The Harrow: The Curse

That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man the unit, and never by man the mass—for this let us thank a merciful God!

— Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Premature Burial'

Having closed the door of the sick room behind him and so shut out the grey daylight, the young peasant was at first mystified by the sense of unease that chilled his spine. He was familiar, through long experience, with the stench of sickness and poverty; hardened and immune, he had thought, to all the horrors that could offend his five senses. As he took a second step into the single room of the house, as his eyes grew accustomed to the deep brown darkness, he knew that he should not have been shocked by the sight of a floor strewn with filth, bloodstained rags and insects, of two creatures driven out of their wits (the woman hiding in the corner, one hand digging slowly into the rotten wood and the other suspended in mid-air; her husband lying, huddled up in a sheet, on a wide bench covered with knots and holes in the middle of the room) or by the sound of the man's hoarse breathing, almost indistinguishable as it was from prolonged groans of pain, or by the sensation of the warm sick air creeping over his skin.

Yet although the merest instant had passed since the young peasant had steeled himself outside the door, it seemed to him that he must in that instant have descended into some cavern, deep underground and far distant from his village, where suffering was endured in entirely unfamiliar ways, and the strangeness of this scene sent his mind into a frenzy. That woman in the corner, her skin grey about her face and hands, her body skeletal, the ragged old clothes hanging off it in great folds, her moist eyes glistening slightly in the tiny shafts of light that filtered through cracks in the walls, her hair like straw; the surface details were familiar. But the devils crawling about inside, so vaguely projected into her outward form—the thoughts and feelings that provoked in her eyes that inhuman glare—the words hiding in those quivering sounds she made with her mouth—her reasons for attempting now to rise to her feet though all she could manage was one feeble stagger before she crumpled up against the wall and was dwarfed by her own shadow (the whole room was like her shadow, he thought)—the young peasant could not guess at any of these things.

At first he had wondered if the woman were trying to plead with him, but now he felt certain she was not. She did not want his help. Gazing into her face, he realised it was beyond him to know any more than this. She seemed so cut off from his world; the young peasant wondered whether she even knew he was there. Perhaps when he entered the room he had unwittingly joined a whole crowd of phantoms that had been standing, peering at her, for hours. And whereas in his childhood he had developed a healthy indifference to vocal expressions of agony, now the scratchy groans of the husband—who lay there with his back to him, trembling visibly—set the younger man's nerves on fire. It was not pity that hurt him so much, but fear of the unimagined pain these cries expressed. That such feelings as had moulded these two writhing worms could even exist swamped him with egotistical fear. Disease in his world had always been natural, but this was not. It was not natural the way her face scanned the room and her body twisted sluggishly with it, sluggishly as if to suggest that there was neither hope nor expectation of an end to her life, that death would never come or never make a difference when it came. It was not natural the way her husband clutched himself, as if the black insects dancing over his sheet were attacking him; the way he seemed, in his growling pain, almost to be chanting something in some alien tongue, an incantation whose words must be drawn out to agonising length to have their effect; or the way the stench in the room suggested rotting corpses, as if that man had already crossed the border into death and begun to decompose.

What was most unnatural of all, what made the young peasant's blood suddenly boil over when he perceived it, was the way the room, the house, the four walls, and the roof, and the floor itself, seemed in the darkness slowly to be closing in on the three of them like a fist. The sense that the place was a trap, that this couple had been drawn, and then dragged, into a trap—a sense brought about by the likeness now taken on, in his eyes, by the two of them, of animals gnawing at their ensnared limbs—was frightening enough; but it was only when he perceived the truly unnatural character of this trap; that is, the way it seemed to have a malevolent will of its own, that the young peasant started forward, desperate to find what he had come for and leave, unwilling to let his thoughts dwell on the idea that had struck him, already wild with fear in case he too should sink, gaping like an idiot, into Hell. Clinging to the surface, to the safe, familiar, material things, he stepped forward. The woman in the corner did not register his movement; her husband curled up tight; the black insects flitted over the sheet. But, submerging all his thoughts and fears in blind courage, the young peasant reached out his hand (bound up several times, with great diligence, in rags) and gently pulled the sheet back from the man's naked body to see what was coming.

'How long does it take?' asked one of the men who, after thirty seconds, was evidently tired of standing there.

'You only have to look,' replied his wife. 'Anyone could see in a moment, if they knew where to look.'

'There can't be much light in there—to see anything by,' said Mrs. Lynch, who stood at the edge of the group, her frayed woollen tunic trailing in the mud, her hood sheltering her black hair and casting a shadow over her pale, smooth forehead. She did not expect anyone to respond to what she had said, and no one did.

An elderly peasant with a grating voice spoke up: 'I feel for his wife. Nothing in the world for her to do.' One or two others grunted.

Another woman, a lame widow, broke in: 'I don't see what business you've got feeling anything of the sort—if those two get it, there's a reason why—and there's no feeling sorry about the just reward of the wicked—not among good people.'

'Good people,' interrupted the lame woman, 'don't have to live like that. I'd sleep in the mud with the rats before I lay my feet in one of those wrecks.'

The plague-struck house—really a wooden hut, held together but loosely, looking as if a decent kick in the right place might bring it creaking down—was just one in a long row of such dwellings, all in varying stages of decay, divided by large gaps of damp earth.

Mrs. Lynch—who had, since her arrival in the village a few years ago, been known as a widow—prickled as someone spoke, with an insinuating voice, in reply to the lame woman: 'Why reward them, do you think, when there are plenty of others waiting to get it who don't—or He snatches it away at the last minute? Hardly—'

'He gives it to them,' asserted the lame woman at the very moment that the door of the shack opened and the young peasant reappeared, staggering and dragging the door shut as if there were someone inside trying to hold it open. His mouth gaped, his eyes blinked furiously, and his legs seemed to buckle toward the mud. The crowd of peasants watched him take a few deep breaths, shake the rags off his hand as if they were on fire, and without a glance at anyone else run at full pelt (stumbling every few yards) away down the muddy street, then dart into the village. Excepting a few feeble expressions of alarm, no one commented on his behaviour.

