6

  BLOOD LUST

  “What’s in there?” screamed Ted Busch. “For Christ’s sake, dude, what is it?”

  I cautiously pushed open my bedroom door. Inside, it was very gloomy, because I hadn’t had time to fix up any proper drapes, and the window was covered with a droopy purple bedspread, fastened with cup-hooks. But there was nothing and nobody there. No whispering hordes, no locusts, no dark stretched-out figures. Only my lonely unmade bed with the crimson quilt and the stained black satin sheets, and the paint-spattered kitchen chair that served as my bedside table. Only the tattered poster of a magic design by J.F.C. Fuller, a friend of Aleister Crowley’s, the master of the black arts—all planets and wavy lines and naked women with their hair on fire. And most of my clothes, of course: crumpled, dirty, and heaped on top of my suitcase.

  However, I was sure that I could smell something. Usually my bedroom smelled of stale Indian spices and damp plaster, with a strong note of Eternity aftershave. But I could detect something else—a very sharp, burned aroma, like a recently lit match—and the smell of disturbed air. I sniffed, and sniffed again. There was a curious feeling that somebody had been here, and had only just left.

  I peered around the door. There was nothing there, either, except for my shiny new golf clubs and my stiff unworn Burberry trench coat—souvenirs, both of them, of my evaporated life with Karen. I may have lost my dignity, but by God I had kept my putters.

  “Anything?” asked Ted, keeping his distance.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “Whoever it was—whatever it was—it came and then it went.”

  “I’m sorry, dude,” said Ted. “I was too scared, honest. I could feel how evil it was. I could feel it. It was like when I was a kid, and there was my He-Man bathrobe hanging on the back of my bedroom door, and I just knew that it was alive, and as soon as my mom went downstairs it was going to jump on me.”

  “No, Ted,” I said, trying to be patient. “It wasn’t like that. Your He-Man robe wasn’t alive and it didn’t jump on you, did it? Your fear of your robe—that was real enough, I’ll grant you. Me—I used to be scared of the wood grain in my closet door. It looked like a wolf, and I couldn’t look at it, in case it tore my throat out, but of course it never did.”

  Ted said, “The thing that was here—what the hell was it?”

  “The thing that was here was alive. We missed seeing it, that’s all.”

  “I could feel so much evil,” said Ted. “I could feel my skin creeping. And I could smell it, you know. It smelled like bleaugghh.”

  I lifted off my gilded skullcap and ran my hand through my hair. I was seriously worried. Whatever that dark stretched-out figure had been, it appeared to have deeply malevolent intentions, at least as far as Ted was concerned. That meant that I was faced with a very uncomfortable choice. Either I could sell Ted a handful of herbs from the Magic Pantry and send him on his way (which, I have to admit, was my immediate inclination); or else I could try to find out what this thing actually was, and why it was giving him nightmares, and whether I could send it back to whatever cobwebby corner of the spirit world it had come from.

  So far, however, in my short but rackety life, my experience of things with deeply malevolent intentions was that they resented being interfered with. Any attempt to get rid of them usually resulted in mayhem, and mass destruction, and finding yourself face-to-face with manifestations that forever afterward would have you screaming in your sleep.

  I compromised. I went to the closet, unscrewed a yellow glass jar, and took out a bunch of of dried mugwort. “Look, Ted,” I said, “you can have this for nothing.”

  Ted inspected the mugwort suspiciously. “What do I do? Smoke it?”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you. Tie it to the head of your bed, and it should protect you from bad dreams.”

  “It’s a weed.”

  “Yes, but it’s not any old weed. It’s mugwort, which the Celts used to call witch-weed. Unlike any other plant, it leans to the north when it grows, which means that it’s magnetic, and that it’s highly responsive to supernatural messages. You never know . . . it might tell you why this—thing—keeps disturbing your sleep.”

  “Is that it?” Ted asked me. He looked seriously disappointed.

  I put my arm around his shoulders. “I don’t know what else I can do, Ted. I tried my darndest, but it was really up to you. I found out what was giving you nightmares, but if you didn’t want to face it, what could I do?”

