by Thomas Hopp
“Umm-hmm,” he responded vaguely, continuing his reading.
“How can you be so calm about what looks like a dangerous situation? I’m thoroughly spooked.”
He paused and looked at me curiously. “If you think about it, Fin, I have no choice but to remain calm. If this is indeed the start of an epidemic, then cool-headedness - especially in this laboratory - is absolutely necessary to avoid a larger calamity. Secondly, it still remains possible that this virus has cropped up somewhere else before and it’s just a matter of identifying the microbe and putting in place the proper control measures. That’s why I am reading every literature report on rhabdoviruses I can lay hands on. That’s much better than sitting and wringing my hands, wouldn’t you agree?”
“But what about you and me?” I persisted. “How can you not be as worried as I am about having been exposed?”
He paused his reading and put a hand reassuringly on my forearm. “Worry is useless, Fin. Calm focus will get this puzzle figured out. If we have contracted something, I’ll make better progress toward a cure if I concentrate on the task at hand, rather than worrying over my own fate or yours. Have faith, Fin. I’ll get this thing before it gets us.”
“Have faith?” I chuckled bitterly. “I guess I have no other choice, do I?”
Chapter 9
McKean read for some time until I said, “Anyway, I’m glad you invited me to come and meet Kay again.”
He looked up from his reading with an expression of faint surprise. “But that wasn’t what I called you here for.”
“No? What, then?”
There were footsteps in the hall and a husky voice outside the office door said, “Knock, knock.” A large man entered, who at first didn’t seem familiar without his yellow raingear and mud on his granny glasses and beard.
“Leon Curtis!” I said, standing and offering a hand. He shook my hand with a big warm paw and then shook Peyton McKean’s hand as well. McKean sat and gestured Leon into the chair Kay Erwin had just vacated. The archeologist overfilled the chair, his broad shoulders tight inside an oversized tartan sport coat. He held a brown leather briefcase in his lap.
“You’ve brought the parchment?” McKean asked.
“It’s right here.” He opened the briefcase and drew out a clear plastic slipcase with the now-unrolled yellow parchment inside and handed it to McKean, who set it on top of the article he had been reading.
“Gorgeous!” McKean looked carefully up and down the cracked but meticulously unfolded page.
Curtis sat with his hands on the sides of the briefcase and one knee bouncing like a nervous schoolboy. “What I didn’t tell you,” he said, “is why I’ve brought the original to you. Have you ever heard the name, Charles Grayson?”
“No,” said McKean, continuing to look the manuscript over with eager intensity.
“Bureau of Indian Affairs Special Agent. He’s responsible for the Makah Reservation and a few others. Popped into my lab unannounced yesterday. Seems somebody told him about the scroll and the fact I’d taken it. He’s made it his duty to track it down. He threatened to arrest me for NAGPRA violations if I didn’t give it up. Fortunately, it was squirreled away in a desk drawer and I denied any knowledge. But he gave me the third degree. Somebody told him every detail except where to find it. I suspect Gordon Steel. If anybody’s aware of what’s going on in that crypt, it’s him.”
“Maybe so,” said McKean. “But Grayson should be made to know that any meddling may slow down your investigation of the Spaniard’s history, and my investigation of what killed him.”
“I didn’t tell him any of that. He’s on a crusade and he’s got me worried. I got a call from Tleena Steel. She knows somebody in the BIA Office in Neah Bay who says tomorrow Grayson will be back with a search warrant. So I brought it here for safekeeping, if you don’t mind.”
“Thanks for entrusting it to me, Leon. I’ll have a good look at it.”
“Great,” said Curtis. “I think I’ll take a few days off. Stress is getting to me so bad I can’t work.”
“Oh?” McKean eyed Curtis closely. “How so?”
“Headaches, bad ones. Dizzy spells. And forgetting stuff. Like today, I got lost on the way here. I’ve come here a dozen times but today I couldn’t find this place to save my life. Drove all over the waterfront. Nearly got in a fender bender with a cop car. The officer was kind enough to tell me how to get here.” He rubbed his eyes deeply with the fingers of both hands. When he removed his fingers his eyes looked red and puffy, no doubt because of the aggressive way in which he had rubbed them.
