  Once she was inside she switched on most of the table lamps in the living room and went into the kitchen to pour out a glass of cold sparkling mineral water. Three vodka-tonics had made her feel dehydrated.

  She was still standing in the middle of the kitchen when she heard a sharp decisive click, and all of the lights in the living room went out. Dammit, she thought, that’s all I need. She and David had lived there for over three years, and she still didn’t know for certain where the circuit-breakers were.

  She put down her tumbler and went out into the living area. There was softly suffused street light shining through the blinds, and the brighter light from the kitchen behind her, so it wasn’t pitch black, but it was still crowded with shadows of all different shapes and sizes. She had a feeling that the circuit-breakers might be located in the small closet just beside the front door, so she edged her way diagonally across the room, making sure that she didn’t bark her shins on the coffee table.

  Oh Jesus, David, she thought. If you only knew how much I wish you were here.

  She was halfway across the room when she realized that the shadows behind the couch were much darker than all the rest – and that there was no reason why there should be shadows there at all. She stopped and frowned into the gloom, and it was then that she realized they weren’t shadows at all. They were three motionless figures, draped in black. They looked like nuns.

  Oh please, God, no. Not nuns. Don’t tell me I’m hallucinating again. Please.

  She took two or three more steps forward, keeping her eyes fixed on the three dark figures. Maybe they really were shadows, and if she changed position, they would mutate into different harmless shapes or even disappear. But when she reached the end of the couch, she could see that they were real. At least, her mind was convinced that they were real, even if they were nothing more than images created by post-traumatic stress.

  ‘I want you to disappear,’ she said, as loudly as she could.

  ‘You … you are the one who must leave,’ whispered a voice. It sounded like the same coarse whisper that she had heard from the nun in the morgue. ‘Time for you to go, Anna, before you and all of your kind come to serious grief.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Anna demanded. She was so frightened that the word ‘are’ screeched like a glass-cutter.

  ‘Time for you to leave, you whore,’ whispered the nun. ‘You don’t know what you’re meddling with.’

  Anna’s heart was drumming so hard against her ribcage that it hurt, and she felt as if the floor was tilting under her feet. She gripped the slippery back of the leather couch to steady herself and took two deep breaths. ‘If you’re real,’ she said, ‘tell me who you are and why you’re here, and how you got in here, too!’

  ‘You want to know who we are?’ said the nun. ‘We will show you who we are.’

  Anna looked around the living area, frantic. David had always said they ought to have a gun in the house, but she had always resisted the idea. She wished she had one now, though. She had never felt so defenseless in her life. What terrified her most of all was the possibility that these nuns existed only in her own mind, and that she was mentally cracking up. There was only one way in which a gun could protect her from psychosis, and that was to shoot herself in the head.

  ‘I need you to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t care who you are. I’m going to close my eyes and count to three, and when I open my eyes again I want you to be gone.’

  ‘You should know who we are,’ the nun whispered. ‘If you know who we are, then you can spread the word that we have come back to take our revenge on you. You can also tell your friends that there is nothing they can do to cure the sickness that we are spreading amongst you. Nobody can cure it. You will die in your hundreds, to begin with, and then you will die in your thousands, and then you will die in your millions. The lands that you took from us will become your cemetery, and we will hunt on them again. We will hunt over your graves.’

  Anna kept her eyes closed, even as the whispering continued. Go, she said silently, inside her head. Go, whether you’re real or not. Get out of my mind – get out of my loft – get out of my life.

  She heard a rustling, and then a creaking, and then a light, spasmodic pattering sound, like sunflower seeds being scattered on the floor. When she took another deep breath, she smelled the acrid tang of cedarwood smoke.

  She opened her eyes. With a jolt of shock that made her gasp out loud, she saw that two of the nuns had grown so tall and so bulky that they almost seemed to reach the ceiling, and they no longer looked like nuns. Each of them had two curved horns on top of their heads, and they both appeared to be swathed in blankets, although their shoulders were bare. Over their shoulders, thousands of shiny beetles were swarming, and it was these beetles falling on to the polished oak floor that were making the pattering sound, not sunflower seeds.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Anna. All the strength drained out of her, and she sank to her knees. ‘Oh God, tell me I’m having a nightmare.’

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘We know who you are and what you do,’ whispered the nun. ‘This time, we will make sure that there is nothing you can do to thwart us.’

  Then – in a voice that was louder, and much more rasping – the figure on her left said, ‘Your people came to believe that your medicine was greater than ours, and for many years we believed it, too, and we lost our courage and our hope of getting our revenge. But now we have discovered how we can do to you what you did to us, and this time your medicine cannot save you.’

  ‘Who are you?’ said Anna. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. What did we ever do to you? Who’s “us”?’

  ‘We are the people who own this land. It was given to us, at the very beginning of time, by the Great Spirit himself.’

  ‘The Great Spirit? Are you telling me that you’re Native Americans?’

  ‘You murdered us, in countless numbers. Many of us died from your infections before you even knew who we were. You murdered us, and then you stole our hunting grounds from us, and our forests, and our mountains, and
our rivers. This was not only a crime but a blasphemy.’

  ‘But who are you?’ Anna insisted. She was shivering with fear, but her mind was still working like a medical professional. To defend yourself against any pathogen, first of all you have to understand how it attacks you, and how it replicates itself and mutates. Know your enemy, and above all, discover what it is that your enemy really wants from you.

  ‘My name is Matchitehew,’ said the huge horned figure. ‘This is my brother Megedagik. We are the sons of Misquamacus – the greatest wonder-worker who ever walked on this earth. We are returned to avenge our father, and to finish what he failed to finish – to take back every last blade of grass that your people stole from us.’

  I am going mad, Anna thought. I can’t believe I’m hearing this.

  Matchitehew said, ‘You, Anna – you know much about diseases. You will tell your fellow doctors that there is nothing they can do to save your people from this infection. It is a sickness bred from the Great Old Ones, from the time beyond time. There is no cure for it, not for you, just like the sickness that you brought to us.’

  Anna looked up at the two towering figures with their horns and their blankets and their shoulders shimmering with insects. She could just about see their eyes glittering, but it was impossible for her to make out the expressions on their faces, or even what their faces actually looked like.

  She was just about to answer when her cellphone warbled. She reached into her pocket and took it out, almost dropping it. She could see that Jim was calling her.

  ‘Jim,’ she said.

  Even as she did so, the three figures in front of her began to shudder. It was almost as if they were formed of nothing but clouds of black smoke and somebody had opened a door, so that a draft was blowing across the living area and dispersing them. They twisted and disassembled, and soon they were nothing but a few dark spirals, and then they were gone.

  ‘Anna? You sound terrible. What’s wrong?’