The Deceit (36 page)

Ash hadu alla ilaha illallah
…

Ryan clicked. And stared. ‘Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease caused by the virus
Toxoplasma gondii
. The parasite infects most genera of warm-blooded animals, including humans; cats are the primary source of infection to human hosts. It is thought that maybe 50–90 percent of Europeans are carriers of the parasite; levels of infection in mankind are equally high in many other parts of the world; most victims will never become aware of their status as hosts, unless the infection becomes acute …’

Ash hadu alla ilaha illallah
…

Parasites.
Parasites.
Just like the malaria that killed Rhiannon
.
He clicked another article:

There is now no doubt that toxoplasma influences human behaviour in ways we are just beginning to understand. The effect of infection is also different between men and women. Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more antisocial, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women. On the other hand, women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls …

More attractive?
The parasite could make people
more attractive
?

I bear witness that there is no God except Allah. I bear witness that Muhammed is God’s Messenger …

The headlines were just bewildering now.

A NATION OF NEUROTICS? BLAME THE PUPPET MASTERS

Today the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London is publishing a
paper
called, ‘Can the common brain parasite,
Toxoplasma gondii
, influence human culture?’ The paper’s answer? ‘Quite possibly yes.’

And another:

A common parasite found in cats may be affecting human behavior on a mass scale, according to a scientist based at the
University of California, Santa Barbara
. While little is known about the causes of cultural change, a new study by the US Geological Survey indicates that behavioral manipulation of a common brain parasite may be among factors that play a role. ‘In populations where this parasite is very common, mass personality modification could result in cultural change,’ said study author Kevin Lafferty, a USGS scientist at UC Santa Barbara …

There were more articles like this – many more. And this was just one parasite: toxoplasma. What else was out there?

Ryan sat back. If religion was not a virus, but specifically a cerebral parasite, altering man’s behaviour, how would it work? It would have to be tiny, yet virulent, warping human minds like toxoplasmosis. And it would have to spread itself. How?

The call to prayer rolled on. As he stared out of his window, he knew he already had the answer.

The Oseirion was just beyond the great Seti temple. It had been filling with water over the centuries. Ryan had been trying to save it for years, save it from the Nile
.

Ryan recalled the Macarius papyrus, and its constant references to baptism. And thought about that woman washing her baby in the river.

Baptism.

If the parasitic virus was born in water, then it would urge people to seek out water so as to continue its life cycle. Baptism would be a perfect way of achieving this, a superb adaptation. That meant that baptism was theoretically a behaviour
induced
by the parasite, so as to better spread itself. But could a parasite do this? Could a parasite make humans enact such specific and exact behaviourisms, such as to seek out water?

He clicked and searched. And one cold tear of sweat ran down his spine.

Hayya ‘alas-salah, Allahu Akbar
… The Guinea Worm.

The Guinea Worm is a particularly unpleasant parasite, endemic in parts of Africa and Asia, especially desert countries like Egypt and the Sudan. It spends its early life curled up inside a copepod, a tiny shrimplike organism, swimming in water. A person drinking that water swallows the copepod, and when the copepod dissolves in stomach acid the Guinea Worm escapes. The worm slips into the intestines and burrows into the abdominal cavity: the human stomach.

From there the worm wanders through the human’s tissue until it finds a mate. The two-inch male and the two-foot female have sex inside the human body, then the male seeks a place to die. The female slithers through the human skin until she reaches the leg of her human host. As she travels, her fertilized eggs begin to develop, and by the time she has reached her destination, the eggs have hatched and become a crowd of bustling juveniles in her uterus.

These juveniles need to get inside a copepod, to be swallowed by a copepod, if they are to become adults themselves, and so they drive their human hosts to water, by causing a searing blister in the leg or foot, which the host tries to cool – by dipping it in cold water, such as a pool or a river.

Ryan paused, and read that again.

The parasites can drive their human hosts to water.

The call to prayer had ended. The silence was absolute and monumental.

