Manitou Blood (29 page)

He paused, and then he said to Jenica, “You don't have any kind of candy bar, do you?”

“What?”

“I think my blood-sugar level is dropping.”

“Well . . . I have Romanian chocolate. Romania is famous for chocolate.”

“Sure, anything. This morning I ate four Snickers bars one after the other, and that was my breakfast. Once I start getting hyped up, I have to have candy.”

 

I have to admit that our whole situation looked slightly worse than totally hopeless. I mean, what a bunch of clowns—what could
we
do to save New York City, the four of us, sitting in this stuffy downtown apartment with the drapes drawn? Shivery, Sleepy, Superstitious and Sexy.

There was Frank, with his face as white as a papiermâché mask, shivering and coughing and grunting every two or three minutes because he felt like he was burning up alive. He was a doctor, sure, but right now his medical expertise wasn't much use to anybody, least of all himself. Then there was Gil. He was a trained soldier, but he was so tired and wired by what he had seen in the streets that he was eating chocolate with his eyes closed. Me—I had some practical experience of malevolent things from beyond, but I didn't have the slightest idea how to deal with real live vampires, and I wasn't at all sure that I was brave enough or public-spirited enough to go out and try. And Jenica—well, she was highly academic, and she was very sexy, but in my opinion it was going to take more than a deep cleavage and a Ph.D. to handle a 550-year-old
svarcolaci
.

More to the point, did any of us have the strength or the guile or the know-how to fight whoever had raised The Wolf up out of his casket, and defeat him? Or
it?
Or whatever it was? Remember that I once saw a mythical lizard appear out of nowhere and bite a doctor's fingers off, so I was prepared to believe in anything at all—and
you
should be, too,
because that kind of shit happens, no matter how much you don't want to believe in it.

In the end, though, Gil was right. We might have been clowns, but we had to do
something
, because it didn't look as if anybody else in New York City had our unique combination of peculiar knowledge and contacts with the spirit world.

I snapped off a piece of Gil's chocolate while he still had his eyes closed. “So, okay,” I said, “where exactly are we going to start looking for these vampires? If they can hide in mirrors, we don't stand a chance, unless we break every mirror in Manhattan.”

“We still need to find the nest,” said Jenica. “
Strigoi
need to gather together from time to time. They are very vicious, but their emotional strength is very brittle. They are thousands of miles away from their homeland, remember, and they have outlived their friends and their loved ones by hundreds of years. My father always says that they are dangerous, but very lonely, and perhaps their loneliness makes them even more dangerous still.”

“Okay, then, let's use some logic. If your father couldn't find the nest,
why
couldn't he find it?”

“He has several suspicions. He has always been sure that when Redding's Department Store was demolished in 1907, the coffins could not have been taken very far away. It would have been too expensive to carry them far, and who would want to pay for dead people they did not even know? Also, there is no mention in any of the newspapers of so many coffins being transported out of New York, or sent back to Romania, and that would have been a newsworthy item.”

“Maybe they were taken to a cemetery and buried?”

“Perhaps. There is a Romanian Orthodox Cemetery in New Jersey, but the records show that they were not interred there. In fact, no cemetery of any faith within two
hundred miles of New York City has records of so many coffins being interred in one day—even Potters' Field on Hart Island, where the city's paupers were buried.”

“What would you logically do with two hundred coffins?” I wondered. “If you weren't going to have them cremated, and if you didn't bury them in a cemetery, where would you stash them?”

Jenica said, “I will show you a map.” She went over to the bookcase and came back with a large-scale street map of downtown New York in 1914, which she spread out over the coffee table. It was yellowed with age, and the creases had been reinforced with Scotch tape to prevent it from falling apart. A sheet of tracing paper was fastened over the pages that showed Wall Street and Battery Park, on which her father had penciled the location of Redding's Department Store on Cortlandt Street, and several other locations where he had obviously thought that the coffins might have been buried, or re-housed.