And, when he had disappeared from sight, the lame woman resumed her speech, simultaneously turning around to limp home: 'He gives it to them when it pleases Him, and takes it away—' glancing maliciously at Mrs. Lynch, who kept her own gaze fixed on the afflicted house, '—so He can fill it up three times full and running over.' She moved into the village.

'Do you think that she'll...I mean that...that she might—well, come out of there, again?' someone asked.

In the near-silence, the noise of the plague victims' groaning could just be heard from where the crowd stood.

'Terrible,' said the woman whose husband was ready to go. 'Sitting in there and watching it happen. When you've had it before, yourself—of course, Miss Lynch had it.' She had raised her voice during these last four words. 'That's how it is, isn't it—you have it once, and you can't have it again? Like she said, almost as if you're being saved for something better.'

'I mean there are widows, aren't there, Miss Lynch—and then there are widows—all right, let go!' and her husband pulled her away.

With most of the others gone, Mrs. Lynch could afford to utter a sigh of relief, although she had to endure a few sharp glances as they left. When a certain other woman and her husband began to move away, arm in arm, Mrs. Lynch followed them without speaking until they had finished their own conversation.

'Mrs. Manders, where are you going?' she asked, a tiny quiver of desperation in her voice.

'Oh,' said Mrs. Lynch. 'I was wondering if we could talk.' The rain got thicker.

The three of them bustled inside the village tavern, brushing water off their clothes. A handful of people sat in the squalid little place, drinking out of wooden mugs and making faces when they swallowed, but swallowing anyway.

One man, who did not look like a peasant, sat examining his mug with some concern. His clothes looked new, though somewhat less than clean; neither frayed at the edges nor torn anywhere, but dusty as if they had been travelled in. His hair was mostly grey. By his table there lay an embroidered red sack. Her two companions did not offer Mrs. Lynch a drink, and she did not ask for one.

'I'm only asking for a little help,' she said, pulling back her hood as they sat down at a table. 'I have to get through the days—you understand—'

'Only there's no chance, is there,' said Mrs. Manders, 'of our ever getting anything back for it? Is there? I suppose you think, judging by the way I live in a stinking rotten old pit like this, that I must have money to spare?'

'Please—he's so small and weak. And the bread has things crawling in it. I only want something for him, to help him.'

'The little creature,' she muttered, 'he's been nothing but trouble to you, has he? From the start I mean—all you went through—from the very start! It scares me to think of it.'

Mrs. Lynch burned with rage and humiliation, and stared at the floor. Mrs. Manders seemed slightly ashamed of what she had said, but not so much that she regretted it. They sat in silence for a minute or two.

The respectable-looking gentleman had called the owner of the place to his table and was talking with him. Mrs. Lynch tried to divert her thoughts by eavesdropping on their conversation. Something about a stagecoach.

Mrs. Manders got up, said, 'Give her something, will you?' to her husband—who reluctantly dropped a little coin onto the table before draining his mug. He rose as well, seeing that his wife had decided it was time to go—and turned to Mrs. Lynch. 'But now leave us alone, do you understand? I know what insects taste like as well as you. If I could afford to support another family besides my own, I wouldn't be living here. Just leave us alone!' She walked out, her husband shuffling behind.

Mrs. Lynch snatched the coin off the table and held it in her lap, her eyes shut.

'Well...' said Mr. Bailey, the owner of the tavern, after glancing in some alarm at the door Mrs. Manders had just slammed shut behind her, 'there isn't exactly a...that is, not a proper one like you mean. Not enough demand. But there's a room upstairs.'

'Yes.' He gulped down some of his drink, then pushed the mug away from him, his eyes wide.

Mrs. Lynch attended very carefully to his voice, turning the penny over in her hands.

'Sir? How long would you uh...want to stay; that is, how many nights do you think?'

'I'm waiting for my wife to arrive. But I have no idea when she will do so—I'm here indefinitely, it seems.'

Mrs. Lynch noted the bitterness in his voice. She opened her eyes and stole a glance in his direction.

'That's good sir—I mean it's...I will have to charge you for meals of course, sir.'

He had a haggard look about him, despite his air of refinement. He was from one of those big walled-in towns; he could afford to travel; even the sack he carried was needlessly embroidered with flowery patterns; his contempt for the villagers was evident; as, Mrs. Lynch thought, was his contempt for his wife. She fantasised about what might be in the sack.

'A man has to sleep somewhere, I suppose,' said the stranger. He picked up his belongings. 'Show me the room.'

'Yes...just upstairs,' said Mr. Bailey, his voice dying away as he led his new guest across the room. The peasants looked up with slight interest as the well-dressed man passed by. Mrs. Lynch watched him till he had vanished completely from sight, and then got up to leave.

Outside the rain was lighter, the sky gradually turning a darker shade of grey. It was a relief that brought some animation into her young, clean face to know that by the time she got home Mrs. Lynch would have something fresh for her nine-year-old son to eat.

Tom arrived back in the village just as the rain intensified and immediately took shelter beside a house with a roof that jutted out at the sides, giving some protection from the weather. There he stood for a few minutes, the wooden soles and the cloth that tied them to his feet damp and caked with mud.

Tom's mouth was hardly ever open, since it hardly ever had cause to be. It was shut tight now, his whole face set in an expression so blank as to seem defensive. He kept as still as possible, backed up against the wooden planks, watching the dirt road that led out from the village, far into the distance, then disappeared into the grey horizon. As he stared at the road, at the horizon, at the bare fields and the raindrops saturating the already rotten and useless earth all around him, he thought about how much he hated all of it; and when his thoughts progressed to what lay behind him, to all those people in the miserable little village, and to what lay beyond it in all directions, to all the villages and towns and cities of the world, then he burned with desire to lay waste to them, to make the ground swallow every village, every speck of mud, every raindrop and every living thing, and burn it all out of existence in the depths of the earth.

