Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  ‘We’re going to be making an early start tomorrow,’ said Michael Newton. ‘We’ll send a car for you at six thirty so that we can start our preliminary briefing at seven. I have a folder here for each of you with all of our test results so far. It includes ER admission figures, but people are coming in so thick and fast that all of those figures will be redundant by the morning. In fact, they’re probably redundant already.’

  ‘What’s the latest count you have?’ asked Anna.

  Michael Newton checked his iPhone. ‘Up until five this afternoon, three thousand seven hundred and twenty. Out of those, there were nine hundred eighty-three fatalities, and at that time they were dying at an average rate of seventy-six every hour. No recoveries reported so far. Not one. If you catch BV-1, that’s it. You’re a goner.’

  They were driving through the suburb of West Athens now. Anna looked out of the window at the rows of single-story houses on either side of the highway, each looking safe and snug, with their porch lights shining and their automobiles parked outside. But she knew that in the darkness of the night, the retrovirus was spreading across the country like the tendrils of some black and poisonous creeper.

  When they arrived at the Embassy Suites, Anna went directly up to her third-floor suite. She had been given a spacious living-room with leather couches and armchairs and a deep-red carpet. However, she went straight through to the bedroom, hefted her suitcase on to the bed and unzippered it. She felt exhausted and detached, as if none of what had happened to her in the past few days had been real.

  While she was hanging up her clothes in the closet, her cellphone warbled. It was Bill Grearson again, calling from A-Z Pest Control.

  ‘Ms Grey? Have the police contacted you yet?’

  ‘The police? No. Why should they?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news, Ms Grey. I sent one of my people around to check what was happening at your apartment, and find out why my operatives hadn’t been in touch. Their van was still in the parking structure, so he assumed they were still on site. He went to the door, but he couldn’t get a response, so he asked the super to check for him.’

  Bill Grearson was silent for a moment, and Anna realized that he was finding it difficult to speak.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, gently.

  At last, he managed to say, ‘They found them in the bedroom. They’d brought in all of their equipment, their gas cylinders and their door seals, everything they needed to fumigate, but they never even got started.’

  There was another pause, even longer this time, but Anna said nothing and waited patiently for Bill Grearson to continue.

  ‘They’re dead, both of them,’ he said. ‘Not just dead, but torn wide open. The guy I sent there to check up on them, he says he’s going to have nightmares about it every night for the rest of his life.’ Yet another pause, then, ‘They were torn wide open. Their guts pulled out, and twisted around their own necks to strangle them.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Anna.

  ‘The cops showed up, and one of them even puked up when he saw their bodies. I can’t believe this has happened. I had to call their wives and tell them. I didn’t give them all the details. How could I? But they’re going to find out sooner or later, aren’t they? Strangled with their own guts. Who would do such a thing?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Anna. Then, ‘What about the bedbugs?’

  ‘The bedbug? What about it?’

  ‘Well, it must have still been there somewhere, and still alive, if they hadn’t yet started to fumigate.’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. It was a bedbug, that’s all. I guess nobody noticed it.’

  ‘This bedbug was huge. You’ve no idea how big it was. You couldn’t fail to notice it.’

  ‘Nobody mentioned it. Maybe it was hiding someplace.’

  ‘The police need to know about it. I’ll call them.’

  ‘All right, Ms Grey, do whatever you have to. I have some more people to call. This is going to ruin my business, you know that? This is the end of the world, so far as I’m concerned. This is the end of the world.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Anna didn’t have to call the police because the police called her first. She was still trying to find their number on her laptop when her cell warbled.

  ‘Is that Professor Grey? Professor Anna Grey? This is Detective Raymond Keiller, St Louis Metropolitan Police Department.’

  ‘Oh, good. I was right on the verge of contacting you myself. A-Z Pest Control just called me about those two employees of theirs being killed.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s what I need to talk to you about. So far as we can ascertain, you were the last person to see them alive.’

