Anna tried to hold her ground, but the nun took another step closer to her, and she was so intimidating that Anna stepped back two paces. I could see that Grandier-Gressil was watching this confrontation with the same sardonic smile as before, although he still kept his choke-hold around Epiphany’s neck.
Matchitehew and Megedagik were watching, too, their feathers hanging damply now the wind had dropped, but their shoulders still alive with glittering beetles. It was still very dark, but up above us the clouds were gradually beginning to tear apart, like damp gray tissue-paper.
‘We are the carriers of this infection, me and my sisters,’ said Jeanne des Anges. She spoke in a triumphant croak, and as she did she stooped down and began to gather up the heavy wet hem of her habit. Slowly, she lifted it up, higher and higher, first of all revealing her thin white legs, and then higher still, right up under her breasts. What appeared at first sight to be a triangle of brown hair between her legs was not hair at all, but brown bedbugs, hundreds of them, swarming in and out of the moist white lips of her vulva and down her thighs.
She held her habit up like that for almost five seconds, and then she let it drop down to the ground again.
‘There is no stopping us,’ she said. ‘And you, Professor Grey, must agree not to try.’
As if to emphasize her point, she turned to Grandier-Gressil, and Grandier-Gressil jerked Epiphany’s head sideways, so that she let out a stifled gasp of pain.
I stepped forward until I was standing beside Anna. My heart was thumping, but Jeanne des Anges didn’t even look at me. She kept her eyes on Anna, as if she were trying to hypnotize her.
‘Anna,’ I said, out of the corner of my mouth. ‘For Christ’s sake, Anna, just say yes, you’ll do whatever they want. Let’s both say yes. Tell them you’ll stop your research, and I’ll agree to spread the word. Maybe it will save some lives if I do.’
‘I don’t think we have to,’ she said, quite calmly.
‘What?’
‘There’s another way. I hope there’s another way, anyhow. I can’t be sure of it, but if you were right about the manitous—’
‘Manitous exist. I know they do. I’ve seen the proof of it.’
‘I meant what you said about modern manitous being more powerful than ancient manitous.’
We were interrupted by Jeanne Saint Anges. ‘So do you agree, professor?’ she asked, in her harsh, penetrating voice. A watery sun was beginning to appear behind the clouds. At the moment it looked more like the moon than the sun, because it was silver, but the wet asphalt was glistening, and the scores of nuns standing silently around us appeared more sinister than ever, because they could no longer be mistaken for shadows. They were real.
Anna took a breath, but she didn’t get the chance to answer, because at that moment the silence in the parking lot was shattered by a loud, echoing gunshot. Shreds of black cloth were blown from the habit of one of the nuns who was standing close to Grandier-Gressil, and she flinched and staggered a few paces, but she didn’t fall over.
Rick came stalking unsteadily down the laboratory steps. He was still wearing a beard of dried blood, and he was holding his revolver in both hands and pointing it directly at Grandier-Gressil.
Anna gripped my arm and said, ‘Oh God, Harry! Don’t let him do it! He’s going to spoil everything!’
‘Rick!’ I shouted. ‘Rick, put it down!’
But Rick ignored me. He walked up to Grandier-Gressil, stuck the muzzle of his gun into his side and said, ‘Let her go, you freak, or I’ll blow you outside in!’
To my surprise, Grandier-Gressil let go of Epiphany and stood back, with both of his hands in the air. They were actually more like claws than hands, with mottled gray skin and long, curved fingernails.
Rick reached out for Epiphany and said, ‘Go on, darling, you go over there and get yourself into my van. You too, Wizard! Anna! We’ve all decided that we’ve had enough of this shit, and we’re leaving!’
We had hardly had time to turn around, though, before we heard an ear-splitting howl that made me go cold all over. It went on and on, and it sounded like every coyote that ever existed howling all at once. A second later, a loud tapping noise started up, arrhythmic but insistent, and that made me go even colder, because I knew exactly what it was. It was the tapping of medicine sticks, which meant that Matchitehew and Megedagik were calling on something from Native American magic to stop us.
