Of Starlight and Plague

by Beth Hersant

  “So you want to become a mambo.” Tam was dubious. “Do you have any idea, child, what you’re taking on? It will take years to learn and when you have, what will your life be like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well let me enlighten you. You’ll never be off duty. The phone will ring at all hours of the day and night. Every time you decide to take a little time off for yourself, someone will have a crisis and desperately need you. You will not make money out of this. Oh sure, if you sell the loa and charge $100 to read nine cards, you can cash in. But the loa are not yours to sell. There will be a reckoning. Other mambos and houngans — you think they’ll form a community of mutually supportive friends? Think again. The competition in this business (because too many treat it just like a business) is ferocious. If you become successful, they will undermine you, bad-mouth you and throw every hex that you can imagine your way. And do you imagine that, in exchange for all you do and all you sacrifice, that at least your personal life will be right?” Here her voice broke. She and Landry weren’t fighting so much anymore. She could have handled the fights. But she could not take the silence and his unwillingness to look her in the eyes. He stayed away more and more now.

  “Mambo,” Geraldine had interrupted these thoughts. “The loa call me in my dreams. I have to do this. I wanted to do this with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll teach me how to do it right.”

  “And what is your definition of ‘right’?”

  “To serve. Both the loa and the people who need my help. To learn what practices are safe and effective.”

  “How will you feed yourself?”

  “This job will pay.”

  “Not enough.”

  “I know,” the girl said, “which is why I have this!” She fished a piece of paper out of her pocket and presented it to Tammany with a flourish. It was an acceptance letter to the Aveda Institute.

  Tammany shrugged and brushed it aside. “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a beautician school,” the girl looked a little crestfallen. Then she flashed Tam a bright smile. “I’m going to be an esthetician!”

  The child’s enthusiasm was infectious, but Tammany kept her face neutral. “How do you feel about doctors and psychologists?”

  “I know this one already! Sometimes the loa want us to send people to doctors and shrinks because that will help them.”

  Tam looked at her for a long moment then nodded. “See you tomorrow.”

  And so began a friendship that lasted thirty-six years.

  When Tammany arrived at Geraldine’s, she ran up the front steps and was about to let herself in when she stopped short. Gerry had painted a long, thin red cross on her door. The cross had two little hash marks at both ends of each line and a small circle around the point where the horizontal and vertical met. It was a sign that Grandma Eula had taught her about — a warning of rampant disease: stay away. The mambo barged right in.

  “Gerry?” she called.

  “I’m here.” Sitting on the couch in the dark, Geraldine Navarro did not rise to greet her.

  Tammany switched on a lamp. “What’s going on?”

  Gerry sat forward and, to Tam’s surprise, started unbuttoning her blouse. There was a large square bandage on the upward slope of her right breast. She peeled it away to reveal a small, round, angry-looking wound.

  Tammany leaned in to inspect it. “That’s a bite,” she said. “A human bite.” And the man who attacked Otis tried to bite him and he in turn bit that old man.

  “It’s from Marie Dias’s little boy. He was running a high fever and she wanted me to take a look at him.” Geraldine paused and looked vaguely around the room for a minute and then started to laugh. “You know that scene in The Lost Boys when the little vampire boy goes all feral and one of the Frog brothers says, ‘Holy shit! The attack of Eddie Munster!’?”

  “Yes,” Tammany mumbled. She replaced the bandage and covered her friend up.

  “That pretty much sums it up. He bit me, he bit his mother, he bit the family dog.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Gerry shrugged. “Don’t know. He ran out the backdoor and before we could get hold of him, he was gone. Fast little guy.”

  Tammany pressed her cheek against Geraldine’s face. The old woman’s hands had been toughened by years of hard work cleaning office buildings to make ends meet. She couldn’t press them up against a person’s forehead and tell if they had a fever. But her cheek was much more sensitive and through it she could feel that Gerry was burning up.

