The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  After the set prayers, he said, “Good Jesus, I know you have sent what help you can, but I fear it cannot prevail against this dark plague. Thy holy servant Katherine says this terror is a disease, but how can it be? For it does not move from man to man, but is everywhere at once.”

  It is.

  (Break)

  Ulf the Reeve is dead.

  Also Sibbe, daughter of the steward.

  Joan, daughter of the steward.

  The cook (I don’t know her name).

  Walthef, oldest son of the steward.

  (Break)

  Over fifty percent of the village has it. Please don’t let Eliwys get it. Or Roche.

  29

  He called for help, but no one came, and he thought that everyone else had died and he was the only one left, like the monk, John Clyn, in the monastery of the Friars Minor. “I, waiting for death till it come …”

  He tried to press the button to call the nurse, but he couldn’t find it. There was a handbell on the bedstand next to the bed, and he reached for it, but there was no strength in his fingers, and it clattered to the floor. It made a horrible, endless sound, like some nightmarish Great Tom, but nobody came.

  The next time he woke, though, the bell was on the bedstand again, so they must have come while he was asleep. He squinted blurrily at the bell and wondered how long he had been asleep. A long time.

  There was no way to tell from the room. It was light, but there was no angle to the light, no shadows. It might be afternoon or midmorning. There was no digital on the bedstand or the wall, and he didn’t have the strength to turn and look at the screens on the wall behind him. There was a window, though he could not raise himself up enough to see properly out of it, but he could see it was raining. It had been raining when he went to Brasenose—it could be the same afternoon. Perhaps he had only fainted, and they had brought him here for observation.

  “ ‘I also will do this unto you,’ ” someone said.

  Dunworthy opened his eyes and reached for his spectacles, but they weren’t there. “ ‘I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and burning ague.’ ”

  It was Mrs. Gaddson. She was sitting in the chair beside his bed, reading from the Bible. She was not wearing her mask and gown, though the Bible still seemed to be swathed in polythene. Dunworthy squinted at it.

  “ ‘And when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you.’ ”

  “What day is it?” Dunworthy asked.

  She paused, looked curiously at him, and then went on placidly. “ ‘And ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.’ ”

  He could not have been here very long. Mrs. Gaddson had been reading to the patients when he went to see Badri. Perhaps it was still the same afternoon, and Mary had not come in to throw Mrs. Gaddson out yet.

  “Can you swallow?” the nurse said. It was the ancient sister from Supplies.

  “I need to give you a temp,” she croaked. “Can you swallow?”

  He opened his mouth, and she put the temp capsule on his tongue. She tipped his head forward so he could drink, her apron crackling.

  “Did you get it down?” she asked, letting him lean back a bit.

  The capsule was lodged halfway down his throat, but he nodded. The effort made his head ache.

  “Good. Then I can remove this.” She stripped something from his upper arm.

  “What time is it?” he asked, trying not to cough up the capsule.

  “Time for you to rest,” she said, peering farsightedly at the screens behind his head.

  “What day is it?” he said, but she had already hobbled out. “What day is it?” he asked Mrs. Gaddson, but she was gone, too.

  He could not have been here long. He still had a headache and a fever, which were Early Symptoms of Influenza. Perhaps he had only been ill a few hours. Perhaps it was still the same afternoon, and he had awakened when they moved him into the room, before they had had time to connect a call button or give him a temp.

  “Time for your temp,” the nurse said. It was a different one, the pretty blond nurse who had asked him all the questions about William Gaddson.

  “I’ve already had one.”

  “That was yesterday,” she said. “Come now, let’s have it down.”

  The first-year student in Badri’s room had told him she was down with the virus. “I thought you had the virus,” he said.

  “I did, but I’m well again, and so shall you be.” She put her hand behind his head and raised him up so he could take a sip of water.

  “What day is it?” he asked.

  “The eleventh,” she said. “I had to think a bit. There at the end things got a bit hectic. Nearly all the staff were down with it, and everyone working double shifts. I quite lost track of the days.” She typed something into the console and looked up at the screens, frowning.

  He had already known it before she told him, before he tried to reach the bell to call for help. The fever had made one endless rainy afternoon out of all the delirious nights and drugged mornings he could not remember, but his body had kept clear track of the time, tolling off the hours, the days, so that he had known even before she’d told him. He had missed the rendezvous.

  There was no rendezvous, he told himself bitterly. Gilchrist shut down the net. It would not have mattered if he had been there, if he had not been ill. The net was closed and there was nothing he could have done.

  January eleventh. How long had Kivrin waited at the drop? A day? Two days? Three before she began to think she had the date wrong, or the place? Had she waited all night by the Oxford-Bath road, huddled in her useless white cloak, afraid to build a fire for fear the light would attract wolves or thieves? Or peasants fleeing from the plague. And when had it come to her finally that no one was coming to get her?

  “Is there anything I can fetch for you?” the nurse asked. She pushed a syringe into the cannula.

  “Is that something to make me sleep?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said and closed his eyes gratefully.

