So little had changed through the centuries. “Burkies. As in Burke and Hare.”
“Yes. They fashion themselves after the resurrection men of the nineteenth century—”
“Burke and Hare were executed.”
“No risk of that here.”
“Could you not leave like . . . others? Set up a little enclave in more comfort . . . with less risk?”
“We were waiting. Hoping.”
Gaelan stood. He couldn’t listen to . . . He leaned his forehead against the far wall to her office, retching. The image of . . . He glanced at the teardrop, still in his hand. All he needed to do was drop it, pocket it. Anything . . .
“And that, my dear Mr. Erceldoune, brings us to your role in all this. Why you are essential to us. Are you listening?” He turned back toward Airmid. She handed him a handkerchief drawn from her bosom.
“I’m listening.” He could not pull himself away from the story. His head pounded, throbbing in rhythm with his arm. With his other hand he pushed against the injury as if to still the ache. The fabric with which he’d covered it was still moist. He looked at his hand. Blood. Why had it not stopped? Light-headed, Gaelan fell into the chair. “My arm. It—”
“Let me take a look. I’m a doctor after all.” She smiled again.
Gaelan lifted his arm. She ripped the sleeve of his shirt to the shoulder. “Glass can be nasty. Could become infected. It needs to be cleaned. Redressed.”
“But I can’t . . . it will . . .”
She wasn’t listening, turning her attention to a large file cabinet. “This will do.”
Unwinding a wide roll of gauze, she wrapped his arm, securing it in a knot on the side opposite the injury. “There. That will do until it’s healed. Come with me. There is someone I want you to meet. It is time to know your part. What you must do. For us. For the future.”
“No. I’m done.”
“Excuse me? What do you mean . . . done?” She stood, standing above Gaelan, hands on hips, her gaze hardened and icy. “Done?” she repeated.
“If,” he began, still half-believing, half-hoping it all was in his mind. “If any of this is real, I am finished with this life. I’ve a way to end it. All I need do is drop this teardrop, return to the catacombs on the other side of the portal, and blow up the entire—”
“You don’t want to do that.” She paled to almost white. Frustration creased the loveliness of her face as she bit her lower lip, inhaling as if to calm herself. “Not yet. Please. Just another few minutes.” She was imploring him. “If, after you’ve seen what . . . Only a few moments more of your time is all I ask.”
Gaelan sighed. “Fine. Only that. I promise nothing else.”
“Understood.”
Gaelan would see what she had to show him; nothing would change his mind. They proceeded down a long hallway, through overgrown, wild gardens: orchids, poppies, forsythia. Orange trees. Vines with fat grapes. “How is this place possible when all around you—”
“As lovely as all this seems to you, it is a prison. We can never leave, but for a moment. And even then, only under cover of darkness or during a storm.”
“Why?”
“I already told you. The Burkies.”
They started down a long staircase, as bare and stark as where they had been was lush. The conservatory. That was it. The seasonal exhibits of botanic delights. Unlike the buildings around it, the heavy, lead glass was still intact, impervious to the elements, protecting this . . . prison. And they could grow things here. Infinitely regenerative sustenance.
They went through a door and into a small alcove, dark but for a single dim bulb.
“She never leaves. She sits. Waits.”
“Who? For what?”
“For you.” Airmid led Gaelan through a curtain.
To the glass museum. His glass museum. It was exactly as he’d left it. With one exception.
A panel. One he’d never placed in the museum, for it had long been missing a small teardrop piece. The one he now held in his hand. The panel was the simplest of the three he’d created in Tiffany’s workshop. A young woman draped in a white cloak holding a small child surrounded by yellow daffodils, and when the sunlight hit the panel just right, the two figures would be cast in a glowing radiance. It was as Gaelan had remembered them, before disease took Caitrin, and Iain was stolen from him by Caitrin’s father. A son he would never know.
A woman sat on the floor before a glass panel, her back to them. She seemed not to notice they’d entered the room, continuing to stare ahead, chanting something. A parched whisper like a mantra. Over and over. He did not hear what it was.
