Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  What I found ironic was that both Matchitehew’s and Megedagik’s names had been borrowed for heroes in sword-and-sorcery type video games. If only the geeky designers of those games had known how malevolent those two brothers really were, and how many real people they would massacre, all across America.

  It was when I came to check up on the Loudun possessions, though, that everything really began to click into place. Father Zapata had told me that a nearby parish priest had been accused of being responsible for the nuns at the Ursuline convent becoming possessed by demons – but I soon realized that this dude had been much more than your garden-variety parish priest. He was wealthy, well-educated and very good-looking, apparently. After he’d been appointed to St-Pierre du Marché, he had affairs with several of the prettiest local girls and even made one of them pregnant.

  In September of 1632, however, an apparition appeared in the corridors of the Ursuline convent in Loudun, and after it had appeared several more times, it was identified by the nuns as him. Soon afterward, the nuns started to show signs that they were possessed by demons – cursing God, screaming, barking and running around naked.

  Even when prayers were said to prevent the parish priest’s living spirit from entering the convent, he was alleged to have introduced more demons by throwing a bouquet of pink roses over the wall. That could explain the bunch of dead pink roses that Father Zapata had found under my bed.

  The nuns picked up the roses and handed them around to each other, and they were immediately infected with evil. They began contorting their bodies, lifting up their habits to flaunt themselves to priests and masturbating in front of the altar with all kinds of objects, from bottles of holy water to pastry-rolling pins.

  To cut a long seventeenth-century story short, the parish priest was charged by the church authorities with being a sorcerer and having sent demons to possess the nuns so that he could take advantage of them for his own sexual pleasure. He was locked up in prison, his body was shaved all over to see if the Devil had left any marks on him, and then he was tortured by having both of his legs slowly broken with wooden wedges. In spite of that, he refused to confess.

  Finally, he was sentenced to death by being taken out to the public square in St Croix, hoisted up on to a scaffold and burned alive. Through the smoke and flames, however, he was seen to be praying, with what appeared to be a smile on his face, as if he had somehow outwitted all of his persecutors.

  At the end of the article about the Loudun possessions there was a contemporary engraving of this parish priest. As soon as I saw it, I felt that same cold creepy sensation that I’d felt when that faceless nun had first appeared in my bedroom. He looked identical to the gray-bearded man in the gray suit that I’d seen with the nuns at LAX. There was no question about it. It was him.

  Now it all started to fit together, or at least I thought it did. Misquamacus had deliberately burned himself alive so that he could be reborn in the future. This parish priest had also been burned alive – and if there were any Roman Catholic rituals that were similar to the one Misquamacus had used, and the parish priest had recited them as he burned, then he, too, could have been reborn. That would have accounted for the smile on his face as he was consumed by the flames. He knew that he was coming back.

  He could well have been reborn as the child that Sister Marysia was carrying on her back. Misquamacus had been reborn in almost exactly the same way, on Karen Tandy’s neck. Those two births had been too damned similar to be a coincidence. So what if Misquamacus and the parish priest subscribed to two totally different belief systems? God is the same, whatever you call him. Water is made up of the same elements, all over the world, whether it’s aqua or woda or nibi. Death is the same, in any religion, and so is reincarnation.

  I stared at the picture of the parish priest for a long time, listening to Mazey mumbling and snorting. I know you, I thought. I know who you are now. The caption beneath the picture said that his name was Father Urbain Grandier.

  I closed the laptop and laid it carefully down on the floor beside my bed. I sat there in darkness, listening to the echo of sirens outside and thinking about what I had just found out. What had Matchitehew said to me? Now we have your spirits on our side. Father Grandier was here, or his direct descendant, at the very least, and if Father Grandier had been the child of Sister Marysia, and was still possessed by Gressil, the demon of infection, then everything that Matchitehew had warned me about made sense.

  Unbelievable sense, maybe. Insane sense. But sense. If there was one thing I had learned from my encounters with Misquamacus, it was that extreme acts of evil are always committed for a reason, no matter how deluded that reason may be, and when you start bringing religion into the mix, the delusion index goes sky-high.

