Plague in the Mirror

by Deborah Noyes

  More or less exhausted by worry over her dog and her parents and herself and Marco, and now, in a surreal twist, this baby — Pippa — May ducks out of Gwen’s sight line into a sideline display on medieval magic.

  In the arched cave of the film nook, she sits on the rug-covered bench alone in the dark for three full loops of a mini documentary on alchemy. The man on-screen is dressed like a wizard. He’s seated at a big table lined with fat leather volumes, floaty dead things in jars, and liquids bubbling in beakers, neat and tidy enough to be a little museum display in its own right. The man’s robe is a spotless royal purple, and the big fire burning in the hearth behind him makes the whole thing feel a bit like Masterpiece Theatre on dope. The tour’s in English because May got to choose her language, but the voice actor’s Scottish or something, and she can barely understand what he’s saying. His voice is deep and slow, persistent like flowing water, both soothing and unsettling. “Step lightly,” the Italian-Scottish alchemist urges, looking straight at her, and here’s what’s wrong: his face is flickering, bleeding into someone else’s.

  “Close your eyes.” May hears it distinctly now, Cristofana’s muffled voice sounding under the drone of the audio tour, familiar and teasing. One minute it’s the Scottish dude talking, and the next it’s Cristofana. One minute the camera pans over his orderly table, and the next, the witch presides over a mockery of the theatrical set. Part spilled contents of a crazy bag lady’s shopping cart, part jumbled secondhand store, part withered garden, her table has bottles and books, just as his does. But it’s also heaped with dusty objects of every sort — the scraps, bits, and bobs of a scavenger. Her robe is a mockery, too, a crazy-quilt of stolen brocade and peasant sack, silk and rags, jewels and feathers.

  The Cristofana-wizard is holding up a large, clear jar with a little doll slumped inside, made of some kind of hairy root with a lock of dirty-blond hair tied on top with twine.

  “Come,” he says — or she does, flickering, crooning —“and cheat time with me. I have your poppet here, see? In this glass. Do as she does. Move as she moves. Little You.”

  Little Me. It could as easily be Cristofana, though. We correspond.

  “What is that thing?” May asks out loud.

  “Mandragora officinarum, also known as Satan’s apple, Circe’s plant, dudaim, ladykins, manikin . . .”

  The words themselves ring like a spell, and May wonders if she’s being enchanted. Her head feels light and her eyes blur in the cool dark of the deserted exhibit. Where are Gwen and Liam?

  “The mandrake came of the same clay as Adam,” the wavering voice says, “and so the Devil holds it in great favor. If grown beneath the gallows, or where suicides lie buried at a crossroads, it is powerful indeed.” He-she smiles absurdly wide, white teething glimmering. “You must go at sunset or in the dead of night and loose the earth. With the point of a two-edged sword that has never drawn blood, scratch three circles around the plant to stop the demons from rising with the root. You have meanwhile tied a black dog — a starved animal is best — to the stalk with a stout cord. Stand back with a trumpet to your lips and hurl meat out of the animal’s reach. Aim carefully, and he’ll lunge and tear the root from the earth. But beware, bella. Make a shrill blast with your trumpet, for when you pull it up, the mandrake sounds a shriek that brings death to all who hear it.”

  Earplugs, anyone? “Including the poor starved dog,” May complains, thinking of True, of the kitten. The Middle Ages were no place for hapless animals, it seems, no place for anyone.

  “The foolish crave ladykins for their love potions and flying ointments, so I am not above improvising.” Cristofana-wizard gropes a loose manikin from her piles. “A bit of poisonous bryony root is a brave substitute. Carve it roughly into human shape. Attach a seed of barley or millet to both head and chin. Bury the root for several weeks, and you’ll see the seed sprout, appearing like so. Amazing! No knife marks. Note how the new tissue has grown over. I challenge you to distinguish it from any true mandrake or womandrake.

  “Now, then. Wash the root in wine. Bind it in silk and velvet. Feed it . . . with sacramental wafers stolen from a church during Communion . . . and you have your manikin.”