  ‘Mr Grearson from A-Z told me what happened to them. I can barely believe it. Disemboweled. Strangled. It’s horrible.’

  ‘Let me say first of all that we’re trying to keep the full details out of the media,’ said Detective Keiller. ‘The way they were murdered was highly unusual, and we don’t want any copycats to throw us off the trail.’

  ‘My God. Who would want to copy two murders like that?’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. There’s always some nut job who wants to attract attention and can’t think up his own way of doing it. Listen – I’ve been in touch with your CEO at the hospital. I fully appreciate that you’re out there in Los Angeles doing critical research work, so I’m not going to ask you to come back here to answer questions. Not yet, anyhow. One of our detectives will be flying out tomorrow to talk to you in person.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’m not going anyplace.’

  ‘Thanks, great,’ said Detective Keiller. ‘In spite of that, I formally have to insist that you stay in Downey for the time being and keep us informed of your whereabouts at all times.’

  ‘My whereabouts? I’ll either be slaving away over a hot microscope at the Public Health laboratory, or else I’ll be crashed out in my hotel. That’s all I’ll have time for.’

  ‘Sure, I understand. All I need to ask you right now is if you noticed anything unusual at the time you let those exterminators into your apartment. Did you see anybody hanging around the corridor or the parking structure – anybody you didn’t recognize, or who was acting suspicious?’

  ‘No, I didn’t see anybody else,’ said Anna. ‘But the reason I was going to call you was because of the bedbug that those two poor men were trying to exterminate.’

  ‘Yes, A-Z Pest Control told me that you’d called them in to deal with bedbugs.’

  ‘This was one bedbug, detective. One enormous bedbug nearly fifteen inches from head to tail and about nine inches wide.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘When I went to bed last night I found that my mattress was infested with hundreds of bedbugs.’

  ‘OK …’ said Detective Keiller. He sounded wary.

  ‘Obviously I couldn’t sleep there, so my CEO kindly let me spend the rest of the night at his place. When I met up with the exterminators this afternoon to show them the bedbugs, the bedbugs had all disappeared. All the normal-sized bedbugs, anyhow. There was only this one monster bedbug.’

  Detective Keiller said, ‘I’m having a little trouble with this, Professor Grey. First of all there were hundreds of bedbugs, but when you came back this morning there was only one, but it was enormous?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK … so what happened to it, this enormous bedbug?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s one of the reasons I was going to call you. You must have searched my loft, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course we searched it. We’ve had a five-person forensic team going over it inch by inch.’

  ‘But you haven’t found a bedbug?’

  ‘Not a monster bedbug, no. There were traces of serious bedbug infestation, definitely, yes, on the bed linen. But no indication of anything as big as you’ve just described to me. Fifteen inches by nine – hey, that’s bigger than some dogs.’

  ‘I know. And I can hear by your tone of voice that
you don’t believe me.’

  ‘I believe you saw something that you believed was a monster bedbug, Professor Grey. Whether it really was a monster bedbug … well, that’s a matter for conjecture.’

  As she talked, Anna walked out of the bedroom and across the living room to the doors that led out to the balcony. Below her, a fountain was softly splashing and a warm breeze was making the palms rustle, as if they were whispering amongst themselves. Look up there, on the balcony. There’s that mad woman who thinks she saw a giant bedbug. Behind the trees in front of the hotel, traffic was passing to and fro on Firestone Boulevard, and the night seemed almost normal. In the distance, though, from every direction, she could hear the panicky scribbling of ambulance sirens.

  As she was standing there, a glossy black Buick Verano turned into the hotel forecourt and stopped almost immediately underneath her balcony. It stayed there for almost a minute with its engine running, but its doors and windows remained closed and nobody got out of it.

  ‘I know it sounds incredible, a bedbug that size,’ she told Detective Keiller. ‘But I’ve been making clinical studies of pathogen-carrying insects for over a decade, and there was no mistaking what it was. If you saw a lobster the size of a truck you’d still know that it was a lobster.’