Too small, and looking considerably younger than his real age (ever since those crippling illnesses in his infancy), Tom Lynch held a crooked stance by the wall; he had a way of always appearing to be dwarfed by whatever or whoever was nearby. His face was pale like his mother's, but also like hers in retaining its freshness despite whatever wasting influences took their toll on the rest of his body. Another thing his face had in common with that of his mother, and with those of all the wretched villagers, was its refusal ever to break out into an expression of joy. Not joy, but animation such as that excited in Mrs. Lynch's face by her receipt of the penny, just a few hundred yards away, could be seen in her son's as well, on such occasions as some measly scrap of good fortune lumbered grudgingly into his hands (such occasions of course being few and far between). More often his deprived and childish mind found escape from reality by imagining how spectacular an end reality might come to if only little Tom could have his way. And so he stood now, wishing the overcast sky a blanket of condensed fire poised to clench its grip over the world.

He felt, looking down, that it was appropriate he should, in such a frame of mind, discover at his feet a rat lying in a puddle, a good deal of its right side hidden in the water, its left eye wide open and glaring red, its wet hair a beautiful jet-black colour. On closer inspection it became clear to Tom that the rat was being fed upon by a swarm of insects: they leapt quickly across the fresh corpse, clambering through the hair to the skin, to bloat themselves with rat blood.

Staring, Tom nudged the body with his foot until it was turned onto its back, its stiff little legs poking out at him and its lips drawn back in a scowl. After a moment he let it fall back into the puddle, seeing that the weather had calmed down and that the sky had darkened.

His own home stood at the end of the row in which the plague-struck couple lived, so that on his way he passed by their house. As soon as he drew near he was halted by the distinct sound of a man groaning with pain emanating from within. His jaw dropped and he moved close to the door, pressing his ear against the moist wood. Tom had never heard a sound like it, and it made his heart itch; he found himself involuntarily taking little gasps instead of breaths.

Standing back to look for a window, he found one in a side wall of the house. In the shadow of the wall he stood, fingering the edges of the square hole, reaching up to feel the damp cloth that had been nailed over it from the inside, to keep out the light. This cloth, he could feel, was nailed in only at the four corners: by lifting himself onto his toes, Tom could pull part of the cloth to one side and look into the room; and he did so.

Gulping with fear as he peered into the darkness, he tried to distinguish the human figures within. Some slight movement took place in the far corner, but deep in the shadows and obscured anyway by a table in the middle of the room. On that long, wide table there was definitely lying a human being; and Tom was frozen stiff as he realised that the writhing movements of this figure corresponded precisely to the rhythm of the terrible sounds he heard.

Tom had heard of deliberate torture. A little grunt came from the back of his throat, and his eyes filled with water. The man in there was being tortured; people were deliberately torturing him, they were sticking things into his body from all sides; that was why he made such a horrendous noise, that was why his naked body—which Tom thought he could dimly see to be naked—kept turning over with jerky movements, first to the left, then to the right, and back again, unable to escape the torturers.

Struggling with his right hand to tear back the cloth that blocked his way, Tom pulled himself up the wall with his left, then forced one arm through the gap, reaching impulsively into the darkness, crying out half with the effort and half to attract the attention of those inside. As light fell into the sick room, the incurable plague victim, bereft of his sheet and begging to enter the final throes of death, responded to the intrusion with a momentous jerk of his whole body, which sent it scraping backward over the bench until his head hung over the end and his inverted face twisted itself up. His eyes strained to look into those of the little boy at the window, and his black mouth tore itself open with a guttural, wrenching scream. Tom saw the whole thing for only a second before his own scream mingled with that of the man on the bench, and he threw himself into the mud, grazing his arm as he dragged it out of the window.

He wasted no time in getting to his feet again, walking very quickly on his way home, brushing the tears from his eyes. He looked up at the sky and tried to concentrate on the feel of raindrops against his face. Cold rain. Soon it would be dark.

Mrs. Lynch's house was identical to that which Tom had just visited, except that its walls were less rotten and it had an underground storage chamber. Its owner was not immediately visible when Tom entered: a candle illuminated the room from a stool in one corner, revealing the two wooden beds on the other side of the room and the open hole in the earth at the very centre, from which glowed a faint light. Next to the hole lay the piece of slate that his mother had dragged aside. When she heard the door close, Mrs. Lynch ascended the ladder to greet her son.

'Tom!' She found herself breathless after the climb. 'I was worried.' She clutched him by the shoulders and examined him, brushing some of the water off his hair and face. 'You shouldn't stay out so long in this weather. You look pale.'

'I'm all right. Don't worry,' said Tom, detaching himself from her grip and moving closer to the candle.

'We have fresh bread tonight, Tom,' said his mother proudly. 'Just a little rough it is—a proper meal.'

'Well...I had to borrow something,' she replied, cutting a hunk out of the coarse brown bread with a small and rusty knife. Resting the loaf on the bed where she sat, she had hard work carving through it with such an inadequate tool; but eventually she was able to hand Tom his dinner, which he took with some enthusiasm.

'Thank you,' he said before gnawing at his evening meal. After a moment he paused, went over to his own bed and sat down. He felt tired.

'We've got the Black Death in our row,' said Mrs. Lynch. 'It's just the two of them, thank God. Except the woman's had it already.' She bit into her piece of bread.

'Yes,' he said, ceasing to chew for a moment. 'I went past it today. I knew which one it was because I could hear the noises inside.'

'Stay away from it, won't you? Don't even breathe the air around that house, just don't go anywhere near it.'

As they ate, the sound of the raindrops beating against the walls and roof became louder: there were no other sounds to hear.

She watched her son doggedly chewing on the bread, grinding his teeth down into stumps. When she had warned him away from the plague house she had been only too aware of the note of futility in her voice. Because it was futile trying to protect him now. He had always been weak. In a place like this, it seemed to her a miracle that he had survived nine years, and an even greater miracle that she had found the means to sustain him for that long; and yet when she really watched her grim little son, seeing the way he looked at everything, hearing the way he talked and watching him twitch in his sleep, the way his brow wrinkled up with every thought that passed through his head, she wondered just what sort of great miracles these were supposed to be; and when she looked up at the grey sky or down at the muddy ground and considered their prospects for the future, she thought, and with only a little shame, that the boy's death would come as more of a tragedy for her than it would for him.

