She started the Prius’s engine and switched on the windshield wipers. It was then that she saw that Brian Grandier appeared to be talking to a group of maybe half-a-dozen people, who were clustered just outside the portico in the pouring rain. At first she thought they were all wearing black hooded raincoats, but after the windshield wipers had squeaked backward and forward three or four times she saw them more clearly.
Maybe their appearance here was only a coincidence. In fact, she thought it must be, but all the same she felt a prickling of apprehension in her wrists and down her back.
They were nuns – and not only that, their faces were all hidden by black veils draped over their heads, exactly like the foul-mouthed nun who had materialized in the morgue when she’d gone to look at Mary Stephens’ body.
Anna sat in her car staring at them for almost half a minute, but then Brian Grandier turned around and looked in her direction. He was obviously wondering why she had started up her engine but not left yet.
At the same moment, her cellphone jangled, so loudly that it startled her. She always had the ringtone set on top volume because she was in the habit of leaving her cell in other rooms, both at home and at work.
It was Epiphany. ‘Professor? I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’
‘No, no, it’s fine. I’m all through here, and I’m just about to leave.’
‘It’s the Meramac School virus.’
‘OK … how is it responding to the tyranivir?’
‘That’s why I’m calling. Yesterday I thought we might have it licked, but all the rats we tested died overnight. I ran a couple more experiments, and the virus has mutated – now tyranivir doesn’t appear to have any effect on it at all.’
‘Shit,’ said Anna. The rain was easing off now, and she could see Brian Grandier and the nuns entering the chapel’s reception area through the sliding glass doors.
‘There’s one really interesting thing, though,’ said Epiphany. ‘I was running a comparison test, and I mixed one of the mutated Meramac School viruses with some of the viruses that I hadn’t yet exposed to tyranivir … so they hadn’t mutated. Guess what happened?’
‘Epiphany, I’m waiting for you to tell me.’ Brian Grandier and the nuns had all disappeared now, and Anna was just anxious to get back to the hospital.
‘The mutated virus attacked all of the non-mutated viruses. Destroyed them, broke them all apart, completely disassembled them.’
‘Now that is interesting,’ said Anna. She checked her wristwatch. ‘Listen, I’ll be back in the lab in twenty-five minutes. You can give me a repeat performance then.’
She drove out of the funeral chapel’s front entrance and headed back toward the city. As she joined Interstate 44, heading north-east, a watery sun appeared behind the clouds and the surface of the highway gleamed so brightly that she had to put on her Ray-Bans.
Back in the laboratory, Epiphany repeated her previous test, and Anna sat watching it on her microscope’s display screen. She could see how much the Meramac School virus had mutated to became resistant to the antiviral drug tyranivir. In appearance, it changed from green to purple, and its burr-like surface grew scores more prickles.
She could also see that in its mutated form, it not only continued to attack the cells of its human host, but it also turned on other Meramac virus cells which had not yet been exposed to tyranivir and so hadn’t mutated. It tore so many holes in their nucleotide structure that they blew apart, like bright green planets exploding in micro-miniature.
She watched the cells bursting apart again and again, and then she sat back and said, ‘That’s amazing. It’s like a child growing up and killing its own siblings. In some ways it’s like the work they’ve been doing at Johns Hopkins – trying to get the DNA repair enzyme to tear the HIV virus apart.’
She climbed off her stool and went across the laboratory to pick up the cup of coffee she had left on her desk. It had gone cold now, and when she sipped it she pulled a face, but she finished it off anyway. She needed the caffeine.
‘Of course, the difference is that the DNA repair enzyme is completely benign – while this mutated Meramac School virus – wow. Just look at it. It becomes more and more aggressive with everything we throw at it. OK – it kills off all of the previous versions of itself, but what are we left with? A mutated version that’s a hundred times more virulent. It’s no good finding a cure if the cure is more dangerous than the sickness it’s supposed to be curing.’