  “Maybe we should ask your spirit guide to give us an action replay.”

  “I’m sorry, Ted, he won’t.”

  “I’ll be much more hyped up for it this time, I promise you.” He took a deep breath that whistled in his nostril, and then another, and stood up ramrod-straight. But I shook my head, and continued to shake my head, and he gradually sagged.

  “Ted,” I told him, “Singing Rock is a Sioux medicine man and very proud. The Sioux get extremely huffy if you take them for granted, and Singing Rock gets huffier than most. Conjuring up that thing for us, that probably took him more effort than you and I can even imagine. But what did we do? We didn’t even have the cojones to take a peek at it. You seriously think he’s going to give us a repeat performance?”

  I could almost hear Singing Rock saying, in that dry, sarcastic voice of his, “You white men! What great warriors you are! If I killed a bear with my own hands, and laid it bleeding at your feet, you would scamper away screaming like frightened children!”

  Ted said, “Okay. I understand.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Maybe we could have another shot tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think so, Ted. This wasn’t like chickening out of a dental appointment.”

  “Would you at least think about it? I mean, I’ll try this weed on my bed tonight, but if I have another nightmare—”

  I could hear an ambulance siren whooping, two or three blocks away, and then another one, much closer, and then another. For a moment, I was reminded of September eleventh, and all the sirens that had whooped that morning, and that terrible gut-sinking feeling that the whole world had collapsed beneath our feet.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll think about it. Sorry I couldn’t help you any more.” I showed Ted to the door. When he reached the landing he turned and looked back at me like a stray puppy, but when he saw that I wasn’t going to change my mind he slowly trudged downstairs, one step at a time, and I could tell that he was trying to make me feel guilty with every step.

  When I heard him slam the street door I went back into the living room and tugged back the drapes, so that the sun could flood in. I took off my robe and hung it on the hat stand. Then I retrieved my can of Guinness, and eased myself back into the old green-velour armchair that I had rescued from the alley behind the Algonquin. It was well past its prime, even for an armchair. Its back was broken and its stuffing was bulging out. But who knows, Alexander Woollcott might have sat in it, and Alexander Woollcott was one of my heroes. “There is some cooperation between wild creatures,” he once remarked. “The stork and the wolf work the same neighborhood.”

  I found the remote control under the cushion and switched on the television. I flicked from channel to channel, looking for the baseball, but almost every station was showing pictures of New York hospitals, and ambulances, and doctors. The running captions were reading “VAMPIRE” EPIDEMIC HITS MANHATTAN . . . SCORES SEIZED BY THIRST FOR BLOOD . . . OVER 100 DEAD . . . MAYOR BRANDISI DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY.

  So that’s why the sirens were whooping. I turned up the volume and I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A senior official from the Centers for Disease Control appeared on screen, a balding man who looked like the medical hologram from Star Trek: Voyager. He was saying, “. . . insatiable thirst for fresh human blood, which has led them to kill acquaintances, friends and even their own children. Once they have satisfied their thirst, however, they seem to be overtaken in a few hours by violent nausea and cardiac arrest. Seventeen of those afflicted have so far died, and I’m afraid that we’re expecting many more.”

  A black woman reporter pushed a microphone into his face. “Sir—do you think you’re getting any nearer to isolating the cause of this outbreak?”

  The official shook his jowls. “All I can tell you at this time is that it bears absolutely no resemblance to any known disease, and in fact it may not even be a disease, in the generally accepted sense of the word. We have CDC and Medcom specialists working flat out to identify it, with the assistance of senior pathologists at every major hospital in New York.”

  “So what can the public do to protect themselves?”

  “Our advice is for people to continue about their business as normal, but to watch closely for any signs in yourself or others of a burning sensation of the skin, or of hypersensitivity to sunlight, or of strong or unusual thirst.”

  I swallowed Guinness, and burped. In spite of the sirens outside, I was starting to think, this has to be a put-on, surely? An updated spoof like The War of the Worlds. Like, vampires? Oh, right.