  “I know I’ve got a fever,” the woman swallowed and winced as if in pain, “… just like the Dias boy. But Tam,” she gripped her friend’s arm hard, “we’re not the only ones. You have no idea how many people I’ve seen with fever. It’s all over the city.”

  Chapter Six

  Globe-trotting

  “The spirit to venture, that I should go forth

  To see the lands of strangers far away.”

  Author Unknown, Anglo-Saxon verse, “The Seafarer”

  Riga, Latvia. Ivars Balodis sat on the floor in the upstairs hall with his back pressed against the wall. Numb with horror and despair, he stared at the closed bedroom door that shook on its hinges every time the girl flung her body against it.

  It was hard to believe that, just a few hours ago, he’d been happy. Things had been so good lately. His daughter Anita, unable to get any significant time off from Toy’s Planet over Christmas, had booked a holiday in early December — off with her girlfriends to the Caribbean. While he hated seeing her go, she was so excited as she dug her beach towel and sunglasses out of her closet. And it’s not like he would have been around much anyway. He was helping to run the Francisco de Goya Los Caprichos exhibition at the Art Museum Riga Bourse. It was an incredible opportunity for him and the graphic illustrations were complex, fascinating works of art. It was what he needed. To be occupied, to be riveted on a subject that kept him from thinking too much. And so it was a contented man who went to pick his daughter up from the airport.

  She’d left a smiling, bright-eyed nineteen-year-old and she’d returned a ghost — pale and remote. There had been trouble on her little island paradise and she was nursing a terrible bite mark on her shoulder.

  The next day he’d knocked on her bedroom door and, at her incoherent mumble, entered the room. It was eight a.m. and Anita was still in bed.

  “Saulītē, you have to be at work in half an hour!”

  “I’m not going in today.”

  “I told you to come back earlier so you’d have time to get over the jet lag.”

  “It’s not jet lag, tēvs. I really don’t feel well.”

  He felt her forehead; she was running a fever. “Maybe you picked up something on the plane. They say the germs just circulate through the cabin till everyone’s sick.”

  And so she remained home while he left for the museum. Today he would guide a group of local dignitaries around the exhibition.

  It all went beautifully and his well-rehearsed speech was in full swing. He pointed to image Number 19 and the group dutifully stopped to examine it. “The title is Todos Caerán.”

  “What does that mean?” asked the mayor’s wife.

  “It means ‘Everyone will fall.’ What is interesting about this picture is not the three human figures here at the bottom, but these hybrid creatures we see here in the air. They have birds’ wings and bodies, but human heads. I believe that these hybrids represent the human soul and the freedom of the human mind to rise to new heights of enquiry and understanding. They are purely free creatures and the horror of this piece lies in the fact that they are the ones who will fall. As you can see here, one of them is already in the clutches of the three women at the bottom of the picture. They have already plucked his feathers and are preparing to consume him. Despite th
is rather barbaric image of them impaling the bird-man so they can roast him on a spit, the people are not depicted as extraordinarily evil figures. They are merely visceral rather than spiritual and cerebral beings. They feed the belly, not the mind or soul. They crouch on their knees in the shadows, in the earth and wait for their prey to be delivered unto them. It seems a grim inevitability.”

  “It’s something out of a nightmare,” one of the women shivered.

  “Oddly enough, before he named his collection Los Caprichos (meaning whims), de Goya had called it Los Sueños … dreams.”

  “Excuse me,” Dace, his secretary, had appeared at the edge of the group.

  “Yes?”

  “Your daughter is on the phone.”

  “Please tell her I’ll call her back.”

  Ivars turned and was about to lead the group on to the next image when Dace said in a firm voice, “Sir, you need to take this.”

  Anita was inconsolable on the phone and babbling that something was “Ēd prom pie manis!” — eating away at her. He had never heard his daughter sound like that. Forgetting about the tour, the mayor, and his big opportunity at the museum, he left without a word to anyone and raced home.

