Manitou Blood (26 page)

“You're sure?”

“Not really, but what else am I going to do?”

Frank looked up at him, shielding his eyes with his hand. “You may as well know that I have a raging thirst for human blood. I can't pretend that I don't. My skin feels like it's on fire, and if you take me with you, then I can't give you any guarantees that I'm not going to cut your throat and drink your blood.”

“What's your name?” the young man asked him.

“Frank Winter, MD.”

“Well, doc, my name's Gil Johnson, and I'm a National Guardsman with the Rainbow Division, and if you even
look
at my throat, I'm going to take this pickax handle and I'm going to beat your brains into raspberry Jell-O.”

Very unsteadily, Frank stood up. “Believe me, Gil, that would probably be a blessed relief.”

Jenica poured us two glasses of sweet white Romanian wine, and offered me a plate of almond biscuits that tasted like very fine sand. She sat next to me on the velvet-upholstered couch, close enough for our knees to keep touching.

“My father telephoned me from Bucharest as soon as he heard what was happening in New York. His very first word was,
strigoi
.”

I coughed on my biscuit. “Singing Rock specifically warned me not to say that name out loud. You know, in case they heard me saying it, and came after me. He said they would tear me to pieces.”

“No, no,” Jenica reassured me. “The word
strigoi
alone is not enough to alert them.
Strigoi
is just general name for vampires, not any special vampire. Your spirit-guide was warning you, yes, but he must have told you another name, too. A special name.”

I shook my head. “If he did, I didn't pick up on it.”

“Well, if he has not told you yet, he will very soon,”
Jenica assured me. “If so many
strigoi
are suddenly loose in New York, they must have come from a nest.”

“I don't follow you.”

“A nest is many
strigoi
who are hiding together, or perhaps sealed up by vampire-hunters. Sometimes they remain concealed for centuries, waiting to escape. My father studied
strigoi
when he was in Romania, at the university in Babes-Bolyai. He was always convinced right from beginning that there was a nest hidden someplace in New York. He has searched for it for many years, ever since he first came to America. He has visited many libraries and studied many old maps and diaries, but he could never locate them.

Jenica took hold of my hand and began to emphasize what she meant by tracing patterns on my palm—a sensation that was strangely erotic. “A nest of
strigoi
will always be guided and controlled by a very powerful vampire spirit, one of the
svarcolaci
. In English I suppose you would translate one of the
svarcolaci
as a
dead
vampire. He does not inhabit his physical body any more, like one of the
strigoi
, who are the undead. He is what you would call a ghost, or a wandering soul.”

“
Svarcolaci
? I never heard of
svarcolaci
. Mind you, I never heard of
strigoi
, either, before today.”

“In Romanian folk stories, another name for one of the
svarcolaci
is Vampire Gatherer. Once the
strigoi
from the nest have infected people, the Vampire Gatherer goes out searching for them, and leads them back to the nest. There he teaches them the ways of the night, so that they become
strigoi
, too.

“I am sure that it was one of the
svarcolaci
that your spirit guide was warning you about, because a Vampire Gatherer can hear his name called, at any distance, even in a whisper . . . even if you say it in your dreams. Sometimes you only have to
think
his name, and he will prick up his ears and come after you.”

“So—uh—what are they like, these Vampire Gatherers?”

“They take many different shapes, Mr. Harry, and many different faces. But mostly people call them the Slanting Ones, because they always appear like shadows, leaning away from any source of light. I will show you.”

Jenica walked across the living room, and brought back a small red leather-bound book from one of the shelves. She opened it up and handed it to me. The text was all in Romanian, but the engraved illustration didn't need any translation. It showed two small children sleeping in a wooden bed, with a guttering candle on their bedside table. Above them stood a sloping, dark, impossibly stretched-out figure, exactly like the figure that had appeared in my apartment when I was reading Ted Busch's fortune. I felt a chilly, sinking sensation in my stomach—the feeling you get when you know that things are going badly wrong and there's nothing that you can do but sit and wait for the worst to happen.