Arie bowed slightly and left the room. Gaelan barely registered her departure as he gazed at the woman. Her hair was longer; the clothes she wore, rags. A tattered sweater—his.
CHAPTER 37
“Anne.”
He did not move; he did not wish to startle her.
“You died.”
“Anne,” he repeated. “What—?” No. Now was not the time to provoke her with questions. She was fragile; he knew that. No need to . . .
She stood, came up to him, and stared. Straight into his eyes, a frightening, chilling glare. Then shuffled back to where she’d been and sat on the floor.
“You lied to me. Told me to trust you, you fucking bastard. Handed me that fucking bottle of poison, when all the while you had another tucked away. I figured that out soon enough.”
“I’m sorry” seemed inadequate. “I never . . . I meant for you to trust that my death would be better—”
“For who? For you? Certainly not for me. You are no longer immortal, by the way. You died. ‘Bout eighty years ago.”
“Glomach?”
“No. Not Glomach. You were found by hikers in the Borders. Near Melrose. You’d been badly burned. Hands, feet. You refused to tell them who you were. But you were taken to a trauma center in Edinburgh unconscious. It was in the papers. On the Internet. Someone recognized you. I recognized you. I was furious. I had to travel to Gattonside to scatter Simon’s ashes, so I took a flight, detoured to Edinburgh if only to confirm it was you. But you were already gone. Sepsis. From the burns. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Gaelan moved for the first time since entering the museum. Sat on the floor beside her. She skittered away.
“Get the fuck away from me.”
“None of that happened.” Yet, was that not his plan? To destroy the catacombs and himself? “Yes. I took the poison, I admit. Thought you would be—”
“Not yet. Hasn’t happened yet.” She stared at him, as if making certain he was real. “Apparently.” She looked away again, continuing to stare through the panel. Something about her voice was wrong. The flat affect. No passion. No spark. Gaelan swallowed hard, knowing he’d been the cause of it.
“How did you know about the museum? My part in restoring the—”
“Dana Spangler. Your friend. She’s here. Somewhere. Everyone is immortal. Except you. More irony. Are you not amused?”
“I’m—?”
“It was the nanobots, by the way. We figured it out. The poison made you mortal, not dead. Why? That’s what we couldn’t quite figure out. We knew there must have been something that altered your physiology, so it could not work the way intended. But what? We figured out you’d treated yourself for something, somewhere along the way, but had no idea what or when.”
“Yes. Nanobots. Airmid . . . Arie . . . told me.”
“I knew you’d ‘overdosed’ the book’s embedded compounds, but not which ones. Not which page. You hadn’t used them directly from the book, but from the raw materials. You’d told me that much. You didn’t know any better. You’d never—”
“Learned how to use it. It was plague. I had Bubonic plague in 1625.”
“That was only part of the riddle. Something else happened to your physiology that made the poison you created destroy the nanobots without killing you. The whole thing was reversed. So, that’s what we’ve been waiting for. T
he final puzzle pieces, so we can put it back to rights. Or rather, you can. The first part, you just gave me. Plague. What’s the second?”
Realization hit with a blunt force. “You used my blood.”
“There was a girl. Is a girl. Still a girl. My fault. I didn’t understand, you see. Not enough.”
She looked over to him, her eyes devastated but dry of tears.
“There were people who’d wanted to . . . Stolen tissues from Evanston Lakeshore Hospital.”
It all came back to the fucking accident.
“It all got so confused. I tried to destroy the tissue specimens. But it wasn’t enough. Or too late. Your DNA, so closely held for so many centuries, was now out in the wild. It had changed. The nanobots mutated.”
“The nanobots? How?”
“You can’t destroy machines the way you destroy living tissue, and somehow along the way, the bots hybridized with biomaterial and transformed. Like a virus. Keep the host alive and live off it. Forever.”
He didn’t quite understand. Anne’s halting speech, dreamlike. How much was real? How much the product of a misplaced guilt? “Your fault? How? It was my blood. My error in 1625 started the problem.”