For another hour Ryan scanned the screen, adding horrible information to his notebook: Ebola, eukaryotic viruses, blood flukes, leishmania, trypanosomes. He even found a curious paper: ‘The Amarna Kings, Aneamias, and Parasitic Liver Disease’, by an obscure scholar, Thomas M Simms, who openly speculated that the strange behaviour and deformities of the monotheistic Pharaoh Akhenaten and his family were the result of an
unknown waterborne parasite
that bred in his artificial lake of Birket Habu. At St Tawdros. Where Helen had caught a fever and nearly died.

Ryan had found enough evidence. Going to his safe, he grabbed all his cash and stuffed it in a bag. Then he exited his apartment, sprinted down the stairs, and took a fast taxi back to the riverside.

He and Helen had done it. They had solved the Macarius puzzle in a way they could not have conceived. They had not only falsified Judaism and Christianity; they had not only proved that these faiths derived almost entirely from pagan Egyptian mythology: they had gone further. They now had evidence that monotheism – monotheistic religion, in its entirety
–
was nothing but an affliction, an actual disease, a pathology of the brain, a radical and epidemic mood alteration caused by a brain parasite.

The whole thing, the whole enormous glittering, imperious cavalcade that was monotheism – Judaism and Christianity and Islam – parading in its pomp through human history
,
was caused by a minuscule virus or microscopic cyst in the brain, maybe little bigger than a molecule. And it was waterborne, and spread by baptism, and in its acute stage it was accompanied by plague. No wonder Victor Sassoon had been driven to suicide.

The theory was terrifying, but it was
beautiful
; the answer was insane, yet the answer fitted so well. It was the truth. He had the truth.

Ryan walked along the pier, feeling the moment. But he had no time to relish this revelation. He had to tell Helen what he had discovered. So he sprinted the last few hundred metres, to the jetty, and the waiting
Hypatia
. He ran up the gangplank, but as he did, he stumbled, and fell.

What?

Hauling himself to his feet he reached for the rope. He couldn’t see it properly.

Ryan spun around. The river was covered with a weird muffling haze. But even as he peered at the mist the truth skewered him with terror. There wasn’t a haze. It was an illusion.

His eyes were lying; his eyes were failing. He was going blind.

Karen woke up in her hospital room, quite alone in the world, desolate and childless. The TV suspended on the wall stared at her with its empty screen.

She groped for her memories: the bottle of pills, the alcohol, the sleeping pills, that agonized late-night phone call to DS Curtis – her poor friend! – the rush to the Whittington Hospital. After that: blackness.

But that was what she’d wanted – blackness – or she wouldn’t have attempted suicide in the first place. Did she really want to die? Karen turned and gazed out of the hospital window. She could see bare winter trees, and a lightly toppling snow, falling on Highgate Hill.

Snow.

Always the snow, how Karen hated the snow. Because the snow equalled memories of snowmen and snowballs and laughing with Eleanor and the twins in the snow, and that equalled a sadness so intense it threatened, right now, right here, to turn Karen inside out with grief.

Indeed it was as if she was being sucked into nothingness, as if she was in a tumbling, broken spaceship with a gashed hole in the side; and the grief was that devouring nothingness beyond, sucking everything out of the spaceship. Pulling everything into the blackness. She had so nearly let go. So nearly let herself spin away and outside and into the silent, black, infinite space. Where her daughter had already gone.

Karen leaned the other way and grabbed a tissue from a plain little cardboard box. As she did, she noticed the bandage on her forefinger, the traces of dried blood on cotton. Now she recalled how she had gnawed at her knuckles. Consumed by anguish.

How long could she cry for? How long could this go on? How many tears did she have? Maybe she should refuse liquids, nil by mouth, then she would at least be unable to cry.

Eleanor.

No more tears. She cried. No more tears. She cried and sobbed.

Karen tried to sit up but she felt pinned to the bed by the grief: the terrible sadness was a rapist, lying on top of her, knife to her pulsing neck.
It gets worse, bitch. You think this is it? It will get worse.

Eleanor.