  He slept either a few minutes or a day or a month. The light, the rain, the lack of shadows, were the same when he woke. Colin was sitting in the chair beside the bed, reading the book Dunworthy had given him for Christmas and sucking on something. It can’t have been that long, Dunworthy thought, squinting at him, the gobstopper is still with us.

  “Oh, good,” Colin said, shutting the book with a clap. “That horrid sister said I could only stay if I promised not to wake you up, and I didn’t, did I? You’ll tell her you woke all on your own, won’t you?”

  He took the gobstopper out, examined it, and stuck it in his pocket. “Have you seen her? She must have been alive during the Middle Ages. She’s nearly as necrotic as Mrs. Gaddson.”

  Dunworthy squinted at him. The jacket whose pocket he had stuck the gobstopper in was a new one, green, the gray plaid muffler around his neck even grimmer against the verdure, and Colin looked older in it, as if he had grown while Dunworthy was asleep.

  Colin frowned. “It’s me, Colin. Do you know me?”

  “Yes, of course I know you. Why aren’t you wearing your mask?”

  Colin grinned. “I don’t have to. And at any rate you’re not contagious anymore. Do you want your spectacles?”

  Dunworthy nodded, carefully, so the aching wouldn’t begin again.

  “When you woke up the other times, you didn’t know me at all.” He rummaged in the drawer of the bedstand and handed Dunworthy his spectacles. “You were awfully bad. I thought you were going to pack it in. You kept calling me Kivrin.”

  “What day is it?” Dunworthy asked.

  “The twelfth,” Colin said impatiently. “You asked me that this morning. Don’t you remember?”

  Dunworthy put on his spectacles. “No.”

  “Don’t you remember anything that’s happened?”

  I remember how I failed Kivrin, he thought. I remember leaving her in 1348.


  Colin scooted the chair closer and laid the book on the bed. “The sister told me you wouldn’t because of the fever,” Colin said, but he sounded faintly angry at Dunworthy, as if it were his fault. “She wouldn’t let me in to see you and she wouldn’t tell me anything. I think that’s completely unfair. They make you sit in a waiting room, and they keep telling you to go home, there’s nothing you can do here, and when you ask questions, they say, ‘The doctor will be with you in a moment,’ and won’t tell you anything. They treat you like a child. I mean, you have to find out sometime, don’t you? Do you know what Sister did this morning? She chucked me out. She said, ‘Mr. Dunworthy’s been very ill. I don’t want you to upset him.’ As if I would.”

  He looked indignant, but at the same time tired, worried. Dunworthy thought of him haunting the corridors and sitting in the waiting room, waiting for news. No wonder he looked older.

  “And just now Mrs. Gaddson said I was only to tell you good news because bad news would very likely make you have a relapse and die and it would be my fault.”

  “Mrs. Gaddson’s still keeping up morale, I see,” Dunworthy said. He smiled at Colin. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of her coming down with the virus?”

  Colin looked astonished. “The epidemic’s stopped,” he said. “They’re lifting the quarantine next week.”

  The analogue had arrived, then, after all Mary’s pleading. He wondered if it had come in time to help Badri, and then wondered if that was the bad news Mrs. Gaddson didn’t want told. I have already been told the bad news, he thought. The fix is lost, and Kivrin is in 1348.

  “Tell me some good news,” he said.

  “Well, nobody’s fallen ill for two days,” Colin said, “and the supplies finally came through, so we’ve something decent to eat.”

  “You’ve got some new clothes as well, I see.”

  Colin glanced down at the green jacket. “This is one of the Christmas presents from my mother. She sent them after—” He stopped and frowned. “She sent me some vids, and a set of face plasters as well.”

  Dunworthy wondered if she had waited till after the epidemic was effectively over before bothering to ship Colin’s gifts, and what Mary had had to say about it.

  “See,” Colin said, standing up. “The jacket strips up automatically. You just touch the button, like this. You won’t have to tell me to strip it up anymore.”

  The sister came rustling in. “Did he wake you up?” she demanded.

  “I told you so,” Colin muttered. “I didn’t, Sister. I was so quiet you couldn’t even hear me turn the pages.”

  “He didn’t wake me up, and he’s not bothering me,” Dunworthy said before she could ask her next question. “He’s telling me only good news.”

  “You shouldn’t be telling Mr. Dunworthy anything. He must rest,” she said and hung a bag of clear liquid on the drip. “Mr. Dunworthy is still too ill to be bothered with visitors.” She hustled Colin out of the room.

  “If you’re so worried over visitors, why don’t you stop Mrs. Gaddson reading Scripture to him?” Colin protested. “She’d make anybody ill.” He stopped short at the door, glaring at the sister. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Is there anything you’d like?”

  “How is Badri?” Dunworthy asked and braced himself for the answer.

  “Better,” Colin said. “He was almost well, but he had a relapse. He’s a good deal better now, though. He wants to see you.”

  “No,” Dunworthy said, but the sister had already shut the door.

  “It’s not Badri’s fault,” Mary had said, and of course it wasn’t. Disorientation was one of the Early Symptoms. He thought of himself, unable to punch in Andrews’s number, of Ms. Piantini making mistake after mistake on the handbells, murmuring “Sorry,” over and over.