  He found her standing in the living room, wrapped up in a blanket that covered her head and shrouded her face. The random thought came to him that she looked like the figure in another Goya image: Que Viene El Coco (Here Comes the Bogeyman).

  “Anita, saulītē, how are you?”

  She slowly raised her head, looked at him for a moment and then suddenly rushed at him. Her outstretched hands were hooked into claws. He was bigger and stronger than her and tried gently to deflect her. Yet she would not stop. She came at him again and again, forcing him to retreat up the stairs.

  She was hurting herself now in her fervor to get at him. She fell once and he heard her ankle snap. The sound made his stomach roil, and he rushed to help her. But she did not acknowledge the broken bone. Instead she darted forward on her hands and knees and, in her scrabbling attempts to get hold of him, she hit him in the groin. White stars of pain exploded in front of his eyes and his whole body jerked protectively inward to shield the offended area. He managed, just, to stay on his feet. It did, however, stiffen his resolve that this dumjš had to stop.

  She stood up — sort of. Her right ankle bent at a sickening angle and to put any weight on it must have been torture; and yet she hobbled forward. With a cry of confusion and pain, he grabbed her, flung her into her bedroom and slammed the door shut.

  That had been three hours ago. His first instinct had been to call an ambulance, but then he thought of his mother. As a five-year-old boy, he’d watched as men in white coats dragged her kicking and screaming out of the house. That image had haunted him all the days of his life. And now he had to call the men with the butterfly nets to come and take his Anita away? No. He couldn’t bear it. He’d give her time to calm down. He could talk her around, he knew he could, if she would just sit down for a minute and listen. But for the past three hours, she had not stopped throwing herself at the door. Why didn’t she just open it? It wasn’t locked; all she had to do was turn the handle and pull.

  As the thudding on the door continued with maddening regularity, Ivars Balodis began to sink into himself. He had been happy for a little while. And then the hammer fell as it always did, as it did one day when a five-year-old boy playing with his trucks was suddenly forced to watch his mother descend into madness. Just as it did when he got the job at the museum and practically skipped home to tell his wife the good news. But Lucia had news of her own: cancer. Life was like the fucking Grim Reaper. It let you skip merrily along, waited until you were warm and happy and secure and then it tapped you on the shoulder with one skeletal hand — “Boo.” And suddenly, any joy or certainty was ripped out from under you and don’t you feel foolish having trusted in those things?

  Sitting there he realized that he didn’t want anymore of this … this life. It was an endless battle and it was time for him to surrender. Slowly the distraught father reached up and turned the knob on the door. Anita suddenly went quiet as if she was crouched on the other side, waiting. He gave the door a little push and it swung inward an inch or two.

  Then he sat back and watched as bloody fingers wrapped themselves around the door and pulled it open.

  Miami, Florida. Eugene Redford felt awful. After a couple of days of the flu, he should be rallying by now. But he wasn’t. He was … sinking — that was the only way he could describe it. The fever rolled over him in wave after hideous wave that made his stomach churn and his head pound. If he’d been thinking more clearly he would have called an ambulance. That thought did, briefly, flit through his mind; but when he looked at his mobile, he couldn’t remember what to do with it. He wanted to get moving anyway — it was important to move for some reason and so he dropped the useless phone, grabbed his car keys out of habit and attempted the drive to the Mount Sinai Medical Center.

  His route led him north out of downtown Miami and onto the MacArthur Causeway. He’d almost made it across, but the sun glaring off the surface of Biscayne Bay sent his headache into orbit. He pulled over (grinding the side of his hatchback into the concrete wall of the bridge), opened the door and fell out of the car. The pavement was hot, an affront to his fevered body, so he scrambled quickly to his feet.

