Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

SIXTEEN

Manhattan

“Something bothering you, José?”

Dan and Dr. Joe ambled crosstown after splitting a sausage-and-pepper pizza and a pitcher of beer at Nino’s on St. Mark’s and Avenue A. José had been unusually quiet tonight.

“Bothering me? I don’t know. Nothing bad or anything like that, just...I don’t know.”

“That’s the first time you’ve put that many words together in a row all night, and six of them were ‘I don’t know.’ What gives?”

José said, “I don’t know,” then laughed. “I...aw hell, I guess I can tell you: I think two of my AIDS patients have been cured.”

Dan felt an anticipatory tightening in his chest and he wasn’t sure why.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s not just my diagnosis. They were both anemic, both had Kaposi’s when I’d seen them in July. They came in last week and their skin had cleared and their hematocrits were normal. I sent them to Beekman for a full work up. The results came back today.”

“And?”

“They’re clear.”

“Cured?”

Dan saw José’s head nod in the dark. “Yep. They’re now HIV neg. Their peripheral smears are normal, their CD4 cell counts are normal, their skin lesions are gone. Not a single goddamn trace that they were ever exposed to HIV. Hell, they both used to be positive for hepatitis B surface antigen and now even that’s gone.”

José sounded as if he was going to cry.

“But how—?”

“Nothing I did. Just gave them the usual cocktail, and let me tell you, man, they weren’t all that reliable about taking their meds. Fucking miracle, that’s what it is. Medical fucking miracle.”

Dan’s mouth went dry. Talk of miracles did that to him lately. So did talk of people seeing the Virgin Mary in his neighborhood.

“Miracle. You mean like...Preacher?”

“I can’t say much about Preacher. I’ve got no medical records on him from when he was blind, so I can’t say anything about the condition of his retinas when he couldn’t see. All I can say is that his vision has improved steadily until it’s almost twenty-twenty now. But...these two AIDS patients, they were documented cases.”

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.

The phone rang. Emilio answered it, said a few harsh words, then hung up.

“Who was it?” Arthur said without looking around.

“That puta reporter again. She wants an interview with Charlie.”

Arthur closed his eyes. Gloria Weskerna from the Star. It still baffled him how she’d got his home number.

Somehow she’d picked up word that Senator Crenshaw’s son was sick. Something was wrong with the son of a potential presidential candidate. What could it be? She and others of her tribe had started sniffing around like stray dogs in a garbage dump, hunting for anything ripe and juicy. Emilio had tightened security, carefully screening the nurses, setting up a round-the-clock guard at the front gate, and spiriting Dr. Lamberson and the nurses in and out in the black-glassed limousine.

“Change the phone number, Emilio.”

“Yes, Senador. If you wish, I can change this reporter’s mind about hounding you.”

Arthur turned to face his security man. “Really? How would you do that?”

“She might have a serious accident—a bad fall, perhaps, after which her home could burn and her car could be stolen. She would have so many other things on her mind that she would not have time to bother you.”

Emilio said it so casually, as if planning a shopping list for the supermarket. Not a glimmer of amusement lightened his Latin features. Arthur knew he was not being put on. Emilio’s sense of humor was about as active as Charlie’s immune system.

Arthur trusted Emilio implicitly, but sometimes he was very frightening.

“I don’t think so, Emilio. We’ll just continue to stonewall. Our position will remain aloof: We admit nothing, we deny nothing. Implicit in our silence is the stance that these rags are not worthy of serious attention. That’s the only way to keep the lid on things.”

“As you wish, Senador.”

Arthur realized he could keep the lid on Charlie’s illness only so long as he stayed alive. If he died...

He reminded himself with a pang that it wasn’t really an if, but a when...and soon.

When Charlie died, the shit would hit the fan. He might be able to dissuade the medical examiner from doing an autopsy, but the death certificate was another matter. He could not expect Dr. Lamberson to jeopardize his reputation, his medical license, and his entire career by falsifying a legal document.

