‘It doesn’t matter what name evil goes under. It’s still evil.’
The woman turned around. Her expression was bright and fierce. ‘You think I’m evil? I’m doing the Lord’s work here, in spite of the burden that the Lord inflicted on me in my mother’s womb. I’m looking forward to the next life, sir, when I get my reward for spreading His Holy Word from one comer of the globe to the other. I’m looking forward to opening my eyes and finding that my legs and arms are straight and strong, and that my hair is long and soft and silky, and that I’m just as beautiful as any other woman who walked the earth.’
She took a deep, tortured breath. ‘My mother gave birth to twins. She had German measles when she was pregnant, and both twins were born weak and sickly. But one twin was so deformed that the midwife couldn’t believe that it was human, and that twin was me.
‘My mother had run away from my father when she first discovered she was pregnant and she tried to have us aborted. She was only fourteen and my father was thirty-five. He was a man of God but he was a tyrant by nature. His manly pride was wounded: no woman ever ran away from him. He had my mother hunted down like an animal by members of his congregation and it was our bad luck that they found her before she could have us flushed out of her.
‘When he first saw us twins in the hospital my father was horrified. He said we were the spawn of Satan, me especially. He wanted the doctors to smother me and throw my body in the incinerator, like an unwanted puppy. The doctors said they wouldn’t do that, but they wouldn’t feed me, either. But I survived. I survived for three days, and in the end my father had a vision that I was sent by God for some great purpose, and he ordered me nourished.
‘All the same, he insisted that nobody should know about me; that I should never be seen. I might have been sent for some great purpose, but all the same he thought I was something shameful and a punishment sent direct from Almighty God. And that’s the way I was brought up: in secret, behind blinds, without friends or family around me. My brother was christened Dennis and I was christened Evelyn, but my brother was always called by both of our names to remind him that he was a twin.’
She wheeled herself a little way away, out of the light, so that Conor could only see the white, tufted dome of her head, and not her face. ‘Dennis grew up like Father. A dedicated believer in the scriptures and the power of God. I was different. I wanted to find out how God had caused me so much suffering, and why. When I was thirteen years old I started to study science, and in particular I started to study viral infections, like the rubella virus that turned me into what I am.
‘Dennis was always devoted to me. Dennis believed what Father believed: that I was sent on earth for a purpose, that I had been deformed by a virus for a reason. Dennis brought the outside world into my room and showed me that I could make a difference to it, that I could change its history, as deformed as I was.
‘He studied science at college and he enrolled in a university course in microbiology, and he did that for me. He went to the classes and tape-recorded all the lectures while I stayed at home and wrote all of his theses and showed him how to do all of the lab work. He carried on with his Bible studies, of course. He was always Bible-hungry. But he lived my life for me, too, that’s how dedicated he was. He never forgot that he was Dennis Evelyn Branch.’
Conor didn’t say a word. He tugged at the straps holding his wrists but they were far too tight for him to pull himself free.
Evelyn Branch said, ‘We saw the world and we saw how corrupt it was and we decided that we were the ones who were chosen to change it. We declared war on atheism and false religions. I built some bombs and Dennis planted them. Then I showed him something else that I’d been interested in, too. Ways of making yourself invisible.’
‘You’re raving,’ said Conor.
‘No, I’m not, and you know I’m not. Sitting alone in my room I had dreamed for years of going outside into the streets and mixing with other people, so long as they couldn’t see me. That’s why I studied hypnotism, and all the other ways of affecting people’s perception. Hypnotism, and drugs like burundanga. I’m even working on a powder made of gallium and arsenic that can stop light dead in its tracks, the same way that fog does. If a man could coat himself in a powder like this, you simply wouldn’t be able to see him. An invisible man.
‘It was when I was studying hypnotism that I first came across the names of Hypnos and Hetti. I read about their technique, and I was able to teach Dennis some basic hypnotic induction, and that’s how he planted his bombs without anybody seeing him. It helped him in his sermons, too. He can virtually hypnotize an audience when he wants to, clinically hypnotize them, so that they’re powerless to leave the room.
