Anna reached out for the back of the couch again, so that she could pull herself back up on to her feet. She looked around, but there was no doubt about it. The three figures had completely vanished. In spite of that, she couldn’t stop herself from shaking.
‘I was hallucinating, Jim, that’s all. I must have been. I thought I saw—’ She paused, and then she said, ‘They’re gone now. It must be stress, Jim, that’s all. They couldn’t have been real.’
‘They? Who were they?’
‘It’s nothing, Jim, really. I need some rest, that’s all. I’ve been overdoing it in the past few weeks, and what with David going so suddenly, I think it’s all been too much.’
‘Listen, Anna, why don’t I come around and pick you up? You can spend the night at my place, and then you’ll be sure that you’re not seeing any spooks. Not unless you count me and my cats.’
‘Honestly, Jim, I’m fine. I’ll have to find a way to get my head round this, that’s all. I thought I saw some people, but obviously I couldn’t have done because there was no way they could have gotten in, and when I challenged them they simply disappeared. They’re gone now. There’s no sign of them.’
‘What kind of people?’
‘Three nuns, to start with.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Anna! What’s this nun thing?’
‘I have no idea. Maybe you’re right and something did happen to me at convent school, but I’ve suppressed it. Anyhow, two of the nuns grew bigger and bigger and ended up about seven feet tall with horns on their heads.’
‘Seven feet tall? With horns on their heads?’ Jim paused for a moment, and then he said, ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Jim, I’m serious, whether you believe me or not. I saw them and they spoke to me. They said they were the sons of some great Native American wonder-worker, and that they were wonder-workers, too. They even told me their names. They said they were going to spread some disease that we wouldn’t be able to cure, and that it was going to kill millions of us.’
‘Anna, please. Let me come back around and collect you.’
‘Jim, I’ll get over it. I’ll take an Ativan and have myself a good night’s sleep.’
‘Anna – you’re seeing nuns and Native American medicine men. It would be funny if it wasn’t so darned scary. What did they say their names were?’
‘I can’t remember. One of them was called Matchy-something. The other one was Something-lick.’
‘Listen, Anna. I’m putting my shoes back on. I’m driving back over there right now. Don’t argue with me.’
‘No, Jim. I don’t think I’m in any kind of danger. It’s all inside of my head.’
‘Exactly. That’s what I’m worried about.’
‘Jim – no. I insist. You can drive around here, but you won’t persuade me to come home with you. I have to deal with this on my own.’
There was a long pause. Jim knew Anna well enough to realize that she meant what she said and that nothing would induce her to change her mind.
‘OK,’ he said, at last. ‘But you know that I’ll always be here for you, no matter what you decide to do.’
‘Yes, Jim, and I really appreciate it. Thank you.’
She hung up, and she was just about to resume her search for the circuit-breaker box when all of the living area lights clicked back on again, by themselves. Now that is freaky, she thought, even though she was deeply relieved. She walked into the bedroom, switched on the lights and went on through to the bathroom. She put in the plug and turned on both the hot and cold faucets. Tonight she felt like a long, warm, jasmine-scented bath. With any luck, a bath would soak away all of her stress. Maybe it would also soak away the lingering smell of charred cedarwood, which was the only evidence that those three ‘nuns’ had actually materialized. Even that had probably wafted in from somebody’s wood-burning stove in a neighboring loft.
She undressed and switched on her sound system to play Dvorak’s Romance for Piano and Violin. She looked at herself in the full-length tilted mirror in the corner of the room, beside her closet. This mirror had always made her look thinner than she really was, but this evening she thought she looked almost skeletal, with her ribcage showing and her hip-bones casting triangular shadows. She hadn’t eaten anything since David had died except for two slices of toast and a cereal bar.
She spent over twenty minutes in the bath, and the monotonous dripping of the faucet almost sent her to sleep. After she had toweled herself dry, she tugged on her white sleeveless nightgown and sat in front of her dressing table to brush her hair. Every now and then she stopped, with the brush held up in mid-air, because she thought she heard a noise in the living area, or in the kitchen.
