“Frank!” I yelled at him. Then, much more quietly, “Frank, don’t do it!”

  Frank looked around. I couldn’t make out if he was feeling regretful, or resigned. The next thing I knew, he was taking a step toward the mirror, and he walked clear through the glass as if there was nothing there at all. His image was momentarily warped, as if I was looking at him through water. But then I could actually see him standing three or four feet away, on the sand, with the wind ruffling his hair. The dark slanting creature was less than a hundred feet away from him now, and it was still loping toward us.

  Susan Fireman hesitated for a moment. “Bring him back,” I asked her.

  “I can’t do that. He’s one of us now, and he always will be. He’s mine.”

  “You like him, don’t you?”

  But again she didn’t answer me. She turned her back on me and stepped right into the mirror. There was that momentary distortion, and there she was standing right next to Frank.

  I thought for a split second that the mirror was going to darken again, and go back to being a normal mirror. But it stayed brightly sunlit, and Frank and Susan Fireman began to walk away, quite quickly, in the direction of the dunes, and the distant summer houses; while Vasile Lup the Vampire Gatherer continued to advance on us.

  I suddenly remembered what Frank had told us about Susan Fireman coming out of the mirror and cutting that detective’s throat. Vampires could step in and out of mirrors as if they were doors. And this one, the arch-vampire, the svarcolaci, was heading straight for us. Now it was less than thirty feet away, and its pace was even quicker than before. It was almost running. It was coming for us.

  “Jenica!” I dodged into the living room and almost collided with her. She was coming out with her crucifix and her bottle of holy water, with her book open at the page on Vasile Lup.

  At the same time, Gil shouted, “Harry! Help me, man! They’re breaking through!” The strigoi had smashed all of the panels out of the kitchen door, and all that was holding them back were the central cross rails. Gil was beating frantically at their groping arms, but it was clear that he couldn’t hold them off for much longer.

  I picked up the nearest weapon I could find—the decorated bone which we had found in the Vampire Gatherer’s casket. I went back into the hallway just as the Vampire Gatherer himself was materializing out of the mirror. He was huge, dark, and slanting, with a hundred faces, and he was so cold that he made me gasp. The temperature in the hallway must have dropped twenty degrees in a matter of seconds.

  Jenica lifted up her jewel-studded crucifix. I knew that she was just as terrified as I was, but there was a look of elation on her face, as if she had been born to do this.

  “I dismiss you, Vasile Lup! I send you back to your sarcophagus! Let the earth take back the flesh it has given you, and the wind take back the breath it has given you, and the rivers take back their blood! Let the ashes of your soul be scattered like the ashes of your body!”

  The apparition opened its mouth, and then another mouth, and yet another mouth. I saw black, ribbed palates and rows of razor-sharp teeth. It let out a noise that was like the whole of existence being twisted, a groan that made me feel as if every organ in my body was being displaced, and I was going mad.

  18

  BLOOD BROTHER

  Gil clamped his hands over his ears, and I fell back against the door frame, stunned, but Jenica held her ground. The Vampire Gatherer was looming over her now, its slanting head almost touching the ceiling, and its face had taken the form that I had seen in the book of svarcolaci . . . handsome, but very Romanian, with a thin hawklike nose and heavily lidded eyes.

  “I dismiss you, Vasile Lup!” Jenica repeated, and now she flung holy water at him, in the sign of the cross. “May your memory be dispersed with the dust; and your name erased from the tongues of all who ever spoke it. May the stars forget that they ever foretold your destiny; and the moon deny that you ever walked beneath her.”

  Vasile Lup threw back his head so that it disappeared into the shadows of his shoulders, and let out another terrible groan. This time, his cry was taken up by the strigoi who were crowded in the kitchen, and they kicked and kicked at the cross bars until the door gave way. They poured out into the hallway, bloody and bedraggled, both men and women, and all of them carrying knives or razors or shards of broken glass.