‘But a few acts of religious terror weren’t enough. In fact they usually made things worse – whipped up blind hostility, and prejudice. Dennis wanted the whole world to see the true way to Heaven, and that’s how the idea of the Global Message Movement came into his head. And that’s how the idea of reviving the Spanish influenza came into my head.’
‘You don’t seriously believe that God would want you to do that!’
‘Yes, I do. My brother and I, we were chosen.’
‘But if you release this virus, millions of people are going to die. Millions!’
‘It’s the will of the Lord, Mr O’Neil.’
Dennis Branch came forward and laid a hand on his sister’s vulture-like shoulder. ‘Think it’s time we got this show on the road, don’t you, Evelyn?’
Evelyn nodded. ‘You’d better go through to the lab now, Magda. We don’t want you to catch Mr O’Neil’s little bug now, do we?’
Dennis stood over Conor and said, ‘I know this isn’t a voluntary sacrifice you’re making here, Mr O’Neil. But it’s a sacrifice that’s going to promote the spiritual well-being of the entire human race, and when the message of God has reached from pole to pole, and the Global Message Movement is the crown of all religion here on earth, I’m going to make sure that you’re remembered for ever, and honored for giving up your life.’
Conor said nothing. He found it hard to believe what was happening. It was only when Magda bent over and kissed his forehead that he realized that he was about to die.
Magda left, followed by Dennis. Three lab assistants came in through the double doors, all of them wearing protective suits and helmets. They carried a fourth, empty suit, and an aluminum box stenciled with a red skull-and-crossbones.
Two of them lifted Evelyn Branch from her wheelchair while the other slid her dangling legs into the bottom of the suit. They fastened the seals, locked on her helmet, and adjusted her airflow. Lying in front of them naked, Conor felt utterly vulnerable.
One of the assistants carefully laid the aluminum box in Evelyn’s lap, and then all three of them left and closed the doors behind them. Evelyn came whining back in her wheelchair. Inside the distorting bowl of her helmet, she looked more like a fairground freak than she had before. She unlocked the box, opened the lid, and brought out a tiny glass vial of clear liquid.
‘Spanish influenza virus, 1918 strain. As virulent as ever, I hope. I’ll be surprised if you last longer than forty-five minutes.’
She took out a hypodermic needle, pressed the plunger, and inserted the needle into the vial of virus. ‘You’ll feel a little bunged up at first, as if you’ve caught a headcold. Then you’ll start shivering and coughing and spitting up blood. After that you’ll be gasping for air, because your lungs will be filled up with fluid. I shouldn’t let it frighten you. It’s no worse than drowning, and at least you don’t have to get wet.’
She approached Conor with the hypodermic. She squeezed his left arm with her spidery fingers to make the veins stand out.
Conor said, ‘I guess it’s no good asking you not to do this.’
Evelyn lifted her eyes. ‘Are you a religious man, Mr O’Neil?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘You’re here, strapped to this table, about to die from the effects of one
of the most appalling viruses known to man, and yet you still believe in God?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Are you a Catholic, Mr O’Neil?’
Conor nodded.
Evelyn looked toward the observation window where Dennis Branch was standing, his forearm resting against the glass.
‘If I were to say to you that if you renounced your Catholicism here and now, and followed the teaching of the Global Message Movement, you could go free – what would you say to that?’
‘I’d say that you were lying.’
The point of the hypodermic needle was less than a half inch away from Conor’s bulging blue vein. ‘I’m not lying, Mr O’Neil. All you have to do is renounce the teaching of Rome, and pledge your allegiance to the ministry of the Global Message, and that’s it. No injection. You get up, you get dressed, you go home.’
‘Are you testing your virus or are you testing my faith?’
Evelyn Branch gave him a wide-eyed, beatific smile. ‘It looks like I could be testing both, doesn’t it?’
Conor closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he thought: What if I renounce my religion? There’s nothing to stop me from confessing my sin after this is all over, and asking for God’s forgiveness. God must understand what I’m facing here. I’m facing death – and not only my own death, but the likely death of millions of others. If I’m the only one who can save them, what right do I have to behave like a martyr? Better to fall from grace than to let so many die.