Tom looked up at the roof, which mercifully kept the rain out, though registering every drop at a piercing volume.

Having hardly slept, Mrs. Lynch was grateful to be able to get up when she sensed the arrival of the next morning. Her son's body lay on its side on the other bed, only just visible; still, she stood for a moment watching it before going over to the stool and lighting the candle. Before picking it up, she knelt down by the slate in the middle of the room and quietly pushed it to one side. Then she took the candle in one hand and descended the ladder into the small underground chamber.

No doubt those who had occupied the house in more prosperous times had made better use of this simple storage area than Mrs. Lynch did now: much expense had been spared in its excavation, with only the wooden boards up the walls as evidence that tools other than shovels had been used; but down here there was space for all manner of life-enhancing goods, and so it always gave the young widow a pain—despite the number of years she had lived there—to come down in the morning and see only a sack of grain in one corner, a barrel full of water in the other, and to one side a table which supported a battered looking glass with a round white frame, a relic of her childhood.

The process by which she transferred two bowls of grain and two mugs of water from this chamber to the main room above was laborious and divided into two stages, but she was surprised—having at last retrieved the candle from the storage room—to find that her son had slept soundly throughout its execution. Tom had not moved an inch from his earlier position.

Mrs. Lynch shook him by the arm, turning him onto his back and examining his face by the light of the candle, and turned pale when she found his brow scattered with beads of sweat.

Tom whined, turning his head. Mrs. Lynch fell silent, the better to hear his irregular breathing. Then she shook his arm again.

He opened his eyes just long enough for his mother to see how red they were before clenching them shut again with a feeble cry, throwing his hands over them.

'Oh, I'm sorry Tom,' said Mrs. Lynch, moving the candle away, 'I'm sorry. You're sweating all over,' and she pulled the sheet back from his body, running her hand over the damp patches about his arms.

'I don't feel hot,' he said, opening his eyes, more calm than before. 'I feel cold.'

'Here—' Mrs. Lynch sprang up to give him the bowl of grain. 'Eat something, you'll feel better.'

Tom shook his head, grimacing, closing his eyes again as if the food were glaring bright and hot.

Mrs. Lynch put the bowl down on the floor, her eyes fixed on Tom's face all the time.

'All right,' she said, as if it didn't matter that her skeletal son had no appetite. 'It's okay—here,' and she handed him the mug of water.

'Please—' Tom swallowed its contents almost in one gulp, his mother shivering to hear the noise it made as it travelled down his throat. She gave him her own mug to drink from while she hurried down the ladder to fetch more: he would have as much as he wanted. Each time, when he had finished drinking, even if it had taken him only a second to do so, he panted as if he had just crawled out of a lake.

Mrs. Lynch set out from her house early in the afternoon—and rain was no longer falling from the grey sky by this time—to see Mrs. Manders, with an agitated step.

As she hurried along the row of squalid huts, she noticed, some way off, smoke rising into the air; and sure enough, as she came closer, she heard the crackling sound of fire, and in good time could see the flames themselves; and a small crowd had gathered in front of the plague house, keeping, as they had done on the previous day, a considerable distance between it and themselves. Mrs. Manders, without her husband, could be seen among the spectators. Mrs. Lynch tried to join them without being noticed.

Indeed, besides the smoke, a great quantity of steam billowed out of the shack, and the surrounding earth was distinguished from the prevailing muddy squalor in being dried out and scorched. The fire posed little threat to neighbouring houses, due not only to the space between them and it, but also to the unfavourable weather conditions and the fact that the walls of the plague house had obligingly collapsed inward from the first, thus limiting the damage to a small area of ground. The difficulty the flames met in disposing of their victim made for an odd spectacle, because parts of the walls had not yet succumbed and were still steaming noisily; the whole front wall was nominally intact, though it was evident the fire was making progress.

'A little taste,' said the lame widow, 'for the living and the dead, of the Hell before them.'

As if in response and with a tremendous noise of hissing, crashing and sizzling, the front wall fell backward into the inferno, which now raged without restraint. The peasants sighed, as if they had been waiting only for that and now the business was over with, although they knew the wreck would burn for some time.

'Was it one of these that did it?' she asked, trying to sound normal. Mrs. Manders looked round with some irritation.

'Someone else—I don't know who,' she said. 'Funny they could wait until the rain had stopped and do it in broad daylight like that.'

It sounded as though she were talking to herself, so Mrs. Lynch thought better of responding. Instead she waited a minute (wondering why Mrs. Manders stopped here so long to watch a plague-ridden house burning, putting her health at risk) before speaking again.

Mrs. Manders sighed irritably. She was waiting because she wanted to be left alone. The fire growled long and deep.

'Tom's ill,' Mrs. Lynch said, unable to stop her voice from breaking up as she did so.

'No! There's no reason to believe it, so soon. He was always weak—he's been much worse before.'

'And he'll get much worse,' said Mrs. Manders cynically. 'Look, you really can't expect me to help you this time—'

'For God's sake,' the woman snapped, 'why don't you listen? There's a doctor staying with Mr. Bailey above the tavern. I heard he arrived last night.' She walked away. 'Go and see him.'

Mrs. Lynch followed, tugging at the other's sleeve: 'What if he's not there? What if he left, or won't see me?'

'Wait for him—I only heard about him an hour or two ago. It's likely he's still there—let go!'

Mrs. Lynch remembered the conversation she had overheard the evening before and felt some relief: he had said he would be staying indefinitely. Still, she kept close to Mrs. Manders, finally halting her in the street through mild physical coercion. She failed to suppress her desperation as she spoke.

'I can't just leave him like that—what if it takes hours and hours—he's all alone in the house! Couldn't you...perhaps, couldn't you stay with him—' Mrs. Manders jerked away, exasperated, 'just for a little while, just so there's someone with him!'

'Mrs. Lynch, please,' she screamed. 'Who do you think I am? Supporting you and your son with the odd hard-earned penny now and then is one thing, but what in Hell makes you think I would willingly torture myself and blacken my body till I died, just to keep your little boy company? Get off me!'