  Abandoning her bryony forgery, Cristofana-wizard lifts the jar and displays Little Me on her palm, pivoting it for the camera in a way that would make Home Shopping Network proud. “But I took every precaution,” she concludes, “in your case.”

  “Are you ADD or what?”

  “They say that to imprison an imp in a bottle rattles its wits,” she goes on. “Over and over it will change shape, anxious to escape, but the bottled imp will perform all manner of miracles for its master. It will divine gold and cause mischief for his enemies.” She sighs morosely. “Which bodes well, but your poppet will not play. This does not rule you or anyone else.” She sets down the jar and extends her hand, which seems to reach from the screen in 3-D, the ruby in her gold ring glinting. “Even still, I have my ring. You will come peacefully, yes?”

  “Ring?” May asks, confused, for now the actor playing a medieval Italian alchemist is yammering in his lilting Scottish accent about a philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, about universal cures, potions, and powders . . . about drinkable gold and a ring that might make its wearer invisible or give him two bodies at once.

  “Yes, you remember her. The girl with the ruby, the finger I sawed away?”

  The voice is blurring now, and the face fading in and out. “You asked for a spell, and here I have one. It is my own favorite, bella. Do you have your quill, as my first master used to say? He was a seer, one who closed his eyes and groped into the dark as I do, but his visions sought only artifacts, those imbued with special meaning by God or his disciples. He was a materialist who would reach back in time and gather all the great objects of biblical lore, dusty shrouds and coins and vessels, but he never thought to look into the future, bella, where I found you. He never watched his back, either, though when he died, he placed this ring on his daughter’s finger — she was all he had left, though I was more his sort than she was — thinking it would render her invisible and keep her safe (from me, perhaps). But the ring has another use. It can grant the wearer two bodies. And so we are two, you and me. Are you ready? Here it is. Your spell:

  “Are you telling the truth?” May asks, afraid of the answer, her head reeling, unreal. “Even a little?”

  Cristofana throws back her head and laughs uproariously. She doesn’t stop laughing for what seems like a long time, and in that time the room grows cold and small. It becomes a room again, with edges and shadows, with the murmur of museumgoers beyond walls.

  “No,” she says. “It’s a lie, of course, every word. How silly you are, bella, to indulge me at such length.”

  “Why do you do this?” May whispers, feeling nuts again.

  “Do what?”

  “Mess with me?”

  “Because you amuse me. Because I don’t want to die, and you can help me, and because you won’t . . . help me.”

  “How does the portal work? Show me.”

  “The time of negotiating is past.” Cristofana-wizard flickers. “Haven’t you wondered about him after all these days, bella? About the baby? Do they live or die? Have I cut Marco’s pretty throat or drowned Pippa in a horse trough? Has the Pest curled outside our doorstep like a dragon, lapping its lips? Your silence surprises me greatly.”

  May feels her breath catch, though she doesn’t believe it. Not really. Any of it. She can’t believe it. We share the same soul.

  “You doubt me?” Cristofana challenges, leaning forward on-screen. If May were wearing 3-D glasses, her double would leap out at her, a boogeyman with her own face. “But how can this be? You know I like my playthings . . . kittens and dollies.” She lifts Little Me from its jar and slowly plucks the long blond hair from its lumpen head, leaving only baby fuzz. “You are a good little nun. Come and care for her . . . Pippa . . . before she is beyond care.”

  May can
’t speak. Her tongue lies like lead in her mouth. As if to relieve her, the Italian-Scottish wizard starts humming under his breath again, jarring her. “Maybe we can figure out how to get you out,” May blurts, “all three of you. There must be a way . . . without my having to play human sacrifice.”

  “There is no way. Believe me. Time will be tricked — a bird for a bird — but never cheated. We are waiting,” Cristofana says, flickering again. “You must know you are her only hope.”

  “Every morsel,” sings the wizard in his lilting Scottish accent, “snap, snap, snap.”

  “Don’t make me come for you.”

