The five fishermen of Penmaby saw her face; they recognized her from the portrait that hangs in her father’s empty house. The portrait is put to the fire and they swear no more girls will be christened Kerenza in Penmaby. When ships burst on the reef they blame Kerenza, when a child is drowned the rock pools they blame Kerenza. Her father’s house burns and the ruins are left to the weeds and gulls and they blame Kerenza.
* * *
Still she waits as frost changes to sun and the turning seasons change sun back to frost again. Kerenza sits on the Loor-Stone and waits for John Johnson. The wooden ships pass by on their way to war, they return again to trade. Then a new ship appears out among the sails, a low black craft that runs fast against the wind with no sail, but tall chimneys that leak black smoke into the sky. Kerenza sits on her rock, on the old Loor-Stone. She is so tired now, and the years spin by making her quite dizzy, but soon she will sleep, when John Johnson returns, then she they can both return to their marriage bed in father’s house and sleep in each other’s arms, then they will wake in the bright sunlight of a new day and begin their lives anew. Their funnels belch black smoke and turn the stones black. Once all boats sailed on the water, now some boats sail under the waves and others sail through the air. She hears them buzz like wasps overhead. Some drop fire on the distant port towns and after that all the villages fall silent and dark. Still John Johnson has not come back although she has waited an age for his return. There are no more Englishmen or Cornishmen, there are only landsmen now in Penmaby.
She looks for lights to set but the town is still dark at night, so she sets her driftwood fires in case he has signed aboard the metal ship but John Johnson does not return and the metal ships out in the fog refuse to be lured. They sail on by poor Kerenza. She weeps with loneliness. Her eyes are hollow with the flood of tears so again she builds her fires. Through the swirling fog a lone soldier comes to investigate her lights. He has a long gun on his shoulder and is dressed in drab bags of cloth hung with pouches and pockets. He seems uncertain as he trudges through the sand and shingle, the water of the rock pools soak up his mud-coloured trousers, his heavy boots slip on the weed. He calls to her as she sits on her stone in a coat of white mist illuminated by the yellow flames of her driftwood fire.
“Put that light out,” he shouts.
Karenza obliges with a snap of her fingers. They are alone together in the cold fog barely lit by a dim and distant moon. Her pale hair floats like the mist as she takes his arm and leads him along the beach and asks him nicely so he’ll tell her, asks him softly so not to startle him, asks him gently in his cold ear with her hand laid close across his heart. Kerenza knows he has brought her the answer, “have you seen John Johnson?” she says.
Magdala Amygdala
Lucy A. Snyder
I was bound, though I have not bound.
I was not recognized. But I have recognized
that the All is being dissolved,
both the earthly and the heavenly.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
“So how are you feeling?” Dr. Shapiro’s pencil hovers over the CDC risk evaluation form clamped to her clipboard.
“Pretty good.” When I talk, I make sure my tongue stays tucked out of sight. I smile at her in a way that I hope looks friendly, and not like I’m baring my teeth. The exam-room mirror reflects the back of the good doctor’s head. Part of me wishes the silvered glass were angled so I could check my expression; the rest of me is relieved that I can’t see myself.
Nothing existed before this. The present and recent past keep blurring together in my mind, but I’ve learned to take a moment before I reply to questions, speak a little more slowly to give myself the chance to sort things out before I utter something that might sound abnormal. My waking world seems to have been taken apart and put back together so that everything is just slightly off, the geometries of reality deranged.
Most of my memories before the virus are as insubstantial as dreams; the strongest of them feel like borrowed clothing. The sweet snap of peas fresh from my garden. The crush of hot perfumed bodies against mine at the club and the thud of the bass from the huge speakers. The pleasant twin burns of the sun on my shoulders and the exertion in my legs as I pedal my bike up the mountainside.
The life I had in those memories is gone forever. I don’t know why this is happening to humanity. To me. I’d like to think there’s some greater purpose, some meaning in all this, but God help me, I just can’t see it.