Mrs. Lynch let her go, coming momentarily to her senses and quenching her own frenzy.

'I'm sorry, Mrs. Lynch,' said Mrs. Manders with a mixture of fury and sympathy as she stalked home. The young widow felt grateful to her, as always, for bothering to address her in that way. She glanced back at the plague house, some distance away, still crackling. Then she turned in the direction of the tavern.

And now she must be calm. She must control herself. She must be a rational, clear-thinking woman.

The tavern enjoyed the custom of no other villagers at that hour, so when Mr. Bailey heard the door noisily opened and shut, he ran downstairs to see who had come in.

'I've heard,' she said, pronouncing her words with deliberate care, 'there's a doctor staying in the room upstairs.'

'Oh yes...well, I don't suppose he minds its being known—so yes, in fact there is, a respectable gentleman—a doctor, yes. Well?'

'Would you tell him, please, that a woman is here to see him on a very urgent matter?'

'An urgent matter...' said Mr. Bailey, frowning, shuffling his grey moustache. 'And what sort of matter is that?'

'Yes, Mrs. Lynch, but he may not like me disturbing him—he's been in his room all day—grim sort of gentleman, doesn't eat much.'

'I don't care,' Mrs. Lynch burst out, losing some of her control. 'Just tell him it's urgent. I need to see him right away—now, please!'

Mrs. Lynch took deep breaths. She had forgotten to pull back her hood: she did so now, revealing her shoulder-length black hair, striking though neglected as it was. As she sat down at a table, collecting her senses, she tried to conjure up on her face the youthful, appealing look she had sometimes glimpsed in her looking glass, even in the hard times of late. She tried to think of her attractive, candle-lit face gleaming in the glass and not of her son turning over and over on the bed, groaning in his sleep—if he were lucky enough to be asleep. She tried, in short, not to look utterly hopeless and contemptible.

By the time the doctor came down from his room, dressed in the same dark clothing as yesterday and with a rather stern look on his face, Mrs. Lynch's nerves had been very efficiently frayed by the three minutes' wait. She stood up to greet him, and his expression lost some of its sternness when he saw her.

'Sir. My name is Mrs. Lynch, I'm a widow—I live with my son, he's nine years old, in that row of houses up the street—you may have seen them—they're a very bad-looking sort of thing.'

'Yes, I saw them,' said the doctor with obvious impatience. 'You were told I was here, were you?'

'Someone said, yes, that there was a doctor, a very respectable gentleman doctor, staying here, just arrived last night—I was, yes.' It was alarming to find herself so breathless, to have to struggle so to express herself clearly.

'It's my son—Tom, he's nine—he's very ill indeed and must be treated as soon as possible.'

'Sit down,' said the doctor, dropping into a chair by one of the tables; Mrs. Lynch sat opposite him. 'What is wrong with Tom?'

'He has a terrible fever, a headache—he won't stop drinking and he's covered in sweat. But he won't eat. Hardly a thing. I had a terrible job just getting a scrap of bread into his mouth.'

'I heard that someone caught the plague in this village,' said the doctor after a moment's silence. 'I assume it was in your row.'

'It sounds very likely I'm afraid, Mrs. Lynch. Are you sure those are all the symptoms you've noticed?'

'No marks or ulcers on the body—lumps under the armpits, around the neck, the legs?'

'Still,' he said calmly, 'you must admit it's a coincidence. You do know that's how it spreads—one house gets it, the neighbours get it.... Perhaps,' and he became a little sharper, 'I shouldn't even be sitting here with you.'

'That may not make much difference to me, Mrs. Lynch,' said the doctor. 'You have his air hanging about you. It spreads through the air—didn't you know that?'

'Of course,' she stammered, 'but there's—really there's no reason to assume it's the way you mean. He was always weak, he's had worse illnesses before—please sir, I can't bear to leave him alone like this! He's alone in the house, there's no one with him! Please, couldn't you at least come and see him?'

'Now, calm down, Mrs. Lynch,' he said, placing his hand on her arm—evidently, she thought, he was not quite so fearful as he had implied of the Black Death that encircled her—speaking in a more soothing, compassionate voice than before, 'just calm down. You know that, whether you're right or not, I'm taking an awful risk even speaking to you like this, let alone coming to your house. You can't expect me to endanger my life out of simple charity, for the sake of the meagre possibility that I might be able to do something to comfort your son—maybe that seems callous.'

'In any case, I've seen enough sores and ulcers to make me callous. I can't help it if I am. And I ask you, Mrs. Lynch, what is there now for anyone to care about?—and in a place like this...' He looked askance at the rest of the tavern, using it to represent the village as a whole.

Mrs. Lynch thought he must look older than he really was, with his grey hair and rough-hewn face; and his voice was like an old man's. He paused again before speaking.

'I doubt, for one thing, that you have any money with which to pay for my services.'

She looked at the floor, her face burning with shame. She knew immediately what was coming. It made her angry as well as ashamed.

'You've probably lived here for a while,' said the doctor, having eliminated some of the patronising tone from his voice. 'I don't think you're a naive woman. I don't think you can live here unless you're realistic—and I'm sorry to say, because it hurts my dignity and yours, that I don't think I need to waste any time explaining myself further. Do you want me to help your son?'

'Please,' she said, unable to stop her voice from growling, 'please sir, couldn't you just come and see him? Couldn't you perhaps give me something—'

'What do you think I would give you, Mrs. Lynch? Are you a doctor? I would need to see Tom to be able to help him at all, even if it is only a fever. Have you ever bled anyone—let alone a child?'

A sob escaped the young widow's lungs, but the tears she held back. She tried to say 'please' again, but her shame was only increased when she could not manage more than a pitiful little squeal.

'There's no need for that, Mrs. Lynch. Please,' said the doctor in his soothing tone, touching her arm again. 'It's really very simple. Do you want me to help Tom or not?'

The doctor didn't flinch, though he looked irritated: 'So you're a widow, are you?' he said, nevertheless leaving his hand where it was. 'I'm surprised that someone like you considers that a factor worth considering.'

