Plague of the Manitou by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780106588
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2015-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

I waited for another two-and-a-half hours at the hospital, standing outside the front doors with that black cat continually rubbing up against my legs and purring like a death-rattle. At a quarter after four I knew that I would have to go or I would miss my flight. I couldn’t afford to forfeit the fare – or get arrested and charged with fraud, for that matter.

While I was waiting several clergy arrived in shiny black limos and taxis and went bustling into the building grim-faced, including the Reverend Deacon Jose Valdes from St Francis de Sales. None of them knew me so they didn’t acknowledge me, and in any case I must have looked pretty dubious hanging around outside a hospital where a priest was suffering from demonic possession with a black cat smooching around my ankles. Just as well I wasn’t wearing my black djellaba with the silver stars on it.

Eventually, I went inside to collect my suitcases from the receptionist. ‘Could you call upstairs and ask how Father Zapata is doing?’ I asked her. ‘I’d like to stay longer, but I have a plane to catch.’

She picked up the phone and talked for a moment to one of the nurses on the third floor. Then she said, ‘I’m so sorry, sir. Father Zapata passed about ten minutes ago.’

‘Oh, shoot. That’s terrible. Did they say how?’

‘Are you a relative, sir? If you’re not a relative, all I can tell you is that he passed.’

I didn’t know what to say. I stood in the hospital’s reception area with my suitcases, feeling almost as if I was personally responsible for Father Zapata’s death. I shouldn’t have asked him for help and advice about that nun. I should have relied on my own experience of supernatural appearances and quit the cottage then and there and not mentioned the nun to a soul. Supernatural appearances are nothing like the ghosts you read about in ghost stories. Even the scariest ghost stories don’t come close. More often than not, they have some grisly and complicated agenda that is impossible for us to understand. They have no sympathy for us whatsoever, and they don’t give a rat’s ass how much they hurt us. Either they were once human, and now that they’re dead, they’re jealous of us because we’re still alive, or else they were never human: they were demons, or spirits, or loogaroos, or manitous, and they have no feelings for us at all. Do you expect a shark to go into mourning if it bites you in half? Do you expect a rock to feel sorry if it topples down a cliff and crushes you? Do you think a lake is going to cry if you drown in it?

I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the airport.

He checked me suspiciously in the rear-view mirror as we drove east on SW 22nd Street.

‘You know you got blood on you?’ he asked me. ‘I ain’t makin’ a mistake, am I? That is blood?’

‘Yes, it is,’ I said.

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