Holy Terror (48 page)

She ran her long fingernails across his chest, lightly scratching him. He turned his head sideways and refused to look at her.

‘Take off his socks,' said an unfamiliar voice. It was dry as an old gate opening. ‘I want to see his feet go black.'

Magda moved away and Conor slowly turned back again. Somebody was sitting in the doorway, half silhouetted against the light. There was a
moment's pause, and then a high electric whine. The figure came forward – a nodding figure in a wheelchair. It drove right up to the side of the bed and suddenly appeared in the bright light that shone over Conor's head.

Conor stared at it in shock. It was a woman, white-faced and pink-eyed like Dennis Evelyn Branch. In spite of its total lack of color, her face was exquisite, with perfectly arched eyebrows and pale pouting lips. It could have been the face of an angel or a saint. Her head, however, was huge, swollen by encephalitis, and tufted here and there with sparse white clumps of hair. Her arms and legs looked like the limbs of a giant mantis, fleshless and useless; yet she wore a short red satin dress that was deeply cut to the cleavage between her chalk-white breasts. Around her neck she wore a crucifix studded with rubies.

She unfolded one of her arms and laid a bony, attenuated hand on Conor's chest. He flinched in revulsion at her touch.

‘If your heart ain't beating like a frog with its legs chopped off,' she said, in that same dry drawl. ‘You're not
scared
of nothing, are you?'

Conor stared at her. Her face was so beautiful that the rest of her body looked even more grotesque than it really was; and the sexual blatancy of her dress only added to the horror. What man would ever think of going to bed with her, except in his darkest nightmares?

She was propped in a Scandinavian Mobility electric wheelchair, $35,000 worth, state of the art. She could move herself forward and sideways with
complete precision. She could circle around the room and then sit utterly still, which was what she did now.

‘Do you know who I am?' she asked Conor, her pink eyes unblinking.

Conor didn't answer.

‘Do you know who I
am
?' she suddenly raged, her mantis-like arms flapping up and spit flying from her lips.

Conor gave her an infinitesimal shake of his head. ‘No,' he croaked. ‘I don't know who you are.'

‘I'm the lady who was sitting in the back seat of Dennis's Jeep when you tried to abduct him. I'm the lady who wound a wire around your neck and brought you to order.' She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled. ‘I like things to go to plan, sir. I like things to go orderly. And you – you were definitely not part of my plan, and you were not orderly, no sir.'

Her wheelchair went
neeee
, and she edged herself sideways. It went
neeee
again and she positioned herself so that she was staring directly into Conor's face. He tried hard not to look at her bulbous forehead, and the blue vein that he could see pulsing beneath her translucent skin.

The woman waited for a long time, silent. Then at last she said, ‘In every life, Mr O'Neil, a little rain must fall; but in my life a little more rain fell than you might consider fair.

‘I believe you've already guessed who I am, but you're such a stubborn self-important bastard you don't want to admit it, do you? I'm going to take such pleasure in what I'm going to do to you now.
It's not often that a biochemist gets the chance to inflict such terrible pain and such overwhelming panic in the course of legitimate research.'

She held out her bony hand and Magda, who was standing close behind her, took it between hers, as if she were pressing a leaf-skeleton between the pages of a book. ‘You want to take a last look at this character, Magda?' she said. ‘This is the last time you're going to see him looking so healthy. In less than twenty minutes' time he's going to be gagging to death on his own lung fluids.'

Conor looked at Magda but her dead-black eyes still gave nothing away. The woman in the wheelchair pulled her hand away and performed a slow 180-degree circle until she had her back to Conor. ‘Come on, now,' she coaxed. ‘You know who I am. You
know
who I am, but you just don't want to give me the satisfaction, do you?'

‘It doesn't matter what name evil goes under. It's still evil.'