  It made sense to me that Matchitehew and Megedagik had enlisted Father Grandier to help them to take their revenge on the colonists who had taken their country from them and murdered their people. From the Pilgrim Fathers onward, so much of the invasion of America had been done in the name of religion, and Father Grandier wanted his revenge on that religion, too. They both had a score to settle with Christianity.

  By now I was so bushed that I wasn’t thinking straight. I lay down and dragged the sheet over my shoulder and closed my eyes. Exhausted as I was, though, it took me a long time to fall asleep. I kept seeing nuns who bubbled up to the ceiling like thick black oil gushers, grew horns, and stared at me with smoldering red eyes. I kept hearing whispering and prayers and the shuffling of sandals on a cold convent floor. I smelled smoke and burning firewood and incense.

  I had been asleep for less than twenty minutes when I was woken by a loud thumping sound, and then a furious scratching. This was followed by another thump, and then another, and more scratching. Then I heard a weird, distorted howling, like the wind that blows down a subway tunnel long before a train arrives.

  I sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. Mazey was still tangled up in her sheets, and she hadn’t stirred. I climbed out of bed and went to the bedroom door, just in time to see Rick coming out of his bedroom, wearing nothing but a droopy gray pair of shorts. He switched on the living-room light.

  The howling noise was going on and on, and every few seconds there was another thump and even more scratching.

  Rick squinted at me, bleary-eyed. ‘The fuck is that? Sounds like a fucking coyote!’

  We could hear now that the noise was coming from the back door.

  Rick returned to his bedroom, and I could hear him say something to Dazey. A few seconds later he reappeared carrying a black Smith & Wesson Governor revolver. ‘OK, Wizard? Now you’re going to see an ex-coyote!’

  ‘Just be careful, will you?’ I told him. ‘The last time I saw you fire a gun was in my apartment, that time you blasted my coffee machine to pieces!’

  ‘I was drunk then. Now I’m sober. Pretty much, anyhow!’

  I followed him into the kitchen. He might have had a gun, but there was another almighty thump and a scrabbling noise against the back door that sounded like claws, followed by a howl that made the back of my neck prickle, and we both stopped right where we were. I suddenly thought: Matchitehew, the father of wolves. A man by day, but a wolf by night. Jesus Christ, what if it’s him, and he’s tracked me down because I didn’t do what he ordered me to do and warn everybody that the sickness was coming?

  Another thump, and another, and more scrabbling, and the howling grew higher and even more eerie.

  ‘Switch on the light,’ said Rick. ‘If it sees us, it’ll probably get scared and run off.’

  ‘I didn’t think coyotes were afraid of humans.’

  ‘Well, how the fuck should I know? I never had one scratching at my door before, trying to get in. I was brought up in the city, just like you.’

  Thump – thump – thump! It was the sound of an animal’s body hurling itself repeatedly against the door. I guessed that the door was probably strong enough to keep it out, but all the same the plaster around the frame w
as cracking, and one of the door panels had split.

  Rick raised his revolver and cocked it. He edged toward the door, his knees slightly bent, his left hand held up as if he half-expected the animal to come bursting in.

  I don’t know what unnerved me the most: the repeated thumping, or the scrabbling of claws, or that endless, hollow howling.

  Rick had almost reached the door when, without any warning, the animal reared up on its hind legs and glared in through the window. Its pointed ears were sticking up erect, and its eyes gleamed yellow. When it saw us, its lips peeled back and it snarled at us, baring its teeth.

  My God, I thought. It is a wolf. It must be Matchitehew. But Rick said, ‘Holy shit, Wizard, it’s Bobik!’

  I tried to see through the window, but there was too much reflected glare from the living-room light behind us, and the animal dropped out of sight. Rick turned to me and said, ‘I can’t believe it! It’s Bobik!’

  ‘It can’t be Bobik! Bobik’s dead. We buried him ourselves.’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t quite dead and he managed to dig himself up.’

  ‘He was dead, Rick, for Christ’s sake! He suffered from a massive loss of blood.’