He winced as he imagined the headlines:

SENATOR CRENSHAW’S SON DIES OF AIDS!!

That would be damaging, but he could weather it. He could not be held accountable for his son’s actions. In fact, he could turn it around and blame Charlie’s death on the moral bankruptcy of modern America. America was on the road to ruin, and who better to turn it around and lead it from the darkness into the light than a man who had been so grievously injured by the nation’s moral turpitude?

Yes, he could survive, perhaps even benefit from public disclosure of the cause of Charlie’s death. His only worry was what rats might crawl out of the woodwork when they heard that Charlie had died of AIDS. What vermin from his past might step forward and say, “Like father, like son.”

Arthur knew he could weather either one alone, but he would fall before the combination of the two.

Everyone would be properly supportive at first, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before the various elements of the coalition he’d been forging began edging away from him. All his born-again friends and admirers would begin looking around for someone else to support, someone who’s immediate family was not so intimately associated with sodomy.

And then his dream of a renewed America would go down in flames, be reduced to ashes.

He treasured two things most in his life: his son and his dream. Charlie’s AIDS was going to steal both.

He looked again at the Times and Daily News clippings in his lap. Like everyone else who read a paper or watched the network news, he’d heard about the four supposedly-cured cases of AIDS in New York. They’d sparked some hope in the growing darkness within him, but after his experience with Olivia he’d learned that cynicism was the only appropriate response to miracle cures. It saved a lot of heartache.

But the Times article said the CDC was getting involved... budgeting an epidemiological study. If Arthur was correctly reading between the lines, it meant that these cures had been sufficiently verified for the CDC to judge them worth the effort and expense of sending an investigative team to Manhattan.

Interesting...

The CDC was headquartered in Atlanta. Arthur had myriad contacts in the Bible Belt. No problem learning what was going on in the CDC, but it might be wise to have his own man on the scene.

“Emilio, how would you feel about a trip to New York?”

‡

Manhattan

Monsignor Vincenzo Riccio suppressed the urge to vomit as he walked along Catherine Street near the Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses and waited for dark.

Dark would not be a safe time here, but he did not worry about that. He hadn’t shaved for days and was dressed in the shabbiest clothes he’d been able to find at the Vatican Mission uptown. He was not an attractive mugging prospect. But even if he were killed tonight, it would not matter.

The new chemotherapy protocol was not working. It had succeeded only in suppressing his white cell count and making him violently ill. He’d lost more weight. The tumors continued their relentless spread. The end was not far off, and human predators could do nothing to him that the cancer and the chemicals had not already tried. A quick death here might be preferable to the slow death that threatened to linger into the fall, but surely not beyond.

But please, God, not before I see her again.

The Vatican had called today. Since he was already here in Manhattan, would he mind looking into these Blessed Virgin sightings that had become epidemic on the Lower East Side?

He’d agreed, of course. What he did not say was that he’d been investigating for weeks.

He’d read of the sightings and had been struck immediately by the similarity between the witnesses’ descriptions of the faintly glowing woman they’d seen down here and the woman he’d seen walking on the fog over the River Lee back in July. He did not resist the yearning to search out this Stateside apparition to see if she was the same.

So far his quest had been as successful as the new chemotherapy.

He scanned the streets around him. He spotted numerous Asian shoppers scurrying home through the fading light, each carrying their purchases in identical red plastic sacks. On his right sat rows of deserted, dilapidated, graffiti-scarred buildings, with empty windows in front and dark, litter-choked alleys on their flanks. All forlorn and forbidding

She had been spotted twice near here. So like her son to appear among the social cast offs. If indeed it was her. Perhaps tonight she once more would grace this lowly neighborhood with her presence.