  But then the CDC official glanced down at his notes and said, “I am also told that a reliable early indicator of the so-called ‘vampire’ condition is nightmares. These frightening dreams usually start three or four days before the crisis, and are associated with a feeling of claustrophobia, or being shut in a box, as well as a strong sensation of motion sickness, as if the sufferer were on board a ship.”

  I slowly sat up. I heard another ambulance, speeding up Sixth Avenue; and then another; and another. A handheld news camera showed a young woman on her knees on the sidewalk outside FAO Schwarz, vomiting blood. Then they showed a man being rushed through the doors of the Sisters of Jerusalem hospital, his clothes smothered in scarlet, like the victim of a bomb blast.

  Jesus, I thought. Nightmares. That was exactly what Ted had been suffering from—and the same kind of nightmares, too. Shut up in a casket, on an oceangoing ship. Then I thought: What if this was an infectious disease? Ted had been standing only two feet away from me, and I had been breathing the same air. I had shaken hands with him, and the chances were that microscopic droplets of saliva had sprayed out of his mouth when he had talked to me.

  I hurried through to my bathroom, soaked my facecloth in scalding water, then squeezed it out and pressed it over my face. I shouted out ahh! when I did it, because it was so goddamned hot, but if there were any viruses on my skin, this would fix them. If I couldn’t bear it, neither could they.

  After a few moments, however, I thought: Just a minute, if my séance with Singing Rock had shown us anything at all, it had shown us that Ted’s nightmares hadn’t been caused by a virus at all, but by some malevolent spiritual presence. A presence that I had actually seen for myself, tall and dark and stretched-out, and sliding through my bedroom door. I peeled off the facecloth and stared at myself in the mottled mirror that hung over my basin. I looked hot. I looked very hot.

  What the hell was I supposed to do now? Call Ted, and warn him that he was just about to turn into a bloodthirsty vampire? Call the CDC, and tell them that all of their experts were wasting their valuable time, because the “vampire” epidemic wasn’t caused by a virus, but by some kind of spiritual manifestation?

  I could imagine myself trying to explain it. “Like, I contacted this dead Sioux medicine man I used to know, and asked him to lure this malevolent spirit into my bedroom, which he did. Unfortunately my client was too chickenshit to open the door, so I never really got to see what the being looked like, not properly. So I gave my client some mugwort and sent him home.”

  Bellevue? My feet wouldn’t touch the ground.

  I sat for almost an hour in front of the TV, watching as the epidemic grew steadily worse. Each successive newsflash showed more and more people regurgitating blood and more and more bodybags being wheeled away on coroners’ gurneys, and with every passing minute I felt increasingly guilty and frustrated. By 3:39 P.M. the death toll had risen to 119 so-called vampires and 147 homicide victims.

  I called Karen, to make sure that she and Lucy were okay. All I got was her answering service, and she didn’t respond to her cellphone number, so I called Herman, the doorman. “Mrs. Erskine left about an hour ago,” he told me. “She took Lucy to visit her grandmother in Albany.” Karen’s mother wasn’t answering, either, but I left a message that when Karen and Lucy reached Albany, they should stay there until this epidemic was over. That would be one less problem for me to fret about.

  I was desperate to tell somebody in authority about Ted’s nightmares and Singing Rock and the tall stretched-out figure that had walked through my bedroom door, but I knew exactly what would happen if I tried. At best, they would dismiss me as a publicity-seeking charlatan. They had only to look up my court record. In October of 1978 I was convicted of dishonestly acquiring a five-year-old Chevy Malibu by persuading an elderly lady from Englewood Cliffs that I could only communicate with her recently dead husband through his car stereo. Not only was this a lie, the car turned out to be a total lemon, so that didn’t say much for my psychic abilities, either.

  That’s it, I thought. I need a psychic to speak on my behalf—a believable psychic. Somebody respectable, somebody with gravitas—somebody who’s going to be taken seriously.

  I knew two psychics like that: Leon Borderman, from the New York Institute of Psychic Research, who claimed to have regular conversations with Benjamin Franklin—although I doubted if he would even deign to talk to me, the patronizing old gasbag. Then of course there was Amelia Carlsson, née Crusoe—but I was pretty sure that Amelia had probably had enough of me for one lifetime. I’m not saying that she didn’t like me any more, but I always seemed to turn up on her doorstep with a motley entourage of Grief, and Complications, and all kinds of Shadowy Terrors from God Alone Knew Where, even when I didn’t intend to.

