The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  He shouted over the top of her: ‘Hester Attlowe, I invite you into my home as my guest, to eat at my table and to rest beneath my roof!’

  And She was there, but She was obviously not happy about it. Her face twisted and winced as if being in the room was causing Her physical pain, and She darted sharp glances to and fro. ‘What is this?’ She snarled.

  ‘Leave us alone!’ screamed his mother, putting herself in front of him, but he gently pushed her to one side.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum,’ he murmured. ‘I told you, I’ve got this. She’s bound by the law of hospitium.’ She looked at him, stunned and confused. He turned to Hester. ‘This is what you’ve always really wanted. It’s the welcome you were always denied. It’s your right, as a traveller on the road, to expect refuge and hospitality.’ He sat down at the table and gestured at what he had set out there. ‘Bread and salt. Please, will you sit and eat with me?’

  It was half of one of his mother’s loaves, a small bowl of cooking salt, a jug of water and two glasses.

  ‘No!’ Hester snapped. ‘I will not!’ Her black fingers opened and closed like claws, obviously itching to kill, and yet She didn’t move from the spot. Her face wore the expression of a hunted animal at bay.

  ‘But you must,’ said Toby gently. ‘It’s the law of hospitium. It’s what has kept you here all this time. You must obey it. You can’t break it and still be you.’

  ‘Where is the token?’ She demanded.

  ‘I destroyed it, and don’t change the subject.’

  ‘Liar!’ Black spittle flew from Her teeth. She flew at him, and his mother wailed, but Hester stopped inches from him as if She’d slammed into a wall. Her contorted, centuries-old rage filled his field of view and Her pestilential breath swamped him. ‘You lie!’

  Somehow he managed to maintain an even tone. ‘If I had it, and it really is something you can’t bear to be near, then surely I’d have given it to my mother to protect her, wouldn’t I? Mum, did I give you the pilgrim badge?’

  ‘No,’ replied his mum in a tiny voice.

  Toby spread his hands. ‘See? Now, please, as my guest, will you break bread with me? The bread is togetherness for my family, and the salt is prosperity and happiness for our guest.’

  Slowly and painfully, as if dragged by hooks, Hester retreated to the other side of the table and took a seat. Toby poured each of them a glass of water from the jug. Then he tore off a chunk of the bread, sprinkled it with a pinch of salt and ate it, washing it down with a mouthful of water. ‘My mother baked this bread,’ he said, and pushed the plate towards Hester. ‘The water is from Saint Sebastian’s Well. Some of it, at least. We had a small bottle from the church, so I tipped it in there. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You believed it would have healed your people, didn’t you?’

  ‘They kept it from us,’ She whispered. ‘They had no right.’

  ‘I’m keeping it from you no longer,’ he said. ‘I want you to have what you were always owed, so that you’ll be at peace and stop all the killing.’

  Hester’s voice was so small, so afraid. ‘I never wanted any of this.’

  Her dead fingers tore off a large hunk of bread, and afterwards he thought She must have known, because why take such a large piece? She raised it to her mouth and bit off a portion, and when She took Her hand away there was a gleam of pewter in the piece that She was left holding, just like a lucky sixpence. It had been the easiest thing in the world for him to cut a slit in the base of the loaf and push the pilgrim badge deep inside. ‘Cuthbert,’ She whispered, with the faintest of smiles, and She began to cry.

  ‘I could have given it to you,’ he said to his mum. ‘But that would have just pushed the problem further down the line. They always said that the Trust looks after its own, and that’s been the problem all along. It has to stop somewhere. The reverend said that Hester was empty of everything except rage, but I don’t think that’s true.’