McKean and I exchanged glances. “Any fever?” he asked Curtis.
“Ye - uh, no - uh, I don’t know,” Curtis replied.
After a thoughtful silence, McKean said, “Go to Seattle Public Health Hospital, Leon. I’ll call Kay Erwin and let her know you’re coming.”
Leon snapped the catches closed on his briefcase and stood. He looked pale. “Sure, Peyton,” he said. “That’s a good idea. I’ll go. Just to play it safe…”
He turned and walked away down the hall in a slow, doddering shuffle. McKean made the call and left a message for Erwin, who hadn’t arrived at her office yet. As he set the phone on its cradle, the patter of small feet resounded in the hallway. Suddenly a small boy of about six rushed into the room and threw himself at McKean, who caught him in his arms, chuckling. The boy shouted, “Daddy-y-y!” This was Sean McKean, Peyton’s fair-haired son, whom I met once through the bio-containment window while I was incarcerated with McKean in Kay Erwin’s isolation ward. They hugged for a long moment and then the boy asked, “Who was that big man on the elevator?”
“That was Leon Curtis,” McKean replied. “He’s an archaeologist.”
“An ark-ee-ol-o-gist,” the boy puzzled out the sound of the word. “What’s that?”
“He studies graves, old bones, things like that.”
“Mummies?”
“Yes.”
“Lost temples?”
“Yep.” McKean smiled at the boy’s bubbling enthusiasm.
“Was he sick?” Sean asked.
McKean’s face clouded. “What makes you ask that?”
“He sneezed.” The answer came, not from Sean, but from a woman standing behind him outside the door. I recognized her as McKean’s wife, Evelyn. Her straight shoulder length dark blond hair was pinned back in businesslike fashion and she wore a tan business dress suit. She didn’t embrace Peyton when she came in, as Sean had.
“We had to encourage him to get off the elevator,” she elaborated.
“He didn’t know if he was going up or down,” Sean added.
“He wasn’t the only forgetful one around here,” Evelyn said coolly. “You were supposed to meet us at the curb.”
“Oh, yes!” McKean exclaimed, glancing at the wall clock. “Sorry.” Then he clasped the boy by both shoulders. “Oh, boy!” he exclaimed. “A day in Dad’s office and then it’s my night to cook dinner.”
“I’m already late for the art museum board meeting.” Evelyn glanced at her watch. “And I’m double parked. Goodbye.” She spun on the heel of a brown pump and hurried down the hall. “Bye, Seanny,” she called. “I won’t be home too late. I’ll see you before you go to bed.”
“Bye, Mommy.”
McKean’s expression brightened when she had gone. He asked the boy, “Want to play with the molecular models?”
“Yeah!”
McKean opened the bottom drawer of a file cabinet and Sean knelt and pulled out handfuls of colorful plastic atomic models that could be connected to make molecules. As he fashioned a fanciful molecule that could have corresponded to one of his father’s authentic chemical inventions, my cell phone rang. I excused myself and stepped into the hall and answered.
“This is Dr. Srinivasan in the Emergency Pavilion at Seattle Public Health Hospital,” the female voice said. “I am calling regarding a patient, John Doe. He is comatose. He has no wallet or ID. But he is carrying in his coat p
ocket a card with your name on it. I am calling to see if you can please help us identify him.”
“John Steel,” I said without hesitation.
“Are you sure? Perhaps you should come have a look at him.”
“I’m on my way.”
I said goodbye to Peyton and Sean and then hurried off.
Within fifteen minutes I was in a small room in the Emergency Pavilion of Seattle Public Health Hospital, standing with Srinivasan, the resident in charge, a diminutive, dark and beautiful woman with a red spot on her forehead and a green surgical scrub outfit that was splotched with other red spots I suspected were from the man who lay on the bed.
“That’s John Steel alright,” I said, dismayed at his condition. He had iv tubes in both arms, oxygen tubes in both nostrils, and his head was bandaged with so much white gauze that he looked like a swami. One eye was swollen shut and the other was half open, although he seemed unconscious. I took some comfort from the sound of his regular breathing and the smooth and even-paced vital signs on the cardiac monitor above him.
