Manitou Blood (6 page)

A blonde woman in a turquoise blouse appeared in the entrance to the antiques store on the opposite side of the street, and stood there, smoking. She had dark roots in her hair, and her stomach bulged over her denim mini skirt, but she had a hair-raisingly pretty face, like an angel out of a Florentine painting. I wondered what would happen if I went across and introduced myself.

“I've been watching you, my dear, and I think you're beautiful, in a strange, trashy way.”

No, that wouldn't work. And I was still trying to work out something more seductive to say to her when my doorbell rang. My doorbell made a wonderful glissando noise like a xylophone and it had cost me only $7.88 in Wolfowitz Discount Electrics on Second Avenue.

I opened the door. A young man of about twenty-five was standing outside in the corridor, blinking. He had messy blond hair and he was dressed in a white T-shirt with
Molten Iris
printed on it in red, and jeans. He was snub-nosed, very pale, with pale green eyes, and blond eyebrows, and he had a 9 kt gold crucifix dangling in his left ear. I could tell by the yellow on his fingers that he smoked, but he was only wearing one ring, and that was a heavy silver skull. You notice details like these, when you're a fortune-teller.

One of the most interesting details about him, though, was that he was here at all. Young men don't consult clairvoyants, not as a rule. Ninety percent of my clientele was female, and the few men who did come had either been diagnosed with a terminal illness and wanted to know how long they had left, or were interested to know in advance which horse was going to win at Aqueduct.

“Can I help you?” I asked him.

He frowned at the folded-up paper napkin that he was holding in his hand. “Are you—uh—the Incredible Erskine?”

“Incredible as it might seem, yes.”

“My sister said maybe I should come talk to you.”

“Your sister?”

“Marilyn Busch. I'm Ted Busch.”

“Do I
know
your sister?”

“I don't think so, but she's friends with a girl who's the niece of a friend of yours. She said I should talk to this friend of yours, but this friend of yours said she didn't do psychic stuff no more but
you
did so maybe I should come see you.”

“What's that in Earth-speak?”

“I keep getting this nightmare, okay? So my sister's friend said I should talk to her Aunt Amelia.”

“Aunt Amelia? I don't know any Aunt Amelias. I don't know any Aunt Anythings. I mean, look at me. Do I look like a nephew?”

“Amelia Crusoe? She's called Amelia Carlsson now, but that's the name my sister told me to tell you.”

Amelia Crusoe
. Oh, God.

I used to love Amelia Crusoe. I
still
loved Amelia Crusoe. Apart from having a husky voice and vulnerable, pre-Raphaelite looks, Amelia was a
real
psychic, a real medium who could talk to dead people as easily as you and I can talk to people on the bus. She had always talked about giving up the séance business, and she had, more than once, but I always knew that she could no more give up talking to the dead than I could give up worry. She
needed
it, to remind herself that she was still alive.

I said, “You'd better come in. You want a Guinness? It's Irish. You drink enough of it, you pee green.”

“I'm cool, thanks.”

“Sit down,” I told him, dragging out a bentwood chair. “What did you say your name was? Fred?”

“Ted—Ted Busch. That's Busch like in Anheuser, not Bush like in George Dubya.”

“Okay, Ted,” I said, adjusting my golden skullcap. “I think the best thing I can do is read your fortune in the cards, and see if this nightmare of yours is going to have a deleterious effect on your life, or whether it's just a harmless nocturnal terror.”

Ted nodded. “I understand.”

I was glad about that, because I didn't. “I'll have to charge you a fee,” I told him. “My rates are very reasonable, I'm not one of these Upper West Side celebrity mystics with a self-help book on
The New York Times
best-seller lists and a gold Lexus in the garage. But peering into the unknown, it's a very complicated business, and it takes years of dedication to perfect it, so I have to ask my clients for the nominal sum of fifty-five dollars, inclusive of tax.”