But: There’s nobody there, she told herself. It’s only the water-heater starting up, because I just ran a bath, or the air-con, or the creaking sound that all old buildings make in the evening as the temperature cools.
She switched on the bedroom TV, but there was nothing on that she wanted to watch and so she switched it back off. She felt exhausted, both body and mind, as if she had been running a twenty-six-mile marathon, or fighting somebody for her life. She threw back the covers and climbed into bed, reaching across to her nightstand to switch off her bedside lamp.
Please, no nightmares about nuns clustering like bats on the ceiling, or sliding out from under the bed. Just let me get some deep, refreshing sleep.
Anna turned over on to her side and punched her pillow into shape. You have nothing to be scared of, she told herself. It’s only your imagination working overtime, trying to find some reason why David had died so suddenly.
She was prepared to concede that Jim was right, and that the nun-figures were nothing more than a long-suppressed memory from her schooldays … but she couldn’t think where she might have read about Native American wonder-workers. Maybe they had been mentioned in one of the textbooks she’d studied when she was cramming for her doctorate. She recalled the story of smallpox being spread amongst the Mandans and the Ankara Indians in 1837. They’d been infected by some of the European passengers on board a fur-trading steamboat called the St Peter’s as it made its annual trip up the Missouri. Both native communities had been decimated by the disease, and it had probably spread even further, to remoter tribes who were never reached by colonists before the smallpox wiped them out, and whose existence remained unrecorded, as if their language and their way of life had never been.
Anna had also read a sensational account of how the US Army had deliberately spread disease amongst the Indians by giving them smallpox-infected blankets from the military hospital in St Louis. Several historians had said that this accusation was unproven, but it had persisted all the same. Whether it was true or not, thousands of tribespeople had died from smallpox and other European viruses, against which they had no natural resistance.
Maybe her imagination had invented two vengeful Indian wonder-workers who wanted to punish the colonists for what they had done, whether it was deliberate or accidental.
She was almost asleep when she felt a tickling sensation across her shoulder. She flicked at it, thinking that it must be a stray hair. But the tickling persisted, and she began to feel it crawling down her arm. She slapped at it, but that didn’t stop it, so she slapped at it again.
The tickling continued, and then she felt more tickling around her knees, and around her thighs. She sat up in bed, switched on her bedside lamp and threw back the bedcover. To her horror, the bed was swarming with a mass of tiny brown bedbugs, thousands of them, and they were scurrying all over her legs and up inside her nightgown.
As soon as she switched on the light, they retreated into the crevices and folds of her bed, but there were still scores of them running up and down her nightgown and over her arms, and the sheets were already freckled with bedbug excrement, so that it looked as if somebody had sprinkled paprika all over them.
She jumped out of bed so fast that she caught her thigh against the corner of the nightstand and t
he bedside lamp toppled on to the floor, plunging the bedroom into darkness. She hopped and hobbled her way to the bathroom, lifting up her arms to wrench off her nightgown, and then brushing and smacking at her naked body to dislodge or flatten the bedbugs that she could still feel running all over her.
She switched on the bathroom light. A few bedbugs were still running up her thighs, and she flicked these off with her facecloth, which was still wet from her bath. She looked at herself in the mirror and shook her head violently to make sure that there were none in her hair. She always waxed, so they had no body hair to hide in. She felt a tickle between her shoulder-blades, and she twisted quickly around, clawing at her back, but if a bedbug had been there it must have dropped off.
Next, before she did anything else, she carefully studied her arms and her legs and her body to make sure that she hadn’t been bitten. If these bedbugs were carrying the same kind of virus that had affected David and John Patrick Bridges and Mary Stephens, then she could be in serious trouble.
She switched on the main bedroom light and stood in front of the full-length mirror, but there were no red lesions on her anywhere, and she couldn’t feel any itching.
She walked back over to the bed. Almost all of the bedbugs had hidden themselves now, under the cover or under the pillows or somewhere in the seams of the mattress. They had left plenty of rusty-colored specks, though, to show that they were still there, even if they were hiding, and Anna could smell them, too. She knew that some people likened the smell to rotten fruit, but to her it was more herby, like cilantro.