Not only that, but the nuns were circling themselves around so that they were blocking our way toward Rick’s van. They had moved slowly before, when I had first seen them approaching the laboratory, but now they seemed to multiply in front of my eyes. We had managed to run less than thirty feet before we realized that escaping was out of the question. Even if we forgot about Rick’s van and tried to make it to the main laboratory gates, those nuns would surround us before we were even halfway there.
We all stopped and turned around again. Grandier-Gressil and Jeanne des Anges were standing side by side with pitying smiles on their faces, two beings resurrected from a time when people truly believed in demons. Right behind them towered Matchitehew and Megedagik. It was Megedagik who was howling, with his eyes closed and his head thrown back, while Matchitehew was beating out that complicated clatter with his medicine sticks.
I felt exhausted and beaten, and most of all I felt a cold sense of utter dread. I had thought that I would never again hear those medicine sticks tapping, and see spirits rising out of nowhere, and have to fight against the bitter resentment that still festers beneath our feet, in the very ground we walk on, because that ground isn’t ours.
But Rick wasn’t going to give in so easy. He never had given in to anyone or anything, ever since I’d known him. He walked back toward Grandier-Gressil and fired his revolver again, and then again. The shots tore at Grandier-Gressil’s coat and vest, but they had no more impact than if Rick had gone up to him and simply punched him with his fist.
Megedagik’s howling reached a crescendo, and Matchitehew was tapping the medicine sticks so fast that they were a blur.
Rick strode even nearer to Grandier-Gressil and Jeanne des Anges, still leveling his gun at him. Before he could reach them, though, three or four of the nuns appeared from behind them and barred his way. They moved so quickly that I could hardly believe what I was seeing. They scuttled, like characters in a speeded-up movie.
‘Oh please God,’ Anna panted, right beside me. ‘Don’t let these be what I think they are.’
Megedagik was screeching now, and as he did so the nuns lifted their habits like Jeanne des Anges had lifted hers. To my horror, though, I could see that they weren’t pulling up their habits with human hands, but with sharp insect-like legs. They clawed their habits right back over their heads, tearing off their veils as well, and it was then that they revealed what they really were. Not nuns, not even women, but huge amber-colored bedbugs, with hard articulated shells and waving antennae.
Even Rick stopped in his tracks. He looked back at me and his eyes were wide with sheer terror.
‘Wizard!’ he shouted.
He turned back to face the bedbugs, but even before he could raise his revolver, three of them had run toward him on their six legs and sprung on him. They weren’t as tall as he was, but each of them must have weighed twice as much, because they knocked him on to his back and clambered all over him.
‘Wizard!’ he screamed. ‘Wizard!’
I went up to him, as near as I could. He was staring wildly up at me from underneath the carapace of one of the bedbugs. The three of them were all over him, and his face was almost all I could see of him.
I clenched my fist and thumped one of them on the back of the head, three times as hard as I could, but it had no effect at all. It was like hitting a copper water-tank. The stench of rotten fruit was so strong that I was close to bringing up my coffee. Next I tried to get my fingers underneath the edge of one of their shells, but it was much too heavy for me to lift it.
Rick let
out a thick, prolonged gargle, and I stepped away because I realized then that there was nothing I could do to save him. One of the bedbugs had torn open his black denim shirt and then torn open his stomach. I could already see his intestines bulging out, and I didn’t want to see any more.
I looked over at Grandier-Gressil, and his demonic red eyes were alight with pleasure. Beside him, Jeanne des Anges had her hand pressed into the front of her habit, deep between her legs. Her lips were parted, and her eyes were half-closed.
Behind them, Matchitehew and Megedagik were swaying and stamping their feet. The rattle of medicine sticks was as loud as sporadic machine-gun fire.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I jumped. It was Anna.
‘We’ll have to do it now,’ she said. Her mascara had run, so it looked as if she was crying black tears.
‘Do what?’
‘I was going to do this before Rick came out … go up to Grandier as if I was going to agree to stop my research …’
‘And?’
She reached into the pocket of her lab coat and took out a hypodermic syringe with a yellow plastic cap on it. She pressed it into my hand, making sure that Grandier-Gressil didn’t see her doing it.