  Gil backed away, brandishing his baseball bat two-handed. The strigoi edged forward, panting urrrhhhhhhh, urrrrrrrhhhhh, urrrrrhhhhh, until Gil and I were pressed close together, right behind Jenica. She looked around quickly, to see what was happening, but she didn’t catch my eye, or give me any indication that she was frightened. She was too busy concentrating on Vasile Lup.

  “The seal that was put upon you was more than a seal of wax,” she recited, although her voice was beginning to waver. “It was a seal of the spirit, and its influence remains. The seven prayers that were said upon your incarceration were more than words, and their influence remains. You are disenchanted, Vasile Lup, until the Day of Judgment, and only then can your soul take shape again, so that you may raise your face to the Lord and pledge Him your obedience.”

  Gil said, “This is bullshit, man. This is bullshit. These motherfuckers are going to cut us to pieces.”

  He shouted, “Back off!” and made a sudden thrust at the nearest two strigoi, his bat clanking against their knives. They lifted their arms to shield themselves, but then they started advancing on us again. Two ordinary looking men in torn and bloodstained shirts. One of them was a bus driver and the other was probably an office worker of some kind, and there was a pasty-faced girl behind them who reminded me of the girl who served in my local coffee shop.

  “I said back off!” Gil repeated, and this time he struck the bus driver on the shoulder. The bus driver retaliated by slashing at Gil’s arm, and cutting the heel of his hand.

  “Motherfucker!” Gil swore at him, and started to beat wildly at the strigoi, left and right, with his blood spraying up the wallpaper.

  At the same moment, the Vampire Gatherer seemed to rise up higher and higher, his shadow covering the ceiling, and the hallway had grown so cold that our breath steamed. Jenica took a step back, still holding up the crucifix, but freezing vapor was pouring out of the darkness and covering her with sparkling particles of ice. It was in her hair, and on her eyebrows, and on her lips. Some of it fell onto my face, too, and it was like being breathed on by a Polar bear, cold and fetid and wet.

  “I dismiss you, Vasile Lup!” Jenica screamed at him. “I dismiss you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!”

  The ice particles fell thicker and thicker, until they were blinding, and my hair was encrusted with them. The Vampire Gatherer appeared to open its arms, or its wings, and lean down toward Jenica as if were trying to embrace her. They weren’t really arms, or wings, they were shadows, but I could guess what would happen if Jenica got folded up in them.

  I struck out at the Vampire Gatherer with my decorated leg bone, and shouted out, “Get off her, you bastard! You’ve been exorcized!”

  Something very weird happened then. I felt as if the leg bone had been plugged into the mains. It felt electric, and alive, and it almost hummed. I held it up, and I felt as if I was holding up the most powerful weapon in the world, more powerful than any sword. Suddenly, I didn’t feel afraid any more. I was calm, and I was strong, and I knew my enemy.

  I heard myself speaking. It was my voice, but the words were somebody else’s. It was extraordinary. My tongue was moving as if it didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t even know what I was going to say next.

  “So you have managed to come back to us, O worker of magic and miracles, and this is where you have been concealing yourself! A spirit concealed within a spirit, concealed within a reflection! I should have known it was you. Only you could be so vengeful. Only you could have such wholesale bloodlust!”

  Jenica turned and stared at me but all I could do was shake my head. “It’s not me,” I told her.

  She stared up at the Vampire Gatherer. The shower of ice particles was already easing off, and the shadowy creature seemed to be edging away from us. Its face changed to an expressionless mask, like a Japanese noh player, and then it flickered through twenty or thirty different changes—so quickly that I could barely see them.

  “It’s no use trying to hide yourself,” I told him. “Now I know who you are, I know how to hunt you down, and defeat you. I have done it before and I will do it again—but this time I will make certain that you are banished from this earth for all eternity!”

  The Vampire Gatherer let out yet another groan. It felt as if the fabric of the whole apartment block was being moved, brick grinding on brick, floorboards squealing against floorboards, joints straining against joints. Jenica was shaking her head from side to side and Gil was roaring “Shut him up! For Christ’s sake, shut him up!”