“Of course this map was drawn seven years after the coffins were moved, so many of the buildings would have been different. In those days, everything in the business district was being torn down and rebuilt, almost constantly. The streets were always filled with rubble. Every bank wanted a grander headquarters, every stockbroker wanted a taller office. Private houses were disappearing and moving uptown, new factories were opening and closing.”

“So—if the buildings were changing so often, it's unlikely that the coffins were stored in a warehouse, or an attic? They would have been easily discovered, if they were.”

“So you're thinking cellar,” put in Gil, without opening his eyes.

“Cellar, or wine vault, or sewer maybe. But someplace underground, that's my guess. Even if the building above it was torn down, a cellar could have stayed intact.”

Frank eased himself out of his chair and came across to the couch to sit beside me. He stared at the map for a long
time, trying to suppress his coughing, and then he said, “What's this? St. Stephen's Church?”

“That's right,” said Jenica. “St. Stephen's Romanian Orthodox Church, on Cedar Street. It was opened in 1916, but it stood right at the foot of the World Trade Center. When the South Tower collapsed, it was totally demolished.”

“Yes, of course, I remember seeing it on TV. The streets on this map are all so different, I didn't realize that this was the same church. But
Saint Stephen
—that's very strange.”

“Why is it strange?”

“In my dream, I saw my grandfather. He was sitting in his old black Mercury Marquis, only it was converted into a funeral car. What I really noticed was that my grandfather's hair was shining like a halo, and I thought:
He looks just like a saint.”

“This was the dream with Susan Fireman?” asked Jenica. “The dream when she was trying to persuade you to go through the mirror?”

Frank coughed, and cleared his throat. “Yes, but I'm beginning to believe that it wasn't a dream at all. It was more like a hypnotic trance. She was inside my head, just like a hypnotist. She was conjuring up my childhood memories so that I would feel that everything was fine and there was nothing for me to worry about. I could walk through the mirror, I could die, I could turn into one of the
strigoi
, everything would be wonderful. It
looked
like my world, but it was entirely controlled by
her
.”

“I don't follow you,” I told him.

“Everything in that dream had some kind of significance. The beach, the mirror, everything. So what was my grandfather doing there? And why was he sitting in a hearse? And why did he have a halo? I keep on turning that over and over in my mind, and the more I think about it, the more sure I am that Susan Fireman was trying to show me something in a way that I would understand it.
My
memories, but
her
meanings. You're going to meet an elder,
and you're going to respect him, the same way you used to respect your grandfather, and you're going to love him.”

“Your grandfather looked like a saint,” said Jenica, nodding her head as if she was beginning to understand what Frank was getting at—which was a damn sight more than I was. “What was your grandfather's name?”

“That's the whole point. His name was Stephen.”

“So, in this dream you saw Stephen, looking like a saint, and sitting in a funeral car?”

“That's right.”

“Did the funeral car have a casket in it?”

Frank closed his eyes, and thought for a moment. Then he said, “Yes . . . yes, it did. A big gray casket, made of metal. But it was very scabby and corroded, as if it had been buried underground for hundreds of years.”

“And were there any flowers around the casket?”

“No, no flowers—but now I come to think, there was something twined around it. Like branches, silver and green—only they were shiny, and I could swear that they were
moving
.”

“
Snakes
,” said Jenica.

“Snakes?” I asked her.

“Of course. This young
strigoica
was trying to persuade Frank to join her in the place where the
strigoi
were hiding, yes? She was thinking so strongly about it that her thoughts appeared in Frank's dream, or trance, or whatever it was. But they appeared in the way that thoughts always appear in dreams—as symbols, or riddles.”

“So Frank's grandfather Stephen looked like a saint?” I asked her. “And the saint was looking after the casket with the Vampire Gatherer in it.”

“Yes. But Saint Stephen is not a man . . . St. Stephen is a
building
. St. Stephen is St. Stephen's Romanian Orthodox Church.”

“But the church was flattened on 9/11.”

“Yes. But maybe not the vaults underneath it.”