“So is the new job going well? Are you able to sleep?” My doctor shines a penlight in my eyes and nostrils and marks off a couple of boxes. Thankfully, she doesn’t ask to see my tongue. It’s the same set of questions every week; I’d have to be pretty far gone to answer badly and get myself quarantined. The endless doctor-visits wear down other Type Threes, but I hang onto the belief that someday there might be actual help for me here.
I nod. “It’s fine. I have blackout curtains; sleep’s not a problem. They seem pretty happy with my work.”
My new supervisor is a friendly guy, but he always has an excuse for why he can’t meet with me in person, preferring to call me on his cell phone for our weekly chats. I used to bounce from building to building, repairing computers, spending equal amounts of time swapping gossip and hardware. After I got out of the hospital, I went on the graveyard shift in the company’s cold network operations center. These nights, I’m mostly raising processes from the dead, watching endless scrolling green text on cryptic black screens. I’m pretty sure the company discreetly advised my quiet coworkers to carry tasers and mace just in case.
“Do you feel that you’re able to see your old friends and family often enough?” Dr. Shapiro asks.
“Sure,” I lie. “We meet online for games and we talk in Vent. It’s fun.”
For the sake of his own health, my boyfriend took a job and apartment in another state; we speak less and less on the phone. What is there to say to him now? We can’t even chat about anything as simple as food or wine; I must subsist on bananas, rice, apple juice, and my meager allotment of six Bovellum capsules per day. The law says I can’t go to crowded places like theaters and concerts. I only glimpse the sun when I’m hurrying from the shelter of my car’s darkly tinted windows to monthly eight a.m. appointments with my court-ordered physician.
So I’m striding up the street to Dr. Shapiro’s office, my head down, squinting behind sunglasses, when suddenly I hear a man in the park across the street shouting violent nonsense. Or he used to be a man, anyhow; he’s wearing construction boots, ragged Carhartt’s work overalls and a dirty grey T-shirt, all freshly spattered with the blood of the woman whose head he is enthusiastically cracking open against the curb. He howls at the sky, and I can see he’s missing some teeth. Probably whatever he did for a living didn’t pay him enough to see a dentist. But his skin looks flush and smooth, so much healthier than mine, and for a moment I envy him.
He stops howling and meets my shadowed stare, breaking into a gory, gap-toothed smile. The kind of grin you give an old, dear friend. I’ve never laid eyes on this wreck before, and the woman beneath him is beyond anyone’s help. They both are. I don’t want to be outed, not here, not like this, so I pretend I don’t even see him and stride on.
A few seconds later, I hear the spat of rifle fire and the thud of a meaty body hitting the pavement, and I know that the SWAT team just took out Ragged Carhartts. They’re never far away, not in this part of town. And once they’ve taken out one Type Three, they don’t need much excuse to kill another, even if you’re just trying to see your doctor like a good citizen.
“Oh, God,” a lady says. She and another fortyish woman are standing in the doorway of an art gallery, staring horrified at the scene behind me. They’re both wearing batik dresses and lots of handmade jewelry. “That’s the third one this month.”
“If this keeps up, we’ll have to close.” The other
woman shakes her head, looking grey-faced. “Nobody will want to come here. The whole downtown will die. Not just us. The theaters, the museums, churches – everything.”
“I heard something on NPR about a new kind of gel to keep the virus from spreading,” the first woman replies, sounding hopeful.
I keep moving. Her voice fades away. People still talk about contagion control as if it matters, as if masks and sanitizers and prayers can stop the future.
The truth is, unless you’ve been living in some isolated Tibetan monastery, you’ve already been exposed to Polymorphic Viral Gastroencephalitis. Maybe it gave you a bit of a headache and some nausea, but after a few days’ bed rest you were going out for Thai again. Congratulations! You’re Type One and you probably don’t even know it.
