“Believe me, Bertie, I wouldn’t bother you if this wasn’t critical. But we’re talking about thousands of people’s lives here. Your life too, and Amelia’s, and mine.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry. I have to think about Amelia’s best interests.”

  But then Gil leaned forward and said, “Excuse me, sir? This is Gil Johnson, Forty-second infantry division, New York National Guard. I believe that we need to give Harry some assistance here.”

  “National Guard? What do you want from us? I don’t understand.”

  “This epidemic, sir. This gentleman believes that he knows what’s causing it, and he needs your good lady’s assistance.”

  “And what if I say no?”

  Gil looked at me and winked. “I’m authorized under martial law to arrest you for obstructing the military, sir, and to require your good lady to assist us in any way that she can.”

  There was a very long silence, and then the door release buzzed. I pushed open the door and we walked into the darkened hallway.

  “Are you coming up?” I asked Gil.

  Gil pulled a face. “I don’t know. I’m not too sure I want to get involved in this.”

  “Come on, Gil, think about your family, too. I need your authority. If you don’t come up, he’s not going to believe this martial law thing, is he?”

  The two of us squashed together into the tiny elevator and went up one floor. When the door slid back Bertie was waiting for us—a tall, thin man with gray, brushed-back hair and rimless spectacles, wearing a loose beige shirt and baggy beige pants and sandals. I grudgingly had to admit that he was reasonably handsome, even if he looked as if he drank nothing but carbonated spring water and ate nothing but Swedish crispbread.

  “So here you are, then, Harry,” he said, making no effort to hide his annoyance. “You and your companion had better come in.” We stepped out of the elevator and into the living area. The apartment was very Scandinavian, with blond wooden floors and furniture that gave you a serious ache in your butt just to look at it. On the walls hung several huge paintings of blue Scandinavian blobs, and in one corner stood an abstract sculpture of a triangular thing dangling from a skinny rectangular thing. It wasn’t easy to reconcile all of this carefully arranged emptiness with Amelia’s old apartment in the Village, which had been heaped up with books and armchairs and rolled-up carpets and reading lamps and blotchy old engravings, not to mention a few dirty dinner plates.

  “Tasteful,” I remarked, looking around.

  But then Amelia appeared, crossing the floor in a gauzy, white dreamlike dress. She seemed taller, until I realized that she was wearing wedge-heeled sandals, but she was certainly thinner, and freshly suntanned, and her curly hair was cropped very short. She was no longer wearing glasses, either.

  She looked extraordinary, at least ten years younger than the last time I saw her. Her face was still sharply featured, and her cheekbones were still prominent, but she didn’t seem to have any wrinkles at all. Her breasts had always been noticeable but now they looked bigger than ever, and firmer, too. She was wearing about two thousand gold bangles on her wrists and a modern necklace made of big lumpy pieces of gold.

  “Harry,” she said. “How wonderful to see you again.” She flowed right up to me and put her arms around me, and kissed me, and kissed me again, and again. God, she smelled good. All woman and Chanel. Meanwhile Bertie was pursing up his mouth as if he were trying to suck battery acid through a blocked straw.

  “Amelia, you look fabulous,” I told her. “Whatever Bertie’s been feeding you on, it definitely agrees with you.”

  “Bertil,” she corrected me. “Yes, Bertil’s been taking very good care of me, haven’t you, Bertil?”

  “I like to think so,” said Bertie, trying to smile, although I could tell that he felt like running around the apartment, kicking over abstract sculptures and screaming Swedish obscenities.

  “Smorgasbord, I’ll bet,” I said. “Nothing like those open sandwiches, hey, Bertie? Saves you a fortune, leaving off that top slice of bread, and who really needs it?”

  “You’re looking tired, Harry,” said Amelia.

  “Tired, scruffy, down-at-heel, that’s right. Well, you know about me and Karen. It was good while it lasted but it was never going to last. She was always going to be too high-end for a mook like me.”

  “You shouldn’t put yourself down, Harry. You have very great sensitivity.”