She went to her closet and took out clean underwear, as well as a silky yellow boat-sweater and jeans. She dressed very carefully, shaking her sweater and her jeans before she put them on to make sure that there were no bedbugs hiding in them. Once she was dressed she went through to the living area and picked up the phone. ‘Jim? It’s Anna. I’m sorry – did I wake you?’
‘No, no. I was watching The Late Show. Well, I was watching it with my eyes closed, but I wasn’t exactly asleep.’
‘Do you mind if I take you up on your offer of a place to stay for the night after all? Something’s happened. You need to come take a look for yourself.’
‘Anna, are you OK? Anna?’
But Anna couldn’t answer him. She could only stand in the middle of the room with the phone held to her ear and her hand pressed over her mouth, with tears sliding down her cheeks.
NINETEEN
By the time we arrived back at Rick’s place, Dazey’s sister Mazey was home, and the two of them were sitting on the couch in front of the TV sharing a pepperoni pizza from an open box. Mazey was picking out the slices very carefully because she had just polished her fingernails gold, and they were still drying. In between bites she was starting to polish her toenails.
‘Hi, honey,’ said Dazey, without taking her eyes off Arsenio, who was interviewing some new boy band. ‘How’d it go?’
‘Buggy,’ said Rick. ‘Very, very buggy.’
Kleks the sniffer dog made a beeline for the pizza, and Mazey lifted the box up high so that it was out of his reach. ‘Hey, shoo, Kleks! This is our supper!’
Mazey looked very much like her sister – pretty, but a little puffy-faced – although she was probably about five or six years younger. Her ash-blonde hair was braided into an elaborate coronet, which looked like it must have taken hours, and her eyes were shadowed with crimson. If Rick hadn’t told me that she was a beautician, I would have guessed it anyhow. She was wearing a sparkly gold button-up vest that only just managed to hold her breasts in and a very short white sparkly skirt.
‘Mazey, this is the Wizard, aka Harry the Incredible Erskine,’ said Rick, tossing his car keys on to the table. ‘Wizard, this is Mazey. You guys going to be OK sharing a bedroom for a night or three?’
‘’S’okay with me, RB,’ said Mazey, in a fluting, babyish voice. She was concentrating on painting her left big toenail, and she didn’t raise her eyes even for a second to see what I looked like. ‘’Ceptin’ if he snores.’
‘I have it on good authority that I’m totally silent at night,’ I told her.
She wiggled her toe, admiring her handiwork, and then she looked up at me at last and gave me a glossy red smile. ‘Hey … not bad! You know who you remind me of?’
‘I don’t have a clue. Who do I remind you of?’
‘That actor. What’s his name? You know the one.’
‘I’m sorry. I have no idea. Tell me one movie he was in.’
‘No, he wasn’t in a movie. He was in Mad Men. I think it was Mad Men. Anyhow, he’s very good-looking.’
‘Well, thanks.’
‘He wasn’t as old as you, but you sure look a whole lot like him.’
I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not, but Rick changed the subject by saying, ‘Harry tells fortunes. He’s a professional what-do-you-call-it. Voyeur.’
‘Clairvoyant,’ I corrected him.
‘That’s right. Clairvoyant. If you ask him nicely, maybe he’ll get out the Tarot cards for you.’
‘Oh, yes, please!’ said Mazey, with her voice rising to a squeak. ‘I love all that fortune-telling stuff!’
Jesus, I thought, this is going to be like sharing a bedroom with Betty Boop. ‘Well, OK, maybe tomorrow,’ I told her. ‘I’m kind of jet-lagged this evening, and I need to be fresh to hear what the cards have to say to me.’ In other words: I’m too tired to make up any bullshit about who your next boyfriend’s going to be, or whether you’re going to get promoted at work to eyebrow-plucker-in-chief.
Rick went through to the kitchen to open a couple of cans of dog food for Bobik and Kleks. Meanwhile, I sat down next to Mazey to watch TV.
‘You want a slice?’ she asked me, offering me the pizza box.