Ted opened up his left hand and there was a $100 bill, neatly folded. “Amelia said that I'd have to pay you, but she didn't know how much.”

Terrific
, I thought.
I should have asked for a hundred
. But I took the money and gave Ted $45 change, including five dollars in nickels and dimes, which I shook out of my jelly jar.

“So tell me about this nightmare,” I asked him, as I reopened the deck of fortune-telling cards and started to lay them out.

“Uh . . . don't I have to tap the deck or nothing?”

“Where do you think we are? Reno? No, you don't have to tap the deck. They know you already, these cards. Look at this top one—a young man with messy hair climbing up a flight of stairs—they even predicted that you were coming to see me.”

“Hey.” Ted looked impressed.

“This is the
Jeu Noir
,” I told him. “The Black Game—the most accurate fortune-telling cards you can buy, if you can ever find them. They're banned, in most countries, and do you know why? People were using them to predict the date of their own death, and then killing people they didn't like
on the day before they were due to die anyhow, so they wouldn't get executed for it.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Look at these cards—exquisite, aren't they? Look at the detail. Do you know who designed them? French prisoners of war, in England, in Napoleonic times. The artists weren't allowed to have pens, so they cut all the flesh off the tips of their fingers, and drew the designs with their own sharpened bones, dipped in a mixture of boot-polish and rats' blood.”

Ted peered across the table with what he obviously thought was a knowledgeable frown. I doubt if he had heard of Napoleon Solo, let alone Napoleon Bonaparte. He sniffed and said, “I have the same nightmare just about every night. I feel like I've been sleeping, okay, and then I suddenly wake up.”

“But in reality you're still asleep?”

“That's right. It's pitch dark, and when I try to sit up, I can't. I'm trapped inside this wooden box, like a coffin.”

“Carry on.” I kept on laying out the
Jeu Noir
cards, in rows of seven, six, five, three and four.

“I'm pounding on the lid with my fists, but it's fastened real tight and I can't budge it, and in some way I know that there's another box on top of me, with somebody in it, and another box on top of that, with somebody in that, too.”

I glanced up at him. He was clutching himself like he had the stomachache and there were clear beads of perspiration on his upper lip. It was a sweltering day, granted, but my rattly old air-conditioner didn't work too bad.

“So . . . you're feeling very claustrophobic?” I asked him.

“I'm
suffocating
, man! I'm banging and I'm banging but I know that nobody's going to answer me and nobody's going to let me out.”

“Is that it? You bang on the lid and nobody lets you out and then what?”

Ted said, “This box I'm in . . . I think it's on a ship. It's going up and down like a fairground ride, and after a while I start to feel like I'm going to barf. I can hear the ocean, and the wind, and clanking noises. I can hear somebody calling out, in this really high voice. Maybe it's a girl but it sounds more like a very young boy.”

I put down the second-to-last card. “Can you catch what he's saying?”

“Not really. It doesn't make any sense. I'll tell you what it reminds me of, though. The super's kids, when my family lived on Twenty-fourth Street. The Popescus, that was their name. I hear this voice, and it sounds just like one of them.”

“So you hear the voice calling . . . and that's when you wake up?”

“Jesus, I wish! Nothing else happens, but I still don't wake up. Sometimes the nightmare seems to go on and on for
hours
, with the ship heaving up and down, and the kid calling out, and I can't do nothing at all but lie there, and I'm gasping for air.”

I looked at him narrowly. “Is there anything happening in your life right now to make you feel trapped? Are you stuck in a job you don't like? Maybe you've just gotten engaged?”

“Not at all, man. Everything was totally cool before I started having these nightmares. I got myself a new job at the beginning of last month, at Lasky's Camera Store, and a new place to live, and I'm gigging in the evenings at the Gothicka club. I don't have a care in the world, man, apart from these nightmares.”

“All right, then,” I told him. “I've laid out the twenty-eight Predictor Cards so that we can see what your immediate future is going to be. The last card we don't turn over till the very end.”

