Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (26 page)

Dan sensed a certain hesitancy in José.

“I wouldn’t happen to know these two patients, would I?”

José hesitated, then sighed.  “Normally I wouldn’t tell you, but they’re going to be in all the medical journals soon, and from then on they’ll be news-show and talk-show commodities, so I guess it’s okay to tell you they’re both regulars at your Loaves and Fishes.  You’ll hear their names soon enough.”

Dan stumbled a step.

“Oh my God.”

“Well, you knew some of them had to be HIV positive.”

Dan tried to remember who hadn’t been around lately.

“Dandy and Rider?”

“You guessed it.”

“They had it but they’re
cured
?”

“Yep.  Both with a history of IV drug use, formerly HIV positive, now HIV neg.  You figure it out.”

Dan was trying to do just that.

He knew Carrie wouldn’t have to think twice about an explanation when she heard the news: the Virgin did it.

And how was he supposed to counter that?  Damned if he wasn’t beginning to think she might be right.  First Preacher gets his sight back, then people all over the area start sighting someone they think is the Virgin Mary, and now two of their regulars at St. Joe’s are cured of AIDS.

The accumulated weight of evidence was getting too heavy to brush off as mere coincidence.

He glanced at José and noticed he still looked glum.

“So how come you’re not happy?”

“Because when I gave Rider and Dandy the news they gave
me
all the credit.”

“So?”

“So I didn’t do anything.  And if they go around blabbing that Dr. Martinez can cure AIDS, it’s going to raise a lot of false hopes.  And worse, my little clinic is going to be inundated with people looking for a miracle.”

A miracle...that word again.

Dan clapped him on the shoulder, trying to lighten him up.

“Who knows.  Maybe you’ve got the healing touch.”

“Not funny, Dan.  I don’t have the resources to properly treat the people I’m seeing now.  If the clinic starts attracting crowds I don’t know what I’ll do.”  Suddenly he grinned.  “Maybe I’ll direct them all to Saint Joe’s Loaves and Fishes.  If they’re looking for a miracle, that’s the place to find it.”

A knot of dread constricted in Dan’s chest, stopping him in his tracks.

“Don’t even kid about that!”

José laughed.  “Hey, think about it: It all fits.  Preacher regained his sight there, and both Dandy and Rider are regulars.  Maybe the cure-all can be found at Loaves and Fishes.  Maybe Sister Carrie’s stirring some special magical ingredient into that soup of hers.”

Dan forced a smile.  “Maybe.  I’ll have to ask her.”

‡

Carrie held up two zip-lock bags.

“Here they are.  The magic ingredients.”

When he’d mentioned José’s remarks to her this morning, she’d smiled and crooked a finger at him, leading him down to the subcellar.  It was the first time he’d been down here since he’d carried in the Virgin.  After Carrie lit the candles, Dan saw that the Virgin looked different.  Her hair was neater, tucked away under her wimple, and those long, grotesque fingernails had been clipped off.  The air was suffused with the sweet scent of the fresh flowers that surrounded the bier.

Carrie then reached under her bier and produced these two clear plastic bags.

Dan took them from her and examined them.  One contained an ounce or so of a fine, off-white powder; the other was full of a feather-light gray substance that looked for all the world like finely chopped...hair.

He glanced back at Carrie and found her smiling, staring at him, her eyes luminous in the candle glow. 

“What are these?” he said, hefting the bags.

“Hers.”

“I don’t get it.”

Carrie reached out and gently touched the bag of fine, gray strands.  “This one’s her hair.”  She then touched the bag with the powder.  “And this is what’s left of her fingernails.”

“Fingernails?”

“I trimmed her nails and filed the cuttings down to powder.”

“Why on earth...?”

Carrie explained about the strand of hair in Preacher’s soup, and how he’d begun to see again almost immediately after.

“But that was coincidence,” Dan said.  “It had to be.”

She trapped him with those eyes.  “Are you sure?”

“No.  I’m not sure.  I no longer know what I’m sure of or
not
sure of.  I haven’t been sure of much for a long time, and now I’m not even sure about the things I’ve been sure I couldn’t be sure of.”

Carrie started to laugh.