But maybe the headache turned into the worst you’ve ever had, and you started vomiting up blood and then your stomach lining, and when you came out of the hospital you’d lost the ability to digest most foods and to make certain proteins. And in the absence of those proteins, your body has trouble growing and healing. The enzymes your DNA uses to repair itself don’t work very well anymore.
Sunlight is no longer your friend. Neither are x-rays. Even if you quit smoking and keep yourself covered up like a virgin in the Rub’ Al Khali, your skin cracks and your body sprouts tumors. Your brain begins to degenerate; you start talking to yourself in second person. Sooner or later, you develop lesions on your frontal lobe and hippocampus that cause a variety of behaviors which will lead to your friendly neighborhood SWAT team putting a .308 bullet through your skull. That means you’re a Type Two, or maybe a Type Three, like me.
If you’re Type Four, we aren’t having this conversation. Unless you’re a ghost. You aren’t a ghost, are you? I don’t think I believe in them. But if you were a Type Four, your whole GI tract got stripped. I hope you were lucky and had a massive brain bleed right when it got really bad, and you never woke up.
I’m pretty sure I woke up.
“Do you find yourself having any unwanted thoughts or violent fantasies?” Dr. Shapiro asks.
“Of course not.” I try to sound mildly indignant.
There’s one upside, if it can be called that. If you lived past all the pain and vomiting, the symptoms of your chronic disease can be alleviated, if you consume sufficient daily quantities of one of a couple of raw protein sources.
If the best protein source for you is fresh human blood, congratulations, you are a Type Two! Provided you have a fat bank account, or decent health insurance, or are quick with a razor and fast on your feet, you can resume puberty or your athletic career. Watch out for HIV; it’s a killer.
If, however, the best source for you comes from sweet, custard-like brains…you are a Type Three. Your situation is much more problematic. And expensive. You better have a wealthy family or truly excellent insurance. Or mob connections. Otherwise, sooner or later, you’ll end up trying to crack open someone’s skull in public. The only question then is if you’ll get that one moment of true gustatory bliss right before you die.
I have excellent health insurance. There’s no bliss for me. What I and every other upstanding, gainfully-employed, fully-covered Type Three citizen gets is an allotment of refrigerated capsules containing an unappetizing grey paste. Mostly it’s cow brains and antioxidant vitamins with just the barest hint of pureed cadaver white matter. It’s enough to keep your skin and brains from ulcerating. It’s enough to keep your nose from rotting off. It’s enough to help you think clearly enough to function at your average white-collar job.
It is not enough to keep you from constantly wishing you could taste the real thing.
“I was wondering about something,” I say, as Dr. Shapiro begins to copy the contents of her survey into the exam room computer.
She stops typing and gives me a wary smile. “Yes, what is it?”
“My medication. I feel okay, you know? But I think I could feel…better. If I could have a little more?” I’m choosing my words as carefully as possible. My tongue feels thick, twitchy.
I can’t talk about the cravings I’m feeling. I can’t mention wanting more energy, because nobody in charge wants someone like me feeling energetic.
I wonder if there’s a sniper watching from behind the mirror on the wall; has he tightened his grip on his rifle? Are gas canisters waiting to blow in the air conditioner vent above me? My skin itches in dread anticipation.
Dr. Shapiro hedges. “Well, I know there’s been a shortage of raw materials these days.”
I swallow down my impatience and worry. The capsules are ninety-eight percent cow brains, for God’s sake. Probably they can squeeze a single human brain for thousands of doses. I can’t imagine the pharmaceutical companies are running short of anything.
“Could you check, just the same? Could you ask for me?” I sound meek. Pathetic. The opposite of hostile. That’s good.
She gives me a pitying look and sighs. The mirror doesn’t explode in gunfire. Gas doesn’t burst from the vents.
“I’ll see what I can do,” my doctor says.
I try to believe she’ll come through for me.
