The White Devil

by Justin Evans

  “To destroy him,” Andrew repeated. “He means he will kill his rival.” Andrew’s eyes leapt to Persephone.

  “As I said. Hell on wheels.”

  Persephone coughed. It was a long, itchy, persistent cough, and it interrupted the discussion.

  Andrew watched her, a sudden and unnamed suspicion aroused in him. She remained pale, withdrawn.

  Stalking.

  Andrew had said it, trying to be the clever student, to impress the teacher. But he had unwittingly supplied his own answer. With a crash of misery, he realized his vision of Harness from the night before might not have been a dream at all.

  “Are you feeling okay, Persephone?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Are you sure? How does your chest feel?”

  “My chest?”

  The group looked at Andrew, puzzled by his question.

  “Your cough,” he said, defensively.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” she said crossly.

  “I’m worried about you. You don’t look well.”

  “You’re being silly.”

  “Shall I go on?” Dr. Cade asked.

  Reluctantly, Andrew nodded. But his eyes kept finding Persephone, watching her for any change, while he listened to Dr. Cade’s remarks.

  “So here,” boomed Dr. Cade, “is the last letter of this extraordinary series, dated June 1809, just a month before Byron sets sail for Portugal. The most passionate of all. If that’s the right word. Dearest—You are going to SD. Not certain what that is. SD? Sounds like a place-name, but I could find no meaningful reference. HE is coming with you. I know. H wrote me and told me all. I will summon all my remaining strength. I am coming to you. There, where we once met, I will find you, destroy him, and all will be well. You said it very well before.” Cade nodded to Andrew. “He is a stalker. A nineteenth-century stalker. For all Byron’s flaws, you can see why he avoided Harness. The young fellow’s jealousy literally drove him mad. I will find you, destroy him . . . doesn’t leave much room for metaphorical interpretation. It’s a death threat.” Cade dropped his reading glasses onto the table. “Still, one is left with many questions. Who was this other lover? And more practically, how did these letters end up all together, at Harrow School? And what is SD?”

  Persephone murmured weakly.

  “What’s that?” demanded Dr. Cade, loudly, without any sympathy.

  Persephone coughed again.

  “Water,” said Andrew. “Is there something here for her to drink?”

  “Upstairs. The fountain,” said Lena.

  Andrew ran up the flights of stairs, panic pulsing in his mind. He felt, for a moment, insane. Persephone was sick. He perceived it. The disease was taking her over at this very moment. His hands trembled as he filled a paper cup of water in the bustling library. He carried it carefully downstairs, back to the consultation room. Yes, she was definitely pale. Yet all these people were sitting around calmly. Of course they are. They didn’t see what you saw, last night, he told himself. He handed the water to Persephone. She drank the water gratefully.

  “Speech Day,” she croaked at last.

  “Speech Day?” Dr. Cade repeated. He tossed back his head, as if to search for the words’ meaning on the ceiling.

  “Speech Day. At Harrow,” Andrew explained, suddenly understanding. “It’s kind of like graduation, at the end of the school year. A bunch of seniors . . . Sixth Formers . . . memorize speeches and deliver them. Byron and Harness might have met on that weekend like . . . like old friends meeting at Alumni Day.”

  “You’re going to SD.” Cade repeated the words to himself. “To Speech Day. Yes, of course. It’s in the summer, is it?”

  “Early June. So they would have got together at Harrow, on Speech Day, in 1809,” Andrew said, putting the pieces together. “That must be where they exchanged the letters.”

  “That meeting would have been a real prizefight,” Cade declared, holding the letters. “After all these.”

  Lena protested. “But these are only Harness’s letters, I’m certain. One handwriting only.”

  “Quite right. There was no exchange of letters. Byron returned all of Harness’s letters,” Cade exclaimed. “They were toxic. Who would want to keep them?” He grew more animated. “And it explains the receptacle. He would not exactly tie these with a ribbon. And he would not want his Harrow friends to see them. So he returned the letters . . . in a biscuit box. Probably one he picked up in a local shop, or near his lodgings at Harrow. A hastily obtained container. Lucky for us—airtight!” Cade grinned, delighted. “This is good! Very good!”

