by Opal Carew
Confused, Drake lifted a hand to his neck, but didn’t feel anything unusual. Not that he’d actually feel a hickey, of course, if that’s really what it was. While both women had spent the better part of the night exploring his body with their mouths, they’d been more interested in the anatomy below his belt than above his collar.
Figuring he’d better see what Anne was talking about, he went to the restroom to check in the mirror and found an ugly, purple welt running along his neck. What the hell? He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, his eyes going wide when he saw the discoloration covering his chest and most of his stomach. It looked as if he’d been beaten with a damn baseball bat.
Alarmed, Drake left the office without even bothering to tell his secretary and went straight to the nearest emergency room. He had to wait almost two hours before someone examined him, but after one look at the rash, the doctor on call put him in isolation, then brought in a dermatologist and an infectious disease specialist.
Within an hour of being admitted, the purple discoloration had turned a sickly looking shade of gray and spread over most of his body. It didn’t hurt, but he was scared shitless anyway. Though the doctors tried their best to hide it as they went about taking blood and skin samples, he knew they were just as freaked out. They looked at him as if he was some kind of monster.
“Have you been involved in some type of industrial accident?” one of the doctors asked. The nametag on his lab coat read Meredith.
Drake frowned. “Industrial accident? No. Why? Do you think I came into contact with some kind of hazardous waste?”
The doctor shook his head as he wrote on his clipboard. “We’re not sure yet. We’re just collecting information at this stage, Mr. Parrish. Do you have any food allergies?”
“No.”
“Have you gone hiking or camping recently?”
“No.”
“Do you own some exotic pet, like a spider or snake?”
“No.”
Dr. Meredith looked at him over the rim of his glasses. “Have you come into contact with anything unusual recently?”
“Unusual?” Drake asked.
“Out of the ordinary,” the man explained.
Drake ground his jaw. “Yeah, I know what the word unusual means. And no, I haven’t. Not that I’m aware of.”
“Have you been out of the country recently?”
“No.”
The man scribbled something on the clipboard. “Have you been using any form of homemade laundry detergent?”
Did he look like the kind of weirdo who made his own detergent? Hell, he didn’t even do his own laundry. “No.”
“Have you been using any form of recreational drugs?”
Didn’t everyone sometimes? But not since he was an undergraduate in college. He shook his head. “No.”
Something about the way he said it must have made the doctor think he was lying because the man regarded him dubiously. “Mr. Parrish, I couldn’t care less about what you do in your free time. I’m trying to help you here. So, let’s try this again. Have you used any drugs recently?”
“No, nothing,” Drake said, then added, “Not since college.”
That must have satisfied the doctor because he moved on to the next question. “Okay, then. Have you recently had unprotected sex?”
“No.”
More scribbling. “Have you had sex with any species other than human?”
“What? Hell no!” Drake said. “What the fuck kind of question is that?”
The doctor didn’t reply, but merely wrote down Drake’s answer. “Do you have any reason to believe someone might be trying to poison you?”
Drake hesitated a moment before answering. He wasn’t so sure about that one. He worked on Wall Street, which didn’t make him a great human being in some people’s minds. And most of his coworkers sure as hell didn’t appreciate his meteoric rise up the ladder. But for the most part, he was known for simply making a lot of people very rich, so he seriously doubted anyone would want to poison him.
He shook his head. “No.”
Drake could tell by the way Dr. Meredith looked at him he didn’t believe any of Drake’s answers, and that annoyed the hell out of him. But he was too terrified by what was happening to him to be angry with the man for long, especially since they moved him to a quarantine room in a separate wing of the hospital. He got even more concerned when the doctors came in wearing biohazard suits. What the hell was going on? Was he contagious?
The doctors wouldn’t answer his questions, though. They just kept telling him to relax and that everything was going to be fine. He didn’t believe them, not after overhearing them talking among themselves out in the hallway when they thought he couldn’t hear.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” one of the doctors said.
“At first I thought it was some aggressive form of leprosy,” another muttered. “But this is so much worse than that. His entire left arm is completely dead, no blood flow at all, and yet he’s still able to move it. It’s unbelievable. And did you see what happened when I took that last skin sample? He actually jumped. That shouldn’t even be possible. Hell, as badly decayed as that arm is, I keep expecting it to fall off any minute.”
“It won’t get the chance.” The first doctor again. “At the rate this thing is spreading, it’s going to reach his heart soon. I don’t care what you say about his arm, there’s no way he can live once it does that. Best case, he’ll make it until morning, but I’m betting he’ll be dead before midnight.”
Drake’s blood went cold at the words. Oh, God. He was going to die. He swallowed hard, struggling to breathe with the sudden crushing weight on his chest.
He wanted to call someone to stay with him so he wouldn’t have to be alone, but then he realized there was no one to call. His parents had passed away a little while after he’d moved to New York and he was never particularly close to his brother and sister, so he hadn’t kept in touch with either of them. Come to think of it, he didn’t even have their phone numbers. That left his coworkers. He wasn’t close to any of them, either. The senior management only liked him for the money he brought in and his fellow analysts pretty much despised him. Even his secretary thought he was a pig. And while he slept with a lot of women, none of them cared about him enough to sit by his bedside.