“You can really read these things?”

“You think I'd have the nerve to charge you fifty-five bucks if I couldn't?”

“Okay,” said Ted, dubiously.

I pointed to the first card, The Sweet Heart. “This is a good start! You're going to meet a new girl this weekend. She's sitting on the bed, see, and she's smiling flirtatiously, and that definitely means romance, even if it's only a one-night stand.”

“Yeah? Then who's
that
—looking in the window?”

I jerked up my head in alarm, but we were three stories up and of course there was nobody. “Jesus,” I told him. “You scared me.”

“I meant there in the card,” said Ted, pointing at it. “The girl's sitting on the bed but there's somebody, like,
spying
on her.”

“Really?” He was right. I had never noticed it before but right in the corner of the card there was a window, and a parchment-colored face was peering into it. A mask, rather than a face, with a slit for a mouth and two slitty eyes. Talk about Leatherface, in
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.

“That face—that's your
conscience
,” I improvised. “When you take the girl to bed, your conscience is going to be watching you and saying, excuse me, Ted, are you doing the honorable thing here? Or are you merely playing with this young woman's affections? See here, beside the bed, there's a chessboard with all the pieces knocked over . . . that's a symbol of the fickle game of love.”

“That conscience dude . . . he's pretty scary looking.”

“Well, your conscience is
supposed
to be scary. He's supposed to make you think twice.”

“Man, if I saw
that
dude staring into my bedroom window, I wouldn't have to think twice. I'd crap my pants and run for the door, in that order.”

“Let's take the next card then. This is you, talking to all of your friends. It may not look exactly like you. I mean you don't have red hair and bright green pantyhose. But it
represents
you. You're smiling, you're relaxed. That's good news.”

Ted picked up the card and scrutinized it for nearly half
a minute. He was obviously determined to get his fifty-five bucks' worth.

“So who's this?” he wanted to know, turning the card around so that I could look at it, too.

“Who's who?”

“This dude way off in the distance, all dressed in black, with the tall black hat, and his face all wrapped up in a scarf.”

“Oh, him! He's not . . . specially significant. We should go on to the third card.”

“No, hold up, man. Here's all these people laughing and joking, okay? But this guy right at the back, he's looking toward this guy dressed in black, and he's definitely scared. He's not laughing and joking like the rest of them, is he? He's got his mouth wide open like he's definitely scared.”

I took the card reluctantly and examined it myself. “Well, I guess you're right. He does look a little concerned.”

“So why is he concerned?”

“You don't really want to know that.”

“I do, actually. Like, if this is my future, and somebody's looking scared, I really want to know why.”

“All right,” I said. “This black figure appears on only seven cards in the
Jeu Noir
, at various distances from the main protagonists. Sometimes he's far away, sometimes he's practically breathing down their necks. But what his appearance actually
means
—that's open to very wide interpretation.”

“But who
is
he? That's all I'm asking.”

“He's, um, Imminent Death.”

“Imminent Death?” Ted blinked. “What does
that
mean?”

“Like I say, it's open to very wide interpretation. But basically it means that you're going to die. More or less imminently.”

“You're putting me on.”

I lifted both hands to show him that I was helpless. “What can I tell you? You wanted to know exactly what the cards predicted, and that's what the cards predict.”

“Do they say
how?
”

I scanned the twenty-seven cards that I had already turned up. “Without going into too much detail, you've already met the person who's going to kill you. See here? That's you in the blindfold, talking to her. She's a woman, and you even know what her name is, although you don't know her
real
name, and never will. That's the significance of the blindfold.”

“Jesus. Do they say who she is?”

“Not specifically, but she comes from very far away. Have you met any foreign women lately?”

Ted nodded. “I met a girl at a party in SoHo last weekend. She spoke pretty good English—but, yes,
she
was foreign. Russian, maybe.”