  May is suddenly acutely aware of smells and sounds. Peanut butter and Liam, who has found her and skootched her over on the rug bench with his hip, parking himself half lotus–style. “Let’s get the hell outta Dodge,” he whispers, sneaking spoonfuls of peanut butter from the jar in his backpack. She leans sideways to breathe him in, tempted to rest her forehead on his shoulder, but instead, instinctively, they inch apart. Gwen can’t be far behind, though no one has ever stopped Gwen from figuring things out — and what “things” is May even worrying about?

  She’s struck hard by a vision of that poor baby, Cristofana’s latest plaything, writhing on the dirt floor of the workshop, startled and screaming, abandoned to the wolves. The child is just part of Cristofana’s plan, May knows. She’s using them all — Marco, too, by this point — in some game beyond their understanding.

  But her twin can’t do more than bluff, May knows. Cristofana can plague her all she wants, threaten, berate — even without help from the portal, as her alchemist gig proves — but can’t lay a hand on her. Because they can’t both be real here at the same time.

  As long as May resists going through the portal of her own accord, she’ll be OK. Safe.

  When she thinks of Pippa wailing with hunger, of Marco’s deepening sadness and confusion, she has to wonder if safety’s all she’s always cracked it up to be.

  The idea of changing places again, even briefly, is terrifying. Most terrifying of all, she thinks, giving in to the spoonful of peanut butter Liam holds out for her, is what might happen to him and to Gwen if Cristofana got loose in the present. Everything that is yours, bella.

  The moment May enters her stuffy, closed bedroom, ostensibly to retrieve her Italian phrase book, she knows she’s made the mistake of a lifetime.

  Being this close, feeling its gaping, invisible presence, knowing how easy it would be to go through only makes it seem physically necessary, inevitable, and maybe it is. Maybe May only imagined she had a choice.

  You have a choice. Isn’t that what May told Cristofana? So righteous and indignant. So sure of yourself — as Li put it — your tidy little world.

  May stands transfixed by the wall, imagining Marco gaunt at his easel, clawing with a stick of charcoal, his face smudged with it, the paper alive with writhing and screaming, with the pains of Hell and the madness of innocence, and she so much wants to watch the image on that easel come to life. She wants to be there when he makes it, be a part of his story, however terrible, and to share and soothe and be seen. She can almost see the veins in his strong, long hands leaping with the work, his eyes possessed, and she imagines, with hope, what he would do when he looked up and found her there, May in the flesh, as real as stone and bone and water.

  But what kind of idiot would she be, to go back there now?

  Liam looks in later and finds her trancing on the bed with the phrase book open on her lap — one her mom supplied, along with guidebooks and art books, the night before they dispatched May for the summer.

  “What’s up?”

  She knows he’s there, but his voice jars her, and she starts thumbing through the pages again. “What’s it look like?” she asks. Touch. You. Twin. Danger.

  He shrugs. “Um . . . I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

  “Learning Italian.”

  Liam sits down beside her, and the swaying mattress makes her blush. “Makes sense. But I kinda thought we were of the ignorance-is-bliss school, since pretty much everyone here speaks enough English to get us by.”

  “Everyone here now.”

  “Got it.” He sighs. “What’s really up?”

  May takes a deep breath, plunging in. “The plague is on full force there. The only other person left in her family is either dead or about to be, and Cristofana’s running out of reasons to stay.” Right now her restless twin could be anywhere, raiding the stores in some old farmhouse, dressing up in other people’s clothes, dead people’s clothes, wearing their jewelry, reading their books, murdering their kittens, but wherever she is, she isn’t happy. Her plaything Pippa could likewise be anywhere, left by the wayside, parched and frightened, flies at her eyes. “Look, I can’t explain now, but if I disappear for a bit . . . cover for me? Tell Gwen I met up with a friend from home, and we’re gonna backpack around and hostel it for a few days?”

  “She won’t buy it.”

  “I know, but do it anyway.”

  “You’re freaking me out.”

  “I can’t help it, Li. I’m sorry.” She touches his cheek quickly, hating the pity in his eyes. He thinks she’s losing it, and maybe she is. Or not. There’s only one way to find out.

  “Let me go with you,” he says softly. “Wherever you’re going.”

  She wants to kiss him, but this isn’t the time, and maybe there never will be a time, and she isn’t doing him any favors pretending otherwise. Time is very definitely the problem. “I don’t know when it will be,” she says. “I don’t know if . . . I’ll be able to get back. Just cover for me, OK?”

