At the bottom of my closet I found the old plaid blanket that my dog used to sleep on, and I took it into the living room to cover up poor old Ted. As I unfolded it, I caught the glint of silver around his neck. It was the medallion which he said that the Russian-type girl had given him—the medallion with the spooky face and the eyes that looked as if they opened. I lifted the medallion up and turned it over. The face was still staring at me, grimly, as if it resented my interfering. I hesitated, but then I unfastened the clasp, and took the medallion off. I wasn’t intending to steal it, but for some reason I felt that it was some kind of clue, in the way that the letters “s” and “t” were clues.

  I drew the blanket over Ted’s head and then I turned the AC right down, so that he wouldn’t start smelling too ripe. Then I knocked on Laticia’s door.

  “You change your mind, Harry? You want to stay the night?”

  Under normal circumstances I might even have been tempted. Laticia was wearing a purple see-through bra and purple see-through panties with dangling ribbons at the side, and she wasn’t unattractive if you didn’t mind Prince without the moustache.

  “Not tonight, Laticia. I have to go out. I just wanted to tell you that I had to leave Ted on the couch.”

  “Okay . . . he’s not going to bother me, is he?”

  “I hope not. If he does, just keep him talking until I get back.”

  I walked down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street. Khaled’s Pakistani Provisions was closed, and its steel shutters had been pulled down. This was highly unusual. Khaled religiously stayed open till 1:00 A.M. at least, seven days a week, in case anybody had an irresistible urge to start cooking murgh masala in the wee small hours of the morning.

  The night was sweltering hot, and there was an acrid smell of burning in the air, like the days after 9/11. The sirens were still screaming and in the distance I could hear somebody yelling through a bullhorn, something along the lines of “wo-wah-wah-WAH-wah-ba-booh-booh-BAH!” I kept walking westward, turning around from time to time to make sure that there was nobody following me.

  As I turned south into Seventh Avenue, I saw two skinny young women with spiky hair crouching on the sidewalk about fifty yards up ahead of me. My first instinct was that they needed help, and I started to walk toward them more quickly. But as I got nearer, I saw that a heavily built man in jeans was lying between them, with his arms and legs spread wide. I also saw that something dark and glistening was running across the sidewalk, like blood. I U-turned smartly and headed back where I had come from.

  Just as I reached the corner of Seventeenth Street, I glanced quickly back over my shoulder. One of the spikyhaired young women was getting up onto her feet, and as she did so she turned around and looked in my direction. She must have said something to the other girl, because she stood up, too. The heavily built man in the jeans stayed where he was, and I took an educated guess that he wasn’t having a nap. The girls hesitated, and then they started walking toward me, and I could tell from the quick, determined click of their heels that they were after me.

  I turned into Seventeenth Street and then I sprinted along to Sixth Avenue, and took a right. I could have kept on running, but those girls were at least ten years younger than me and they hadn’t been drinking Guinness. Instead, I took another right into Sixteenth Street, and ran as far as the alley next to Feinman’s Antique Carpets, and hid myself behind a Dumpster. I waited, and waited. Two people walked past, talking and laughing, but they were both men, and they both seemed as jumpy as I was.

  I gave myself five more minutes. The alley was airless and it smelled of weeds and damp brickwork and pee. Across the street, in the window of a discount camping store, I could see the letters RIG in red neon. It flicked on, and then it flicked off. The strange thing was that sometimes it stayed on for almost fifteen seconds, while at other times it flicked on and off almost instantly. RIG. Blank. RIG.

  RIG. Maybe Singing Rock was sending me another signal—three more letters for my mystery word. ST plus RIG spelled S-T-R-I-G. But what the flaming Falujah did that mean? I couldn’t think of any word that began with STRIG. Maybe it was part of an anagram, like “ostrich.” Maybe it was an anagram of a biological term, like “streptococci.” But Singing Rock had never had any sense of humor, and he had always been totally contemptuous of white man’s medicine, so it was more likely to be something else altogether, like somebody’s name.