* * *
I go home. I take my capsules with some Mott’s apple juice. I rinse my mouth out with peroxide and don’t look at my tongue. I rub salve on the places my clothes have rubbed raw, and I climb naked into my bed. Sometime later, the alarm goes off, and I rise, shower, dress, and drive to work in darkness.
My shift is dull-clockwork, until just after grey drizzling dawn, when one of the new tech leads comes in to talk to my coworker George about some of the emergency server protocols. I haven’t seen this young man before; he’s wearing snug jeans and the sleeves of his black polo shirt are tight over biceps tattooed with angels and devils. His blond hair is cut close over a smooth, high-browed skull. He starts talking about database errors, but he’s thinking about a gig he has with his band on Friday night, and it suddenly hits me not just that I know what he’s thinking but that I know because I can smell the sweet chemicals shifting inside his brain. The chemicals tell me his name is Devin.
I am filled with Want in the marrow of my bones. I am filled with Need from eyeballs to soles. I excuse myself and hurry out into the mutagenic morning and punch Betty’s number into my cell. Soon after we met, she made me promise not to save her details in my phone, just in case anything went wrong.
It’s early for her. But she answers on the third ring. Speaking in the casual code we’ve used since we met online, we agree to meet that evening. It’s her turn to host.
I sleep fitfully. When my alarm goes off, I call in sick, shower, dress, and check my phone. Betty’s texted a cryptic string of letters and numbers for my directions. And so I drive out to a hotel we’ve never visited before, drinking Aquafinas the whole way. It’s a dark old place, once grand, now crumbling away in a forgotten corner of downtown. I wonder if she’s running short of money or if the extra anonymity of the place was crucial to her.
Still, as I get out my car and double-check my locks in the pouring rain, I can’t help but peer out into the oppressive black spaces in the parking lot, trying to figure out if any of the shadows between the other vehicles could be lurking cops or CDC agents. The darkness doesn’t move, so I hurry to the front door, head down, hands jammed in my raincoat pockets, my stomach roiling with worry and anticipation. I avoid making eye contact with any of the damp, tired-looking prostitutes smoking outside the hotel’s front doors. None of them pay any attention to me.
My phone chimes as Betty texts me the room number. I take the creaking, urine-stinking elevator up four floors. My pace slows as I walk down the stained hallway carpet, and I pause for a moment before I knock on the door of Room 512. What if the watchers tapped Betty’s phone? What if she’s not here at all? My poised hand quivers as my heart seems to pound out “A trap – a trap – a trap.”
I swallow. Knock twic
e. Step back. A moment later, Betty answers the door, wearing her Audrey Hepburn wig and a black cocktail dress that hangs limply from her skeletal shoulders. It’s appalling how much weight she’s lost; her eyes have turned entirely black, the whites permanently stained by repeated hemorrhages.
But she smiles at me, and I find myself smiling back, warmed by the first spark of real human feeling I’ve had in months. I have to believe that we’re still human. I have to.
“You ready?” Her question creaks like the hinge of a forgotten gate.
“Absolutely.” My own voice is the dry fluttering of moth wings.
She locks the door behind me. “I’m sorry this place is such a pit, but the guy at the Holiday Inn started asking all kinds of questions, and this was the best I could do on short notice.”
“It’s okay.” The room isn’t as seedy as the lobby and exterior led me to expect it to be, and it’s got a couch in addition to the queen-sized bed. Betty has already covered the couch and the carpet in front of it with a green plastic tarpaulin. Her stainless steel spritzer bottle leans against a couch arm.
“Want some wine?” She gestures toward an unopened bottle of Yellow Tail shiraz on the dresser.
“Thanks, but no…I couldn’t drink it right now. Maybe after.”
She nods. “There’s a really good Italian restaurant around the corner. Kind of a Goodfellas hangout, but everything’s homemade. Great garlic bread.”
Supernatural Horror Short Stories Page 71