  “By the way,” I said, “I’d like you to meet Gil Johnson of the Rainbow Division. Gil, this is Amelia, my psychic friend, and this is her husband Bertie.”

  “Bertil,” Bertil corrected me, shaking Gil’s hand. “Perhaps I can offer you gentlemen a drink? Tea, or coffee, or a soda?”

  “I could murder a beer, if you have one.”

  “I have Pripps.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Pripps is the best-quality Swedish beer, brewed in Stockholm.”

  “In that case, thanks, don’t mind if I do. Amelia—I can’t believe how terrific you look. Do you ever hear from MacArthur? What a guy! Do you remember that night that you and MacArthur ran all the way around Washington Square Park with nothing on but paper bags over your heads? I couldn’t touch tequila for about a year after that.”

  Bertie came back with two bottles of frosty-cold beer, and a frosty-cold expression on his face. “Do you think you could get to the point, Harry?”

  I sat down in one of those orthopedic armchairs. Poor Gil remained standing. He was looking very uncomfortable, but he obviously thought it would be impolite to swig his beer down and go. Bertie sat very close to Amelia, with one hand resting possessively on her thigh, giving her an occasional squeeze.

  I swallowed beer, and it was so cold that it made me hiccup. “This vampire epidemic, I’m one hundred percent sure that it’s being caused by some kind of malevolent spirit. Don’t ask me how, or why, but Gil thinks it could even be a real vampire.”

  “A real vampire?” said Bertie. “Vampires are in the movies. Vampires can’t be real.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right, and we’re making fools of ourselves. But Singing Rock has managed to give me the vampire’s name, and Gil says it’s the same name that Romanians used out in Bosnia, when they wanted to call somebody a butcher or a blood-sucker.”

  “Singing Rock?” asked Bertie. “Who or what is Singing Rock?”

  “He’s a Native American medicine man we used to know. He’s passed over now, but he still acts as my spirit guide.”

  “You mean he’s dead?”

  “In the sense that he’s no longer physically with us, yes, I suppose you could say that he is.”

  “So a dead man has given you a name, and this name is Romanian for vampires, and this is why we must believe that New York has been invaded by vampires?” Actually, he said “inwaded by wampires.”

  “Erm, yes.”

  “What’s the name?” asked Amelia.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Bertie.

  I ignored him. To give the poor fellow some credit, he hadn’t come across anything genuinely supernatural before, and I can remember my first encounter with things from beyond. I thought it was wall-to-wall bullshit.

  “Singing Rock said that I shouldn’t say it out loud, because the spirit would hear me, and come looking for me. But if you give me a pencil and a piece of paper . . .”

  Amelia passed me a notepad from the Martinez Hotel, in Cannes, France, and a gold mechanical pencil. I wrote down STRIGOI, and pushed it across the glass-topped coffee table to Amelia.

  She leaned forward to look at what I had written, but then she immediately sat up straight, staring at me as if I had done something truly appalling.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh, Harry. Oh my God.”

  11

  BLOOD FEVER

  The creature’s shrieking went on and on, like a knife scraping on glass, but then it stopped, abruptly; and then there was only the clamor of the hospital, and the roaring of the city outside.

  Frank stayed where he was, straining his eyes in the darkness. He thought he could see shadows moving in front of the window, but it could have been the lights of a passing helicopter, criss-crossing down the airshaft.

  He cleared his throat and called out, “Who’s there? Whoever you are, I’m warning you, I’m calling security.”

  He wasn’t sure that he had spoken loud enough for the thing to have heard him, because it had scared him so badly. It had looked spidery and disproportionate, the sort of creature that appears only in the very sweatiest of nightmares. But although it had been impossibly stretched, it had also looked unnervingly human—as if it would be capable of logical thinking, and even talking. In the split-second that he had looked into its eyes, Frank had seen a terrible knowingness. And contempt, too, and only humans were capable of contempt.

  “I’m going for security now!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? I’m going to have your ass thrown out of here so goddamned fast!”