  But then there was silence. The Vampire Gatherer whirled around in a complicated counterplay of shadows, and stormed back through the mirror, onto the sand, and started to walk away from us. Above him, in the mirror world, the sky began to darken. Black clouds rolled over from the ocean, as quickly as a speeded-up movie, and seagulls were tossed in the wind like sheets of newspaper.

  Behind me, I heard murmuring, and shuffling, and when I turned around, I saw that the strigoi were beginning to retreat back into the kitchen. Gil prodded them with his baseball bat, harder and harder, and they struggled back through the doorway, pushing and jostling each other. They were snarling at Gil with frustration, but for some reason they seemed to have lost their appetite, and their nerve.

  Jenica took hold of my wrist. “Look,” she said. Back in the mirror world, the Vampire Gatherer had stopped, and was staring at us.

  His shadows slanted sideways, away from the wind, at an increasing angle. Forty-five degrees, and then fifty, and then sixty. No human being could have stood at an angle like that. But as the shadows slanted, they revealed a figure standing in the middle of them—a figure who stood tall and upright.

  “Oh God,” I whispered.

  “What?” said Jenica. “What is it?”

  I took a step toward the mirror, and then another, and then all I could do was to stand there, staring into a world that I could never enter, at the man who had turned my whole life into pain and turmoil.

  He looked exactly like his photograph, the one taken at Pyramid Lake in 1865. His face was like chiseled granite, his cheeks embossed with magical scars. His eyes were as cold and glittering as ever. Now, however, he was wearing his full war bonnet, a huge headdress fashioned from the skull of a buffalo, and hung about with crow feathers and strings of beads, and crawling with shiny black beetles, thousands of them, which dropped onto his shoulders and scuttled over his cloak.

  His cloak was sewn with hundreds of crow skulls, and dried ribbons of human flesh—pieces that his followers had cut from their own bodies and given to him in homage. There were ears, and strips of thigh muscle, and fingers, and even penises, all shriveled up and orange with age.

  He stood very tall, but the fierce wind that was blowing across the sand seemed to make his figure sway slightly, as if he were standing two or three inches above the ground.

  I was afraid of him. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t. I had seen how cruel and ruthless he could be, and I knew that his hatred for the people who had swarmed all over his land was deep and dark and utterly bottomless—as bottomless as the world of death that exists below our feet, the Happy Hunting Ground.

  He said nothing. He didn’t need to. Although I had no idea how he had managed to resurrect himself, I knew why he was here, and what he wanted to do. He wanted to see the pages of history turned back six hundred years. He wanted to see every American city deserted, and strewn with dead, whether they were white or black or Hispanic or Oriental. He wanted the crows to circle, and pick our bones.

  Above all, he wanted to see Indians riding across the plains again, so that they could come to the top of a rise, with the wind lashing the grass all around them and lightning dancing on the distant hills, and know that this land was theirs, all of it, forever.

  He was probably the last remaining Native American who refused to admit that there was no such thing as “forever.” But then his name was Misquamacus, and he was the greatest wonder-worker who had ever lived, and died, and lived again, and been dispersed to the elements. And here he was again, and for all the pompous words that had magically come out of my mouth, I knew that we were royally screwed.

  In the mirror, the sky grew blacker and blacker, until I found myself staring at nothing but my own reflection. I turned round and Jenica was standing close to me, with about six different expressions on her face.

  “Who was that?” she asked. “Do you know him?”

  Gil came out of the kitchen and laid his baseball bat down on the hallway table. “They’ve gone,” he said. He had wound a tea towel around his hand, but it was already soaked with blood.

  Jenica said, “Here . . . let me see that.”

  “It’s not too bad. At least it’s clean.” He looked back into the kitchen as if he couldn’t believe what he had witnessed. “You should have seen them hightailing it out that window . . . like roaches when you switch on the light. And they climbed right down the wall, like, headfirst, man. How do you climb down a wall headfirst?”