“You see, it was me that showed them it could be done. Indirectly, but they figured it out when I’d refused to . . . There were more samples of your tissue. I knew that, but if they didn’t know how to use it, they couldn’t . . . I destroyed everything to do with the project. My records. Scans, computer backups. Everything. And still they . . . it wasn’t fucking enough—”
“Anne, stop. Please. You’re . . . it’s all right. It’s not—” She was reciting, rambling. Like a robot. How many times in a century had she gone over it and over it? There was nothing he could say. A century of guilt, of grief held for so long with no respite. He needed to simply let her talk. Get it out. To listen.
“So much good might have come from it. Eradication of the worst diseases. I couldn’t . . . I thought I’d destroyed everything. But they’d captured it all. All my notes, my methodology. Everything. I thought . . . No, I believed I’d destroyed . . .
Perhaps if he got her away from here—this musty relic of a museum. How long had she been there, just sitting? Waiting. “Come, walk with me. Just a stroll. The sun will do you good.”
He knew the way, unless it had been boarded up. A small passageway up through what had been an office straightaway to the edge of the dock. She nodded and let him help her up.
They reached the water’s edge. A decaying bench lay on its side nearby. He turned it over and sat, urging Anne to sit beside him with a nod of his head. “Here. Sit by me, but first, breathe.”
She nodded and sat at the other end of the bench; stared out at the water toward the horizon.
“It’s worse than you can imagine, Gaelan. The mutation causes a terrible, cancer-like illness. Undifferentiated tissue taking over the body, the brain, one bit at a time. Unendurable pain, nothing you can do about it. Disfiguring, but keeping the victim alive. So they can live. Forever. Cancer, but not fatal. It’s affected nearly everyone, but the few of us who seem to be immune, though no one knows why. We live in an enclave of—they’re called . . . we’re called . . . immunes. Immune—supposedly to the lesions; able to regenerate entire body parts in a single bound. Not just ordinary immortals, us. No, we’re super-immortals.”
“Descriptive.”
“But not entirely accurate. All of us are beginning to show signs of the mutation. Even here. Even me.” She lifted her shirt to expose blister-like lesions. “Perhaps we were meant, the scientists here, to see the destruction of everything whilst we lived unscathed. Now it’s our turn to enter hell.”
“The Malebloge.”
“The what?”
“Never mind.”
“What is my role . . . in this . . . now?”
“You, and only you, can reverse it.”
“Before it ever happens—
“Not quite. For the trigger had been pulled by this point in your timeline. You wouldn’t be in time to stop it, but you can fix it before any real damage is done.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It is not.”
“The final piece of the puzzle is to figure out what you did to alter your physiology . . . what changed the nanobots, caused the mutation in the first place—but after you were already immortal. It had to be something in the Saf Rafah.”
“But I don’t have the lesions. I—”
“No. Then again, it was simply part of your internal ecosystem. Who knows what adaptations your physiology made along the way to compensate? But when your blood was used to create a cell line . . . We must know the pathway from your original tissue regeneration to . . . this mess.”
It was getting chilly on the dock. The sun had sunk low in the sky behind them. Gaelan turned toward the fading light, which lent an eerie glow to the destroyed skyline.
“We should get back in. Night is falling, and Burkies will be about.”
The dock weaved and bobbed below them as they entered through a side door in the structure. Into darkness. They walked down the corridor in the dark. In the distance, the sound of water lapping up against the pier, but nothing else. Gaelan did not know what he could do to change the inevitable, but he owed something to Anne, to Airmid. To the future. He had to at least try.
“Ah . . . the lights have come back on.” She looked into Gaelan’s eyes. Hers had come alive as they had not been when he’d first come into the glass museum. “And now you are here. Full circle.”
So much for Conan Doyle’s fairies. Gaelan could not suppress a laugh.
“What?”
“I was thinking of Conan Doyle. His fairies. His expansive view of the universe. He was a time traveler and never knew it. But fairies? Not so much.”