'Quiet,' she kept saying—had been saying for a long time. Over and over again: 'Quiet, Tom...there now...quiet...please. Quiet.' Her voice was very faint. It was dark outside. Tom had eaten nothing since she had got back. The sheet covering him was damp with sweat. Mrs. Lynch's sleeves were damp. So was her face.

Only occasionally did Tom speak, whispering or screaming for his mother, whether asleep or awake; Mrs. Lynch herself had difficulty discerning when he was one and when the other. And every time he spoke—'it's so cold...it hurts...more water...can't, I can't...please...please, help me'—he pushed another needle into his mother's heart for not bringing him the help he needed, for being so naive, and for lacking the strength really to comfort him by herself.

He wanted her there, at least. She could at least hold his hand, mop the sweat off his face, talk to him, give him more water. But all of it was a disappointment, she knew: he wanted her there but found no joy in her presence; he wanted her to talk to him, but her words meant nothing and did nothing; he wanted water, but his throat would still be dry and sore if he drank a river. She could see him deliberating, wondering which was worse, to have one's eyes open or to have them closed? To twist about and groan or to conserve one's energy and rest one's lungs? To try and sleep or to stare up at the ceiling and distract one's mind (though deliberate sleep and deliberate self-distraction were equally impossible)? She could almost hear his confused thoughts, having once had similar thoughts herself, and having seen Tom in such states before.

But as in his infancy she had longed to share the pain and physical disintegration he had suffered, so now she wished that she could feel enough of what he felt to empathise. Somehow, she thought, if she could only do that it would be of more help to him than all her current efforts combined. For him to feel that he was not alone in his pain, but that he and she endured it together, that he had always the true company and understanding of his mother, and not just some detached, weeping alien woman clutching his hands, feeding him water and saying 'quiet, quiet' all the time: if he could only feel that, then at least she would not be plagued with such intense guilt, she would not feel so inadequate, such a worthless mother—at the last, when he needed her most of all—to her only son.

It was very late now; she had no idea quite how late. Tom lay in a state resembling sleep. His eyes were shut, rather too tightly, his limbs still, his breathing less irregular than usual. But it became apparent how grey his skin had become when he suddenly opened his eyes, unveiling what little white matter there was left in them and providing a gruesome contrast: around them the eyelids crumpled up, so grey that they looked like stone—as if the eyes stared out of a tomb.

Tom opened his mouth as well: 'How late...' he murmured, catching his breath and starting again, 'how long...is it before morning?'

'Hours yet, Tom,' sobbed his mother, 'It may be only just past midnight. I'm not sure, I don't know.' She could hear his breathing, suddenly loud and hoarse. 'Tom? Can you hear that?'

'In my chest,' said Tom. He gasped as a pained expression flared up in his face, his eyes wide again. 'It hurts when I breathe. It's hard...'

His mother stroked his hair, partly to soothe her own nerves, trying not to think about the way each time he inhaled it sounded like a little shriek in his throat.

'In my chest,' he repeated. She threw the sheet off him, opened up his shirt and exposed his naked chest, moving the candle a little closer so that the skin gleamed just enough to be visible. She laid her hand on his ribcage, feeling the jerky rising and falling movements as he breathed in and out with his eyes tight shut again. 'It's like tickling, only it hurts...it sort of...burns...' Breathing was still easier than talking, so he stopped talking for a moment.

Mrs. Lynch ran her hands over his chest, caressing it in time to his breathing; but as she moved her hands out further, toward his arms, he began to flinch, and then violently clutched his arms into his sides with a squeal. 'My...my...' he groped for the energy to say what hurt him, 'it's...under...my—my arms!'

Frantically his mother pulled off his shirt, exposing a slight graze on his forearm. She had to move him ever so gently or he couldn't bear it. Just so she pulled his left arm away from his chest, to look underneath. His hoarse breaths came very fast now. 'Oh...it's hot!' he screamed. Mrs. Lynch herself could hardly breathe. There was a tiny red lump there, which she did not dare to touch. It took all her self-control not to hurry (and so alarm Tom) as she carried the candle to the other side of the bed to look under his other arm. Something similar was there.

'Please...' said Tom. 'They're hot!' He writhed on the bed. 'They're on my legs...just here,' and he held his trembling hand over his upper thigh. His mother removed his clothes to look there as well. 'And...' gasped Tom, 'in my toes...' with great difficulty indicating his right foot, 'there's something in my toes!' Mrs. Lynch knelt down at the foot of the bed and held the candle up to the toes of his right foot. But she had seen nothing there before, and saw nothing now. With one hand she gently massaged the skin. Tom gasped once more as she held onto the toes—'there, it hurts there!'—and sure enough when she pulled apart two of them with her left hand she saw between them a grizzled red patch; only for an instant, because the exposure caused her son too much discomfort. 'Oh please...please...don't leave me,' he whispered. 'Please help me.' 'Quiet, Tom,' she said, by his side, his body covered over again, her voice by now shot through with hysteria. 'Sleep...quiet, now...sleep.'

The starless black of the sky was just perceptibly suffused with a dull grey haze. The village was asleep. But Mrs. Lynch, repeatedly stumbling over her tunic and scrabbling back to her feet again, ran to the tavern where the doctor stayed. She did not care who slept, whom she disturbed, or how many bruises she took in her haste. Nor did she take any notice, as she ran past it, of the heap of charcoal that now covered the skeletons of her village's first plague victims, nor of the black rats scurrying about inside it, nor of the light rain that had begun to fall before she reached the door of the tavern.

Then, finding it to be locked, she beat at the door with her fists, screaming to be let in. She didn't hear Mr. Bailey's footsteps descending the stairs inside, but when he pulled the door open and appeared before her, a furious expression clouding his face, she dropped her fists.

'Mrs. Lynch, will you be quiet,' hissed Mr. Bailey. 'The doctor is asleep; now go home!'

He tried to shut her out again but she lunged forward, grazing his chest with the door and struggling to keep it open, saying: 'Please, Mr. Bailey—just let me in—tell him who it is, it's an emergency—oh, please! Let me in!' But just as Mr. Bailey succeeded in hurling her back into the street, he heard the voice of his lodger crying from a window above, and came outside to look up at the doctor's face.