  Move, his mind was telling him, but it gave him no indication of direction. Looking vaguely around, he chose a path at random (one that took him back the way he came) and began the long, staggering trek across three miles of hot concrete. As he walked he removed items of clothing in an attempt to cool off. By the end of the second mile, he was naked and that should have horrified Eugene. He’d had the stereotypical dreams of being out in public in a state of undress and had always awakened from these nightmares with a pounding heart and a sense of dread. Now, however, he was completely unaware of his nakedness — a pre-Fall Adam in a concrete Eden. He was equally unconcerned about the damage to his feet. In his bid to cool down, he’d kicked off his shoes and his bare feet had stepped in melted tar and on broken glass. But none of that mattered so long as he moved. He covered the final mile and, as he reached the on-ramp, his efforts were rewarded by the sight of a scrawny, grey-haired man resting in the shade below the ramp.

  In his aimless wanderings, this finally was a goal. He knew now what he’d been looking for. His tottering steps became purposeful, his speed increased and a rage that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere propelled him physically into the man. The body slam sent his victim toppling and knocked him senseless. Then Eugene got down to work. He bit into the man’s cheek and tore away a strip of flesh and muscle. As he sat there chewing contentedly, a voice (commanding and yet high with agitation) ordered him to “Freeze.”

  Redford turned slowly to face the young cop who stood, feet apart and gun drawn, three yards away. He suddenly felt very protective of his prey. He would not let anyone else have it and so growled a low, feral warning at the officer. By now he’d finished his mouthful. He turned and bit into his victim’s nose.

  Eugene’s body jerked with the impact of a bullet from the cop’s .40 Smith and Wesson, but he merely grunted and continued to gnaw at the nose until he ripped it free. With a cry of horror and disgust, the officer fired again.

  The Island of Cáscara. Dr. Edwin Caldwell surveyed the reports compiled by his colleagues. They had traced every one of the tourists who had passed through Cáscaran immigration in the last month. Thankfully, the vast majority were fine (as confirmed by the raft of medical tests ordered by Caldwell). However, not every visitor had managed to leave the island unscathed. Nine tourists had been injured by Juanita Pimental on the twelfth of December. Lab results confirmed that she was infected with the new strain of rabies. Like the other patients who tested positive for a lyssa infection, she was plagued with intensified, but nonlethal symptoms. In short, he had an isolation ward full o
f rabies patients who would not die. And now, because the tourists went home carrying the virus with them, he had clusters of the disease popping up around the world…

  There was the incident in Miami. Eugene Redford had been shot and killed by police while attacking a homeless man. Emergency admission records at Cáscara General Hospital confirmed that Redford was treated for a bite wound on December twelfth and he is listed among the key witnesses to the Our Lady of Guadalupe attack. While he no longer posed a threat, his victim had bitten an ER nurse at Mount Sinai and her whereabouts were unknown. Miami police were searching for her as a matter of urgency and a CDC team was on site. In addition to their more practical duties, they had to calm the panic stirred up by the media. Newspaper headlines screamed “Causeway Cannibal Eats Man’s Face” and “Miami Zombie Attack.” Conspiracy theorists were coming out of the woodwork, insisting that Redford had been the victim of a secret government experiment to test a weaponized “Rage Virus.” There were grim predictions that this was just the beginning of a 28 Days Later scenario that could easily go global.

  Next there was a report from Reading, England and another from Riga, Latvia.

  A fourth tourist was traced to Kenora, Ontario. In a brutal, animalistic attack that shocked the local community, Liam Morin had clawed and bitten his wife and four children — two of whom were now missing. Nathan Carlson, an apparent authority on native legend, cited the many parallels between this incident and the myth of the wendigo — an angle that reporters were quick to jump on. The following quote by Carlson appeared in three separate news articles: “Even in today’s fast-paced world, with our technological marvels … when circumstances dictate it, it does not take long at all before our minds swing back to the paranormal-themed fears and superstitions of cultures and eras long gone.”

  The problem, Caldwell knew, was not the supernatural or paranormal. The problem lay in our technological marvels — the high speed, readily available transportation that allowed an infected individual to carry the virus anywhere in the world. Hop a plane (tourists five and six) and voilà there is an outbreak in Bedburg, Germany, and another in Beijing, China.