She watched more viruses exploding, and then she said, ‘It’s pretty damned obvious, isn’t it? What we have to do now is find a mutated form of this virus that can destroy this mutated form, but which in turn isn’t harmful to humans.’
‘Maybe that’s too much to ask,’ said Epiphany.
‘Come on, Epiphany, you know my motto. “If you can imagine it, you can make it happen.”’
‘I don’t know. I’m not so sure that’s true. I used to imagine that Jason Derulo knocked on my door, saying that he wanted to take me out on a date.’
Anna shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know who that is.’
‘He’s a singer. He’s so cute. And he can dance! He can stand on his head without supporting himself with his hands.’
‘Sometimes I feel like I’m doing that all day, every day.’
That afternoon Henry Rutgers came down to Anna’s laboratory with a Styrofoam tray of samples and a thick blue plastic folder.
‘I’ve run preliminary tests on all three deceased,’ he told her, lifting out their individual files one by one. ‘John Patrick Bridges, Mary Stephens and – here, last but not least – your David.’
‘So, did you found anything?’
‘Oh, I found something all right. All three of them were infected by what looks like a retrovirus.’
‘But?’ said Anna. ‘I definitely sense a “but”.’
‘You certainly do. Quite frankly, it’s like no virus I’ve ever come across before. In fact, if my readings are correct, its behavior is quite bizarre. That’s why I’ve brought down these samples. I’d like you to run some tests on it, too – see if you agree with me.’
‘In what way “bizarre”?’ Anna asked him. She was beginning to feel deeply tired now. Arranging David’s funeral had emotionally drained her much more than she had expected. She had hoped that doing something practical about his death would help her to come to terms with losing him so suddenly, and to deal with the symptoms of shock, but she had hardly been able to think about anything else all day. She kept visualizing the Grandier Funeral Chapel, with its dark-brown brick, and Brian Grandier standing outside talking to those nuns, and the rain streaming down her windshield as if it were trying to hide them from sight.
She had the feeling that something strange and threatening was happening in her life, but she couldn’t work out what it was. When she was a child she had seen demons’ faces in her bedroom wallpaper, but when she looked at the wallpaper more closely the faces had been nothing but rose-petals. The events of the past two days had given her the same kind of uncertainty. Maybe the artist who’d designed the wallpaper had deliberately hidden the demons’ faces in the flowers, just like the nuns were giving her a message that she couldn’t yet decipher.
‘I’ll tell you what’s so goddamned bizarre about it,’ said Doctor Rutgers. ‘It’s picky.’
‘“Picky”?’ What do you mean by that?’
‘Most viruses will invade any host cell, regardless of who the host is, and I’m talking about ethnic origin here. Viruses don’t usually care if you’re black, white, Chinese or whatever. But not this little piggy. Oh, no. I carried out a series of control tests on host cells of five different ethnic origins, and it simply ignored the cells of anyone who was anything other than white, although it did infect a small percentage of Hispanics.’
‘That is bizarre.’
‘Wait, there’s more. Not only did this virus ignore the cells of every other ethnic type apart from white or Hispanic, it ignored a
high percentage of those, too, and I have absolutely no idea why. There doesn’t seem to be any biological reason for it being so choosy about who it infects – none that I’ve been able to find, anyhow. But here we have a virus that will kill some people, but shows absolutely no interest in infecting any others.’
Anna took the samples and the folder of printouts. ‘I won’t be able to go through these all today, Henry. I have to get myself something to eat and a few hours’ sleep. But I’ll have Rafik look them over when he comes in.’
‘Thanks, I appreciate it,’ said Doctor Rutgers. He paused by the door for a moment, and then he said, ‘I know this sounds fanciful, but do you know what this virus reminds me of? The Carlson Coombs killings.’
Anna looked up at him. The Carson Coombs killings had happened late last year, when a deeply resentful employee of Carson Coombs Insurance in St Louis had turned up at the company’s offices one morning, after years of being bullied and mocked by other staff, and had shot twenty-three of them. However, he had done this very selectively, shooting only those who had been making his life unbearable. He had shown no interest in killing anybody else, even though there were more than two hundred employees in the offices at the time and he could have shot far more.