“He is resting under heavy doses of pain medication,” Srinivasan explained. “We won’t need to wake him until morning if his signs stay good.”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He is camping in the woods above the freeway. An old man there says he is flashing some twenty-dollar bills and so some other vagrants are beating him and taking the money.”
“It was my fault then! I gave him the money.” I explained the few facts I knew about John Steel to Srinivasan and after that, to the two responding police officers. The cops left to file their report, and Srinivasan got a pager call and hurried off to another patient, leaving me alone with John. I sat down in a corner chair and used my cell phone to find the number of Neah Bay Elementary School. Within minutes I was connected to Tleena Steel.
“Hello, Tleena,” I said when she answered. “This is Phineus Morton.”
“Oh,” she replied. “What a surprise.”
“Not a pleasant one, I’m afraid. I’m at the hospital with your brother John.”
“John! How? Why!”
I gave her a rundown of the situation and John’s guarded but hopeful prognosis.
“Oh my gosh!” she said. “I’ll get there as quickly as I can.”
After Tleena hung up I sat beside John Steel pondering the thick web of events that had followed on what I once considered an almost inconsequential trip to Neah Bay. After quite some time, a familiar thin-but-firm voice came from outside the door. “There you are, Fin. I thought I’d find you here.” Peyton McKean stood in the doorway, his hat and field coat rain-dampened, suggesting he had followed the same route I had walked several hours before. He glanced at Steel and whispered, “How’s your friend?”
“Okay, I guess. What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to visit Leon Curtis. I stopped by to find you because I thought you might want to join us up on the isolation ward.”
I shuddered. “Just the mention of that place gives me the creeps. After what we went through - “
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted. “You and I have reason to fear the place, having recently faced death there. But we’re healthy again and we’ll be on the outside looking in.”
“I think I’ll stay here and keep an eye on John.”
“Oh, come on,” McKean said. “Your friend is in good hands. And he’s not too talkative, it seems to me. You’ll get more out of a visit with Leon. Where’s the intrepid medical reporter? You’ll want to be in attendance. You see, Kay Erwin agrees that Leon has come down with something potentially dangerous.”
“The Lost Souls disease?”
“Answer: yes, if you like that term. Whatever the name, it seems that something is seriously wrong with Leon. The parallels to Pete Whitehall are there and his condition has grown worse. Come on, Fin.”
McKean turned and stalked away and I hurried to follow him through the zigzagging hospital corridors. We took an elevator to the ninth floor, home of the Northwest Regional Infectious Disease Isolation Facility. Kay Erwin came out of her office when she saw us at the elevator landing. We went to the window wall that separates the isolation ward from the rest of the facility. Leon Curtis was in the nearest of six beds inside the windows. He lay with the bed back raised and pillows propping up his head, looking comfortable enough in a hospital gown. He greeted us with a feeble wave and a friendly smile. Since we had seen him last, the whites of his eyes had dramatically reddened and his eye sockets had sunk and showed hints of the purple coloration we had seen around Pete Whitehall’s eyes.
There are microphones and speakers in the window wall that allow communication without compromising the airtight seal. “How are you feeling?” McKean asked his friend.
“Okay. Headache’s gone.”
“High dose ibuprofen,” Erwin explained.
“I get so confused,” Curtis said. “I was lucky to make it here at all. Drove the wrong way on a one-way street.”
“Trouble operating machinery, just like Pete Whitehall,” McKean observed.
“I know,” Curtis replied.
“Furthering our discussion of the parchment,” McKean said, “I’ve gone over it in detail. It’s challenging. An archaic dialect of Castilian Spanish, with some peculiarities that complicate the translation.”
Curtis nodded. But he stared blankly, as if it were a strain to follow what was being said.
“The handwriting,” McKean went on, “in its time, probably would have been considered poor. And the spelling. I suspect the author had little writing skill and no access to a dictionary.”