'Sir?' she said, staggering to her feet. The doctor leaned out of his window, looking and sounding irritated at having been woken up.

Mr. Bailey stood getting his breath back and waiting for instruction from above.

'Mr. Bailey,' said the doctor, 'show her in, then go back to bed.' He closed the window. It was evidently to be assumed that he would be down shortly.

Mr. Bailey rubbed his eyes, stalked into the tavern, and waited at the door for Mrs. Lynch. When she had come in as well, he closed the door behind her, then lumbered upstairs without saying a word.

The young widow pulled back her hood and ran her fingers through her hair. When she looked at them through the gloom, she could just see that they were trembling. She wished it were not so dark in there: she did not like to see the doctor, fully clothed, floating down the stairs, his upper half illuminated by a candle, looming up at her like the Devil himself.

'Sit down,' he muttered, placing the candle on the same table they had argued over the day before. But Mrs. Lynch did not follow his example—she did not sit down.

'You must come and see Tom now—he's desperate, and you must see him now or he'll die. I'll do anything you want, anything—but I can't leave him any longer, I can't bear it!' Her voice had already risen to a scream.

'Mrs. Lynch, calm down!' said the doctor, almost shouting himself. 'If you don't calm down I will not be able to help you at all. Now you will sit—' and he indicated the chair opposite, 'there, as I told you to, and control yourself or I will follow my current inclination and go straight back to bed and you will never see me again.'

'For Heaven's sake,' said the doctor, 'you're hysterical. That won't help your son—quite the opposite. Take deep breaths... That's right, come on.'

For a minute or two she simply could not stop the tears streaming, however hard she tried. It distressed Mrs. Lynch greatly to feel herself so overcome, so robbed of self-control. But with difficulty she managed to restrict her display of emotion to a level that the doctor found acceptable, and look up at him with some scrap of dignity.

'All right,' he said finally. 'Am I to take it that you accept my proposal, and are willing to bypass whatever scruples you claim to have—that you want me to cure your son of the plague?'

'There are lumps,' she said, 'red lumps on his body—and an ulcer in between his toes—and now he won't stop coughing, he can't breathe properly—oh God!'

'I can't! Doctor, you must come and see him immediately—whatever you want, I'll do it, but we can't waste any more time—'

'If we have wasted time, Mrs. Lynch,' he interrupted, 'your stubbornness is the cause.'

'Yes. I'm sorry, I know that—please forgive me, I was confused. I didn't know what to do. But I can see now—I don't care about anything else, I just want to help him.'

'I cannot treat your son now. You will have to wait for a few hours—and I will see him after you have fulfilled your end of our agreement.'

'But, doctor,' stammered Mrs. Lynch, 'you can't mean that! You can't—you can't realise what it's like! Please, for pity's sake—you have to see him now, don't you understand? He'll die unless you see him right now!'

'I can assure you that it takes longer than two days to succumb fully to the condition, Mrs. Lynch. Your son will not die yet—and I will not see him yet. I will not see him at all if you continue to make the situation more difficult through your obstinacy and hysteria.'

'But I don't understand,' she pleaded, her hands clawing each other in her lap, 'I don't understand why you wouldn't—'

'I can't see him now, that's why. I don't have any of my tools or ointments here with me, and I need them—'

'Stop interrupting me, Mrs. Lynch. I have nothing in that sack except the few things that I need when travelling alone. All that I require to cure your son is currently in my wife's possession. I discovered last night that she is waiting for me in the next village, and in four hours' time a stagecoach will arrive to take me there. I will treat Tom when I get back. You will accompany me on the journey.'

'I have not finished. Now I wish to return to my sleep—then there are some letters I must write before I leave—but the journey there in the stagecoach will provide a convenient interlude during which you can settle your debt.'

'In the stagecoach?' She thought about it for a moment. 'But...your wife will be there,' protested Mrs. Lynch. 'She'll see me—why would I be with you if you were coming right back?'

'I think, Mrs. Lynch,' said the doctor impatiently, and with a hint of irony in his voice, 'that you overestimate my wife. That is the very least of your worries. And now,' he got up, taking the candle with him, 'I am going back to the bed you dragged me from. You will meet me here in four hours.'

'But you could come now,' she gasped, standing up and reaching out her unstable hand to him, 'you could just come and see him now, and tell me what to do!'

'I will not go anywhere near your house until I am covered from head to foot in the protective clothing I use in such cases, which, as I have said, is not presently accessible. Now you've heard my proposal, and you accept it? Remember that I am risking my life for the sake of your son. I am risking my life just discussing the matter across a table with you.'

'Two more things. First, if I were you, I would not run about the village screaming at everyone to help you, as you have been doing. Exhibitions such as yours tonight are likely to provoke your fellow villagers, who may take a dim view of plague victims festering in their midst—in my experience they prefer the eradication of illness to its cure. If you want them to burn you and your son alive, as they did the other couple in your row, then by all means take them into your confidence, share your problem—but you don't want that, do you?'

She knew she did not have to respond to this, so stood there in silence, listening.

'Second, if you come here four hours from now in a state like this, I will leave the village on my own. I want you to be calm: I don't want to see you breaking down or screaming defiance at me. If you want your son to be helped then you will quell your hysteria. Do you understand?'

'Yes, doctor.' And she was outside before he had even turned round. The sky had grown a lighter shade of grey, the rain worsened slightly.

Tom's descent over the next few hours was rapid. His mother watched as the lumps under his arms, on his legs and now on his neck grew bigger and redder; she listened to his hoarse groans and his pleas for comfort, and the coughs that wrenched his body. She was desperate to take him in her arms and soothe him physically, but she knew the agony that would cause him. So she just sat there, watching and listening, giving him water, whispering to him although she knew he couldn't hear and couldn't be helped. When she saw that the flesh under his skin—on his arms, legs, parts of his chest, even his face—was in fact turning a dark grey colour, and when she was forced to look on in horror as, in one prolonged coughing fit, bile and thick black stuff drooled from his lips onto the sheet that covered him, it seemed to her that she was incapable of fulfilling the doctor's command. Had she been able to consider dispassionately her own feelings, she would have observed that, sitting there watching her son writhe himself to death on his hard bed, she was quickly going out of her mind. And yet she must be calm.