‘Well?’ asked Evelyn Branch. ‘What’s it to be?’
‘If I renounce my religion … if you let me go … who’s to say that you aren’t going to use somebody else as a guinea-pig?’
‘That’s irrelevant, at least as far as you’re concerned. This is your choice, nothing to do with anybody else. If you don’t embrace the Global Message Movement, then you’re going to die, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘All right, ‘said Conor; and his mouth felt as if it were full of ashes. ‘I embrace it.’
Dennis Branch banged the window in glee. Evelyn Branch said, just to make sure, ‘You embrace the Global Message Movement and you turn your back on the Roman Catholic Church?’
Conor was breathing so deeply now that he was hyperventilating. ‘Yes,’ he said, even though he knew in his heart that God would never forgive him for this.
Evelyn Branch didn’t take the needle away. She remained tense: one hand clutched tight around Conor’s upper arm. ‘Excellent test. Worked perfect, didn’t it? You’re a strong man, of very strong principles, I know that. But you’re prepared to abandon your faith in order to stay alive, and I can’t say that I blame you.
‘Dennis will be glad to know that devout Catholics are prepared to surrender their so-called beliefs so easily, in the face of death. Let’s hope it works with Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims, too.’
Conor stared through the window and knew that he had renounced his faith in vain. Dennis Branch had taken off his blue sunglasses and was staring back at him with his pink eyes wide open and his face filled with triumph. The world will fall before me. The world will turn its back on false religion, and follow me to God. And I shall lead you all to Heaven, every one.
‘I hope you go to Hell, both of you,’ said Conor.
Evelyn Branch squeezed Conor’s arm even tighter, and pushed the hypodermic needle up against his skin so that it was making an indentation.
Conor said, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, forgive me for having renounced my faith in you. In my heart I never did. Forgive me for my cowardice, O Lord. Forgive me all of my sins and trespasses. I love you, God, regardless.’
It was then that an extraordinary thing happened. Evelyn Branch’s hand began to shake, and then to shudder. She stared at Conor through her helmet and her eyes were bulging with strain. God, thought Conor, she’s having an epileptic seizure. But she wasn’t thrashing about or foaming at the mouth or choking. She was struggling with herself. She was trying to push the hypodermic plunger into Conor’s vein but for some reason she simply couldn’t.
‘What?’ she shouted at Conor, her voice muffled by her bio-helmet.
There was nothing else that Conor could do. He jerked at his straps – but they were far too strong. He saw Evelyn Branch lift the hypodermic away from his arm, and twist in her electric wheelchair. He heard Dennis’s tinny voice over the intercom, shouting, ‘Evelyn? Evelyn? What’s the matter, Evelyn?’
Evelyn lifted her head and her mouth was stretched wide open – like a woman trying to battle with every demon that had ever scorned her or humiliated her. She raised her left hand, protected in two layers of rubber gloves; and then she raised her right hand, with the hypodermic still in it, and pointed it toward the ball of her thumb.
‘Evelyn!’ screamed Dennis, through the intercom. ‘Evelyn, listen to me! What the hell are you trying to do there, Evelyn? Drop the syringe! Hear what I say? Drop the syringe and get yourself out of there, pronto!’
Evelyn ignored him, or didn’t even hear him. She sat tilted at an angle in her wheelchair. She looked as if she might have had a minor stroke – one eye closed, the tell-tale sign of apoplexy or a mental struggle so ferocious that it was threatening to drive her mad. Slowly, with quivering fingers, she moved the point of the hypodermic needle closer and closer to the ball of her thumb, until she was a millimeter away from pricking it.
‘You shouldn’t do this,’ said Conor. ‘If you so much as scratch yourself, that’s it. That’s the big tortilla. I don’t know what’s happening inside of your mind, but try to see what you’re doing.’
Evelyn stared at him. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘You’re a saint, after all. If I were you, I would tell me to stick this needle right in my thumb and God damn you to hell.’