  The tears came out of Her like black oil, far too much of it to be normal, pouring down Her face and quickly soaking Her ragged tunic, and then pooling on the floor underneath Her chair. As She wept, the pool grew and spread towards the walls of the kitchen, and Hester seemed to shrink, the marks of Her disease diminishing until She was little more than an ordinary-looking girl, somebody that Maya might have been friends with in another world and time. Then the angle of the light must have changed somehow because the blackness seemed to be rising up behind Hester like a vast shadow of a much larger figure whose head brushed the ceiling, clothed in shifting veils of darkness. Whatever the pilgrim badge meant to Hester, its effect had been to fill Her with something that left no room for whatever had ridden Her for six hundred years. Toby knew that it was aware of him, and with that recognition came the knowledge that it was ancient, immeasurably older than the spectre of the dead girl. Six centuries of purgatory was probably no more than a blink of the eye for it. He also realised how massively he had underestimated what he was facing – how arrogant and naïve he was to think that he could do anything to stop a power like this.

  ‘I don’t know who you are,’ he said. He couldn’t stop his voice from shaking this time, and he knew it lacked conviction. All he wanted to do was crawl under the table, find some deep hole in which to escape its pitiless regard. He was vaguely aware that his mother was praying, her eyes closed, murmuring fervently. ‘But you weren’t invited. Get out of my home.’

  If anything, the shadow loomed larger.

  ‘She is the gwrach clefyd,’ said Hester. She looked utterly spent, like the last flame of a dying candle, ready to blow away at the slightest breath. ‘From the land of my mother’s people. She is winter, and plague, and the promise of death whispering to you from the moment you are born. She is the rake; She is the broom. She is everywhere. She needs no invitation.’

  With a banshee wail, the gwrach clefyd boiled towards him through the air like a thunderhead, and straight through the shape of Hester who unravelled completely at its touch. He cowered, waiting for the blow that would kill him, but the gwrach clefyd veered away from him at the last moment and plunged at his mother as she prayed to her Lord for deliverance. Tornado clouds of shadow tore around her, enveloping her from head to foot, battering at her, ripping at her clothes, hair and flesh, seeking for a way in. But his mother was no hollow vessel to be possessed, and the gwrach clefyd, repulsed, turned its violence outward into the house. It screamed through the halls and bedrooms like an arctic gale, ripping doors from the hinges, slamming furniture against the ceilings, tearing pictures and shelves and light fittings from their fixings and flinging them into a maelstrom of destruction that eventually narrowed and concentrated itself into a seething funnel of rage which finally poured itself into the shape of a huge grey rat in the middle of the dining table. It glared at them both for a moment, and then leapt out through the broken kitchen window and was gone.

  * * *

  Toby and his mother helped each other out to the Uber which was still waiting in the road. It seemed impossible that the events in the house had taken only a matter of minutes, and that the driver had been sitting out here with his headphones on, humming away, oblivious to the noise and destruction. The world had tilted on its axis; surely an age must have passed at least. They sat in shocked silence with their hands tightly entwined all the way back to the hospital. It was only when they were standing in the anteroom, watching Toby’s father fighting for his life, that either of them said anything about what had happened in the kitchen.

  ‘It didn’t come for me,’ he said. ‘Right at the end. It was going to, but it veered off and went for you instead. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘But I felt Her and what She wanted when She was trying to get inside me. She was – is – too much for a male to contain.’

  Toby said, ‘She’s still out there, along with the disease. Did we stop it?’

  ‘I don’t know. You stopped Hester. Isn’t that enough?’

  It should have been, he told himse
lf. Saving one soul should be enough for anyone. They watched the slow wheeze of the respirator, the blinking LEDs that tracked his dad’s blood pressure, heartbeat, temperature. The pallor of his face, and the fevered flickering of his eyelids as he dreamed. He stood close to his mother and held her hand, watching his father, waiting to see if the world would tip on its axis again, and if so, which way.

  Some unguessable amount of time later a doctor came in and confirmed what they already suspected: that Peter Feenan had been infected by a mutated and highly virulent form of the Yersinia pestis bacterium. For the moment the antibiotics were just about holding it at bay, but the hospital wasn’t prepared to give him better than a 50/50 chance. Trish resumed her earlier position, seated in the plastic chair with her head against the glass and her hands clasped under her chin, praying.