Dan shook his head.  “Sounds like a country-western song, doesn’t it?”  Then he too started to laugh.

“Oh, Lord,” Carrie said after a moment.  “When was the last time we laughed together?”

“Before Israel.”

Slowly, she sobered.  “That seems like so long ago.”

“Doesn’t it.”

Silence hung between them.

“Anyway,” Carrie finally said, “I’ve been dosing the soup with tiny bits of her hair and her ground-up fingernails every day since she arrived.”

Dan couldn’t help making a face.  “Carrie!”

“Don’t look at me like that, Dan.  If I put in a couple of snippets of hair I mix it with the rosemary.  If I use some fingernail, I rub it together with some pepper.  Tiny amounts, unnoticeable, completely indistinguishable from the regular spices.”

“But they’re
not
spices.”

“They are indeed!  You can’t deny that things have changed upstairs since the Virgin arrived.”

Dan thought about that and realized she was right.  In fact, strange things had been happening at the Loaves and Fishes during the past month or so.  Nothing so dramatic as the return of Preacher’s sight, but the place had
changed
.  Nothing that would be apparent to an outsider, but Dan knew things were different.

First off, the mood—the undercurrent of suspicion and paranoia that had prevailed whenever the guests gathered was gone.  They no longer sat hunched over their meals, one arm hooked around the plate while the free hand shoveled food into the mouth.  They ate more slowly now, and they talked.  Instead of arguments over who was hogging the salt or who’d got a bigger serving, Dan had actually heard civil conversation along the tables.

Come to think of it, he hadn’t had to break up a fight in two weeks—a record.  The previously demented, paranoid, and generally psychotic guests seemed calmer, more lucid, almost rational.  Fewer of them were coming in drunk or high.  Rider had stopped talking about finding his old Harley and had even mentioned checking out a Help Wanted sign he’d seen outside a cycle repair shop. 

But the biggest change had been in Carrie.

She’d withdrawn from him.  It had always seemed to Dan that Carrie had room in her life for God, her order, St. Joe’s Loaves and Fishes, and one other.  Dan had been that one other for a while.  Now he’d lost her.  The Virgin had supplanted him in that remaining spot.  

Yet try as he might he could feel no animosity.  She was
happy
.  He couldn’t remember seeing her so radiant.  His only regret was that he wasn’t the source of that inner light.  Part of him wanted to label her as crazy, deranged, psychotic, but then he’d have to find another explanation for the changes upstairs... and the cures.

He stepped past her to stare down at the prone, waxy figure.  She looked so much neater, so much more...attractive with her hair fixed and her nails trimmed.

“You think she’s responsible.”

“I
know
she is.”

Dan’s gaze roamed past the flickering candles to the flower-stuffed vases that rimmed the far side and clustered at the head and foot of the makeshift bier.

“You’ve done a wonderful job with her.  But how do you keep sneaking off with all these flowers?  Aren’t you afraid one of these trips somebody in the church is going to catch you and ask you what you’re up to?”

“One of what trips?  I haven’t borrowed any flowers from the church since she arrived.”

Dan turned back to the flowers—mums, daffodils, gardenias, gladiolus, their stalks were straight and tall, their blossoms full and unwrinkled—then looked at Carrie again.

“But these are...”

“The same ones I brought down the first day.”  Her smile was blinding.  “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Dan continued to stare into those bright, wide, guileless eyes, looking for some hint of deception, but he found none.  Suddenly he wished for a chair.  His knees felt rubbery.  He needed to sit down.

“My God, Carrie.”

“No.  Just His mother.”

That wasn’t what he needed to hear.  Things like this didn’t happen in the real world, at least not in Dan’s real world.  God stayed in His heaven and watched His creations make the best of things down here while priests like Dan acted as go-betweens.  There was no part in the script for His mother—especially not in the subcellar of a Lower East Side church.

“Is it her, Carrie?  Can it really be
her
?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding, beaming, unhindered by the vaguest trace of doubt.  “It’s her.  Can’t you feel it?”

The only thing Dan could feel right now was an uneasy chill seeping into his soul.

“What have we done, Carrie?  What have we
done
?”