“I've seen him,” I told Jenica, handing the book back. “I've seen this sucker for real. Singing Rock showed him to me, in my apartment. This is him, or something very much like him.”

“Then now we are absolutely sure what we are dealing with,” said Jenica. She studied the picture for a moment and then she closed the book tightly and put it down on the table, with a heavy glass paperweight on top of it, as if the Vampire Gatherer might find a way to escape from between the pages. “There are many
svarcolaci
and I think my father knows them all, but of course I cannot contact my father yet, until the phones are back.”

“But your father really believes that there's a nest of
strigoi
here in New York?”

“He is completely sure. He found some letters from the nineteenth century and also some bills of lading from a shipping company. Some of the letters were written in a kind of code, but it was not a difficult code to break.”

She poured me another glass of wine. I didn't really want
one, especially since it tasted like sweaty leather watch-bands. But it was well past 2:00 in the morning and even though I felt exhausted and bruised and more than ready for bed, my brain was still jumping. Maybe the wine would act as a sedative, and maybe it would stop me from dreaming, too. Believe me, the last thing I wanted to do tonight was dream.

Jenica said, “In 1869, two of the richest men in New York were Charles Redding, from New England, and Gheorghe Vlad, from Cluj-Napoca, in Romania.”

“Sure, I've heard of them. Well, Charles Redding, anyhow. He founded Redding's Department Store, didn't he? And he built some incredible Greek-style mansion right next door to the Astors on Fifth Avenue.”

“That's right. Charles Redding and Gheorghe Vlad were business partners. Together they made millions of dollars by importing luxury goods from Europe and the Middle East—women's fashions and furniture and carpets and glassware. Charles Redding was satisfied to stay in New York. But Gheorghe Vlad believed that they could become a hundred times richer if they opened department stores all over America—first in Denver, in Colorado, and then others in California. He traveled to Denver, and found a site for a new store, and then he sent back to New York for his wife and his six young children to join him. On their way across the Plains, though, his family was attacked by a war party of Teton Sioux, and all of them were tortured and killed, even his newly born baby.

“Vlad swore an oath in front of God that he would have his revenge on the Indians, and that he would wipe out the Sioux—men, women and children, just as they had wiped his family out. He took his family's remains back to Romania, and arranged a traditional funeral. But my father discovered that he arranged something else, too. He went to a village near Borsa in Transylvania, and arranged to take
two hundred coffins from the vaults of the local churches, where they had been sealed since 1767 for safekeeping. According to the letters that my father found, these coffins contained
strigoi
, the undead, as well as a special iron sarcophagus containing one of the
svarcolaci.

“Gheorghe Vlad's intention was to ship them to America, and then to have them carried to Sioux territory, where he would revive them, and they would exterminate every single Sioux they could find.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That was a hell of a plan. But even in those days, how did he think that he was going to get away with it? I mean, anybody who wanted to cart two hundred dead bodies into Indian country wouldn't exactly have been inconspicuous, would he?”

“Of course. But there is some documentary evidence that Gheorghe Vlad was actually given support by the U.S. military, and even an offer of wagons. The Army saw it as an opportunity to defeat one of the most warlike of all the Indian tribes without having to risk any casualties among their own troops.”

“But letting all those
strigoi
loose—that was a pretty risky idea, don't you think? Once they'd wiped out the Indians, who were they going to feed on then? They would still have been looking for a regular diet of human blood, wouldn't they?”

“I don't know for certain,” Jenica admitted. “Maybe Gheorghe Vlad had thought of what he was going to do with all of those
strigoi
once he had taken his revenge. Maybe he hadn't. But you have to understand that he would have had very strong control over them, through the Vampire Gatherer. The Vampire Gatherer is a
dead
vampire, remember. He would not have been able to come back to life until Gheorghe Vlad had performed the appropriate rituals to revive him, and once he was revived, he would have had to obey Gheorghe Vlad's wishes, whatever they were. It is
like the story from the
Arabian Nights
of the genie in the lamp. Whoever revives the Vampire Gatherer controls the vampires.”