  Eventually, I emerged from the alley and looked left and right to make sure that the spiky-haired girls had gone. From somewhere over by Washington Square, there was a tremendous bang, almost like a bomb, followed by echo after echo. Jesus, this was seriously scary. I could deal with the normal perils of a New York City night—drunks, muggers and assorted freaks—but this didn’t feel like New York City any more. I started half-walking and half-jogging toward TriBeCa, staying in the shadows as much as I could, and staying highly alert for people who looked as if they might be hunting for fresh human blood.

  I was only a few blocks away from Christopher Street, where Amelia lived, when a man stepped out of a darkened doorway, right in front of me. He had a shaved head and dark glasses and a neck like a section of trans-Atlantic cable, and he was built like a Marine. He was wearing a khaki T-shirt and camouflage pants and about a hundred chains and dog-tags and keys around his neck, and probably a few human ears, too, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was eating a Snickers bar and his mouth was full.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I tried to skirt around him but he double-shuffled to one side and blocked me.

  “Excuse me, do you have a problem?” I demanded. “I’m in kind of a hurry here, if you don’t mind.”

  “You know what they say, man. More haste less speed.”

  I tried to sidestep, but he sidestepped, too. I backed off a couple of paces and he backed off, too, but when I took one step forward, so did he.

  I tried to look cool, and bored by all of this waltzing, but my heart was thumping like a basketball and I was beginning to feel very frightened.

  He swallowed, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I gotta know if you’re one of them,” he said.

  “What are you talking about, ‘one of them’?”

  “Me and my friends, see, we’re protecting this neighborhood, and if you’re one of them you’re not welcome beyond this point.”

  I looked across the street, and for the first time I saw three other men, waiting in the shadows. At least one of them was holding a rifle.

  “My name’s Harry Erskine, I’m an herbal visionary.”

  “You’re a what?”

  “An herbal visionary. I tell your future and then I give you herbal remedies to improve your life prospects.”

  “Are you trying to be smart?”

  “Of course not. It’s not your usual nine-to-five job but somebody has to do it.”

  “Got any ID?”

  I showed him my driver’s license. “I was also on the front page of Psychic Weekly, if you want to know. I’m on my way to visit a friend of mine who’s another psychic. And if by ‘one of them’ you mean who I think you mean, then I’m not ‘one of them.’ In fact I’ve been trying to keep well clear of them.”

  “Okay, Harry. You won’t object if I frisk you, then?”

  “Frisk me? For what?”

  “For anything that you can use to cut somebody’s throat.”

  I lifted both arms. “Go ahead, frisk away.”

  He didn’t hesitate, and he frisked me like an expert. While he was patting my crotch, I said, “The only reason I’m down here tonight is because I think I might be able to stop this epidemic.”

  “You? What can you do?”

  “This person I’m going to visit—she and me, well, we’ve handled some stuff like this before. You remember all those buildings that collapsed, in the nineties? We stopped that.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true. This epidemic, it’s not a physical disease, like chicken flu or cholera or anything like that. It’s not a terrorist attack, either, like anthrax or ricin.”

  The man finished frisking me and stood up. “Go on. I’m not stupid. I was with the Rainbow Division in Bosnia. If it’s not a disease, what is it?”

  “I think it’s a spiritual force. Like an evil manifestation from the world beyond.”

  The man stared at me for almost ten seconds without saying anything. Then he slowly shook his head and started laughing. One of his friends from across the street called out, “What’s so damn funny, Gil?”

  “Got me a screwball here,” said Gil.

  “Do I look like a screwball?” I demanded.

  Gil looked me up and down. “Yes, Harry. You definitely do.”

  Apart from being moderately drunk, I was still feeling desperately guilty about splashing Clorox all over Ted, and I was exhausted, and disoriented, and I badly needed to show somebody that I was right about this epidemic. So I said to Gil, “I’ll prove it you. I’ll damn well prove it you.”

  “You’ll prove it to me? How are you going to do that?”

