The White Plague (51 page)

Abruptly, with part of her mind, she knew this was not merely idle speculation. This fantasy had touched something live and real. It was almost palpable and she found this both magnetic and terrifying. She knew then that she had opened up something more than just a dream. This was a channel where fantasy might educate… or at least prepare her against strange possibilities.

Kate focused hard on that external world then – that place outside the pressure chamber where new relationships were developing. It was a crucible out there with agony and wrenching loss. Any fantasy she attempted from now on would have to consider the strange realities that she saw only as reflections from the words of the guards and the images on the telly. 

When they have found a cure, I will step out into that world
, she thought.

This was a profoundly disturbing realization and she felt angry at her own fantasies for leading her into such a predicament. She still did not doubt that she would survive; fantasy protected her there. But right at the edge of her dreams there lay goblin actualities, which leered at her. Frantic, she grasped for a protective dream.

An island! That was it! She and Stephen would find their own island and…

“What’re you thinking, Kate? Your face is all screwed up as though you’d swallowed something bitter.”

Stephen’s voice intruded at the moment she found her fantasy breaking on more impossibilities – what island? How would they get to it? She found herself thankful for the interruption. Opening her eyes, she saw that Stephen had put down his book and was preparing to bake bread. Odd, how he liked to do that, a bit of domesticity in him that she had never suspected. All the ingredients came in sterilized cans, though, and he had fastened on this as a way to add interest to their lives.

“I was wondering what’ll become of us when we get out of here,” she said.

He turned a wide grin of pleasure toward her. “There’s my girl! Never doubt for a minute that we’ll make it, darlin’.”

“Will we, Stephen?”

Without her dreams, she found herself plunged back into a world beset by doubts.

Please, Stephen, tell me something reassuring.

“We’re perfectly safe here,” he said. But there was a ring of insincerity in his voice that she had come to recognize immediately.

“Oh, Stephen!”

Kate dissolved into sobs and all thought of bread baking was gone for the moment. His hands still dusted with flour, Stephen came across the room and knelt beside her, holding her tightly around the waist and his cheek pressed against her abdomen.

“I’ll protect you, Katie,” he whispered.

She clutched at him, holding his head against her.
Oh, God! He might die trying to protect me!

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

– Dylan Thomas

H
ERITY FOLLOWED
an even more circumspect route as they neared Dublin, leading his party in across the pasture lands to the northwest of the city and avoiding the traveled ways to the interior where, it was said, bands of land pirates still lurked.

John remained a mystery to him, but there was no doubt in Herity’s mind that the man concealed something dark. He might be the Madman. Then again, he might only be another lost one with his own sins on his mind, his own griefs and reasons for coming here. He might even be sincerely desirous of helping Ireland in its hour of testing.

As he marched across the fields toward Dublin, Herity prodded and listened to every word John uttered. It was maddening. How could this be the Madman? There was emotional betrayal in him, but betrayal of what?

Father Michael remarked on the absence of cattle as they neared the city.

“Men still eat,” Herity said.

“But they leave a lot for the birds,” Father Michael said.

The boy took on an intense look of concern as Father Michael mentioned the birds. An ancient stone ruin stood off to the side of their track, rooks soaring around it. Beyond it, they could see the hills to the south of the city. Barren trees devoid of all green fanged the heights. Somewhere over there lay Tara, Herity knew. There where kings had lived, not even cattle grazed now.

“Isn’t it strange,” Father Michael mused, “so many of the ancient lyrics mentioning the blackbirds.” He stared at the birds wheeling over the ruin.

John also watched the flock, thinking how those particular birds haunted this landscape, realizing that this must always have been the case. He said as much, noting how sharply the boy looked from one speaker to another when the birds were mentioned.

Herity kept his gaze roving over the landscape around them, a mounting tension in him. Green copses off there and burned houses, the meadows like moats with the weed-grown lanes through them. A burned patch in a meadow off to the left showed ugly mounds in it – suggestive shapes drawn there in charcoal and not yet washed away by the rains. Bodies?

A dark line of rain could be seen sweeping across the fields and copses – black as the wings of the soaring birds.

Seeing undamaged buildings ahead, they hurried to beat the storm. Their lane came out on a narrow paved road with an intact shed beside it, glass on the ends of the shed, a long bench at the rear, an empty wooden pocket there for timetables on a no-longer-existent bus line. The squall swept overhead as they reached this shelter and they were only dampened by it as they huddled in the rear. Rain pelted the roof and bounced off the macadam, bright pellets of water beating all around. The temperature dropped sharply.

As quickly as it had come, the storm passed. It left long lanes of blue in the sky. The hills to the south stood out clearly in the rain-washed air, ridges lighted by the lowering sun. Green there with patches of yellow furze, the trees clumped along the ridges like spears planted there by the ancient kings who had ruled from that place.

John stepped out of the shelter and stared around him. There was an emerald brilliance to the land, a beauty that he thought had been near enough to this for eons… something to ignite in the human breast a love of the earth beneath the feet. He felt that it was a thing deeper than patriotism, because it infected Gaelic descendants who had never seen this land. People caught up in that kind of love identified with it. They became bound to it in a way that could make them happy if they could only go into a grave covered by such beauty.

Was it possible, John wondered, to love a country without caring very much for the people who put their mark on it? Possession might not be nine points of that law, after all. When you considered it carefully, possession was transient, no more than the right to carve your initials in a length of cliffside… or to build a wall that eventually would melt back into the earth.

Herity came around from behind the shed zipping up his fly. “Let’s be moving along. We’ll not be in Dublin by nightfall but there’s shelter ahead and a bit more civilization. We’re inside the Dublin pale here at last.”

He strode off. John fell into step beside him. Father Michael and the boy brought up the rear.