‘I’ll approach him now. If I don’t, he’s going to have those creatures kill Epiphany next. You come with me. Move behind him, and when I’ve got his full attention, stab him in the neck with this. Make sure you press the plunger right down.’
‘What is it?’ My voice was shaky because right behind me, I could indistinctly hear a treacly, stretching sound, and several desperate grunts. That was Rick, in the last stages of being strangled with his own bowels.
Anna and I went over to Grandier-Gressil. I couldn’t help myself from looking at Rick as we walked around him, but all I could see was those gigantic bedbugs climbing all over each other, with loops and smears of blood on their shells.
‘Don’t tell me that we’ve convinced you,’ said Grandier-Gressil, raising his voice so that we could hear him over the howling and the tapping of medicine sticks. Jeanne des Anges was standing very close to him, with her eyes closed as if she was dreaming, although I had the feeling that she was listening to us intently.
‘I can’t see you murder any more of us like this,’ said Anna. She lifted her hand toward the shattered entrance to the laboratory building. ‘All of those lab technicians … they didn’t deserve to die like that. Neither did this man. He was only trying to protect us and help us to get away.’
‘All you had to say was yes,’ Grandier-Gressil said, grinning. He nodded toward Epiphany, who was standing on her own with her back turned, so that she wouldn’t have to look at Rick and the bedbugs jolting and jostling against each other as they climbed all over him. ‘I assume you are going to say yes? You don’t want to see that lovely young Nubian die in the same way, do you?’
‘I don’t think I have much alternative, do I?’ said Anna. Her integrity amazed me. Even now she wasn’t going to say yes to him. Personally, I would have told him anything he wanted to hear, so long as he didn’t send those monstrous bedbugs to tear anybody else apart, especially Epiphany.
‘You must give me your solemn promise,’ said Grandier-Gressil. ‘And don’t even think of breaking it. If you do, my darling black sisters will go hunting for your nearest and dearest. Your mother, Caroline. Your father, Daniel. Your brother, Luke.’
‘You know my family?’ asked Anna. ‘You know all their names?’ At the same time, she nudged me, hard, and I knew that the moment had come for me to strike. While Grandier-Gressil gloatingly told Anna that he knew everything about his enemies, all of them, I sidled around to the left, until I was standing close behind his right shoulder. Jeanne des Anges was now leaning against his left shoulder, her fingers stroking the side of his neck and playing with his wiry gray hair. If her eyes had been open, she would have been looking straight at me. For the moment, however, she seemed to be lost in a world of her own. All of that howling and tapping and grisly killing had obviously aroused her.
Ann was saying, ‘You realize how much this promise conflicts with my professional principles and my religious beliefs—?’ She didn’t look at me, but I realized that she was trying to hold Grandier-Gressil’s attention so that he wouldn’t suddenly become aware that I’d moved around behind him.
My own attention was caught for a split-second by the giant bedbugs that were crawling over Rick’s bloody and half-dismembered body. It looked as if they had finished with him now, and they were turning toward Epiphany, with their antennae twitching.
This had to be the moment. I was holding the hypodermic in my left-hand coat pocket, and I pushed the plastic cap off it with my thumb. Then, as fast as I could, I whipped it out and stabbed it into Grandier-Gressil’s neck. It felt like stabbing a needle into thick papier-ma˘
ché and made the same kind of chut! sound.
He jolted with shock, jerking his arm up to feel what had pricked him and twisting his head around. He hit me hard in the ribs with his elbow, trying to knock me away, but I pressed the hypodermic’s plunger all the way down, and then left it dangling in his neck.
‘Qu’est-ce que tu as fait pour moi, salaud!’ he screamed. ‘Qu’est-ce que tu as fait pour moi, tu diable!’
He came after me, his eyes red, his yellow shark’s teeth bared in rage. Jeanne des Anges opened her eyes and stood rigid, her arms by her sides with her hands looking as if they were fixed on backward, her ivory-white face even more elongated and unearthly.