  Not long after, however, the TV news showed a respectable middle-aged woman on her hands and knees, vomiting blood all over the floor of Bloomingdale’s shoe department. That’s when I thought wotthehell wotthehell I have to try this even if Amelia won’t talk to me. I picked up the phone and punched out Amelia’s number.

  As it rang, I rehearsed what I was going to say. Amelia, don’t put the phone down, it’s Harry. Amelia, I desperately need your help. New York needs your help. Amelia, I don’t know how to tell you this, but—

  The phone rang and rang, and I was beginning to think that I would have to leave another message. But then a man with a Scandinavian-sounding accent picked up and said, crossly, “Bertil Carlsson.”

  “Oh, hi! You must be Mister Carlsson.”

  “That’s correct. Bertil Carlsson. Who’s calling?”

  “This is Harry Erskine.” No answer. “Harry . . . Erskine?”

  Still no answer. I was just about to repeat myself, when Bertil Carlsson said, “Well?”

  “Ah—I used to be a friend of your wife, Mr. Carlsson. I’m still a friend of your wife, I hope. We didn’t have a falling-out or anything, it’s just that we haven’t touched base in quite a while. Quite a few years, as a matter of fact. Well, two, anyhow, maybe three.”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Erskine. My wife has mentioned your name.”

  “Oh, right! Glowingly, I hope.”

  “Glowingly? No.”

  “Right, well she wouldn’t, I don’t suppose. Not that there was anything—I mean the last time we saw each other, it was all quite amicable.”

  “What do you want, Mr. Erskine?”

  “Have you been watching the news? This epidemic thing?”

  “Yes, we’re watching it now. Or trying to.”

  “So Amelia’s there, with you?”

  Another long pause. Then, “I don’t think I want you to talk to her, Mr. Erskine. Perhaps she may not have told me about everything that you and she were involved in, but I would rather that she didn’t get involved with you again.” He pronounced it “inwolwed,” which made me wonder how he would say “Volvo.”

  “Listen, Mr. Carlsson, I can understand how you feel. I really can. If I were you, I wouldn’t my wife to be inwolwed with me, either. But you’ve seen this epidemic on the news. I really think I know what’s causing it, and I think I could save a great many people’s lives.”

  “Well, Mr. Erskine, I’m certainly not stopping you.”

  “I know. Of course you’re not. But my problem is that I have to find somebody in authority who’s prepared to believe me, and for one reason or another people in authority tend not to believe me.”

  “I can’t for the life of me think why.”

  “Mr. Carlsson, I wouldn’t have dreamed of calling Amelia if I’d been able to think of any other way. But you’ve seen how many people are dropping dead, and you’ve seen how many people have been murdered. I mean, we’re talking hundreds, and where’s it going to stop? I mean—supposing you catch it? Supposing Amelia catches it?”

  “Mr. Erskine—”

  “Please, Mr. Carlsson, call me Harry. And please don’t think that I would let anything happen to Amelia, ever. You’re the luckiest man on the planet, being married to her. But I need to talk to her, at the very least, even if she tells me to take a running jump.”

  At that moment, an extension phone was picked up.

  “Harry?”

  I felt as if a punching bag had swung back and hit me square in the chest. “Amelia.”

  “What’s happening, Harry?”

  For a moment, I couldn’t speak. My throat tightened up, and I couldn’t do anything but open and close my mouth like a recently caught codfish. Amelia and I had never been lovers, except in my dreams, but somehow I had always felt that our destinies were tangled together. I had made the wrong choice, all those years ago, like I always make the wrong choice, and it was almost unbearable, talking to the person I could have shared my life with, if I had only been humbler, and kinder, and less of a smart-ass, and seen her for what she really was.

  “I didn’t really want to call you,” I garbled. “No—that came out wrong. I didn’t want to involve you in anything, that’s what I meant. I should have called you years ago, shouldn’t I? But—you know—there was always a reason not to.”