“We have been perceived through time as fairies, and perhaps they do exist, but we are not them. There are many portals to many worlds.”
“Can you not simply take blood from me? Use it here? Now?”
“We simply do not have the materials or the technology to do it, not the way the world is now situated. It has been so long, and nanobots out there in the ether for so many years, we cannot know if it would even work. Could make things worse—if that’s even possible. No. The only answer is to fix it in your timeline.”
“How? How am I supposed to remember what I might have inadvert . . .” Gaelan had used the ouroboros book—the Saf Rafah—only four times. In 1625, when he’d become immortal, then in 1826 . . . the English sweat.
“It was 1826. Must’ve been.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Anne. I think I know when—and what I did that must have altered my physiology. It was in 1826. A terrible epidemic in London. I’d used the . . . ourobo . . . Saf Rafah, but carefully. Until I had an unfortunate incident with a syringe. That had to have been it.”
LONDON, 1826
CHAPTER 38
The morning broadsheet proclaimed the death toll “at least seven hundred succumbing to the mystery disease.” No one cared that in Smithfield the tide had begun to be pushed back, and no one was ailing.
Mrs. Mills was quick to report that the ill housed in the White Owl were doing as well as might be expected. And supplies of the two elixirs were running low. Nearly all the pallets in the makeshift pest-house were filled.
“I treated them as your boy said,” she explained, showing Gaelan her dwindling supply of medications.
“My . . . boy?” he nearly said, stopping himself, realizing that she’d meant Caitrin. At least that ruse had worked well enough . . . at least well enough to trick Mrs. Mills. “I’ve a medicine now will cure them, Mrs. Mills. And whilst I treat them, I would ask that you put word out that I’ve also the means to prevent the illness entirely. Any who come into Smithfield the first time since the illness struck must stop by my shop straightaway. Before they do anything else. Also, anyone not stricken with the illness, likewise. Please be kind enough to act quick
as you might about it so the word will spread.”
Gaelan injected the medicine beneath the skin of each, coming at last to the final pallet on the floor of the White Owl. A man of middle years. He was restless, thrashing about the straw. “Mrs. Mills, if you assist me.”
“Of course, Mr. Erceldoune. Right away, sir.”
“Hold his arm for me while I—”
Gaelan readied the injection device. The man reared up, knocking Gaelan to the floor. Damnation! The sharp point had pierced deep, painfully into Gaelan’s thigh. The glass tube was half what it had been. Bloody waste of medicine.
Gingerly, he dislodged the device, refilling it before treating the man, who was by now much calmer. They waited, Gaelan impatiently counting the minutes on his watch. The preparation did its work as it had with his first batch, and within half an hour each had revived, showing no signs of illness whatsoever.
He returned home just as Simon Bell knocked on the apothecary door.
“Good morrow, Mr. Erceldoune.”
“Dr. Bell. Do come in. My . . . apprentice told me you would be calling this morning.” Bell looked haggard, more exhausted than Gaelan felt. Dark smudges beneath his eyes and the slowness to his gait gave away his state. “I’ve a kettle on the stove. You look like you might do with some tea.”
Bell nodded slowly, his lips drawn into a tight line.
“Then is it yet not faring well? What of the remedy concocted by your fellows at the Royal Academy? No success there?” Genuine concern for the well-being of both Bell and his patients failed to conceal the sarcasm embedded in the question.
“No. They were wrong, clearly. As you . . . and I . . . suspected. So many dead. More than one thousand in London alone, I hear, and I cannot help but wonder had I employed . . . had I used . . .” He nodded to the broadsheet open on the countertop. “You have read as much. And here? You seem yet rather calm for all the chaos about. No further cases, then?” He cast a look about the shop as if to see evidence of disaster recommenced.
“Smithfield was not spared; there is a pest house set up at the White Owl. I have treated all the ailing there, and the treatment seems to work—and with remarkable speed. Had I been but swifter, I might have spared more in Smithfield. As it is, at least one hundred forty-two have perished. And now I have had the time, with the immediate crisis past, to formulate a preventive medicine as well.”
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