  Rick stood still for a moment, thinking. The thumping and the scratching and the howling had stopped, and now the night was quiet again, except for the cicadas chirruping and the wailing of sirens. ‘I’m sure it’s Bobik. Maybe he didn’t lose as much blood as we thought he did. I mean, how much blood does your average German Shepherd have in him? Do you know? I’m damned if I do!’

  We waited. Whether it was Bobik or not, the animal had stopped flinging itself at the door and howling.

  Rick said, ‘If it’s Bobik, we can’t just leave him out there. He’ll be hungry and thirsty, and maybe he needs some medical attention, too.’

  ‘If he’s survived being buried alive, Rick, I’m sure he’ll survive until morning.’

  ‘I’ll switch on the yard light. Maybe we can see him.’

  ‘Rick—’ I didn’t think that switching on the outside light was a very good idea, especially if it wasn’t Bobik out there, but Matchitehew in the guise of a wolf, or even a mangy old coyote. The trouble was, I couldn’t really think of a reason to stop him. I had to agree. If it was Bobik, then leaving him out there would be heartless.

  Rick switched on the light and peered out of the window into the back yard, shading his eyes with his hand to cut out the reflection.

  ‘Is he out there?’ I asked him.

  ‘Mmm … not that I can see. Maybe he’s decided to call it a night.’ He turned the key in the door and bent down to shoot back the bolt.

  ‘Rick … be careful.’

  Rick held up his revolver. ‘This baby can stop anything, Wizard. It’s loaded with point four ten shotshell, muzzle velocity eight hundred fifty feet per second.’

  ‘All the same, be careful.’

  Rick eased the door open and peered out into the yard. I stayed well behind him. Quite apart from the fact that I wasn’t at all sure that the animal that had been thumping and scratching and howling at the door was Bobik, I didn’t want to risk getting between Rick and some maddened coyote if he was firing shotgun shells with his usual wild abandon. He hadn’t only blasted my coffee machine in New York, he had shot three large holes in my ceiling and narrowly missed killing Mrs Greenbaum, my opstairsikeh.

  Apart from the usual noises of the night, there was nothing. No howling, no growling, no snuffling. Rick stepped outside and circled around the yard, ducking down now and again to check beneath the shrubbery.

  ‘Nah,’ he announced. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s taken a powder.’

  He was still crouched down, trying to see beneath the shadows of a boxwood bush, when there was a screeching howl like every werewolf movie you ever saw, and the animal came bursting out of the bushes and ran straight across the yard toward the open kitchen door.

  It bounded up the steps and leaped toward me before I had time to dodge aside. It was Bobik, his hair thickly matted with blood and mud, but this wasn’t the gentle, obedient Bobik that he had been before he had died, or supposedly died. His yellow eyes were staring, and his teeth were bared, and he hit me as hard as a sack of wet cement. I fell backward and sideways, jarring my shoulder against the kitchen table and knocking over one of the kitchen chairs.

  Bobik was on top of me immediately, his claws digging into my chest, his spit spraying into my face. He was cold and filthy and incredibly heavy, and when I tried to lift myself up he went for me, sinking his teeth into my upraised arm and shaking it furiously from side to side. The pain was unbearable, and I shouted out, ‘Gaaaahhh!’ and wrenched my arm out of his jaws, but I was immediately spattered in my own blood.

  Next he went for my neck. I tried to beat him off, punching the top of his head again and again and pulling at his ears, but he seemed determined to rip out my throat. I felt his hard, chilly nose against the side of my face, and his teeth tore into my ear lobe. At the same time he continued to claw at my chest and my thighs, and he stepped between my legs, which made me shout out again.

  I couldn’t hold him off much longer. His wet muzzle was lungeing at my neck again and again, and twice I felt his teeth tearing at my skin. I thought: Jesus, he’s determined to kill me, and he’s going to succeed. I had read somewhere that you could stop a mad dog by grasping both of its front legs and yanking them outward in opposite directions at ninety degrees, which would burst its heart, but I was too busy struggling to keep Bobik away from my neck to try anything like that – apart from which, he was much too aggressive and much too heavy. It was like he was possessed.