“Despite what Joseph says, don’t expect civilization here,” Father Michael said. “This is a brutal place, John. It may be that the centers of government were always this way and now we’ve merely pulled off the mask, exposing the truth of the matter.”

“Brutal?” John asked.

“There’s stories of torture and madness and proof enough to confirm them.”

“Then why are we going here? Why aren’t we going directly to the Lab at Killaloe?”

Father Michael nodded toward Herity’s back. “Orders.”

John felt his palms wet against the machine gun, which hung from its neck strap next to his chest. One little flick of a finger to remove the safety the way Herity had showed him. He could run off by himself and find his own way to Killaloe. Or could he? Three bodies to dispose of… and no telling who might come to investigate the shooting. He glanced at the boy.

Could I do it?

He felt his fingers relaxing from the gun’s hard metal and that was answer enough. Something had changed among the four of them here on this road. O’Neill’s revenge had been accomplished upon these people. John knew then he could not bring his companions more agony.

“What do you mean… torture?” he asked.

“I’ll not speak more of it,” Father Michael said. “There’s things bad enough in this poor land.” He shook his head.

The road led into a tall stand of evergreens and they were almost into the trees now. John glimpsed buildings off to the right through the dark trunks of the evergreens – white stone and black roof. It was a large building with several chimneys. Smoke drew vertical lines from two of the chimneys.

Herity whistled as he walked. Abruptly, he stopped whistling and held up a hand for them to stop. He cocked his head, listening.

John grew aware of singing, the sound of choristers in the distance, toward the building. It was a lovely sound of harmony, reminding him of holidays. His memories began to play – Grampa Jack, firelight and stories, music from the radio. The singing grew louder, extinguishing the memories. Illusion vanished as he recognized the choristers’ words.

“Listen to the little bastards, will you?” Herity exulted. “Listen to ’em, Michael Flannery!”

The sweet young voices sang with inescapable clarity:

“Fucking Mary we adore,

Fucking Mary, Jesus’ whore.

And when we all ejaculate,

That is why we masturbate!”

Father Michael clapped his hands over his ears and failed to note that the singing stopped. Now, there was only a grunting chant from off in the trees, a Gregorian parody: “Hut, hut, hut, hut, hut…”

Herity threw back his head in laughter. “Now there’s memorable blasphemy for you! There’s blasphemy to conjure with, Priest.” He grabbed Father Michael’s right arm and pulled it away from the ear. “Ahhh, now, Michael, I wish I’d thought of that little song.”

“Somewhere you still have a conscience, Joseph,” Father Michael said. “I shall find it yet though it lie beyond the bottomless pit.”

“Conscience, you say!” Herity blared. “Is it your Church’s old guilt game again? Whenever will you learn?” He turned and strode off down the road, the others close behind.

Father Michael spoke in a conversational voice. “Why do you speak of guilt, Joseph? Is it something on that conscience you profess not to have?”

It was clear to John that the priest was maintaining better control. Herity’s anger mounted with every step. His knuckles were white on the stock of the machine gun. John wondered if the man might turn that weapon against the priest.

“Why will you not answer me, Joseph?” Father Michael asked.

“It’s you that has the guilt!” Herity raged. “You and your Church!”

“You keep harping on the Church,” Father Michael said, his tone reasonable. “If one person says you’re guilty, yourself saying it of yourself, that’s a sore problem, Joseph. But the collective guilt of a whole people – that’s another matter.”

“You’re a dirty, lying priest!”

“Hearing you rant has brought me to some hard thinking, Joseph.” Father Michael quickened his pace until he walked beside Herity. “It occurs to me, it does, that it’s hard for a collectivity of people to accept the awakening of its conscience.”

Herity stopped in the center of the road, forcing Father Michael to stop also. John and the boy halted a few paces back and watched the antagonists. Herity regarded Father Michael with a silent scowl, his forehead creased in thought.

“The Church could administer to the individual,” Father Michael said, “but not to the people. That was our failure. Where is a people’s conscience?”

A look of bland superiority erased the scowl from Herity’s face. He stared at the priest. “Has the mad priest finally come around to sanity? Do you see at last the world you’ve made?”

“All I’m saying is that it’s hard for people to feel guilty together,” Father Michael said.

“Is that all of it?” There was glee in Herity’s voice.

Father Michael turned and looked back the way they had come, staring past John and the boy at the road climbing out of the trees toward the meadows. “No, Joseph, that’s not all of it. Before the people will accept guilt, they’ll do terrible things together. Better the bloodbath, kill the innocents, ignite the war, lynch and murder…”

John felt the priest’s words like a physical lash. What was this? What had Father Michael said to produce such feelings? John knew his face must appear frozen. He could not sense O’Neill-Within anywhere. He had been left alone to face this thing, whatever it was. He felt shattered, broken away from essential ground.

“So you’re sorry for all the pain you’ve spread?” Herity asked. John felt the question. He thought it had been asked of him directly, although it was obvious the words were directed at the priest.

“Sorry?” Father Michael looked squarely at Herity, forcing the man to meet his gaze. It was as though Father Michael saw Herity clearly for the first time. “Why should I be sorry?”

“Blather!” Herity sneered. His voice sounded weak, though. “Father Michael says this. Father Michael says that. But Father Michael is a notorious liar, trained in it by the Jesuits!”

“Joseph, Joseph,” Father Michael said, pity in his tone. “John Donne’s bell can toll for the one but not for the many. I shall pray for your individual soul, Joseph, and for the soul of any individual I can identify. As to the many, I see that I must think on it.”

“Think on it! Is that all you can do, you silly old fool!” Herity turned his glare on John. “And what’re you staring at, Yank?”

The boy stepped clear of John’s side, stopping a pace away.

John tried to swallow in a dry throat. He knew his inner turmoil must be transparent.