  Cade opened his mouth to ask more questions. But this time he was unable to speak because Persephone coughed again, loudly. The cough perpetuated itself; hacking; scratching; on and on, as the lungs searched for, but never found, the blockage. It bent Persephone double.

  Andrew’s stomach fell. Here it was. He had been both right and wrong. Right that he had seen the vision, and known, instinctively, that Harness had infected Persephone. Wrong that he had not acted upon it immediately.

  The faces of his companions instinctively screwed up in disgust and sympathy—then finally—finally!—Persephone’s cough seemed to have found the blockage; something caught, at last; and she—with a grimace; and not having time to grab a handkerchief—delivered some liquid into her palm. She held up her hand and looked at it.

  Agatha spoke first.

  “Oh my God! Persephone!” she shrieked. “It’s blood! Andrew! Persephone just spit up blood!”

  Andrew leapt to Persephone’s side, both he and Agatha immediately bending over her, staring at the hand Persephone had extended. She now withdrew her hand, trying to hide it. A puddle of blood, bright red and gleaming.

  “It’s nothing,” she said weakly. “Stop worrying.”

  “We are worrying,” protested Agatha. “You’ve been looking funny all morning. We’d better go. We’ll go to my room and you can lie down. I’m sorry, Dr. Cade.” They coaxed Persephone from her seat. Professor Cade remained seated, disappointed; his audience was breaking up. Lena Rasmussen whispered to him—I need these back, sir—and took the precious letters from him, tucked them back in the box, and disappeared into the rolling stacks again. Then the group became a chaotic scrum, circling around Persephone, moving her through the passage between the high shelves back to the narrow staircase.

  “I’m taking her back to London,” Andrew said.

  “London?” protested Agatha.

  “She needs to go to the hospital.”

  Andrew wrapped his arms around Persephone and led her up the narrow stairs, through the student library, where they drew stares, and out under the silent colonnade. Andrew and Agatha moved their friend back through the courtyard, retracing their steps toward Trinity Street. It suddenly seemed a long way to walk.

  “Are you really leaving?” exclaimed Dr. Cade, who had followed them out.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Agatha called over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she added, to Lena.

  Andrew heard Cade boom out after them: “I intend to publish this you know!” Then, he added: “How can I contact you?” They didn’t answer. As they reached the portal on the far side of the courtyard, he called out again, with a desperate note: “Do you want credit for the discovery?”

  Andrew kept his arms wrapped around Persephone. He kept leaning over to check her face, check the pallor there, check for the shallowness of her breathing, check for things that made her look like Roddy sucking air out of that black punching bag for dear life, or like Theo don’t think it like Theo lying cold and stiff and vaguely purple with gravel on his eyebrows. Agatha peppered him with scolding counsel there’s an infirmary we can be there in ten minutes but he ignored this. He knew what he needed to do.

  HE HALF GUIDED Persephone, half carried her, through those streets they had dashed through the night before. Now the route back to the train seemed endless. A market square, crowded, but no one offering to help. It’s okay, I know whe
re to take you, he told her. You’re overreacting, she murmured, then began another attack of heaving coughs that bent her double right there in the street, people giving them a wide berth, disgusted, like they were some degenerate pair—druggies, needles, HIV! It’s like people knew, could sense symptoms that lay outside the normal curve of colds and coughs. Did you get blood again? he asked desperately. I don’t think so, she answered.

  At last they reached the train station. He left her on a bench with Agatha—who had stopped protesting a while back, and now merely followed and hovered—as he ran in to check the timetables. The next train left at 12:55. It was now 11:57. Nearly an hour. He choked with anguish. He could not wait an hour. He ran back outside. Persephone remained upright—thank goodness—and had resumed that self-sustaining, self-protecting posture, hands gripped together, shoulders hunched, eyes shut and focused inward. But her face had gone the same cheesy pallor

  Know what caseosis is? Dr. Minos had said When your lungs turn to cheese

  that Roddy’s had. Andrew fought off panic. He needed to think. He pressed his eyes shut.