  “Count Dracula did it, in the original novel,” I told him.

  Jenica said, “They defy gravity, the strigoi, because they are no longer alive.”

  I lifted up the decorated bone and looked at it again. I had no idea what its origins were, or what the symbols on it might have meant, but it definitely contained some extraordinary power, and not Romanian-type power, either.

  “I could sure use a drink,” said Gil. “How about opening another bottle of death-breath?”

  “There is one thing I must do before that,” said Jenica. She picked up Gil’s baseball bat, went up to the mirror, and hit it as hard as she could. Her first blow only starred it, but then she swung the bat again, and this time the glass dropped onto the floor in a sparkling heap, and there was nothing left in the frame but a plain wooden backing. “I think I owe Frank an apology,” she said. “And you too, Harry, for doubting you.”

  “Little bit late for Frank, I’m afraid.”

  We went into the living room and sat down. Jenica said, “I think my father would understand if I open his palinca.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She held up a clear glass bottle. “Plum brandy, from Transylvania. Very strong.”

  She poured us each a large measure, and we took a swallow without making a toast.

  “Jesus wept,” said Gil, gasping for breath. “You could dissolve diamonds in this.”

  “My father says that every person who drinks palinca becomes in their heart a Romanian, whatever their passport says.”

  I took another swallow. I don’t know what it was doing for my nationality, but it was certainly doing my cojones good. I reckoned that after half a bottle of palinca I could probably fight a whole legion of strigoi, and any svarcolaci you cared to bring on.

  “So what exactly happened out there?” said Gil. “I don’t understand why those strigoi suddenly turned tail.”

  “I am not so sure, either,” said Jenica. “I spoke the ritual for disenchanting the Vampire Gatherer, and at first I thought that it had not worked. Yet suddenly he turned around and returned to the mirror world, and when he did that, all of the strigoi left, too.” All the time she was looking at me, because she wanted to know who that figure in the war bonnet was, and she knew that I knew.

  “That creature . . .” I said, “that shadow thing . . . that looks like the spirit of Vasile Lup, and it is the spirit of Vasile Lup, mostly. But he’s like somebody who gets possessed by a demon . . . you know, like Regan in The Exorcist? Outwardly, you know, they seem to be the same person. Their appearance is the same, but they’re not in control of their own personality. It’s the demon who’s taken charge of everything they say and everything they do.”

  “So what are you telling us?” said Gil. “That Vasile Lup’s spirit is possessed by another spirit? How does that work?”

  “Spirits are just the same as living people. Some of them are leaders and some of them are followers.”

  “Vasile Lup must be a pretty dominant character, though, if he was able to rouse up all of these vampires. And he not only roused them up, he got them to spread themselves all over the city in less than forty-eight hours. Think about it. A couple of hundred vampires have managed to do in two days what even al Qaeda could never have done, even with a nuclear bomb. They’ve killed thousands of people and they’ve recruited thousands more to do the same, so the killing is spreading, like, exponentially.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But Vasile Lup didn’t start this epidemic himself. Somebody had to rouse him, didn’t they? That’s why I think that he’s been possessed by some spirit that’s even more powerful than he is.”

  “You know who this spirit is, don’t you?” said Jenica. “It was that man with the headdress on. The one you saw in the mirror.”

  “You actually know who that was?” said Gil.

  I nodded. “He’s a Native American wonder-worker called Misquamacus. He was the greatest medicine man of his time—or any other time, for that matter. I’ve had a couple of run-ins with him before. I thought I managed to destroy him. Well, I thought I managed to destroy him four times over. Three times he came back, but the last time I thought was for keeps.”

  “A Native American wonder-worker,” said Gil, haltingly, as if he was trying to say “Please direct me to the nearest restroom” in a foreign language. “And how exactly did you come to get yourself involved with a Native American wonder-worker?”