  “If you escort me to my friend’s house, she can show you that I’m telling the truth. We’ll hold a séance, and you can see for yourself.”

  “A séance? You’re inviting me to a séance?”

  “What’s the matter, you got repetitis? That’s what I said, a séance. If we can identify the spirit that’s causing all of this chaos, we can do something about it. Exorcize it, or banish it, or send it back to wherever it came from.”

  Gil smiled, and stepped back to indicate that I could pass. “You just move along, Harry. I think you could do with some strong black coffee and a very cold shower.”

  “And supposing I get attacked by ‘one of them’?” I demanded. “Or ‘two of them,’ even?”

  “Harry—”

  “Supposing I never get the chance to tell the city authorities why all of these people are cutting other people’s throats? Thousands more people could die. Millions, even. Listen to me, Gil. Without me, this city is doomed. America is doomed.”

  Gil opened and closed his mouth but didn’t say anything. A police squad car came howling past us, followed by another, and another. I heard another explosion: a deep, dull thump, somewhere over by the Hudson River waterfront. I could feel the aftershock right through the soles of my feet, as if the sidewalk was a rug, and somebody had tugged it.

  “How far is your friend’s house?” asked Gil.

  “Four blocks. Christopher Street, that’s all.”

  “Okay, then, I’ll come with you to the front door, give you protection, but that’s all. I ain’t attending no séance.”

  He walked with me southward toward Christopher Street. It turned out that his name was Gil Johnson, and he worked for a company on Twenty-fifth Street that moved pianos. Once, when he had been hauling a Bechstein into an apartment building on East Fifty-seventh Street, a steel hawser had snapped and the piano had dropped nine stories into the street below, flattening a man who had been wanted by the police for rape and armed robbery. “Now was that supernatural justice or what?” Gil had a wife and two teenage daughters and he lived and breathed for the N.Y. Jets. “I love those guys.” He had even persuaded Freeman McNeil to be godfather to his oldest daughter.

  “We saw the news about people killing people and me and my buddies decided we was going to protect our neighborhood. I’m not having no diseased people cutting my family’s throats, no way.”

  About twenty men and women came running across Charles Street, howling and screaming, but they didn’t pay us any attention. They ran off, their footsteps echoing like applause. God alone knew where they were headed, or what they were planning to do when they got there.

  “You understand what’s going on, Harry?” Gil asked me. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “I think I know what. But don’t ask me why.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Harry,” said Gil. He showed me his left forearm, which was tattooed with a grinning skull. “I faced death when I was out in Bosnia. I looked death right in his hollow eye sockets. I saw my buddies get shot, and blown up by RPGs, and it was madness out there. But at least we knew who were fighting. We were fighting the Serbs, and the Romanian mercenaries, and the Muslims, no matter how crazy they were. But this—this is like we’re fighting everybody and nobody.”

  “I think that just about sums it up, Gil. Everybody and nobody.”

  Gil turned around and showed me his right bicep. It was tattooed with the number 10, all wrapped around with razor-wire, and dripping with blood. “That was us, Number 10 Special Detail. One of the toughest details ever. Our job was to penetrate the enemy’s positions and grab their senior officers—alive, if we could. Mostly it all went to shit and we ended up blowing their heads off. But that’s who I am. I may shift pianos now, but up here in my head I’m still a grunt, and I think like a grunt.”

  At that moment we were passing a liquor store, and as we did so, a red-and-blue Michelob sign flickered and jumped. I looked into the store window and saw that the number “10” appeared to be dancing on his arm—only it was backward, so that it looked like the letters “OI”. A fraction of a second later a great multi-branched tree of lightning crackled over Battery Park, and there was a deafening collision of thunder,kabooommmmm! right over our heads.

  “Holy shit,” said Gil.

  It shook me, too—but I believed I knew what had caused it. “O” and “I”—two new letters. And, judging by that thunderous punctuation mark, maybe they were the last two letters, and I was now in possession of the whole word. I stopped, my face lifted to the sky, turning around and around on the sidewalk. “Singing Rock! Singing Rock! Is that you again?”

