Inside the ward, all the blinds had been drawn down tight, so that the physician assistants and emergency nurses were working in twilight, like pale green ghosts. Frank walked up and down the aisle, stopping to examine each patient in turn. Some of them lay silent and white-faced, as if they were sleeping, or already dead; but some of the newer admissions were crying and screaming and retching and begging for mercy. The stench of partially digested blood was so thick and fetid that Frank could taste it in his mouth.
All the time the sirens kept whooping, as more people were brought in from the sweltering city outside, and the plastic doors kept flapping open, and gurneys rattled along the corridors, and paramedics shouted for assistance.
Frank and Dean went back into the emergency room and tugged off their masks. “Anything new from Willy?”
asked Frank. The vinyl-tiled floor was sticky with blood, so that the soles of his shoes made a scrunching sound.
“He's been testing for everything you can think of, from sarin to ricin to mustard gas. He's testing for anthrax, cholera, chicken flu, three kinds of plague and you name it. Nothing so far, but he hasn't given up, and he's still screening samples from every patient we bring in.”
“How about the enzyme?”
“Nothing conclusive, not yet, but it's a metallozyme, apparently, with a silver component. He has some idea that it might be related to the aging process, but he'll have to do some more work on it.”
As he reached the doors, Dr. Pellman came in, accompanied by his deputy medical director, Ingrid Kurtz, both of them looking grim-faced.
“The mayor's declared a state of emergency,” said Dr. Pellman. “Up until fifteen minutes ago, there were three hundred seventy reported cases of people vomiting blood, citywide, and so far the police have found ninety-three exsanguinated bodies.”
“God,” said Frank. “This is beginning to sound like
Dawn of the Dead
.”
Dr. Pellman said, “You can forget about the legal niceties, Dr. Winter. We urgently need to find out what's wrong with these people. We need to know what they have in common . . . what they've eaten, where they've been, who they've had any kind of contact with. We need to pinpoint where each of them lived, and where they were when they started to show signs of sickness. The CDC is sending us two senior advisers, and I've also been talking to Medcom. You call in as many of your own staff as you need. All leave is canceled until we've got this situation under control.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, Dr. Garrettâ”
“Yes, sir?”
“As soon as you can, take a couple of hours off. Take a shower and get yourself something to eat. You look like shit.”
As Frank returned to the eleventh floor, he could see that the scale of the panic was rising by the minute. Every time the elevator doors opened, more and more people pushed their way in. Crowds of non-critical patients were being moved in wheelchairs to the convalescent wards, anxiously clutching their belongings on their knees, while technicians and nurses hurried along the corridors, and telephones warbled urgently at every nurses' station. In the space of only a few minutes, the hospital had turned into a noisy, crowded, chillingly air-conditioned Babel.
He was only halfway along the corridor to room 1566 when his beeper went. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it, and then broke into a run. He arrived in the doorway at the same time one of the emergency technicians was coming out, and they almost collided.
“What's happened?” he demanded.
“She's asystolic. No warning.”
Frank peered past the technician into the darkened room. Three nurses were gathered around the bed, and Susan Fireman's nightgown had been dragged up to expose her sparrow-like chest. One of the nurses was already holding up the bright yellow defibrillator paddles, and shouting “
Clear!
” But for some reason Frank knew for certain that Susan Fireman's soul had already left her body.
He stepped into the room. He felt as if he were walking in slow motion, while the crash team was rushing around the bed in a speeded-up frenzy of activity. They shocked her, and shocked her, and shocked her again. But her face remained deathly white, and her skinny wrists flopped like a doll's, and she showed no signs at all that they might be able to save her.
He waited in the shadows with his hand pressed over his mouth. There was nothing else he could do. In the end, the emergency nurse backed away from the bed and returned the paddles to the crash cart. “Sorry, folks. We've lost her.”
Frank stepped forward and stood at the end of the bed. “Sorry, Dr. Winter,” said the nurse. “We did everything we could.”
“Her heart just stopped,” said another nurse, popping his fingers. “One second all her stats were looking pretty steady. The next second, snap, flatline.”
Frank looked down at Susan Fireman and he was surprised to feel so upset. Usually, when his patients died, he felt nothing more than professional regret that he hadn't been able to give them longer to live. But only a few hours ago, Susan Fireman had been contorting herself outside Macy's, and climbing a ladder that wasn't there, and he hadn't had the chance to ask her what she was doing, and what she was trying to say, and he realized now that he had really wanted to know.
In spite of her waxy pallor, however, Susan Fireman looked completely composed, and he could almost have sworn that she was smiling to herself.
“Do we know how to get in touch with her family?” asked one of the nurses.
“Yes,” said Frank. “You'd better go. You'll be needed in the emergency room, all of you.”
The nurses packed away their equipment and unfastened her drips and at last he was left alone with her. He studied her face under the lamplight and thought,
I wonder what really happened to you, Susan Fireman?