‘Henry,’ said Anna, ‘what you’re talking about is revenge. Viruses don’t infect people out of revenge. It’ll be some aberration in its protease, that’s all.’
‘I know,’ said Doctor Rutgers. ‘I don’t know why it made me think of Carson Coombs, but it just did. I’ve probably been working too hard.’
When she returned home that evening, Anna carried all of her shopping bags into the kitchen and then went back out into the living room. The smashed mirror was still hanging on the wall, and when she stood in front of it, it was like looking at herself through a kaleidoscope. Fifty fragments of Anna, all seen from different angles.
She walked around the loft, switching on lights and drawing down the blinds. Although there were no nunlike shadows lurking in any of the corners, she still felt uneasy, and she opened all of her mirrored closet doors just to make sure there was nobody hiding inside.
‘Anna – you’re being ridiculous,’ she told herself. ‘You’re suffering from stress, that’s all.’
But something had been niggling her ever since Henry Rutgers had brought his samples down to her laboratory. What was it about the virus that had made him think about the Carson Coombs killings? Those murders had been a classic case of revenge, the bullied underdog finally getting his own back. And what had that nun said to her, in the morgue, where the bodies of John Patrick Bridges and Mary Stephens and David had been lying? ‘Nothing will stop us this time from getting our revenge.’
She made herself a bagel with lox and cream cheese and ate it standing up in the kitchen. Then she tidied up, showered and went to bed. Tonight the bed seemed even wider and emptier than ever. She dressed in David’s blue-striped pajamas, but they felt tangled and hot and uncomfortable, and after a half-hour she climbed out of bed again and took them off. It was no good trying to bring him back by wearing his clothes. He was gone.
That night she had a nightmare about nuns. The bedroom window was slightly open at the top, and nuns were silently pouring in through the gap, a whole black flock of them, scores of them, like bats.
Soon they were covering the entire ceiling, hanging upside-down, rustling and whispering and climbing all over each other. Their whispering sounded like prayers, or perhaps it was nothing but malicious gossip.
She sat up, clutching the sheet against her breasts, straining her eyes in the shadows to see what had woken her. She could hear traffic noises from the street outside, but was she awake, or was she simply dreaming that she was awake?
She glanced upward. There were no nuns clustering on the ceiling so she must be awake.
She reached across for the glass of water on the nightstand next to her. She had just picked it up when she heard a sharp slithering sound which seemed to be coming from down on the floor, right underneath her. She paused and listened. Seconds went past, and all she could hear was an occasional car, and then the mournful, echoing hoot of a ship on the river.
She raised the glass to her lips, but as she did so she heard that slithering sound again, as if something was being dragged across the bedroom carpet. A black shape suddenly slid out from the narrow gap from underneath the bed and sat up next to her. It was a nun, all draped in black, with her face covered like the nun in the morgue.
Anna didn’t cry out, but she was so shocked and frightened that she dropped her glass of water on to the floor. With two pale hands the nun drew back the veil that covered her face and her face was pale too, deathly pale, with shadowy smudges around her eyes and dragged-down lips.
The nun opened her mouth wide and screamed at her. Her scream was so shrill and so penetrating that Anna rolled herself away from her and scrambled wildly across the bed. The sheets wound themselves around her legs as if they were trying to stop her, and for a few seconds she was trapped, but then she managed to twist and kick herself free and tumble off the opposite side of the bed on to the carpet.
The nun rose up to her full height and threw herself after her, but as she launched herself over the bed she vanished, vaporized, as if she had been nothing more than a cloud of black smoke.
Anna knelt by the bed, shaking. She looked around the room, and then up at the ceiling, but there was no sign of any nuns anywhere. Nightmare, she thought, it must have been a nightmare. But if it had been a nightmare, she must have been asleep when she sat up and reached for her glass of water, and asleep when she dropped it on to the floor. She must have still been asleep when she rolled across the bed to get away from the nun, because there was no nun here now.