  She thought of telling him about BV-1, the bedbug virus, but decided that she didn’t have enough information on it herself yet. As yet, there was no provable connection between BV-1 and the bedbugs that had appeared in her bed except for her own visions of nuns and Native American wonder-workers, and she didn’t want to stretch his credulity any further than it was stretched already.

  ‘Well, thank you, professor, I appreciate your cooperation,’ he told her. ‘Like I say, one of our detectives will be in contact with you sometime early tomorrow.’

  Anna was about to go back inside when the Buick’s doors opened and two men climbed out. The first one was wearing dark glasses, even though it was night-time, but he had gray brushed-back hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard, and she recognized him at once. At least, she thought she recognized him, but maybe he was only a lookalike, because what was he doing here, in Downey, outside the very hotel where she was staying? He was supposed to be running a funeral chapel in St Louis.

  The second man had his back turned to her, and because she was looking down at him at such an acute angle it was difficult for her to see what he looked like. In spite of that he did look strangely familiar. He was wearing a dark suit and a very white shirt, and his hair was fashionably messed up.

  Anna felt as if she were standing in an elevator that had suddenly dropped down ten floors without stopping

  When the second man turned around and started to walk toward the hotel entrance, she could see his face clearly. It was David. Her own dead David.

  After he had disappeared from view beneath her, Anna stayed on the balcony for three or four seconds, numb with shock. This couldn’t be. This was impossible. She had watched David’s casket disappear behind the curtains of the crematorium. His mother had even called her from Boise to say that she had received his ashes, in a green ceramic urn. How could he be here now, with Brian Grandier, the very man who had arranged his cremation?

  In the next instant, though, she threw aside her cellphone and ran for the door. She sprinted along the corridor to the elevators and jabbed frantically at the ‘DOWN’ button. She could hear the elevator whining, but then it stopped abruptly at the floor above her, and she could hear banging and thumping noises, and talking. It sounded as if somebody was deliberately keeping the doors open so that they could wheel their luggage in or out.

  She jabbed the button again, but still the elevator didn’t respond, so she ran to the end of the corridor and pushed open the door to the stairs. Her shoes clattered as she hurtled down them as fast as she could, almost twisting her ankle as she jumped down the last three stairs of the first-floor flight.

  When she reached the ground floor she burst out into the lobby, turning around and around to see if she could see David anywhere. The lobby was huge and high-ceilinged, with a balcony all the way around it, a fountain and armchairs all around. But apart from an elderly couple who were sitting glumly side by side, as if they had run out of anything to say to each other about twenty years ago, there was nobody there.

  She hurried across to the front desk, where a young red-haired woman was talking on the telephone. She waited impatiently until the young woman had finished and put down her receiver, and then she said, ‘Two men just came in here. Can you tell me where they went?’

  The receptionist frowned at her, as if she had spoken in a foreign language.

  ‘Two men,’ she repeated. ‘One wearing a dark suit, the other with a gray beard and sunglasses.’

  The receptionist shook her head. ‘Sorry, ma’am, we’ve had nobody in here for the past half-hour. And no gentlemen who looked like that.’

  ‘You must have seen them,’ said Anna. ‘They parked right outside the front entrance. They were in a black sedan, a Buick.’

  The receptionist kept on shaking her head. ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

  Anna left the front desk and went out through the revolving door to take a look at the hotel forecourt. Behind the trees an ambulance sped past, heading north-westward, its siren silent but its red-and-white lights flashing. There were twenty or thirty vehicles parked outside the hotel, but none of them was the black Buick Verano in which David and Brian Grandier had arrived.

  Or maybe they hadn’t arrived at all. Maybe she had imagined seeing them.

  She went back into the lobby. The elderly couple were still sitting there, side by side, staring into space. The receptionist gave her a shrug, as if to say, Sorry, but I told you so.