  As he started to edge his way out of the room, however, the lights suddenly ping-clicked back on again. He blinked, and shielded his eyes. The window was still open, but the shadow creature had gone. The floor was still covered with rows of bodies, all tied up in sheets, but the young girl who had been climbing out of the window had disappeared, too, and so had the young man who had been following her.

  Frank thought he ought to call security, but what would they say, if he tried to tell them that he had just seen a stretched-out shadow creature, and dead people who could come back to life? He was already feeling off balance, and he was sure that he was running a fever. Maybe he was still dreaming all of this; or maybe he was sick, and he was hallucinating. There was no way of telling what was real and what was imaginary. He could be lying in bed at home, fast asleep, and none of this was happening, except as a shadow-theater inside his mind.

  Cautiously, he made his way toward the window, stepping over bodies as he did so. When he got there, he looked out into the airshaft. The main hospital building went up as far as the seventh story, with a thirty-five-story tower on the northeast corner. All he could see were the lighted windows of the wards and the corridors opposite, and people hurrying to and fro. In the distance, he heard the indigestive grumbling of thunder. He must have dreamed the stretched-out creature, or imagined it. His throat was so sore that he could barely swallow, and his skin was burning.

  He was just about to turn away from the window when there was a dazzling crack of lightning, and the air was so charged with electricity that Frank felt his scalp prickle and his teeth buzz together. There was another crack, and then another. He looked upward, toward the sky. And it was then that he saw what had happened to the creature, and the two young people it had been helping to climb out of the storeroom.

  They were two-thirds of the way up the airshaft—not just them, but ten or twelve more, all of them still wrapped up in their hospital sheets. They were climbing the sheer concrete walls as quickly as if they were huge white spiders, not even using the window ledges or the drainpipes to help them.

  Frank stared at them, appalled. They were dead, those people. That’s why they were wrapped up in sheets. And yet here they were, climbing up the airshaft, and disappearing over the edge of the hospital roof. What had Susan Fireman said? “Any wall can be climbed, Frank, if you have the ability to climb it.” But if you were dead?

  He watched until the last of the climbers had vanished. Then he slammed the window and turned the security key. He was shaking uncontrollably, and his skin was so sensitive that he could hardly bear the feel of his clothes. He needed to tell somebody what he had seen. But who was going to listen to him, especially with patients dying in every corridor, and hundreds more victims trying to force their way into the hospital?

  He left the storeroom and went back into the morgue, and stood among the sheet-swaddled bodies, shivering. He was still there when Helen Bryers reappeared. “Doctor?” she frowned, putting down her purse. “Is everything all right? You really don’t look well.”

  “Keep the window in the storeroom closed,” he told her, in a hoarse voice.

  “What? It isn’t open.”

  “Not now it isn’t. I closed it myself, and locked it. But make sure you keep it that way. There’s something around.”

  She stared at him through her magnifying spectacles. “I’m sorry, doctor. I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Someone managed to get in. A prowler. I caught him in the storeroom, but he managed to get away. He was—he was disturbing some of the cadavers.”

  “He did what? What are you talking about?”

  Frank had to lean against the stainless-steel bench to keep his balance. At the far end of the bench, next to the faucets, lay an open instrument case full of scalpels and lancets. He couldn’t help thinking that all he had to do was pick up a scalpel, and slit Helen Bryers’ throat. One deep slice would do it, and then all of that warm, refreshing blood would come pumping out. He could clamp his mouth over her neck, and swallow, and swallow, and all of that hoarseness would be eased, and his skin would stop itching, and he wouldn’t feel so burningly thirsty any longer.

  “Doctor?” said Helen Bryers. “Maybe we should call security. I mean, if there’s really an intruder—”

  Frank nodded. “You’re right, Helen. Maybe we should. I’ll go talk to them now.”

  He pushed his way out of the morgue and into the corridor. He tilted from one wall to the other, and his vision was jumbled like a handheld camera. He could hear people shouting, and the clatter of gurneys, but he felt as if this was all happening to somebody else.