‘Think what you’re doing,’ said Conor.
‘I’m doing what I’m told. When you’re told to do something, you have to do it, you know that. Unless you’re God, of course, or Dennis.’
‘Who told you what to do?’ Conor demanded.
Evelyn didn’t answer, but turned toward the observation window. Dennis was staring at her in horror; but behind him stood Magda, with a thin-lipped, satisfied smile. Shit, thought Conor. She hypnotized her. She always said that she was unequaled at post-hypnotic suggestion, and that’s what she must have done to Evelyn.
‘Don’t do it,’ said Conor. But almost in defiance, Evelyn slid the needle through the double layer of gloves that protected her thumb, so that a bead of dark red blood sprang out. She squeezed the syringe and the virus disappeared into her bloodstream. She continued to stare at Conor for almost fifteen seconds, her eyes wandering. Then her head dropped forward, and she collapsed.
‘Evelyn!’ wailed Dennis, beating his fists on the glass. The hypodermic dropped to the floor and rolled away. The three lab assistants hurriedly put on their helmets again and opened up the doors. They unstrapped Conor from the bed and one of them slapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Out! Quick as you can!’ Conor heaved himself onto the floor and an assistant helped him to limp barefoot out of the quarantine room. Magda was waiting for him. ‘I have your clothes here,’ she said. She laid her arms around his shoulders: after all, she was tall enough. She led him through to a small room at the back of the laboratory where his clothes had been tossed onto a chair.
He dressed, leaning against the wall to support himself. He felt weak and shivery, as if he had a pounding hangover. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ he whispered. ‘You made Evelyn prick herself.’
‘You think I could do a thing like that? Evelyn knows how dangerous that virus is. Maybe I could hypnotize somebody into eating a raw potato, thinking it’s an apple. But it isn’t so easy to hypnotize somebody into killing themselves.’
‘So what are you trying to tell me? That you didn’t stay here to save my life? That you came back here to work for Dennis Branch?’
‘No,’ said Magda. ‘I stayed here because I didn’t think you were ever coming back. If you disappeared, if
you were dead, what was the point of my going back to Oslo? I didn’t even stay for my revenge. Revenge is too much of a luxury. I stayed for my money, that’s all.’
‘Did you know about Evelyn?’
She shook her head. ‘Not until now. Not until I came back here. They’re a very strange pair.’
‘They’re not just strange, they’re maniacs. If I don’t stop them, they’re going to wipe out half the population of the world.’
‘You? How can you stop them? You’re not a police detective any more, are you? I saw you today and you were just an ordinary man with no clothes on. Besides, do you want to get yourself killed?’
They were still hoarsely whispering when Dennis Branch appeared in the doorway. He was breathing deeply and harshly, and he fixed Conor with a look of absolute hatred.
‘That’s my twin sister in there, Mr O’Neil! That’s my twin sister! You’re going to watch her get sick! You’re going to watch her die! You’re going to see what I’m going to do to the world, and then I’m going to kill you, too, with the same virus, and then you’re going to know what it feels like!’
‘You told Toralf that you were looking for a sword,’ said Conor. ‘A sword to cut down the unbelievers! Well, just you remember that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.’
Dennis said, ‘If you quote the Bible to me, Mr O’Neil, you’d better quote it right. Matthew chapter twenty-six verse fifty-two: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” And remember what else Matthew said. “He saved others, himself he cannot save.”’
Chapter 31
At first they thought that the virus might not have survived its eighty-year sleep in the snow. Evelyn lay on the bed in a black T-shirt and black drawstring pants, her globe-like head resting against the pillow, her eyes restless. She slept for two or three hours – a disturbed sleep, sweating and murmuring and waving her weakened arms in the air. Conor had been positioned in a hard plastic chair right in front of the window, his wrists tied together. He was so exhausted that he could hardly keep his eyes open, but Dennis kept viciously prodding him in the shoulder-blades and saying, ‘Watch! Watch, you bastard! That’s me dying in there, too! And soon it’s going to be you!’
Holy Terror Page 37