  Suddenly, I became aware that Rick was kneeling down close beside me. ‘Hold still!’ he was shouting, although Bobik was snarling so loudly that I could hardly hear him.

  He seized one of Bobik’s ears and pressed his black revolver against the side of his head. Bobik twisted his head around and tried to snap at his fingers, but Rick squeezed the trigger and the gun went off with a mind-stunning bang. Bobik’s head exploded, with fragments of skull and hairy skin and brain spraying everywhere like warm gray custard – mostly into my face, by the feel of it.

  Incredibly, with half of his head missing, Bobik still didn’t stop blindly attacking me. He had lost his eyes and his nose and his upper jaw, and his lower jaw was dangling, but he kept on jerking his neck up and down, trying to snag my neck with his remaining teeth, and he continued to rip at my chest and my legs just as viciously hard with his claws.

  ‘Get him off me!’ I wheezed. I was so winded by Bobik’s weight that I could hardly get the words out. ‘Sharky, for Christ’s sake, get him off me!’

  Rick fired again, into the side of Bobik’s body this time. I felt the dog shudder with the impact as the shotgun pellets blew out his insides. But still he kept clawing at me, even if his leg movements were feebler, and spasmodic, and no longer seemed to be voluntary. Rick fired a third time, although I didn’t hear the shot because I was totally deafened by now. This shot blasted off Bobik’s pelvis with both of his back legs attached, and he finally dropped sideways on to the kitchen floor.

  Rick gave me his hand and helped me on to my feet. I was plastered in blood and glutinous brain matter and tiny chips of bone.

  ‘That was crazy, man,’ said Rick, looking down at Bobik’s body. ‘One shot should have finished him off, easy.’

  ‘Rick,’ I said, ‘he shouldn’t have been alive at all.’

  Dazey had come out the bedroom and was standing in the living room in her Minnie Mouse T-shirt, her hair all tangled. ‘Rick – what’s happened? Oh my God! What’s happened? Is that Bobik?’

  ‘What’s left of him,’ said Rick. He opened the chamber of his revolver and shook out the empty shell casings. ‘Don’t know how in God’s name he done it, but he dug himself out of the ground and came for the Wizard like a bat out of hell. To quote Meatloaf.’

  Dazey looked around. ‘Where’s Kleks? He’s not in his basket.’

  ‘I d
on’t know,’ I told her. ‘I don’t remember seeing him when we first came in here.’

  At that moment, Kleks appeared from behind the couch in the living room. He came to the kitchen door and looked at the bloody remains of his companion and let out a thin, sorrowful whine. I guessed he must have been frightened when he first heard Bobik thumping and scratching and howling, and he had slunk off into the living room to hide. I didn’t say anything to Rick, but that reinforced my opinion that Bobik had been possessed by some spirit or other, maybe Matchitehew, the father of wolves. After all, he had ignored Rick and rushed straight at me. That made me suspect that Matchitehew and Megedagik were out to punish me now, for not having done what they wanted. Like they had told me, their tribal code of honor prevented them from personally harming anybody who had defeated their father Misquamacus, but that obviously didn’t stop them from setting a dog on me, even a dead and resurrected dog.

  ‘You’re a mess,’ Dazey told me. ‘You’d better get yourself washed up. Rick – I’ll help you clear up the kitchen.’

  I think all of us were still in shock. Without another word between us I went to the bathroom to take a shower, while Rick took out a khaki plastic trash bag and started to drop Bobik’s body parts into it. Dazey filled up the kitchen sink with hot water and Astonish floor cleaner.

  Kleks stayed by the door, his head cocked to one side, as if he couldn’t understand what was happening. He wasn’t the only one, I can tell you.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  None of us really felt like going back to bed, but we were all exhausted and even if we couldn’t sleep we decided that we needed the rest. It was still only 3:35 a.m., and we had no idea what kind of a situation we’d be facing tomorrow. Even Kleks crept back into his basket, although he hung his head over the side like a seasick sailor in a coracle, and it didn’t look as if he was going to sleep either.