  As he made his way through the ER, he heard Dean shouting to him. “Frank! Frank! I could really use some help here!” He turned around, and he could see Dean trying to help a young woman who was kneeling on the floor, vomiting up cascades of blood. But he felt too feverish, and he knew that none of these people could be saved. Dean shouted at him again, but he pushed his way through to the entrance, and back out into the night.

  What do I do now? he thought to himself. Where do I go? Maybe I ought to go home and crawl back into bed. Then I can finish this nightmare, and wake up properly, and none of this chaos will have happened.

  The streets outside the Sisters of Jerusalem were packed with struggling people. Some of them were still screaming, and some of them had dropped to their knees, babbling and swaying from side to side. But most of them were silent, although their eyes were staring and they were bearded with blood. “Save my boy!” a black woman called out, holding up a lolling child in bloodsoaked pajamas. “Please, sir, for the love of God, won’t you save my boy?”

  Frank lifted his left hand to block out the sight of her. From the angle of the child’s head, and the gaping wound in his neck, it was obvious that he was already dead. Turning away, Frank tripped on a woman’s body and almost fell. The night was so hot that he could hardly breathe, and his skin was burning so fiercely that he felt like tearing off his shirt. Yet he couldn’t bear the thought of water. If he splashed himself with water, he was sure that he would be scalded. He needed to slather himself in fresh, warm blood.

  He was still stumbling around behind the police lines when somebody came up behind him and gripped his shoulder.

  “Dr. Winter? Dr. Winter?”

  He swiveled around. It was Lieutenant Hayward Roberts. The lieutenant looked tired and grim and disheveled, and the red-and-blue police lights were dancing on his sweaty face. Not far away stood Detective Paul Mancini, talking on his cell phone. Detective Mancini’s white shirt was torn and his left eye was half-closed by a glossy crimson bruise.

  Lieutenant Roberts had to shout to make himself heard over the sirens and the noise of the crowd. “Glad we found you, doc! We’ve just been talking to your boss!”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “We found out what it meant! ‘Tattle nostrew!’ We thought—you know—it might help to give us some answers!”

  “You found out what it meant?” With a feeling of complete unreality, Frank thought: Why are you telling me this? I know what it means. He couldn’t quite translate it word for word, but he knew that when Lieutenant Roberts explained it to him, it wouldn’t come as any surprise.

  Lieutenant Roberts took out a damp red handkerchief and wiped his face. Then he leaned forward and said, “I mentioned it to one of our detectives, back to the precinct. He’s Romanian, a guy called Cioran.”

  “Our Father,” said Frank.

  Lieutenant Roberts stared at him. “That’s right. ‘Our Father.’ How do you know?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. But I guess when you think about it, it’s obvious. The way that everybody was chanting it, it sounded like a prayer, and what’s the one prayer that everybody knows by heart? ‘Tatal nostru, carele esti in ceruri . . .’ Our Father, who art in heaven.”

  “So you worked that out already? You could have saved us a journey.”

  “No, no,” said Frank. “It just came to me, I don’t know how. But I’m really pleased you made the effort. At least we know for sure.” He swayed a little. He felt so hot that he was sure that the skin on his face must be bubbling up in blisters. “Who did you talk to?”

  “Your boss, Dr. Pellman; and a couple of your senior medics. But they didn’t seem to think that it helped them any. In fact they found it more baffling than ever. Why is everybody who gets sick saying the Lord’s Prayer, in Romanian? Like Dr. Pellman said, you can catch the chicken pox, and you can catch the influenza, but you can’t catch a language.”

  “Mass hysteria, maybe,” said Frank, thickly. God, he felt bad.

  “Well, if it is, it’s not like your usual mass hysteria. According to Dr. Pellman, there’s been plenty of case histories of people thinking they’re possessed by Satan, and cursing, and talking gibberish—and from what he knew, that kind of hysteria can spread pretty quickly, given the right social circumstances. Happened in Pennsylvania in the 1880s, apparently; and in Utah, among the Mormons. But nobody ever started speaking word-perfect Romanian, nor any other language.”