Curtis made no response. Then his head twitched powerfully to the side. Afterward, he appeared dazed. He shook his head as if clearing mental cobwebs.
“That’s a new sign,” Erwin murmured. “Not quite sure what to make of it. Might be a petit mal seizure.”
“I recall seeing Pete Whitehall do that,” said McKean.
Kay scribbled on a chart she had brought from her office. McKean tugged at his chin with long fingers and looked thoughtfully through the glass at Curtis. “Returning to the manuscript,” he said a bit dispassionately, “I have confirmed your mention of almas perdidas, the Lost Souls disease. That’s definitely a part of the story.”
“Giving more weight to Gordon Steel’s threat,” I interjected.
“Perhaps,” McKean allowed. “But it may simply mean the manuscript and Gordon Steel are referencing the same superstition.”
Curtis had revived somewhat. “Superstition?” he murmured. “Steel said the garrison was cursed by a shaman called Devilfish. Devilfish prayed to Raven for a plague to punish the Spaniards for raping a Makah girl.”
McKean said, “I read the part about El Pez del Diablo, the Devilfish. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”
“Devilfish is the Makah word for octopus,” said Curtis. “They’re nasty creatures to hunt.”
“No doubt,” McKean concurred. “The Pacific octopus is the largest in the world, up to twenty-five feet across. With a beak that can cut a man’s arm off, it’s a devilfish for sure. But the story seems to reference a man by that name, not an animal. And in any case, devilfish is not one of the terms I’m having trouble with. It’s been translated into Spanish and therefore is easy to translate into English. But other terms are almost impossible to interpret. They may be misspellings or transliterations of Makah words, written as they sounded to a Spanish writer. They’re particularly thick in a passage describing a cure the shaman produced to save the last of the Spanish. I can sound the words out, but without knowledge of the Makah language, they have no meaning to me.”
“I had the same problem,” Curtis murmured. He lay back and closed his reddened eyes.
“Maybe Gordon Steel can help us read it,” McKean suggested.
“Lots of luck with that,” said Curtis. “He’s too bitter. And he lives like a hermit. I tried to find him once but I couldn’t locate him.”
“According to his so
n,” I said, “he lives in a longhouse on Spirit Cove.”
“Spirit Cove? Do you know where that is?” McKean asked Curtis.
“Not exactly.” Curtis rubbed his left eye deeply with a knuckle. “It’s hidden away somewhere near Cape Flattery. Not many Makahs even know where it is. Steel and some other traditionalists are renewing the ancient ways out there. No road. No electricity. No plumbing. Off the grid, so to speak.” He began rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of both hands. McKean knocked on the glass. Curtis stopped rubbing and looked at McKean with decidedly purplish, sunken eyes.
“How long have you been doing that?” McKean asked him.
“The eyes? They’ve been itching like mad since this morning.”
“What do you make of that?” McKean asked Erwin. “Are there other reports of eye-rubbing in your Neah Bay case histories?”
“All of them,” she said, observing Curtis carefully as he went back to rubbing his eyes. “Several cases mentioned itchy eyes as the first symptom.”
Curtis put his hands to his sides as if trying to keep them from his eyes by sheer willpower. He asked McKean drearily, “Do you think I’ll end up like Pete Whitehall?”
“Hopefully not,” McKean replied. “You’ve got a lot of medical support - and no bulldozer.”
Curtis turned his head and looked at us. “What about you two? You feeling anything?”
“No symptoms so far,” said McKean. “Right, Fin?”
I nodded.
“Your misfortune,” McKean said to Curtis, “was to have worked quite intimately with the coffin and its contents. And Pete Whitehall was the first to enter the crypt. Fin and I were relative latecomers.”
“You reached in the coffin and pulled out the sample,” I reminded McKean.
“Using proper sterile technique,” he replied. “I’m not concerned for myself, but you became quite intimate with the mud of the place. How have you been feeling, Fin?” He turned square with me and looked me in the face. “Your eyes don’t look red. Have they been itching?”
When Kay Erwin pressed near to join McKean in looking me over, I backed away. “Oh no you don’t! Neither one of you is getting me behind that glass wall again!”