The White Plague by Frank Herbert
Now what had made them think a cure already had been produced?
The guards hustled Doheny into the bailey behind John, Father Michael and the boy, but not before he glimpsed Kevin once more striding along the parapet of the old castle. Kevin did not deign to glance down at the mob that was shouting out there. His manner said he considered them a pack of brutes hungering for the food of the gods, the manna that only he controlled.
“Give us the cure! Give us O’Neill!”
Doheny and his companions were herded to the door at the head of the dungeon keep. The guards thrust them through the door and slammed it behind them, not bothering to lock them in their individual cells. They stumbled down the long stairs to the chant of the mob, which had returned to its original demand: “O’Neill! O’Neill!”
They stopped in the room of jumbled discards at the bottom of the stairs. Father Michael brushed cobwebs off his face. John returned to his cell and entered it. The boy climbed up on the broken sofa trying to peer out of a barred window high on the wall. The mob sound was loud there. John emerged presently wearing the clothing the guards had made him discard. It was damp and marked with patches of slime, which he tried to wipe away with the lab coat.
“Why did they take away my clothes?” he asked, his voice distant. “Was it because the priest had a knife?”
“It’s all right, John,” Father Michael said. He put a hand on John’s shoulder. There was a deep trembling in the man.
The boy was clambering across the stack of lumber in the corner, still unable to reach the barred window.
“Give it up, lad,” Doheny said. “You’ll fall and hurt yourself.”
A great roar came from the mob. There was a quick burst of automatic weapons fire, then silence. Even the chanting stopped.
“What do you suppose they’re doing out there?” Father Michael asked.
“Sharpening their scythes, their pruning hooks and pitchforks, most likely,” Doheny said. “Preparing for the jacquerie.”
The last word was almost drowned in another mob roar that shook the room.
John seemed not to hear. He was staring up at the boy on the stack of lumber, remembering him as he had been during their tramp across the countryside. There was a feral energy in the boy now, a tension and purpose about him.
“Father Michael!” the boy called, his voice low and intense. “There’s a tunnel back here!”
“A tunnel is it?” The priest scrambled over the discards toward the boy, pulling boards aside and peering behind him. He lifted his head and spoke to Doheny: “There’s fresh air! It’s a way out!” He pulled out more boards, exposing a low opening. “Bring John!”
Doheny took John’s arm. “Come along.”
“I can’t,” John said. “O’Neill doesn’t want to go.” He swept a wild gaze around the dark room. “Why have they come? I don’t…”
The rest of it was lost in another roar from the crowd and more gunfire. The mob sounds became a rhythmic assault, no words, just hoarse and inarticulate noises – a gigantic grunting that filled Doheny with terror. Father Michael darted across the junk and took John’s right arm.
“I think we’ll have to drag him,” Doheny said.
“Come with us, John,” the priest said. “We’re trying to save you. Aren’t we, Fin?”
“We are that.”
“Will you take O’Neill, too?” John asked.
“Of course!” Father Michael said.
“But where is he?” John asked. “He was in the jar on the table. I don’t see him.”
“He’s already gone on,” Doheny said.
“Oh.”
John allowed himself to be led in a stumbling scramble across the junk and around the stacked wood. The boy awaited them there in an arched passage of moldy stone. The floor underfoot was slippery with slime and there were upturned stones, puddles of water. The smell of sewage seeped through the cracks.
Doheny listened to the mob sounds overhead. The thumping of many feet could be felt. The gunfire had been reduced to a few scattered shots. Father Michael pushed John down the passage ahead of him. The boy led. There was faint light ahead, but it was dark and odorous in the tunnel. Presently, they saw patchy daylight ahead framed in bushes and partly blocked by an iron grating. Father Michael waved them all to a stop at the grating, listening. The mob was a dim sound behind them. No more gunfire. Doheny realized they had stopped in a small stone hut piled on both sides with rusty gardening tools – hoes, rakes, shovels, trowels, hand cultivators.
Rows of earthenware pots had fallen from rotted shelves and the broken shards ground underfoot with bits and pieces of wire and rust-eaten cans. Daylight leaked through chinks in the stone and through a doorway partly blocked by a gate of rusty iron and thick shrubbery.
John closed his eyes and hugged his arms close. He breathed in shallow gasps, flexing and tensing his fingers.
The boy crept out under the shrubbery and could be heard moving around the hut.
Doheny touched one of John’s hands and was rewarded with an abrupt upward jerking of the head, eyes wide open and glaring.
Father Michael waved for Doheny to stay and went after the boy. He returned in a moment to say: “This hut sits beside an old glass house and there’s an overgrown trail that seems to go out to the road. The boy’s gone on ahead to scout it.” The priest nodded at John. “Is he saying anything?”
“It’s fascinating,” Doheny said, caught up in clinical observation of John. “Controlled displacement of identity, I think. He knows there’s another persona present and may even talk to it but I doubt he can overcome the dissociation.”
Father Michael shuddered. “Whatever shall we do with him?”
At Father Michael’s words, John squatted on the filthy floor and hid his face against his knees, crouching like a hunted animal in its den.