  “May,” he pleads, “you said you’d talk to someone if —”

  “And if I turn up and seem strange, all sly and evil and shit, then —”

  “You said you’d talk to someone,” he repeats flatly.

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “Someone qualified.”

  She pauses, annoyed, thumbing briskly through the phrase book again. What if she found a way to explain — about the plague and how it worked, how to cure it — to a doctor of Marco’s day?

  On the one hand, Liam’s Back to the Future paradox makes sense, and what could May possibly trade for a historic game changer like antibiotics? How would she strike that famous balance Cristofana keeps talking about? Impossible. There is no trade big enough, and anyway, May doesn’t need or want to save the world. . . . Just one life or two — three if she’s feeling generous. She’s not that good, despite what Cristofana might think.

  On the other hand, it may theoretically be true, that the past is immutable. Over. Done. But what if it isn’t? Doesn’t May owe it to Marco and Pippa — yes, even Cristofana, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of strangers who might be saved by a simple Wikipedia printout or three — to try?

  What does she have to lose that she hasn’t already gambled with for curiosity’s sake? May wouldn’t be able to get her hands on actual antibiotics; procuring them would have been hard enough in the States, and like her, they’d come through ghosted anyway. But if she can find a doctor in Old Florence and explain about Yersinia pestis . . .

  She’s in no hurry to run into one of those freaky beaked men, but she leaves to fetch her laptop, returns, and logs into Google anyway, linking to Wiki and the printer, her fingers racing over the keys.

  “You’re working on your essays again?” Liam groans. “OK. Now I’m really freaked out.”

  “I know.” She stands and looks him in the eye, relieved to find him looking back, really looking at her. May kisses him quickly on the forehead, unable or unwilling to explain. “Me too. But it’ll be OK.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “I don’t know how to.”

  “You’ve never known how, but seriously, we’re going to talk about this. Tomorrow morning. About you. You say I don’t know you, but I do. Pretty well, I think. Better than most. We’ll go out to breakfast, just us, and you’re gonna tell me everything that’s h
appening to you, really happening, and I promise to try to believe you. I promise we’ll make a plan. OK?”

  She nods, eyes downcast.

  “I’ve got to run those CDs I picked up over to Gwen at the library. Don’t go anywhere,” he insists, watching her too intently. “Better yet, why don’t you come with?”

  “No, I’m good,” she says, shaking her head.

  “Don’t stay here alone. Please. You look like a ghost.”

  The words chill her . . . and fuel her determination. “Not me, dude. I’m a real, full-figured girl.”

  Li’s crooked smile is the best reason in the world to stay — or to make it back, if it comes to that.

  At dinner he doesn’t take his eyes off her. Whenever May looks up at him over her microwaved linguini, she has to look away again.

  She wants to let him help her, and Liam could, she thinks. If anyone can, it’s Liam. But there’s something hypnotic about what’s happening to Cristofana — how whatever it is that was less than good in her before is growing bigger and meaner and more focused by the minute.

  Long after Gwen turns in for the night, as Li’s hauling himself off the couch to head to bed, May grabs his arm and pulls him back. She rests her hands tentatively on his shoulders. His neck glints sticky in the heat, soaking the edge of his T-shirt, and she pulls him close in a kiss that goes deep way too quickly. He bends her back against the cushions, but when May stiffens under his weight, he pulls back on his own, lifting her hands from his freckled neck, kissing one palm and slapping it away with a smile. “Nah, I’m not that cheap a date. This movie sucks. See you in the morning?” He stands with a groan, his voice softer, serious. “Breakfast?”

  Their eyes meet, his shining in the blue TV light, and May nods, watching him disappear down the unlit hall and mouthing, “Thanks,” into the dark.

  That night, she dreams she’s dying, writhing, her body covered in lumps and sores.

  It’s almost dawn, and in the faint light, the creature at the end of her hotel-style bed, the bed she’s just started sleeping in again, is familiar. It wears her face, but it’s a winged, translucent thing made of light, chanting under its breath.