Чак Хоган - The Blood Artists

“A little,” I said.

“Just rest. Raisin toast and tea in the morning.”

And glasses of flat ginger ale; an uncapped bottle of Canada Dry set out overnight on the kitchen counter. And later, chicken soup.

My father remained on the landing in his tweed overcoat, fixing his collar, waiting to go. Flickering out.

Sunlight struck the trophies on the bureau. I was still in my summer room in Amagansett. Burning up and meaning to do something about it. Open a window maybe. I was going to get up, soon. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to be lying down.

Peri came to me later. She appeared in the middle of the room with her eyes closed and her arms out at her side, nude. I was terrified she would open her eyes and see me lying there, helpless, but I hadn’t the strength to hide. When she did open her eyes, her orbits were hollow and black, and tears of toxic blood poured down her cheeks to her breasts and over her stomach and legs, burning through her spoiling flesh to the meat and bone beneath. She was rotting with her own blood and howling at me as, standing there, she decomposed.

Then she was gone. The bed was trembling.

Vaccine? This way.

She cannot bear to be touched.

Burning

She cannot bear even the pressure of a bedsheet.

Maman

Her name.

The candle

Vaccine. A cure.

Two days ago. I buried them next to the house.

I am floating

You are a camp doctor.

The others are much worse.

It is death

You’re sick.

The rain it stinks of death

This will protect you.

I am going with you

If you tell me to do it I will I will go

I looked out at the small writing desk next to my bed and saw the patient from bay twenty-six. Rather than junk the outgrown desk, my parents had moved it to the summer house, and now this wasted phantom sat large in the young child’s chair, his flat legs tucked snugly under the desk, gnawing on his lips with destructive precision as he typed. Sideways I watched the ghoulish little man as he keyed through pages on my tablet. The file he stopped at looked familiar. It appeared to be the title page of “Investigation.Maryk.” When he turned his head toward me, his red eyes were kindled by the faint light of the screen and the night glow from the skylight above.

“Pearse,” he said, his ragged lips twisted into something like a smile.

Something about this apparition differed from the others, in that something about it was true. The man moved about the room, preternaturally well, dressed in street clothes now and a colorful, brimless cap, his shirt and pants hanging formlessly off his slim hips. He mumbled to himself as he paced, chewing his lips, thinking. Deciding something.

He crossed to the bed, and I heard the plastic sheeting crumpling underfoot. I had forgotten about the sheeting, and the sudden memory of it, an icy splash of reality among the humidity of my dreams, commanded my attention. He leaned over me — his face was cheekless almost to the sinewy muscles beneath, eyes wet and large and boiling red — and I realized I was terrified. He looked me up and down with a flat, sluggish grin, like a deranged artist amused by the incoherence of his own incoherent work.

“Mine now,” he told me. “You are mine.”

He was right.

Then the room was empty again, and I was waiting for Jacqueline Moutouari. The bed was floating: I was floating. Blackness shone through the skylight as I burned.

The horse head knocker clanked as the front door was opened downstairs. Footsteps wandered somewhere on the first floor, and I imagined she was coming to me now, to take my hand and lead me to the others. The room was beginning to drift again, but I held on, I held on.

A creak on the stairs: I knew the exact spot: fifth step, right side: and the creak again as the foot was lifted. The doorway slid away along the wall, circling the room, everything starting to spin and collapse.

The figure rose onto the dark landing outside my door. There was no disappointment on my part, no feelings either way; acceptance was all. His shadow filled the bedroom doorway, and I saw the zinc shock of hair under the skylight and recalled how in school behind his back they used to call him “Pearse’s Lab Rat.” Tight pale gloves glowed on his oversized hands. He was like a thing I had created, an ill-considered experiment gone awry and unleashed upon an unsuspecting, unprepared world, now returned to exact revenge upon its master. But like those of the patient from bay twenty-six, Peter Maryk’s actions also seemed true, not what I might have fancied or hoped for or feared, but exactly what I might have expected had he actually walked into the room. There was nothing at all like compassion in the severity of his shadowed face, the heat of his bright, gray eyes, the contemptuous slant of his lips. Only absolute, unforgiving disgust.

“You’re sick,” he said.

Maryk stood inside the silvered doorway. He looked at the wasting figure of Stephen Pearse lying on the child’s mattress. The odor of decay was thick and distinct. He backed out of the doorway into the shadows of the landing. The shock of the moment left him as quickly as it had come. He looked again at Stephen Pearse lying on his side with his right arm stuck off the bed. Stephen’s eyes were sunken and crimson and staring.

Maryk returned downstairs. The house was like a museum with each room a closed exhibit. He walked to a glass-walled sitting room off the kitchen in the rear and rooted himself in the memory of his only previous visit. Lace curtains had been sashed along the walls and leather bindings had lined the low bookshelves under the windows. A mayonnaise jar full of buffalo nickels had sat upon the fall front of the cherry wood desk.

Every piece of furniture that remained in the house was shrouded. Maryk set his tablet on an upright Steinway covered in thin plastic sheeting. His black bag balanced on the keyboard and pressed out a dull chord that echoed throughout the cloistered first floor. Outside the windows the sloping backyard was silver and the moon was sprayed over the wrinkling ocean.

He opened his tablet and dialed Bobby Chiles. The deputy director’s haggard face appeared in a window on the screen.

“Found him,” Maryk said.

Bobby clapped his hands softly once and sat back in his chair. His shirt collar was twisted open anxiously. “Where is he?” he said.

“He’s sick.”

“Sick? What do you mean?”

“Who else is there with you?”

“I’m alone. Stephen is sick with what?”

“Plainville.”

Bobby’s eyes held fast to the screen as the rest of his face struggled.

“You need to make a decision,” Maryk said.

“—Get him to a hospital.”

“Not here. The New York press. Let me bring him back to Atlanta.”

“Plainville? But how?”

“I am the only one who can get near him without a full suit now.”

Bobby’s hands were up at his face.

Maryk said, “Listen. We need to act fast. I need all resources placed at my disposal. No restrictions, and no questions asked.”

“But if it’s Plainville, what can you—”

“I can treat him,” Maryk said simply.

Bobby was staring beyond his screen and well beyond Maryk. Maryk told him what he would need and then ended the connection.

He left his tablet glowing atop the piano and took his black bag back upstairs. Stephen lay on the boy-sized bed as before. The things in the bedroom were preserved under plastic except for the bed and a short blond wood dresser with the trophies on it. A cold breath of rot reached Maryk and he looked across at an open,and unscreened window. A car passed the house. A city of twenty-five million people waited at the other end of the highway. Maryk wondered if the self-appointed “Health Ambassador to the World” could have already ignited a lethal chain of transmission in the most populated city in North America.