  When he opened them, he saw a taxi stand.

  He ran up to one of them, a sleek grey economy car, and leaned into the open driver’s-side window.

  “I’m going to London,” he said.

  The driver was a slim guy, young, with an angular, Eastern European squint. He gave Andrew a dubious grimace. “That’ll cost you a hundred quid.”

  “Do you take credit cards?”

  He did.

  Andrew ran back to the bench, gingerly eased Persephone up, across the sidewalk, and into the backseat of the taxi.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Agatha.

  “I’m taking her to a hospital in London. They specialize in . . .”

  “In what, Andrew? Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “She has tuberculosis.”

  “Tuberculosis?” she cried. “How . . . how do you know?”

  “It’s related to what we talked about with Vivek,” he said. “Long story. I’ll call you later. I promise.”

  They said quick goodbyes and the taxi nosed its way out of Cambridge, Andrew willing the traffic to part. He waited the trillion years required for his mobile browser to load a thumbed search for “Royal Tredway London.” He gave the driver the address. As the car moved into the flow and speed of the highway, he leaned back at last, and Persephone tucked into him, wrapping her arms around his forearm. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  “You would be well, for starters,” he said.

  “No,” she protested.

  “I know what’s happening,” he told her. “Harness is infecting people. But not randomly.”

  “Then how? Why?”

  “I . . .” Andrew looked at her pale face. A blood spot still stained her lower lip. His heart crumpled in pity. “You should rest.”

  “I want to know, Andrew. You can’t keep it from me.”

  “Last night . . . I saw Harness. In our room.”

  Persephone’s face fell. “The ghost? Here?”

  “He infected you. On purpose.” Her expression flickered with doubt, then fear. Andrew continued. “He’s jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Remember what the letter said? I will destroy him, and all will be well. He thinks I’m Byron. And anybody I get close to . . . he’s infecting. That’s how Theo died.”

  Persephone sat up. “Theo?” she asked. “Roddy?”

  “I spent time with them,” Andrew confirmed. “Harness is looking for male lovers. Competition. That rival he was obsessed with.”

  “I’m not a man!” she said indignantly.

  “I know.” Andrew managed to grin. “But . . . ,” he said, suddenly realizing, “your hair.”

  She touched her short locks. Their matching haircuts. “Oh, God.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked gently. “You seem a little . . .”

  He was going to say better. Their conversation—so ordinary, in a way—had given him a moment of hope, or at least a moment of denial. But he should have kept his mouth shut, he scolded himself. As soon as the word better formed in his throat, Persephone started a wild hacking, so uncontrollable her eyes opened wide in panic, as if some foreign being were trying to fight its way out of her body; she flung her hand to her mouth to cover it, but it came up anyway, spattered through her fingers and onto Andrew, his jacket. Blood.

  two cupfuls

  “Oh my God!” he cried. He was sticky with it. Like being struck by a water balloon.

  “What is it?” she asked, terrified, even though it was obvious; it dripped from her hand; it coated her lips.

  “What’s going on back there?” demanded the driver.

  “Please just hurry,” urged Andrew. “Please.”

  19

  All Will Be Well

  THE EMERGENCY ROOM in Royal Tredway teemed with bodies today; seasonal, explained the triage nurse grumpily. General practitioners get overloaded with bronchitis and walking pneumonia and send them to us—so we get overloaded. Andrew swiftly introduced the code words coughed up blood to earn her attention. He then followed up with Our school was visited by the Health Protection Agency, they’re afraid of a TB outbreak, in order to jolt her from her seat. She moved into the corridor behind the triage room, where she and another nurse conferred; the words Dr. Minos were spoken, and the triage nurse came back with instructions to place a mask over Persephone’s face. She took them to one of the side treatment rooms until Dr. Minos arrived. The nurse eyed the bloodstains on Andrew’s jacket and trousers warily, and helped Persephone change to a gown.

