Manitou Blood by Graham Masterton Page B

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 wereokay. 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.”
    â€œOh, hi! You must be
Mister
Carlsson.”
    â€œThat’s correct. Bertil Carlsson. Who’s calling?”
    â€œThis is Harry Erskine.” No answer. “Harry . . . Erskine?”
    Still no answer. I was just about to repeat myself, when Bertil Carlsson said, “Well?”
    â€œAh—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