She switched on the bedside lamp. She quickly glanced left and right, but there was nobody else in the room. Not only that, the gap between the bed and the carpet was less than three inches high, so nobody could have been hiding underneath it.
She stood up and circled around the end of the bed to the bathroom. She hesitated for a moment, and then she threw open the door and checked inside. There was nobody in there, either.
Come on, Anna, she told herself. Don’t let this get to you. You have an important job to do, so you can’t let David’s death mess up your mind. People are depending on you to save their lives.
In spite of that, she got dressed in jeans and a pink sleeveless T-shirt and spent the rest of the night on one of the couches in the living-room, with the lights on. She slept only fitfully, and at five a.m. she got up and went into the kitchen to make herself a mug of coffee.
FIFTEEN
It didn’t take long for me to pack, because I had given away almost everything I owned before I left New York and came down to sunny Miami. I used to have leather armchairs and card tables and a bookcase full of books, including bound copies of Playboy. I used to have a vacuum cleaner and cutlery and most of a Willow Pattern dinner-service with only a few side-plates missing. I used to have a large framed picture of Vermont in the fall, with the trees turning crimson and yellow. I don’t know why: I had never been to Vermont, and I had never had the slightest intention of going there, either.
All I owned now was my clothes, and a few CDs, and three sets of fortune-telling cards – and I hadn’t looked at the Parlor Sibyl deck since they had all turned black. My Mustang I was going to leave here with Marcos, who could either use it himself, or sell it for me. There was no point in owning a car in Manhattan.
Sandy had gone home to pack, too, although I had tried to persuade her to let me find someplace for us to stay before she joined me. I really liked her, but right at this juncture in my life I didn’t want to be responsible for her, especially since Matchitehew and Megedagik and the nun had threatened to hurt my friends and loved ones if I didn’t warn the world that they were going to spread some terrible sickness.
As I packed I was so jittery that I was right on the point of panic, and every time I heard a noise in the
yard outside I couldn’t stop myself from peering out of the windows to see what it was. I kept trying to convince myself that I had been hallucinating last night, and that the appearance of the nun and the two sons of Misquamacus had been caused by nothing more than stress and exhaustion and too much alcohol. But I had been there before. I had seen the enormous power of Native American magic, and I knew how devastating it could be. It comes from the ground right underneath our feet, because after all this was their ground, not ours.
What was scaring me so much was that I couldn’t think how I was possibly going to do what they had ordered me to do. Who could I warn that some disease was going to spread across the United States – some disease against which we had no immunity? The emergency services wouldn’t listen to me. They would probably think that I was simply trying to find a way to stay in Florida – either that, or I was cracked. The media would probably think the same.
But like I say, I had seen for myself how devastating the forces of Native American shamanism could be. What would happen to me if an epidemic did break out and millions of people died because they had no resistance to it? I would probably get the blame for being some kind of terrorist and having started it myself.
All I could think of doing was getting the hell out of Florida and never coming back. Misquamacus had been the most terrifying spiritual apparition that I had ever come across, and if Matchitehew and Megedagik had only half his vengefulness between the two of them then we were heading for disaster, on a scale that I couldn’t even begin to imagine. And what about that nun? If any occult appearance had ever given me the shivering cold creeps then it was her.
When I was almost finished packing I called my old friend Rick Beamer’s number in Brooklyn. I had rescued Rick from some sticky situations more than once, mostly from what you might call ‘relationship misunderstandings’ with women, and two or three times I had let him stay in my spare bedroom – once for almost four months. Rick was a good-looking guy in a thin, sharp, Clint Eastwoody way, with a high gray pompadour and a permanently self-satisfied smirk on his face. Women always fell for him, but not for long, because he couldn’t stay faithful. He shuffled go-go girls and waitresses and pole dancers as fast as I shuffled Tarot cards.
Plague of the Manitou Page 16