He will kill you, bitch, he will smell the fear in you. The devil is in him.

Maybe the mad girl in the Bodmin asylum had been right. Rothley was the devil. He had smelled the fear in her.

‘Good morning?’

The voice was kindly, and authoritative. A doctor approached, with stethoscope and white coat, and sat on the end of the bed. His label read
DR HEPWORTH
.

He gazed at her. ‘So you’re awake. You had us all very worried.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Karen mumbled. ‘I’m so sorry … stupid.’

‘Well, that is a bit harsh. But, anyway … We’ll need to do some tests – you’ve been, you know, elsewhere for two days now.’

‘Two days?’

Hepworth nodded. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Quite delirious. We had to restrain you at one point.’

‘God, I’m just … sorry.’ Karen stared at the shape of herself under the hospital bedsheets. Her legs. Her stupid body.

The doctor strode across, and came close. He shone a torchlight in both of her eyes, tilting her head back. He checked her pulse with two fingers. Then he sat down on the visitor’s chair, and frowned, and asked her a question: the capital of England.

Karen mumbled, ‘London.’

‘The name of the prime minister?’

She told him that, too.

Hepworth nodded and jotted something on a clipboard. ‘OK. Four times ten.’

‘Forty.’

‘Uh-huh.’ He tapped the pen against his chin. Then said, ‘Repeat after me, penny lion Paris bicycle.’

‘Penny lion … Paris bicycle.’

He wrote something down on the clipboard, as if he was actually writing,
PENNY LION PARIS BICYCLE
. ‘OK. Well. There it is.’ He frowned ‘We’ll need to do more tests but you seem
compos mentis
. This is very unusual of course, though not entirely unique.’ His frown softened. ‘I’m sure you must be pretty keen to see your family.’ He walked to the door and signalled down the corridor.

‘No,’ said Karen, desperate. ‘I don’t want to see anyone. I don’t. I can’t. I’ve already seen Eleanor, that’s my family, I’ve seen the body, please, I can’t—’

The doctor swivelled. ‘Body? What are you talking about?’

Karen gazed at him.

She could hear footsteps running down the corridor. Light footsteps, running footsteps, a child’s running, happy footsteps, a little girl’s running steps. She saw a glimpse of blonde hair through the glass of the door. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, it surely wasn’t, surely not, it mustn’t be, it couldn’t be; could it be?

Could it be?

Could it be?

The time and space surrounding her dwindled to a nothingness, and all that Karen was and all that Karen could be and all that Karen could ever be was Karen at this moment staring at the door and seeing the blonde hair and the smiling face and the little girl who leapt onto the bed, smiling, and hugging her. Hugging her mummy.

‘Eleanor?’ Karen’s voice had never been so cracked. Cracked with sadness, and a terrifying happiness. ‘Eleanor?’

Her daughter was lying on the bed, hugging her mother. Karen could smell her hair. It was Eleanor. She was alive. Karen had no idea how, but
she was alive.

Now the tears came again, in their hundreds and thousands, and Karen didn’t care. For ten minutes she rocked her daughter in her arms, weeping with happiness, crying and laughing so loud that nurses from the next ward came to stand and stare, and smile, and one of the nurses cried as well, and Eleanor didn’t understand, and Karen didn’t want to tell her. She just stroked her daughter’s lovely, lovely, lovely blonde hair, and cried.

Three hours later Dr Hepworth pronounced her fit and well – as far as he was able. Karen barely let go of Eleanor’s hand throughout the procedure. It was only when Julie and Alan and the twins had been in and out, and more tears had been shed, that she let Eleanor go and play with the twins. Even then Karen grimaced with anxiety. At the memory of her imagined yet very real terror.

As soon as they had left the room, she turned to Boyle and Curtis, who had been waiting patiently. ‘So what happened to me, when did I start hallucinating?’

DS Curtis shook his head, as if he didn’t know the answer, though he clearly did. ‘Soon after the discovery of the girl’s body in Chancery Lane, maybe ten minutes later. According to the site manager.’