  “I’ll go fetch the doctor. Please do not leave this room,” admonished the nurse. Then she departed.

  Andrew and Persephone sat in silence a moment. Persephone sat on the examining table, leaning against the wall.

  “How are you feeling?” Andrew asked for the fiftieth time since they left Cambridge. A part of him stupidly hoped she might leap to her feet, wink, and chirp, All better now.

  “Chest hurts.” She winced.

  They sat silently again, this time for a long while. Persephone coughed. It seemed to pass at first. Then she coughed some more. More blood. This was taking on the feeling of a nightmare. It stained her white face mask. They peeled it off her, gingerly, as if the blood were a toxin. Andrew disobeyed the order to stay in the room, bursting out of the doors to call for help. The triage nurse returned, and seeing Persephone’s state, moved quickly to clean her up. Andrew felt useless, miserable. His cell phone buzzed, informing him he had voicemail. He looked at the screen. He had three, in fact. This could not be good. Despite the abundant warnings not to use mobile phones in the emergency room, Andrew furtively placed the phone to his ear.

  Andrew, it’s Piers. I’m in your room . . . and it’s empty. Ring me.

  The second was the same, only Fawkes’s voice was half an octave higher.

  Andrew . . . where are you? It’s Sunday night. Contact me. Please. As soon as you can.

  The third had a graver tone:

  Andrew, it’s Piers. Monday. The story about Roddy is all over the school. People know it’s tuberculosis. Father Peter is away, damn him. You’re the only one who can help with the ghost and all this turmoil. I’m covering for you in the hopes that you’re at Trinity and finding out something good. We’re nearly out of time. Come back!

  Andrew pulled the phone from his ear in a daze. The nurse had eased Persephone back onto the examining table. The girl had wilted, her face totally drained of beauty or humor.

  In that instant, Dr. Minos entered, with his shiny pate and his heavy-lashed eyes. Andrew snapped his phone shut. The doctor approached Persephone without even a glance at Andrew, strapped his own face mask on, took hers off, and began asking questions in a low, soothing voice. He pressed his stethoscope to Persephone’s chest. Dr. Minos frowned. He seemed to have found what he was looking for, too quickly. He gave a long command to the
nurse. She nodded and scampered off.

  Dr. Minos turned to Andrew.

  “Almost didn’t recognize you without your uniform,” he said. “You were in here yesterday. For the TB tests.”

  “Hi.”

  “I suppose you saw the signs about mobile phone use,” the doctor said. “But the rules don’t seem to apply to you, do they?”

  Andrew’s heart sank.

  “This one your girlfriend?” the doctor said.

  Andrew hesitated. He had the feeling anything he said would incriminate him.

  “As I remember it, you were supposed to be back at your school, not seeing anyone, not going anywhere. Yet here you are in central London with another sick friend. I told you yesterday, didn’t I? About involuntary confinement?” The doctor’s eyes blazed. “I told you if you didn’t listen to what I said, I would put you in isolation.” Andrew’s eyes widened. “Well, I think you’ve met my criteria.” The doctor’s words were bitten off in suppressed anger. He nodded to Persephone. “She’s in bad shape.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re a doctor now, are you? Let me see your arm.” Before Andrew could move, the doctor stepped close, to corner him. “Take your jacket off.” He did. “Roll up your sleeve.”

  Dr. Minos held Andrew’s wrist tightly and rubbed the spot where Andrew had received the injection the day before. The doctor looked at Andrew in surprise.

  “What?” Andrew demanded. “Is it bad?”

  “Nothing,” said the doctor, puzzled. “A positive test creates a raised bump. You’re smooth.” He frowned. “Doesn’t matter. We get false negatives in fifteen percent of cases. And I’ve got your bloods.” He glared at Andrew. “I’ll keep you anyway. As soon as we get her settled, I’ll start the paperwork. You stay right here.”