It struck him then how lousy he was at interpersonal relationships. Hell, he was lousy at being a human being. He’d been in New York for more than two years and hadn’t made a single real friend. That was a sad realization. But it was too late to change anything now. So instead, he lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling, regretting the things he hadn’t done and preparing himself for the inevitable.
The waiting quickly became unbearable, however. He desperately wanted to slip into a peaceful sleep so he wouldn’t have to think about what was happening to him, but every time he closed his eyes, visions of the orderlies coming to take his decaying body away for disposal while he was still alive made him jerk awake. So instead, all he did was lie there and wait for his body to slowly die around him. He lifted his arm, cringing at the blackened skin. Shit, he looked horrible. Like he was rotting from the inside out. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Almost midnight. If the doctors were right, it wouldn’t be too much longer. At least he wasn’t in pain. He was thankful for that.
By five the next morning, however, he was still alive and kicking, even though the doctors couldn’t find a heartbeat. That disturbed Drake, but not as much as learning his face was now as black and disgusting as the rest of his body. He knew it was bad when a cute, blonde nurse took one look at him and ran out of the room with her hand over her mouth as if she was going to be sick. Shit. Okay, he’d had enough. As much as he didn’t want to die, he wished his body would get it over with already.
But two hours later, whatever disease had stricken him disappeared in the span of a few minutes and his skin returned to its normal, healthy color. When the doctors came in to check on him,
though, they were even more alarmed than before. Apparently, they could understand a person dying from some exotic, unknown disease, but they couldn’t puzzle out how he’d made such a miraculous recovery.
They wanted to keep him for observation so they could run more tests and call in more experts, but Drake shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “I’ve been poked and prodded enough.”
“I’m sure you have,” Dr. Meredith said. “But you really should stay so we can do some more tests.”
Drake folded his arms across his chest and fixed the man with a hard look. “Am I contagious?”
“No, we don’t think so, but—”
“Then I’m leaving.”
Effectively putting an end to the conversation, Drake got dressed and went back to his office at Graystone and Burke. To his surprise, no one at the investment firm even noticed he’d left early the day before.
“Your suit is wrinkled,” was all his secretary said before she went over his calendar for the day.
Determined to forget the horrific episode ever happened, Drake buried himself in his work. Four days later, however, the skin on his right leg started to tingle during a meeting with some extremely wealthy investors from South America. He discreetly pulled up the cuff of his pant leg and was horrified to see the skin was a sickly grayish color. His pulse started to race. Shit, it was happening again.
Walking out right in the middle of the meeting, he jumped in a cab and headed to the emergency room again. By the time he got there, his whole leg was black. The color spread over half his body within a few hours and the doctors still couldn’t figure out what was causing it. They took a hundred blood samples and performed every test they could think of, then called in their colleagues from other parts of the city to take part in the circus that was becoming his life. Somewhere along the way, they had stopped treating him like a person. Instead, he was just some curiosity to oooh and aaah over. He felt like a fucking sideshow attraction.
That night, as if by magic, the strange discoloration disappeared of its own accord just as it had the first time. Drake left the hospital the moment he was back to normal. In the cab ride to his loft in the Financial District, he promised himself if it happened again, he wasn’t going back to the emergency room—no matter how disgusting he looked. The doctors couldn’t do anything to help him and seeing the look of revulsion on their faces was worse than his fear of whatever disease he had contracted.
Things went steadily downhill in the weeks after that. He had to leave work whenever the condition flared up, which happened frequently and without warning. Sometimes it lasted a few hours, other times it lasted for days. Sometimes the discoloration affected only a small part of his body, other times it covered him from head to foot and got so nasty it was hard to even look at himself in the mirror. Since he’d decided not to go back to the hospital, he had no choice but to lock himself in his overpriced loft each time and pray it would go away as it had before.
He missed a lot of work because of his condition and after two months of unexplained absences for which he couldn’t even give them proof he was sick since he wouldn’t go back to the hospital, his superiors at Graystone and Burke finally had enough and fired him. The way they figured it, if he wasn’t in his office, he wasn’t making them money, and if he wasn’t making them money, he wasn’t of any use to them. Drake supposed he couldn’t blame them. If he were in charge, he’d fire his ass, too.
For the first few weeks after getting canned from Graystone and Burke, Drake hid in his loft, afraid to even go to the coffee shop down the street for fear he’d turn gray and moldy. There were some days he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go on living, much less get out of bed. But he was too much of a coward to end it.
The worst part was going without female companionship. Oh, who the hell was he kidding? The worst part was going without sex. He was used to sleeping with three or four different women a week and being forced to go cold turkey was absolute hell. But as much as he hated going without sex, he couldn’t take the chance he’d turn right in the middle of a sack session.