“Your father—didn't he ever
search
St. Stephen's Church?” I asked Jenica. “It seems to me like the first place he would have checked out. Not only that, it's only three blocks away from Redding's Department Store.”

“Of course. He searched it in the 1960s, on the pretext that he was a student of religious architecture, but he found nothing at all. I know this, because he mentioned it to me after we heard that St. Stephen's had been demolished.

“He said that he tried to search it again in the 1970s, after there was a documentary on TV about the building of the World Trade center towers. It showed them excavating the foundations, and my father realized how soft the soil was, because it was all landfill, and how easy it was to dig so deep. I remember him wondering if St. Stephen's Church had vaults beneath vaults, like some of the older churches in Translyvania and Wallachia. Most of them used to have catacombs and tunnels that ran deep below the Carpathian mountains, and this is where they hid all their art and their treasure during the time of the Ottoman empire.

“My father asked the church authorities if he could make another search, but by this time they knew from articles in the newspapers that he was trying to find
strigoi
, and they refused. The Orthodox Primate of New York was not going to allow the media to say that he had welcomed a vampire-hunter onto the premises!”

“Well, I may be barking up the wrong building,” I said, “but if your father thought that St. Stephen's Church was worth a second look, I think we ought to do just that.”

Frank coughed, and nodded. “I have an intuition that you may be right, Harry.”

“Are you okay?” I asked him. “You don't want me to make you another liver-and-wine smoothie?”

He couldn't speak at first, but he vigorously shook his head. Eventually, he managed to choke out, “Harry—I'd rather die first.”

After a brief and bad-tempered argument, we agreed that we would
all
go looking for the vampire's nest. Jenica thought that it was far too risky to take Frank along with us. He was so sick, and he would slow us down, and supposing he was already much more infected by the
strigoi
virus than he was letting on, and led us into a trap? But Gil was confident that he could handle Frank, even if Frank did try to double-cross us. As for Frank—Frank was desperate not to be left behind on his own, coughing his lungs all over the carpet and waiting for theVampire Catcher to come for him.

“What do you think, Harry?”

“I think he should come with, if he's feeling up to it. This situation can't be any more suicidal than it is already.”

Out on the streets it seemed twenty times hotter. The sky was a weird shade of laurel green, as if we were on another planet, and there was a noticeable absence of shadows: as if they, too, were hiding away from the vampires. The back of my shirt was soaked in sweat before I had even walked down the front steps of Jenica's house, and I had to keep wiping my face with a balled-up Kleenex.

Frank wore oven gloves and a hood and he had thickly smeared his face in even more Ambre Solaire. Jenica had draped a net curtain over his head to strain out as much light as possible, so that he looked like a medieval leper. Even so, when he took his first step into the sunshine he sucked in his breath, like,
itttthhhhh
! and for a moment I thought he was going to turn around and stumble back inside.

“Frank?
Frank?
Think you can make it?”

“I'm a survivor, Harry, don't you worry about me. I'm not going to die. And besides—” c
ough!
“—I'm damned if I'm going to let that goddamned wife of mine take all of my property.”

I turned to Gil with exaggerated wonderment. “Did you hear that? This must be the first vampire who's more worried about his divorce settlement than he is about drinking blood.”

“Same thing, from what I've heard.”

Jenica was still acting sulky, but I happen to like petulant women. She was wearing a short linen dress, in a natural color, with blue and yellow flowers embroidered across the yoke, and soft cream leather boots. She carried an embroidered bag across her shoulders, which contained her vampire-hunting kit. This consisted of a large crucifix, set with amber and bloodstones, which had been given to her father by the Orthodox monks from Maramures Monastery in Romania, and which he had always taken with him when he went looking for
strigoi
; as well as a round brass bottle of holy water, several sticks of pale green sealing wax, and a screwtop jar full of garlic paste, thickly mixed with silver filings from a maker of religious icons. Most important of all, though, she had the book of
svarcolaci,
and the words that could seal the Vampire Gatherer back in his casket—hopefully, for another five hundred-fifty years.