The woman turned around. Her expression was bright and fierce. ‘You think I'm evil? I'm doing the Lord's work here, in spite of the burden that the Lord inflicted on me in my mother's womb. I'm looking forward to the next life, sir, when I get my reward for spreading His Holy Word from one comer of the globe to the other. I'm looking forward to opening my eyes and finding that my legs and arms are straight and strong, and that my hair is long and soft and silky, and that I'm just as beautiful as any other woman who walked the earth.'

She took a deep, tortured breath. ‘My mother gave birth to twins. She had German measles when she
was pregnant, and both twins were born weak and sickly. But one twin was so deformed that the midwife couldn't believe that it was human, and that twin was me.

‘My mother had run away from my father when she first discovered she was pregnant and she tried to have us aborted. She was only fourteen and my father was thirty-five. He was a man of God but he was a tyrant by nature. His manly pride was wounded: no woman ever ran away from
him
. He had my mother hunted down like an animal by members of his congregation and it was our bad luck that they found her before she could have us flushed out of her.

‘When he first saw us twins in the hospital my father was horrified. He said we were the spawn of Satan, me especially. He wanted the doctors to smother me and throw my body in the incinerator, like an unwanted puppy. The doctors said they wouldn't do that, but they wouldn't feed me, either. But I survived. I survived for three days, and in the end my father had a vision that I was sent by God for some great purpose, and he ordered me nourished.

‘All the same, he insisted that nobody should know about me; that I should never be seen. I might have been sent for some great purpose, but all the same he thought I was something shameful and a punishment sent direct from Almighty God. And that's the way I was brought up: in secret, behind blinds, without friends or family around me. My brother was christened Dennis and I was christened Evelyn, but my brother was always called by both of our names to remind him that he was a twin.'

She wheeled herself a little way away, out of the light, so that Conor could only see the white, tufted dome of her head, and not her face. ‘Dennis grew up like Father. A dedicated believer in the scriptures and the power of God. I was different. I wanted to find out how God had caused me so much suffering, and why. When I was thirteen years old I started to study science, and in particular I started to study viral infections, like the rubella virus that turned me into what I am.

‘Dennis was always devoted to me. Dennis believed what Father believed: that I was sent on earth for a purpose, that I had been deformed by a virus for a reason. Dennis brought the outside world into my room and showed me that I could make a difference to it, that I could change its history, as deformed as I was.

‘He studied science at college and he enrolled in a university course in microbiology, and he did that for me.
He
went to the classes and tape-recorded all the lectures while
I
stayed at home and wrote all of his theses and showed him how to do all of the lab work. He carried on with his Bible studies, of course. He was always Bible-hungry. But he lived my life for me, too, that's how dedicated he was. He never forgot that he was Dennis
Evelyn
Branch.'

Conor didn't say a word. He tugged at the straps holding his wrists but they were far too tight for him to pull himself free.

Evelyn Branch said, ‘We saw the world and we saw how corrupt it was and we decided that we were the ones who were chosen to change it. We declared war on atheism and false religions. I built
some bombs and Dennis planted them. Then I showed him something else that I'd been interested in, too. Ways of making yourself invisible.'

‘You're raving,' said Conor.

‘No, I'm not, and you know I'm not. Sitting alone in my room I had dreamed for years of going outside into the streets and mixing with other people, so long as they couldn't see me. That's why I studied hypnotism, and all the other ways of affecting people's perception. Hypnotism, and drugs like burundanga. I'm even working on a powder made of gallium and arsenic that can stop light dead in its tracks, the same way that fog does. If a man could coat himself in a powder like this, you simply wouldn't be able to see him. An invisible man.

‘It was when I was studying hypnotism that I first came across the names of Hypnos and Hetti. I read about their technique, and I was able to teach Dennis some basic hypnotic induction, and that's how he planted his bombs without anybody seeing him. It helped him in his sermons, too. He can virtually hypnotize an audience when he wants to,
clinically
hypnotize them, so that they're powerless to leave the room.

‘But a few acts of religious terror weren't enough. In fact they usually made things worse – whipped up blind hostility, and prejudice. Dennis wanted the whole world to see the true way to Heaven, and that's how the idea of the Global Message Movement came into his head. And that's how the idea of reviving the Spanish influenza came into
my
head.'