After a month of staring blankly at the television, drinking way too much and living like a pig, he finally pulled out of his funk and convinced himself he had to at least try to beat whatever it was that had taken over his life.
The first thing he did was research his condition on the internet. To his consternation, he couldn’t find anything even remotely close to his kind of problem. Apparently, he was the only person in the world—or at least the only one with an internet connection—who had an issue with random parts of his body dying whenever they felt like it. Next he joined several medical chat loops, but he didn’t learn anything from those, either. When he described his condition to the medical personnel hosting the sites, they thought he was making the whole thing up and insisted what he was talking about was medically impossible. Then they accused him of trying to get attention and banned him from their groups. Nothing like getting tossed from a psoriasis chat loop to make you feel good about yourself, Drake thought dryly.
Unwilling to give up, he finally looked into alternative medicine. Unfortunately, there was no way to do that over the net, which meant he had to leave his loft. That proved to be tricky, but after three months of dealing with his condition, he’d started recognizing when an episode was coming on. It was usually preceded by a mild tingling on some part of his body that slowly turned into an itch just before the skin started to discolor. Sometimes, the process could take a few hours, but never less than forty-five minutes. Which meant he had to constantly be on guard and rush back home any time he felt the slightest tingle. It was a nerve-racking way to live, but it was the only way he could get out and try to find help.
So, he waited for those periods in between episodes to visit different nontraditional medical practioners all over the city. He looked into anything and everything he’d been able to find—holistic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Indian Ayurveda balancing, acupuncture, acupressure, healing stones, guided imagery, even reflexology. While some of the people were probably charlatans, others seemed as if they genuinely wanted to help him. Until he went into greater detail concerning his symptoms. Then even the most compassionate ones usually threw him out. He didn’t hold it against them. He terrified himself sometimes.
Drake was walking along Flatbush Avenue through Little Haiti in Brooklyn after yet another such discouraging visit when an unusual storefront caught his attention. He couldn’t help stopping to gawk at the macabre collection of skulls, candles and eerie looking dolls in the window. The sign over the door read simply Madam Bijou’s.
He stood there a moment, debating whether to go in. What the hell? He’d tried everything else. Voodoo spells couldn’t be any crazier than holding healing crystals to his forehead.
Dimly lit, the shop smelled of burning incense inside and had just enough of a creepy vibe to make him rethink his decision. But then he remembered how desperate he was.
There wasn’t anyone at the front counter, so he wandered around looking at the various items for sale. Never having been in a Voodoo shop before, he didn’t know what to expect, but he was a little weirded out by what he saw. Damn, there was some strange shit in here. In addition to the statues and candles lining the shelves, there were colorful little bags filled with stuff that smelled dreadful, bottles of potions and oils, more incense than a drug den, rolled-up pieces of parchment claiming to bring a person their every desire, and of course the requisite Voodoo dolls.
Drake had just picked up one of the cloth dolls to take a closer look at it when a young, black girl came out from behind a curtain at the back of the shop. No more than eighteen, she had long, wavy hair and eyes so gold in color they were almost mesmerizing.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Before Drake could answer, the curtain behind her parted again and an old woman stepped out. Tall and reed thin, she reminded him of the ancient crone who’d stormed into his office so many weeks ago,
except her face was less lined with wrinkles and her dark eyes were a hell of a lot more kind. Around her neck, she wore an open-work pendant shaped like a heart with one crystal in the middle of it and another dangling below.
The old woman gazed at him for so long in silence he wondered if his skin had suddenly started to turn that sickly gray color again. After a moment, she leaned close to the younger girl to whisper something in her ear. Whatever the old woman said must have taken the girl by surprise because her gold eyes widened in amazement. The old woman whispered something else to the girl then. She frowned and shook her head vigorously, but the older woman simply pointed at the curtain with a bony finger. The girl opened her mouth to argue, but snapped it shut again when the old woman gave her a stern look. Glaring at the older woman, she turned on her heel and disappeared through the curtain into the back of the shop.
Abruptly realizing he still had the Voodoo doll in his hand, Drake quickly set it down on the table. He didn’t want the woman thinking he was interested in buying it.
The old woman turned to regard him with shrewd eyes. “Someone done be puttin’ a bad hate on you, boy. Got you livin’ near the Other Side, boy. What di’ you be doin’ to earn tha’ hate?”
The knowing look in her dark eyes chilled him almost as much as her words and he couldn’t suppress a shiver. “This was a mistake,” he mumbled.
Eager to get out of there as fast as he could, he turned to go, but her next words stopped him in his tracks.
“Where you be goin’, dead boy? You got someplace you dyin’ to be?”
She laughed as if she found her own words hilarious. Her cackle made him think she might be insane, but after what she said, it was impossible for him to simply walk out. His heart pounded at the possibility someone might actually know what was happening to him.
He walked back over to where she stood. “You know what’s wrong with me, don’t you?”
She inclined her head, but said nothing.