  Anna took the elevator back up to the third floor. She felt as if her brain had been smashed like the mirror in her loft, and she was frightened, too. If she was so stressed and exhausted that she was continually seeing people who weren’t really there, how could she trust herself to carry out the rigorous research that was required to isolate BV-1? She might even start to see imaginary cells in her microscope, or interpret her test results in a way that seemed logical to her but in reality made no scientific sense. Anna Through The Looking-Glass.

  She knew that her expertise with viral epidemics was badly needed, but in her present state of mind her involvement in the BV-1 project could be disastrous.

  She walked back along the corridor. Luckily, one of the chamber-maids was outside the door of her suite, because she hadn’t taken her key-card when she had rushed out to see David.

  Back in her living room, she picked up her cellphone from the floor. She had three messages already: one from Epiphany, one from Jim Waso and one from American Express. Both Epiphany and Jim were simply wishing her a good night’s sleep. American Express was reminding her that her monthly account was overdue.

  She sat down on one of the couches and closed her eyes. The door to the balcony was still open, and the warm night breeze made her feel more relaxed. In the distance she could still hear ambulance sirens nagging, as if they were never going to stop reminding her why she was here and how urgent it was that they needed to find an antiviral for BV-1. In spite of that, her shattered thoughts began to piece themselves together again, like a slow-motion movie of her broken mirror being run backward.

  She still had her eyes closed when she felt somebody sit down on the couch next to her. She opened them at once and jolted in fright. It was David. He was much more pallid than she had ever seen him, but he had an extraordinary expression on his face – triumphant, almost – as if to say: Look what I’ve done! I’ve come back!

  Anna made a whimpering noise and tried to shift herself away from him, but he reached out and laid his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Anna,’ he said and smiled at her. His voice sounded the same as always. A little throatier, maybe, but she would have recognized it even if she hadn’t been able to see him. ‘Anna, don’t be frightened. It’s only me.’

 
‘David,’ said Anna. ‘I’m dreaming this. This is a dream. You’re dead.’

  ‘People don’t have to die, Anna, not if they don’t want to. I know that now. Death is a matter of choice.’

  ‘David, you died in my arms and you were certified dead and you were cremated. This can’t be you. David is nothing but ashes. Go away!’

  ‘Listen to me, Anna. I was asked what I wanted to do. Did I want to die, or did I want to keep on living? Usually, at our age, that’s a question that hasn’t yet reared its ugly head. But what would you choose?’

  David lifted his hand off her shoulder, and Anna stood up, keeping her eyes on him all the time. She backed across the living room toward the door.

  ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’ David asked her. ‘You’re not walking out on me, are you?’

  ‘You’re dead, David! If anybody left anybody, you were the one who left me. You can’t come back. It isn’t possible. I’m having a nightmare. Go away. Go away and let me wake up!’

  David stood up too, although he kept his distance. ‘It is possible, Anna. Here, look at me. I’m the living proof. I never knew it before, but there are spirits in this world who can bring you back, even if you’re dead, and give you life everlasting. This is why I need to talk to you.’

  ‘This isn’t real, David, any of it. I’m hallucinating. You’re dead. I was holding you in my arms when you died.’

  ‘I was sick, yes. I was very, very sick, and I did appear to die. I even thought myself that I was dead. OK – in a way, I did die. But Brian Grandier gave me the choice of coming back to life.’

  ‘Brian Grandier was supposed to have cremated you.’

  ‘Brian Grandier is a savior, Anna. Brian Grandier is a savior of souls – a great, great man. He’s linked up with others like him, and together they’re going to give this country back everything that was taken away from it.’

  Now he came around the couch and slowly approached Anna, both hands held out, until he was almost near enough to reach out and touch her. She felt frightened to the point of total hysteria, and yet fascinated, too, because he was David, he really was. He was very pale, but the look in his blue-gray eyes was sincere, his smile was encouraging, and he was speaking just like David always used to speak to her – gently and reasonably and optimistically. David had always believed that things were going to get better. Even when she’d despaired of finding a cure for some disease, he had always promised her that she would, if only she persisted and continued to believe in herself.