‘You cunts!’ she shrieked. ‘You miserable shit-swallowers! What have you done!’
I backed away from Grandier-Gressil, but there wasn’t any place for me to go. I was surrounded by nuns, and I collided with three or four of them. I could feel their hard-shelled bodies and their insect legs beneath their habits. They jostled me and pushed me, and the next thing I knew Grandier-Gressil had seized my sleeve.
Instead of hitting me, though, he stood still, although he didn’t release his grip. He stared at me with that gray demon’s face, and I could see that he was beginning to find difficulty in breathing. His chest rose and fell like an old-fashioned leather bellows, and I could hear the air rasping in and out of his throat.
‘Tu es fou,’ he said. ‘Vous n’avez pas compris, vous avez fait? Vous m’avez parlé de l’histoire. Qu’est-ce dio vous connaissez l’histoire, vous la fraude, vous faux, vous diseuse de bonne aventure.’
I stared back at him – it – or whatever he was.
‘Do you know something?’ I told him. ‘I don’t understand a single fucking word you’re saying.’
He almost smiled. His black upper lip curled upward, and he nodded. ‘This was meant to be, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘This was always meant to happen this way. That’s why we couldn’t touch you two. You were our nemeses.’
With that, he let go of my sleeve and dropped to the ground at my feet. Jeanne des Anges took two or three stiff-legged steps toward us, but then she stopped and looked at me, aghast.
Grandier-Gressil shriveled. He literally shriveled up, his head collapsing into the collar of his shirt, his sleeves flattening out, his coat folding up. Within a few seconds he was nothing but ash, and the light damp breeze that was blowing across the parking lot began to whirl him away.
All around us, the nuns began to fade and disappear. The monstrous bedbugs, too, because that was what they were. One moment they were translucent, and I could still see their shadowy outlines, but the next they were gone altogether, as if they had never been there.
Jeanne des Anges was the last to fade away. She spoke some obscenity, which echoed like somebody calling out to us from a crypt, and then she was gone.
Only Matchitehew and Megedagik remained, their feathers and horsehair decorations fluffing in the wind, but even they seemed blurry and unfocused. Either that, or I was tired out and suffering from eye strain.
They looked as weary as I felt, but they stood there upright and dignified, and even though I couldn’t forgive t
hem for what they had done, and all of the innocent people they had caused to die, I could understand why they’d done it.
‘I think our father knew that the story of our people had to end like this,’ said Matchitehew. ‘We will never forget how you murdered our women and children, and how you destroyed our crops and burned our homes, and even washed away the memory of what we were. And after you had done that, what did you do? You went into your churches, and you thanked your God for what he had given you.’
He paused, and then he said, ‘We spit on you.’
I was about to say something to him and his brother when there were two thunderous bangs, like two bombs exploding. A shock wave almost knocked me off my feet, and it made Anna and Epiphany both stagger too.
Two clouds of gray smoke rolled up into the air, although they were quickly snatched away by the wind and vanished. All we saw were two ravens, flying high above the trees, and then they were gone, too.
I leaned down and picked up the hypodermic. Anna had gone over to Epiphany, and they were holding each other tight, too stunned and shaken even to cry.
I held up the hypodermic and said, ‘It was that Meramac School virus, wasn’t it?’
Anna nodded. ‘You said that everything has its manitou, didn’t you? You were right.’
I looked around at the wreckage of the health laboratory, and Rick’s ripped-open body, and Grandier-Gressil’s empty gray suit, and I thought of Misquamacus. Mostly, though, I thought of Singing Rock. I could almost hear him saying, ‘Even the wind has its manitou, Harry, and the wind blows every day, and the wind never forgets where it blew the day before.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
As I don’t have to tell you, the BV-1 retrovirus disappeared overnight, and everybody who was showing symptoms of it slowly recovered. The CDC were at a loss to explain why, so I thought I’d set the record straight, even if you don’t believe me. I don’t know what the final death-toll was, and I don’t suppose that we’ll ever know for sure, although it ran into several thousands. The only lasting effect among the million or so survivors appeared to be persistent nightmares about insects crawling all over them.
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