‘No, thanks. Seeing all of those bedbugs has kind of killed my appetite.’
‘Oh, they’re gross!’ put in Dazey. ‘I went out on a job with Rick just one time and one time only, and let me tell you I almost barfed. I don’t know how he does it. And what’s worse than bedbugs is roaches. Urgh! And maggots! All white and blind and wriggly!’
Mazey had just picked up a slice of pizza. She peered at it closely, and then put it back in the box.
The girls went to bed first, while Rick and I stayed up and drank a few beers and talked about the days and nights we had spent in New York.
‘All seems like a long time ago now, Wizard,’ said Rick.
‘It was only five years.’
‘Still seems like another lifetime. You remember those Japanese twins?’
‘How could I ever forget?’
‘That was the day I started to feel that age was creeping up on me. They both wanted to spend the night with you.’
‘Believe me, Rick. Nothing happened. I was too drunk to climb the stairs to my apartment, let alone do anything when I got there.’
Kleks came into the living room and went up to Rick and started whining in the back of his throat.
‘What’s the matter, Kleks? Co jest nie tak?’
Kleks nudged Rick’s knee with his nose, and then took two or three steps toward the kitchen.
‘What is it? You want some more food? You’ve eaten a whole can each. You’re not getting any more until the morning.’
Kleks came back and nudged him again.
‘What?’ said Rick. He was growing irritated now. ‘I swear to God, Wizard, don’t ever have a dog. They’re like children who never grow up. I look at dogs, and I say to myself, that proves that Charles Darwin was wrong. There’s no such thing as evolution. If there was any such thing as evolution, dogs would be able to speak by now, and drive automobiles, and flip burgers at McDonald’s, even if they couldn’t understand string theory. Mind you, I don’t understand string theory myself.’
Kleks went back toward the kitchen door, but when he saw that Rick was still making no move to follow him, he barked.
‘Shut up, Kleks! Zamknij sie˛! You’ll wake up the girls!’
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‘Looks like he wants you to follow him,’ I suggested.
Rick put down his can of beer and wearily stood up. ‘You’re right, of course. He needs me to let him out for a leak. I won’t be a minute.’
He followed Kleks out of the room. A short time later he came back in again.
‘That was quick,’ I told him.
‘He didn’t need to go. I don’t know what he wanted. He kept snuffling around Bobik, but Bobik seems to be OK. He’s fast asleep in his basket, which is where Kleks should be.’
I shrugged and looked at my watch. ‘That’s where I should be, too, asleep in my basket. Thanks for everything, Rick – putting me up like this. Give me a couple of days to find someplace to stay and I’ll be out of your hair.’
‘Hey … don’t sweat it, man. What are friends for?’
I finished my beer, and then went into the bathroom to give myself a quick lukewarm shower and wash my teeth. When I came out, Kleks was still circling around the living room whining. Rick had already disappeared for the night and closed his bedroom door.
‘What’s eating you, boy?’ I asked Kleks. He whined again and led me into the kitchen, his claws scratching on the vinyl-tiled floor. Bobik was lying on a plaid blanket in his basket, and he appeared to be deeply asleep. Kleks sniffed at him and prodded him with his nose, but he didn’t stir.
I knelt down and leaned over Bobik’s basket. My veterinary expertise was someplace south of noplace at all, but Bobik was still breathing, and it sounded to me like his respiration was pretty regular. He hadn’t emptied his bladder or his bowels, and as far as I could tell he didn’t smell funny.
‘Kleks, dude, I can’t work out what’s eating you. I’m sorry. Bobik seems fine to me. Why don’t you get yourself some sleep, because that’s what I’m going to do.’
Kleks stood quite still, looking up at me. I think he must have understood the gist of what I had said to him, because he didn’t whine again. Instead, he appeared to be resigned, as if he had done his best to communicate something important to me, but knew that he had failed to do so and that it was probably beyond him. That in itself was very unusual. Normally, if a dog is trying to attract your attention, he will go on whining or barking ceaselessly until he does, even if he doesn’t stop all night and all of the following day.
Plague of the Manitou Page 21