  “Sorry,” he murmured. It had not been Badri’s fault. It was his. He had been so worried about the apprentice’s calculations that he had infected Badri with his fears, so worried that Badri had decided to refeed the coordinates.

  Colin had left his book lying on the bed. Dunworthy pulled it toward him. It seemed impossibly heavy, so heavy his arm shook with the effort of holding it open, but he propped that side against the rail and turned the pages, almost unreadable from the angle he was lying at, till he found what he was looking for.

  The Black Death had hit Oxford at Christmas, shutting down the universities and causing those who were able to to flee to the surrounding villages, carrying the plague with them. Those who couldn’t died in the thousands, so many there were “none left to keep possession or make up a competent number to bury the dead.” And the few who were left barricaded themselves inside the colleges, hiding and looking for someone to blame.

  He fell asleep with his spectacles on, but when the nurse removed them, he woke. It was William’s nurse, and she smiled at him.

  “Sorry,” she said, putting them in the drawer. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  Dunworthy squinted at her. “Colin says the epidemic’s over.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at the screens behind him. “They found the source of the virus and got the analogue all at the same time, and only just in time. Probability was projecting an 85 percent morbidity rate with 32 percent mortality even with antimicrobials and T-cell enhancement, and that was without adding in the supply shortages and so many of the staff being down. As it was, we had nearly nineteen percent mortality and a good number of the cases are still critical.”

  She picked up his wrist and looked at the screen behind his head. “Your fever’s down a bit,” she said. “You’re very lucky, you know. The analogue didn’t work on anyone already infected. Dr. Ahrens—” she said, and then stopped. He wondered what Mary had said. That he would pack it in. “You’re very lucky,” she said again. “Now try to sleep.”

  He slept, and when he woke again, Mrs. Gaddson was standing over him, poised for attack with her Bible.

  “ ‘He will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt,’ ” she said as soon as he had opened his eyes. “ ‘Also every sickness and every plague, until thou be destroyed.’ ”

  “ ‘And ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy,’ ” Dunworthy murmured.

  “What?” Mrs. Gaddson demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  She had lost her place. She flipped back and forth through the pages, searching for pestilences, and began reading. “ ‘… Because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world.’ ”

  God would never have sent him if He’d known what would happen, Dunworthy thought. Herod and the slaughter of the innocents and Gethsemane.

  “Read to me from St. Matthew,” he said. “Chapter 26, verse 39.”

  Mrs. Gaddson stopped, looking irritated, and then leafed through the pages to Matthew. “ ‘And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’ ”

  God didn’t know where His Son was, Dunworthy thought. He had sent His only begotten Son into the world, and something had gone wrong with the fix, someone had turned off the net, so that He couldn’t get to him, and they had arrested him and put a crown of thorns on his head and nailed him to a cross.

  “Chapter 27,” he said. “Verse 46.”

  She pursed her lips and turned the page. “I really do not feel these are appropriate Scriptures for—”

  “Read it,” he said.

  “ ‘And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Ehi, Eloi, lama sabacthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”

  Kivrin would have no idea what had happened. She would think she had the wrong place or the wrong time, that she had lost count of the days somehow during the plague, that something had gone wrong with the drop. She would think they had forsaken her.

  “Well?” Mrs. Gaddson said. “Any other requests?”

  “No.”

  Mrs. Gaddson flipped back to the Old Testament. “ ‘For they shall fall by the sword, by the
famine, and by the pestilence,’ ” she read. “ ‘He that is far off shall die of the pestilence.’ ”

  In spite of everything, he slept, waking finally to something that was not endless afternoon. It was still raining, but now there were shadows in the room and the bells were chiming four o’clock. William’s nurse helped him to the lavatory. The book had gone, and he wondered if Colin had come back without his remembering, but when the nurse opened the door of the bedstand for his slippers, he saw it lying there. He asked the nurse to crank his bed to sitting, and when she had gone he put on his spectacles and took the book out again.

  The plague had spread so randomly, so viciously, the contemps had been unable to believe it was a natural disease. They had accused lepers and old women and the mentally impaired of poisoning wells and putting curses on them. Anyone strange, anyone foreign was immediately suspected. In Sussex they had stoned two travelers to death. In Yorkshire they had burnt a young woman at the stake.

  “So that’s where it got to,” Colin said, coming into the room. “I thought I’d lost it.”

  He was wearing his green jacket and was very wet. “I had to carry the handbell cases over to Holy Re-Formed for Ms. Taylor, and it’s absolutely pouring.”

  Relief washed over him at the mention of Ms. Taylor’s name, and he realized he had not asked after any of the detainees for fear it would be bad news.

  “Is Ms. Taylor all right then?”

  Colin touched the bottom of his jacket, and it sprang open, spraying water everywhere. “Yes. They’re doing some bell thing at Holy Re-Formed on the fifteenth.” He leaned around so he could see what Dunworthy was reading.

  Dunworthy shut the book and handed it to him. “And the rest of the bell ringers? Ms. Piantini?”

  Colin nodded. “She’s still in hospital. She’s so thin you wouldn’t know her.” He opened the book. “You were reading about the Black Death, weren’t you?”