It would kill him to restore him to O’Neill, Doheny thought.
Where had that boy got to? A sudden chilling thought welled up in Doheny’s awareness: Kevin had said the boy was ready to spring the hangman’s trap under O’Neill. Had the boy gone to alert Kevin or the mob?
A noise at the doorway brought his attention away from John. The boy slipped through the opening. He appeared subdued, more like his silent self. He gestured for them to follow him and went back outside. The bushes swished with his passage.
“There’s a sweet lad,” Father Michael said, “and his soul guided by the Sacred Heart.”
I hope you’re right, Doheny thought.
“Up we go, John,” he said, and helped John to his feet.
Father Michael ahead and Doheny behind, they got John out of the hut into the open air. It was an overgrown park with tall evergreens all around, a glimpse of the lough through the trunks. A narrow stone-flagged walkway with bushes overhanging it led away from the lough. The boy was not to be seen.
Single file with Father Michael still leading and Doheny bringing up the rear, they forced their way along the flagstone walk. Bushes constricted the passage; limbs whipped at them. Father Michael turned his back on the obstructions and pulled John along, feeling for the flagstones with cautious steps. Doheny held a warding arm in front of his face.
They emerged presently through a hedge screen onto a narrow macadam roadway, its surface pocked with jagged potholes. The boy waited for them at the hedge and, as they emerged, he turned and set off to the left away from the castle.
Doheny hesitated, listening. There wasn’t a sign of the mob, nor a sound. The silence felt sinister.
“Come along!” Father Michael whispered.
He feels it, too, Doheny thought. Well, flight was the only sensible thing at this moment.
Father Michael trotted off after the boy, who was almost a hundred meters ahead now. Doheny and John followed. John appeared willing to go, Doheny guiding him with a light grip on the left arm, but there was a slackness in him as though he had no volition except that imparted by his companion.
The road turned at the end
“That’ll be Ballymore, I believe,” Father Michael said.
The boy had gone out to the edge of the lookout where he stared back toward the lough. The others joined him, passing a screen of tall trees and gaining, at last, a view down to the castle. Flames leaped from windows and roof. Smoke drew a vertical column in the windless air. Father Michael shuddered at the sight of the smoke, remembering the smoke at Maynooth. And there was a mob here, too.
All four of the watchers stared silently off across the treetops toward the castle, perhaps a kilometer away. A solid mass of people filled the grounds, a moving carpet of people. They were pressed body to body and the movement above them was hands waving, the glistening of weapons. The skin-crawling thing, though, was the silence. Not a shout… no outcries, no chanting… just that silent movement.
“Saints preserve us,” Father Michael breathed.
The boy crept close to Father Michael and held the priest’s arm.
John, noting the priest and the boy, thought them familiar figures. Yes, they had come a long way over the countryside. He turned to his left and saw an unfamiliar face.
“Who’re you?” John asked.
“I’m Fin Doheny.”
“Where’s Joseph?”
Doheny understood and said: “I’m taking Joseph Herity’s place.”
“Where’re we going now?” John asked.
Before Doheny could answer, Father Michael held up a hand and said: “Listen!”
They all heard it then: horsemen coming down the road from above them. A group of horsemen came around a bend in the road. In the lead rode a tall, bearded man carrying a rifle across the pommel. He lifted the rifle for his followers to stop when he saw the group at the lookout. The bearded man stared a moment at the people below him. His companions remained behind the screen of trees, only the noses of two horses exposed. Seeing no display of weapons from the party at the lookout, the bearded man lowered his rifle. He spoke over his shoulder: “Wait here.” He rode down then and stopped at the edge of the road.
Doheny noted foam at the horse’s bit. These men had been riding hard.
“What’s happening off there t’ th’ castle?” the bearded man asked, gesturing with his chin.
“We were just looking at it ourselves,” Doheny said. “Looks like a mob.”
“And who might you be, if I may make so bold as to ask?” the horseman asked.
“My name’s Fintan,” Doheny said. “And this is Father Michael and –”
“A priest now!” the bearded man said. “Would y’ be bound for Ballymore? It’s God’s own truth about th’ miraculous cures from our spring water.”
Father Michael looked up the hill, his expression saying: “Why not?” He nodded. “Yes, we’ll be drinking the waters at Ballymore, God willing.”
“A miraculous thing it is,” the bearded man said. He leaned forward in the saddle and peered at John, who ducked his head and closed his eyes at this attention. “And what’s t’ matter wit’ your friend?”
Doheny wet his lips with his tongue, catching a fearful glance from Father Michael. Before either of them could compose an answer, the boy stepped forward and took John’s hand. “We’re going to your spring, Mister. This is my father. He’s been this way since my mother died.”
The horseman straightened. His voice sad, he said: “There’s many that way, God help us all.” Turning in the saddle, he shouted to his companions: “Des! Bring t’ packet of bread and cheese!” He turned to Father Michael. “I notice you carry no food. It’s a ways to Ballymore. We’ll share and pray you’ll stay wit’ us at Ballymore.” He nodded beyond the castle. “We’ve business down in Killaloe. Could y’ be tellin’ us how t’ get t’rough yon mob?”