‘You don't seriously believe that God would want you to do that!'

‘Yes, I do. My brother and I, we were chosen.'

‘But if you release this virus, millions of people are going to die. Millions!'

‘It's the will of the Lord, Mr O'Neil.'

Dennis Branch came forward and laid a hand on his sister's vulture-like shoulder. ‘Think it's time we got this show on the road, don't you, Evelyn?'

Evelyn nodded. ‘You'd better go through to the lab now, Magda. We don't want
you
to catch Mr O'Neil's little bug now, do we?'

Dennis stood over Conor and said, ‘I know this isn't a voluntary sacrifice you're making here, Mr O'Neil. But it's a sacrifice that's going to promote the spiritual well-being of the entire human race, and when the message of God has reached from pole to pole, and the Global Message Movement is the crown of all religion here on earth, I'm going to make sure that you're remembered for ever, and honored for giving up your life.'

Conor said nothing. He found it hard to believe what was happening. It was only when Magda bent over and kissed his forehead that he realized that he was about to die.

Magda left, followed by Dennis. Three lab assistants came in through the double doors, all of them wearing protective suits and helmets. They carried a fourth, empty suit, and an aluminum box stenciled with a red skull-and-crossbones.

Two of them lifted Evelyn Branch from her wheelchair while the other slid her dangling legs into the bottom of the suit. They fastened the seals, locked on her helmet, and adjusted her airflow. Lying in front of them naked, Conor felt utterly vulnerable.

One of the assistants carefully laid the aluminum box in Evelyn's lap, and then all three of them left and closed the doors behind them. Evelyn came whining back in her wheelchair. Inside the distorting bowl of her helmet, she looked more like a fairground freak than she had before. She unlocked the box, opened the lid, and brought out a tiny glass vial of clear liquid.

‘Spanish influenza virus, 1918 strain. As virulent as ever, I hope. I'll be surprised if you last longer than forty-five minutes.'

She took out a hypodermic needle, pressed the plunger, and inserted the needle into the vial of virus. ‘You'll feel a little bunged up at first, as if you've caught a headcold. Then you'll start shivering and coughing and spitting up blood. After that you'll be gasping for air, because your lungs will be filled up with fluid. I shouldn't let it frighten you. It's no worse than drowning, and at least you don't have to get wet.'

She approached Conor with the hypodermic. She squeezed his left arm with her spidery fingers to make the veins stand out.

Conor said, ‘I guess it's no good asking you not to do this.'

Evelyn lifted her eyes. ‘Are you a religious man, Mr O'Neil?'

‘Yes, I am.'

‘You're here, strapped to this table, about to die from the effects of one of the most appalling viruses known to man, and yet you still believe in God?'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘Are you a Catholic, Mr O'Neil?'

Conor nodded.

Evelyn looked toward the observation window where Dennis Branch was standing, his forearm resting against the glass.

‘If I were to say to you that if you renounced your Catholicism here and now, and followed the teaching of the Global Message Movement, you could go free – what would you say to that?'

‘I'd say that you were lying.'

The point of the hypodermic needle was less than a half inch away from Conor's bulging blue vein. ‘I'm not lying, Mr O'Neil. All you have to do is renounce the teaching of Rome, and pledge your allegiance to the ministry of the Global Message, and that's it. No injection. You get up, you get dressed, you go home.'

‘Are you testing your virus or are you testing my faith?'

Evelyn Branch gave him a wide-eyed, beatific smile. ‘It looks like I could be testing both, doesn't it?'

Conor closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he thought:
What if I renounce my religion? There's nothing to stop me from confessing my sin after this is all over, and asking for God's forgiveness. God must understand what I'm facing here. I'm facing death – and not only my own death, but the likely death of millions of others. If I'm the only one who can save them, what right do I have to behave like a martyr? Better to fall from grace than to let so many die
.