AIDS Cures Linked To Virgin Mary

A prayer vigil outside St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on the Lower East Side last night attracted over two thousand people.  Many of those attending proclaimed the recent well-publicized AIDS cures as miracles related to the sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the area during the past month.  When asked about the connection, Fr. Daniel Fitzpatrick, associate pastor of St. Joseph’s, responded, “The Church has not verified the figure that has been sighted as actually representing the Virgin Mary, and certainly there is no established link between the figure and the AIDS cures.  Therefore I would strongly caution anyone with AIDS from abandoning their current therapy and coming down here looking for a miracle cure.  You might find just the opposite.”

(N. Y. Daily
News)

CDC to Begin Epidemiological

Study on Lower East Side

(Atlanta, AP) The Center for Disease Control has announced it will begin a limited epidemiological study of the five cases of AIDS reported cured of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  A spokesman for the Center said...

(The New York
Times)

Paraiso

“Are these all the clippings?” Arthur Crenshaw asked as he reread the
Times
article for the third time.

“The latest batch,” Emilio said.

Arthur slipped the rest of the clippings back into the manila envelope but held onto the
Times
and
Daily News
pieces.   For a moment he stared through the glass at the Pacific, glistening in the early afternoon sun, then glanced to his right where Charlie lay. 

He’d turned the great room into a miniature medical facility: a state-of-the-art AIDS clinic with round-the-clock nursing, a medical consultant with an international reputation in infectious diseases, and a patient census of one.

All to no avail.

Charlie was fading fast.  He’d received maximum doses of the standard AIDS medications, including triple therapy, and had even undergone a course of a new and promising drug that was still in the experimental stages.  Nothing worked.  Apparently he’d picked up a particularly virulent strain of the virus and had ignored the symptoms in the early stages.  Only scant vestiges of Charlie’s immune system had remained by the time he’d started treatment.  On his last visit, Dr. Lamberson would not commit to how much time he thought Charlie had, but he said the prognosis was very grave indeed.  Ordinarily Lamberson would have laughed at the thought of a house call, but with what Arthur was paying him, he came when called.  He’d just brought Charlie through a severe bout of
pneumocystis
pneumonia and said another would certainly kill him.

Charlie was sleeping now.  His hospital bed had been wheeled closer to the glass wall so he could read in the sunlight, and he’d dozed off after a few pages.  He had no strength, no stamina, and the pounds were melting from his frame like butter.  And he was so
pale
.  Arthur had begun insisting on colored sheets so that he could look at his son without feeling he was being absorbed into the mattress.

Charlie, Charlie, Arthur thought as he stared at him.  If only you’d listened!  Dear boy, you never meant to hurt anyone.  You don’t deserve this.  Please don’t die, not until I can work up the courage to tell you I understand, that for a while I...I was like you.  Almost like you.

I had been back in the sixties, in the hedonistic dens behind the Victorian facades of Haight Ashbury.  Arthur had been looking for himself, trying anything—drugs, and sex.  All kinds of sex.  For a year he had lived in a commune where group sex was a nightly ritual.  Every combination was tried—men and women together, women with women, and...men with men.  He had tried it for a while, even enjoyed it for a while, but as time went on, he realized it wasn’t for him.

Been there, done that
, as the expression went.

But he’d never considered it as a lifestyle.  Yet the memories haunted him.  What if someone from those days stepped forward with stories of young Artie Crenshaw having sex with other men? 

Many a night the possibility dragged him sweating and gasping from his sleep.

Not fair.  Those days were long past..  An aberration.  He’d repented, and he was sure he’d been forgiven.  He wanted Charlie to be forgiven as well.  But would learning about his father’s past lighten Charlie’s burden?

Arthur didn’t know.  If only he
knew
.

So much he didn’t know.  Especially about AIDS.  Arthur had begun his own research, learning all he could—more than he wished to know—about HIV, ARC, CD4, p24, AZT, TP-5, and all the rest of the alphabet soup that was such an integral part of the AIDS canon.  He hired a clipping service to comb the world’s newspapers, magazines, and medical journals for anything that pertained to AIDS.  The flow of information was staggering, mind-numbing.  What he could not comprehend he brought to Dr. Lamberson’s attention.