  After a while she asked Toby if he wanted to join her. He thought it over and pulled up a chair beside her.

  He figured it couldn’t hurt.

  39

  SAFELY DOWN

  ‘EXCUSE ME, SIR, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO WAKE UP – we’ve landed. Sir? Sir?’

  Poh Min Yuan shook the passenger in 32A gently by the shoulder, but he only muttered something and his head lolled in a way which set every one of her alarm bells ringing. She tried again in Russian and French for form’s sake, but by then she was already convinced that the man was seriously ill.

  She looked up and towards the front of the aircraft’s economy cabin where Omar was going along the aisle with a plastic bag, taking in the blankets. The rest of the seats were empty, the other passengers having deplaned only moments earlier.

  ‘Omar!’ she called.

  He smiled, but his smile dropped as he saw the expression on her face.

  ‘Get Celine,’ she ordered. He was young, only in his second year as a flight attendant, but to his credit he didn’t ask why, he just dropped the bag and hurried forward to get Celine Lim, the in-flight manager.

  In Min Yuan’s six years as cabin crew for Singapore Airlines she had seen a few passengers become ill during long-haul flights, but nothing worse than mild food poisoning – and never where the passenger had deteriorated as rapidly as this. He’d been fine when he’d come on board at Heathrow – a little snuffly, perhaps, but had satisfied them that it was nothing more than a head cold. In her experience, Britain was a cold, damp, and generally miserable country where colds were to be expected. She’d given him a complimentary boiled sweet to suck at take-off for his ears, and that had seemed that. He’d been up and down to the toilet quite a few times but had otherwise remained undemonstrative and undemanding throughout the journey to Changi International, and given the other demands on her time that had been a blessing. She saw now the small drift of crumpled tissues and blister packs of medication between his feet that his blanket had hidden, and kicked herself for not having been more vigilant.

  ‘What is it?’ Celine was approaching with clipped strides, an avatar of efficiency – her hair and make-up immaculate, her flight manager’s purple kebaya as neat and uncreased after twelve hours as if she’d only just put it on.

  ‘He’s ill. I can’t get him to wake up.’ His colour was very pale and she gasped when she felt his forehead. ‘He’s got a terrible fever.’ There was a smell rising from him too – pungent and hot. The stink of illness. Her grandfather had reeked of it in the months before his cancer took him. ‘Who is he?’

  Celine leaned over her and tried to rouse the man, but with as little effect. She checked his wrists and throat for any medical jewellery, but found nothing. ‘Get away from him,’ she said, straightening up. Cursing quietly, she took out her tablet and called up the passenger manifest. ‘David Liam Corr, UK national, no medical alerts. One security flag: he’s a policeman, apparently. Checked through to Sydney.’ She tucked away her tablet. ‘Somehow I don’t think he’s going to make it that far.’

  The man with no medical alerts began to cough violently, and his eyes snapped open, though it was obvious that what he was seeing existed only in his feverish imagination. ‘She’s here!’ he screamed, and coughed again. A fine spray of red droplets hit the screen in the seat-back in front of him. Both Min Yuan and her manager jumped back in alarm. ‘She’s here! She’s come for us all!’ Bloody mucus streaked his mouth and chin.

  Min Yuan’s alarm turned to disgust as she saw the front of the man’s trousers darken and then the stench hit her as he soiled himself. His coughing worsened and he doubled over in his seat as it turned to a deep, spasmodic retching, and he vomited in a sudden bright-crimson gush. She clapped a hand to her mouth and backed away, horrified. Celine was barking something into her Bluetooth. Min Yuan cast a terrified glance up the plane in case any of the other passengers had also lingered and seen this. But other than Omar, staring wide-eyed and terrified, there was nobody. All four hundred men, women and children were on their way through the airport’s customs and immigration systems to catch connecting flights and continue their journeys all over the world, finally to be safely home and in the arms of their loved ones.