It occurred to him that he was probably going to find out, within the next few hours, if more and more people died of the same condition. But whatever had taken her, she had been a strikingly attractive young girl, and this was a very sordid ending to a very short life.
“When you were climbing that ladder,” he asked her,
“where were you going? Where did you think that was going to take you to?”
Without warning,
she opened her eyes
. Those pale, ice-blue eyes, and stared at him.
“What's
in
there?” screamed Ted Busch. “For Christ's sake, dude, what is it?”
I cautiously pushed open my bedroom door. Inside, it was very gloomy, because I hadn't had time to fix up any proper drapes, and the window was covered with a droopy purple bedspread, fastened with cup-hooks. But there was nothing and nobody there. No whispering hordes, no locusts, no dark stretched-out figures. Only my lonely unmade bed with the crimson quilt and the stained black satin sheets, and the paint-spattered kitchen chair that served as my bedside table. Only the tattered poster of a magic design by J.F.C. Fuller, a friend of Aleister Crowley's, the master of the black artsâall planets and wavy lines and naked women with their hair on fire. And most of my clothes, of course: crumpled, dirty, and heaped on top of my suitcase.
However, I was sure that I could
smell
something. Usually my bedroom smelled of stale Indian spices and damp plaster, with a strong note of Eternity aftershave. But I
could detect something elseâa very sharp, burned aroma, like a recently lit matchâand the smell of
disturbed air
. I sniffed, and sniffed again. There was a curious feeling that somebody had been here, and had only just left.
I peered around the door. There was nothing there, either, except for my shiny new golf clubs and my stiff unworn Burberry trench coatâsouvenirs, both of them, of my evaporated life with Karen. I may have lost my dignity, but by God I had kept my putters.
“Anything?” asked Ted, keeping his distance.
“Nothing,” I told him. “Whoever it wasâ
whatever
it wasâit came and then it went.”
“I'm sorry, dude,” said Ted. “I was too scared, honest. I could feel how evil it was. I could
feel
it. It was like when I was a kid, and there was my He-Man bathrobe hanging on the back of my bedroom door, and I just
knew
that it was alive, and as soon as my mom went downstairs it was going to jump on me.”
“No, Ted,” I said, trying to be patient. “It wasn't like that. Your He-Man robe wasn't alive and it didn't jump on you, did it? Your
fear
of your robeâthat was real enough, I'll grant you. MeâI used to be scared of the wood grain in my closet door. It looked like a wolf, and I couldn't look at it, in case it tore my throat out, but of course it never did.”
Ted said, “The thing that was hereâwhat the hell was it?”
“The thing that was here
was
alive. We missed seeing it, that's all.”
“I could feel so much
evil
,” said Ted. “I could feel my skin creeping. And I could
smell
it, you know. It smelled like
bleaugghh
.”
I lifted off my gilded skullcap and ran my hand through my hair. I was seriously worried. Whatever that dark stretched-out figure had been, it appeared to have deeply malevolent intentions, at least as far as Ted was concerned. That meant that I was faced with a very uncomfortable choice. Either I could sell Ted a handful of herbs from the
Magic Pantry and send him on his way (which, I have to admit, was my immediate inclination); or else I could try to find out what this thing actually was, and why it was giving him nightmares, and whether I could send it back to whatever cobwebby corner of the spirit world it had come from.
So far, however, in my short but rackety life, my experience of things with deeply malevolent intentions was that they resented being interfered with. Any attempt to get rid of them usually resulted in mayhem, and mass destruction, and finding yourself face-to-face with manifestations that forever afterward would have you screaming in your sleep.
I compromised. I went to the closet, unscrewed a yellow glass jar, and took out a bunch of of dried mugwort. “Look, Ted,” I said, “you can have this for nothing.”
Ted inspected the mugwort suspiciously. “What do I do? Smoke it?”
“I wouldn't if I were you. Tie it to the head of your bed, and it should protect you from bad dreams.”
“It's a weed.”
“Yes, but it's not any old weed. It's mugwort, which the Celts used to call witch-weed. Unlike any other plant, it leans to the north when it grows, which means that it's magnetic, and that it's highly responsive to supernatural messages. You never know . . . it might tell you why thisâ
thing
âkeeps disturbing your sleep.”
“Is 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?”
“Maybe we should ask your spirit guide to give us an action replay.”
“I'm sorry, Ted, he won't.”
“I'll be much more hyped up for it this time, I promise you.” He took a deep breath that whistled in his nostril, and
then another, and stood up ramrod-straight. But I shook my head, and continued to shake my head, and he gradually sagged.
“Ted,” 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?”
“I don't think so, Ted. This wasn't like chickening out of a dental appointment.”
“Would you at least
think
about it? I mean, I'll try this weed on my bed tonight, but if I have another nightmareâ”
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.
“Okay,” 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 into
the 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
.