“Business in Killaloe?” Doheny asked.
“I’m Aldin Caniff, t’ leading man of Ballymore,” the bearded man said. “We’re escorting Erskine McGinty down to Killaloe where it’s said they have a wireless t’ talk across t’ waters. Erskine’s had a vision commanding him t’ tell t’ new pope about our waters!”
“I don’t know about any wireless at Killaloe,” Doheny said.
“It’s well known,” Caniff said. “T’ new pope, y’ know, is called Adam for t’ new beginning! Himself as was David Shaw. Imagine! A simple priest one day, a cardinal t’ next, and now! Now, he’s t’ pope!”
“If you’re bound for Killaloe, I’d stay off the roads,” Doheny said. “Mobs are a dangerous thing.”
“Good advice, Mister Fintan,” Caniff said. “It’s Aldin Caniff himself as thanks y’ for it.”
A horseman came from behind the screening trees and reined up beside Caniff. The second horseman was a slender youth with straggling black hair. It framed a thin face with a gap-toothed smile. He carried a rifle in his left hand, which also held the reins. A leather bag was in the other hand. He lowered the bag to Father Michael.
Caniff looked at his companion. “Go tell t’ others t’ head back t’ way we come. You mind t’ path we saw? Wait for me at t’ path. We’ll be leaving t’ road.”
The other horseman reined around and returned behind the trees.
Caniff looked at Father Michael, who stood clutching the leather bag in both hands.
“T’ way’s secure t’ Ballymore, Father. You’ll find it marked by stones, piles of seven and a pointer t’ t’ way. Just you be careful crossing t’ N-Six and stay away from Moate. Evil men in Moate. If anyone stops you, say you’re under t’ protection of Aldin Caniff!”
“Go with God,” Father Michael said.
Caniff kicked his horse, reined it around and soon was hidden by the trees. They heard the clatter of departing hooves.
Doheny waited for the sounds of the horsemen to fade. He looked at Father Michael then. The priest nodded. They both understood. If any of Kevin O’Donnell’s people had survived the mob, John and his companions could be identified. Word could get out that a priest, a boy and two men had been seen on the road to Ballymore.
“We dare not cut across to Dundalk,” Doheny said. “They’d expect us to head for my friends.”
Father Michael looked at John, who stood staring off at the lough. The boy still held John’s hand, a penetrating look on the young face as though he were trying to peer into John for the answers to strange questions. They would have to name the boy soon, since he would not reveal his original name. A new name – the boy wanted a second baptism, admitting that he had been blessed in the Church. But that was all he would admit.
“We’ve a rare cargo to protect,” Father Michael said.
“I’m hungry, Father Michael,” John said. “Did Joseph leave us any food?”
“We’ll eat soon,” Doheny said. “We should be getting off this road. We’ve been lucky in our encounter but there’s danger depending only on the luck of the wayfarer.” He turned and led them up the road, hearing the others follow. When he glanced back, he saw the boy guiding John, still holding his hand.
Nightfall found them far along a narrow path winding through thick evergreens. Doheny knew the kind of track they followed – a woodcutters’ way, and there would be shelter of sorts along it. Plenty of firewood around, as well, to keep them through what promised to be a cold night. They had crossed several country roads and once had waited, peering out of the bushes, before running across a wider paved highway. Doheny did not know precisely where they were but he had marked the position of the sun and knew they had headed generally east. If they could avoid the Beach Boys…
John followed with the docility of fatigue. He walked alone now, the boy and the priest bringing up the rear. John seldom looked up from where he would put his next step.
Shelter was more or less where Doheny expected to find it, just over a rise
John flopped to the floor and sat with his back against a wall. Father Michael dropped his leather sack and stared around the gloomy interior. The boy joined John.
In the last of the daylight, Doheny started a fire and squatted in front of it warming his hands.
Father Michael closed the door and propped a stick of wood against it. The boy crept around the wall behind the fire, taking advantage of the reflected heat. John got to his feet and moved aimlessly around the confined space. Father Michael watched him carefully.
John stopped suddenly and spoke: “O’Neill doesn’t like it here.”
Father Michael glanced fearfully at Doheny crouched by the fire. Doheny stared back at the priest and motioned him closer. Father Michael edged around John and stood with his back to the fire looking down at Doheny. Steam started to rise from the damp places on the priest’s clothing.
“Will O’Neill say why he doesn’t like this place?” Father Michael asked.
Doheny waved a hand to make him stop. Did the priest not understand? O’Neill could not be brought out of this human shell. The man had seen too much of the terrible consequences brought on by his plague. Revenge he might have wanted, but this!
Father Michael stared down at Doheny with a puzzled frown.
John remained silent, his head cocked to one side as though listening.
Only an amoral monster could live with this Ireland on his conscience, Doheny thought. Everything they had learned about O’Neill said he had been a man of conscience – at least before Herity’s bomb.
John straightened his head suddenly and spoke: “O’Neill says this world is not safe.” He looked down at Doheny. “Did Joseph leave you one of his guns?”