“But Gheorghe Vlad
didn't
wipe out the Sioux, did he? I mean, the U.S. Army did it in the end.”

“Well, you are right. The ship carrying the coffins arrived safely in New York harbor . . . my father found a written record of that. Unfortunately for him, Gheorghe Vlad died of a stroke an hour before the ship docked. So here were all these coffins in the ship's hold, but nobody knew what was in them, or why they had been shipped all the way from Romania. Apart, that is, from the clerics in Borsa, in Romania, and two or three senior officers in the U.S. Army. Once GheorgheVlad was dead, of course, nobody from the Army was going to come forward to requisition the coffins. Even if any of their officers had known how to revive the
strigoi,
which they didn't, somebody in authority would have asked what they wanted them for, and they wouldn't have been prepared to admit that they were planning on genocide.”

“So what happened to the coffins?”

“Charles Redding ordered them to be stored in the basement of Redding's Department Store until he could find out why his partner had brought them across the Atlantic. He thought that maybe they were the remains of Gheorghe Vlad's relatives, and that Vlad had wanted them all to be buried in America, where he could pay his respects to them and tend their graves. He sent letters of inquiry to Bucharest, but he never received any replies, and only five months later, in the winter of 1871, he himself died, of pneumonia.

“Redding's Department Store almost went bankrupt after his death, and it was bought by Green's, and then by Bloomberg's, and nobody knows what happened to the coffins. Presumably they were bricked up and buried in the foundations when Redding's Department Store was demolished in 1907.”

“But now it looks like they've showed up?”

“Yes. My father and I, we both believe that these
strigoi
have come from Gheorghe Vlad's nest. But there is a big question. Who has revived them? They must have been discovered by somebody who knew how to bring the Vampire Gatherer back to life.”

“There can't be many people who would know how to do that.”

“Of course. But we have no ideas who it is. Somebody who knows old Romanian legends perhaps.”

“So what's the plan?”

“I don't know. If we want to stop this epidemic, we have to find out where is the nest, and where is the Vampire Gatherer, and who has revived him.”

“And
why
he revived him, surely? I mean, whoever knew how to do it, they must have had some idea of what the consequences would be.”

“Of course. So we are looking perhaps for a terrorist. Or maybe somebody worse than a terrorist. A complete madman, maybe.”

“That's encouraging.”

I tried my cell phone again, but it was still dead. I listened, but for now the city seemed to be weirdly silent. No sirens, no helicopters, no traffic.

“Do you want to come to bed?” asked Jenica.

“Excuse me?”

“You can sleep in my father's bed if you wish. There is nothing more we can do tonight.”

“Oh, right. That would be great. And I could really use a toothbrush, if you have one. My mouth feels like I've been French-kissing an armadillo.”

Jenica smiled. “That is Romanian wine. They say it gives a man such breath that he can knock down a house made of brick.”

I was woken up by somebody touching my shoulder. I thought it was Karen at first, and I batted her away.

“
Sleep
,” I protested.

“Mr. Harry, I have brought you tea.”

I opened one eye and tried to focus. Jenica was standing over me, wearing a silky fuchsia-pink robe, very loosely tied. I lifted my head and looked around, and realized that I was lying on her father's cement-slab four-poster bed, in his gloomy museum of a bedroom, and that I was fully dressed, apart from my shoes.

I sat up. I could see myself in a blotchy mirror on the opposite side of the room. My hair was sticking up like Erskine the Mad, and my left cheek was embossed with Oriental patterns from the cushion that I had used as a pillow. There was a hole in my fawn-colored sock, and my big toe was poking out of it.