  Then she looked at how many seats there were between here and the toilets. How many other people he would have had to pass. How many he would have brushed against, or coughed over. How many would have used the same cubicle.

  Through the window, she saw blue flashing lights screaming across the tarmac towards the plane.

  AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  IN LATE SUMMER OF 1349 A SHIP CARRYING WOOL from Norfolk landed in Bergen, Norway – the story goes that its entire crew was already dead from the plague which was carried by the rats on board, and whether or not that’s just a bit of gruesome dramatic licence, the fact remains that the Black Death wiped out somewhere between a half and two thirds of the Norwegian population in the following two years. How does a culture with no knowledge of bacteria, let alone epidemiology, handle a catastrophe like that?

  They invent a new myth, that’s how.

  Along with the disease, tales began to spread of a terrifying hag called Pesta who travelled from town to town and village to village, killing all she met. She was described as old and bent-backed, wearing a black hood and a red skirt, and she carried either a broom or a rake to sweep away the lives before her. If she was carrying a rake when she arrived at your village you might be one of the lucky ones who escaped through its teeth, but if she was carrying her broom you’d best set your affairs in order, because nobody would survive.

  It’s interesting to note that the plague wasn’t being blamed on the displeasure of God or the wickedness of Satan – almost as if the Black Death was so completely unnatural and aberrant that it couldn’t be accounted for by anything as normal as the actions of heaven or hell. You could pray your way out of trouble with the Lord, or failing that you could try dickering with the Devil, but none of that worked with this disease. It was utterly implacable and relentless. Pesta wasn’t anything as mundane as a witch, casting spells on her neighbours. She was a force of nature given form: a plague hag, a goddess of death. Similar figures in British folklore include the cailleach, a female creator deity from Scotland and Ireland also known as the Queen of Winter or the Veiled One; as well as the cyhyraeth from Wales, a wailing banshee-like spectre. I know this is Norwegian folklore and not English, but can you blame me? I couldn’t write a tale about the Black Death and not have her in there somewhere.

  It helps that by a linguistic coincidence the name Pesta (presumably deriving from the same Latin root as the word ‘pestilence’) rhymes nicely with Hester, which is as close as I can get in English to Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth, home, and state – all of which are central themes to this story. I just like patterns and rhymes.

  So that’s the one place where I deliberately mashed up a set of folkloric references because it seemed like a fun thing at the time. The gwrach clefyd is my own fictional version of the same thing, so blame me for the dodgy Welsh name. That and any other accidental historical mistakes are on me, though I am indebted to the f
ollowing people for helping me to keep them to a minimum:

  Cat, Jo and Hayley for their keen editorial eyes and for making me learn a load more about medieval history than I ever wanted to – not to mention everybody else at Titan, especially Sarah and Lydia for general unflagging promotional loveliness, and Miranda just because.

  Iain Grant, for his copy of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, who got it back significantly more dog-eared than when he loaned it to me, and patiently answered all my questions about What Fourteenth-Century Peasants Thought About God. And while we’re on the Ians, my agent Ian Drury for just letting me get on with it.

  Tamara for help with the Serbian material. Sorry for all the swearing.

  Caz, who marked my spelling, punctuation and grammar and demanded dragons. Maybe next time.

  Dan for the mind-clearing rambles around the Worcestershire countryside.

  Jamie-Lee, bookseller extraordinaire. You rock.

  …and the triumvirate goddesses of my own hearth: TC, Hopey and Eden.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JAMES BROGDEN IS A PART-TIME AUSTRALIAN WHO grew up in Tasmania and now lives with his wife and two daughters in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, where he teaches English. He spends as much time in the mountains as he is able, and more time playing with Lego than he should. He is the author of The Hollow Tree, Hekla’s Children, The Narrows, Tourmaline, The Realt and Evocations, and his horror and fantasy stories have appeared in various periodicals and anthologies ranging from The Big Issue to the British Fantasy Society Award-winning Alchemy Press. Blogging occurs infrequently at jamesbrogden.blogspot.co.uk, and tweeting at @skippybe.

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