Manitou Blood by Graham Masterton

. . . it might tell you why this—
thing
—keeps disturbing your sleep.”
    â€œIs 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?”
    â€œMaybe we should ask your spirit guide to give us an action replay.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Ted, he won’t.”
    â€œI’ll be much more hyped up for it this time, I promise you.” He took a deep breath that whistled in his nostril, andthen another, and stood up ramrod-straight. But I shook my head, and continued to shake my head, and he gradually sagged.
    â€œTed,” 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?”
    â€œI don’t think so, Ted. This wasn’t like chickening out of a dental appointment.”
    â€œWould 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.
    â€œOkay,” 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 intothe 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, “. . .