  Gil waited for me, with his hands on his hips.

  “You’re definitely a screwball, Harry, no doubt about that.”

  “I wish. Singing Rock is my spirit guide. He’s been trying to tell me who started this epidemic.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really. The problem is, he has to give me the name in individual letters, a couple at a time. He can’t tell me the entire name outright, because if I say it outright, the thing will come after me, whatever it is, and rip my throat out, or something equally undesirable.”

  “If you say so, Harry.”

  “Gil, will you just trust me? So far, he’s given me five letters—‘s’ and ‘t’ and ‘r’ and ‘i’ and ‘g’. Now I looked at your tattoo just then and there was a damn great rumble of thunder which really emphasized what I was looking at, the letters ‘o’ and ‘i.’

  I held up my hand and counted the letters off on my fingers. “So far we have S-T-R-I-G-O-I which spells—”

  “Don’t say it!” Gil screamed at me. It was so unexpected that he made me jump.

  I stared at him, shocked. “What? I was only trying to—”

  “Don’t say it, man! I know that word! I know what it means!”

  “What do you mean you know what it means?”

  “They were always using it in Bosnia, the Romanian mercenaries. It was like an insult, only it was worse than an insult. It was what they called somebody they were really scared of.”

  “You mean stri—”

  “Don’t say it! For Christ’s sake, it’s too much of a coincidence! If people have been killing people and drinking their blood—that’s like vampires, man, and that’s what it means. It means vampire.”

  “You’re pulling my chain.”

  “I’m not, Harry, I swear it. You can check it out. That word means vampire and that’s what your spirit guide didn’t want you to say it out loud. Even in Bosnia they never said it loud, not unless they were all hyped up, and even then it wasn’t like they were talking about real vampires.”

  “Vampires?” I repeated. “Come on, Gil, is this likely? I know they keep calling it a ‘vampire epidemic’ on the news, but that’s only because people have been drinking blood.”

  “But why not?” said Gil. “You said yourself that this epidemic was caused by some kind of evil spirits, didn’t you? Maybe this is what they are. Real, genuine vampires.”

  “Gil, I’m not at all sure that I believe in real, genuine vampires.” I put on my Bela Lugosi accent. “ ‘The children of the night . . . what music they make!’”

  “You believe in spirits, though, don’t you?” Gil persisted. “You believe in all of that Twilight Zone stuff? Come on, man, you’ve just told me you have a spirit guide called Singing Rock.”

  “Listen, Gil, you’re supposed to be the skeptic around here.”

  “Yes, but that word, man! Jesus, I haven’t heard that word in eleven years but when you spelled it out—that really made my hair stand on end.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess it’s worth looking into. We can ask my friend about it when she holds her séance.”

  “You mean you can ask her. I told you, I ain’t going to no séance, especially if you’re going to start talking about vampires.”

  “You fought in Bosnia and you’re scared of vampires?”

  “Are you kidding me? I fought in Bosnia and that’s exactly why I’m scared of vampires.”

  We reached Amelia’s apartment on Christopher Street. She and Bertie lived in a second-floor studio in one of those elegant nineteenth-century apartment blocks that were originally built for the clothing industry, with high windows and decorative columns. The first floor was taken up by Christopher Street Cashmere, which sold strawberry-colored men’s sweaters to the kind of men who would pay $400 for a strawberry-colored sweater. And lemon-colored sweaters, too. And pink.

  I climbed the steps at the side of the building to the shiny olive-green front door and pressed the shiny brass doorbell marked Carlsson. I waited and waited, and eventually Bertie said, “Hello?” through the intercom.

  “Bertie? It’s me, Harry Erskine.”

  “For God’s sake, Harry, what are you doing here? Don’t you know what time it is?”

  “Bertie, I have to talk to Amelia. It’s incredibly urgent.”

  “I told you earlier, Harry, I don’t want you involving Amelia in any of your problems, whatever they are. Now please go away.”