‡

Israel

Kesev could feel the sweat trickle from his armpits as he clutched the ends of his arm rests and stared out the window of El Al flight 001. He saw Tel Aviv and the coast of Israel fall away beneath him. Anyone watching him would think he was afraid of flying. He did not like it, true, but that was not what filled him with such anxiety.

Never before in his long life had he left his homeland. The very idea had been unthinkable until now. And even under these extraordinary circumstances, he was uneasy. He had never wanted to be more than a few hours away from the Resting Place. Now there would be a continent and an ocean between him and the site in the Wilderness where he had vowed to spend the rest of his days.

Not that it mattered now. The Mother was gone. His duty was to follow her to wherever she now lay.

And Kesev had a pretty good idea now where that might be.

New York.

He couldn’t be sure, of course. The visions of the Virgin Mary in Manhattan meant nothing by themselves. On any given day, someone somewhere thought he or she had been gifted with a vision of the Mother of God, and this was nothing new for New York. Since the 1970’s a woman named Veronica in a place called Bayside had claimed to see and speak to the Virgin on a regular basis. And more recently in Queens had been the painting of the Mother that had seeped oil.

Since the Mother’s theft Kesev had accumulated a huge collection of reports on these visions. Lately the vast majority seemed to occur in America. Some were utterly absurd—the image of the Blessed Virgin in the browned areas on a flour tortilla, in a patch of mold on the side of a refrigerator, in a forkful of spaghetti, on the side of a leaking fuel tank—and could be discarded without a second thought.

Others were more traditional apparitions, often repeated on a scheduled basis, such as the first Sunday or first Friday of the month, but although thousands would be in attendance for the occasion, the actual vision was restricted to a single individual. Kesev marked these as possible but most likely the product of one unbalanced mind and fed by the public’s yearning for something, anything that might indicate a Divine Presence. Visions had been occurring long before the theft of the Mother and would certainly continue after she was returned to where she belonged.

But these Manhattan visions...something about them had sparked a flicker of hope in Kesev. They didn’t follow the pattern of the other sightings. They appeared to be random, had been reported by a wide variety of people belonging to a polyglot of races and religions. When Muslims and Buddhists began reporting visions of a softly glowing woman in an ankle-length cowled robe, identical to the image Kesev had seen countless times atop the tav rock, he had to give them credence.

And then there was the matter of the cures.

The tabloid press was always touting cures for the incurable, but these were linked to no miracle drug or quack therapy. These were as spontaneous and random as the sightings of the Virgin Mary.

And just like the sightings they all seemed to be clustered in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

He glanced at his watch. The flight was due to arrive in Kennedy at 5:20 a.m. local time. Shortly after that, Kesev, too, would be in Lower Manhattan. Searching.

If the Mother was there, Kesev would find her. He had to. And when he did he would silence the thieves so they could not reveal what they knew. Then he would return the Mother to the Resting Place where she belonged, where she would remain until the Final Days.

Only two questions bothered Kesev. Who were these people who had stolen the Mother away from him? The job was so smoothly and skillfully done, leaving not a trace of a trail, they had to be professionals. If that were so, why was no one trumpeting her discovery? He was overjoyed that there had been no such announcement, for that meant he could still set matters right before irreparable damage was done. But why the silence? Could it be they didn’t know what they had? Or were they, perhaps, trying to verify what they had? Whatever the reason, he could not let this opportunity pass.

The second question was more unsettling. Why had the Lord allowed this to happen? Did it mean that the Final Days were imminent? That the End of All Things was at hand?

Part of Kesev hoped so, for he was desperately tired of living. Yet another part of him dreaded facing the Second Coming with this new disgrace to account for.

IN THE PACIFIC

7^o N, 155^o W

North of the Line Islands, between the trackless rolling swells and the flawless azure sky, a haze forms, quickly thickening into a mist, then a fog, then a raft of clouds, immaculate white at first, but darkening along the underbelly as it fattens outward and reaches upward, casting cooling shadow on the warm water below, which rises to a gentle chop as the wind begins to blow.