'He'll come back in and tell us when the coach is here. I don't propose to stand in the rain waiting for it.' The doctor had just sat down opposite Mrs. Lynch having sent a young man outside to watch for the stagecoach. Mrs. Lynch kept her hands and eyes still, as she had been doing in that exact spot for fifteen minutes. 'How are you feeling?' asked the doctor, placing his embroidered red sack on the floor by his chair.

'No, of course not. I can't imagine trying to live in a place like this, day after day—even under better circumstances.'

'Hm,' she grunted. But she must say something else. 'You're from one of those...the er, towns, with the walls around them?'

'Yes,' said the doctor with a breathless laugh, 'but I wouldn't say it's much better than here, since you mention it. At least you have some space here.' He paused, scratching the table. 'The less space there is, the less distance the Black Death has to travel.' He seemed to be talking to himself, as though he were uncertain of how to behave with her. 'You say you had it, Mrs. Lynch, when you were a child?'

'That said,' continued the doctor in a less friendly tone, looking more closely at her face, 'you don't look as though you've slept for a while either.'

'I hope so. I hope you're in a fit state, Mrs. Lynch—I know it must be difficult. But I am taking a great risk helping you, and for a relatively small price. I hope you will be fair.'

'I will—I promise.' She tried to smile but it was no good. The doctor looked more bad-tempered.

Just then the boy ran in, soaking wet, to tell the doctor his coach had pulled up outside. The latter dropped a coin in the boy's hand and walked Mrs. Lynch out into the rain.

She thought it a very respectable-looking conveyance, with two horses at the front to pull it and a man sitting at the top, shielded from the rain by a black canopy. The doctor opened the door and helped her into her seat, then threw in his sack, got in himself, closed the door and pulled the curtains over the windows on either side, plunging the interior of the carriage into darkness. Only several minutes after they had set off was Mrs. Lynch able to see anything. They sat in silence, not looking at each other.

She supposed the doctor had been waiting until they were well clear of the village before getting to his feet, pulling aside a little hatch in the roof and shouting, 'Slow down for a few minutes!' to the driver. He sat back down again, close beside her, seeming nervous. She tried to be still.

And he began, without a word of warning: turning on her and laboriously removing her clothes as if she were incapable of doing so herself. And in fact the darkness and warmth in the carriage were too much for her; the utter silence apart from the doctor's heavy breathing contrasting too starkly with the conditions to which she had involuntarily become accustomed during the preceding day, and she could not pay attention. She did not quite fall asleep—echoes of her earlier, hysterical mood still sounded in her head, and the doctor had rough hands and a rough manner—but she felt and looked as though she were hypnotised. The sense that something physically awful was happening to her at that moment was vague, and it was not until the doctor retreated to his side of the carriage that, feeling cold suddenly and noticing that she was short of breath, Mrs. Lynch came fully to her senses and picked up her clothes. Her head raged with such pain that it hurt even to have her eyes open. Her throat was dry.

'What was that?' mumbled the doctor. Mrs. Lynch looked at him. He didn't seem particularly tired himself. His upper lip curled in disgust.

'What do you mean?' she asked, then finished dressing. Neither of them spoke for a few seconds. The doctor reached across her and tossed the curtain back from her window, peering out of it before repeating this procedure with the window on his own side. The sound of the rain was deafening, the view of the barren fields distorted by water coursing down the glass. As light streamed into the carriage, making her eyes blink and her head throb, Mrs. Lynch noticed that the doctor was fingering a silver coin in his lap.

'Never mind. I didn't realise how...' He trailed off, sighing. Evidently it was of no use trying to explain.

'Forget it.' His mouth was open as if trying to say something. He stared at the coin. 'Mrs. Lynch...I can't do anything for your son.'

'What...' Mrs. Lynch became more animated as she tried to comprehend the meaning of the words. 'What are you saying? Why are you saying that?'

'No,' she said, gasping, 'you can't say that! We had an agreement—what are you saying? Listen to me!'

'Mrs. Lynch, the kindest thing you can do for Tom is to put him out of his misery. By this stage... There's no hope, I promise you.'

'I know. But it isn't true. There is no cure for him now. I'm sorry, Mrs. Lynch.'

'No,' she began to scream, 'I won't hear it! You can't say that to me! You've got to help him—you've got to help him—please, for God's sake—he's only a child! You must! We agreed, I did what you said, you said you'd help!' She shook so much that it made her speech incoherent; the doctor just stared at the silver coin, grinding his teeth. 'You can't realise—doctor, please—if you'd only seen him—if you knew what it's like, you couldn't—oh, please, please help him!'

'I know what it's like,' he said grimly. Then he fixed her with his sharp eyes: 'Mrs. Lynch—I never did tell you my name, did I?'

'What?' she just had time to say before the doctor lunged at her, pinning her back with his right hand while his left undid the catch on her door and flung it open, letting the rain pelt into the carriage. He tossed the coin out. Mrs. Lynch uttered a terrible scream as if she had been stabbed, struggled to free herself from his grip. 'No, no!' she wailed, but had nothing like enough strength to shake him off; and, his face all twisted up with the effort, the doctor dragged her out of her seat and pushed her into the doorway. She clung momentarily to the frame, trying to thrust herself back inside, but with a growl of fury and a tremendous blow with both his hands, the doctor loosened her grip on the carriage. She fell into the road, bruising her body and turning over in the mud, her eyes wide. Almost immediately she staggered to her feet again and tried to pursue the carriage. But she could not keep her balance on that ground; she felt beaten down by the rain, and the doctor had evidently told the driver to speed up again: the carriage rattled away down the long road, gradually disappearing.

'Stop!' she screamed, struggling to stay upright in the mud, drawing her words out long and shrill, flailing her arms. 'Please, stop! Come back, please! Doctor! Wait! Wait! Oh please, please! Help me!' But the doctor was gone.

She wheeled round and ran back in the other direction, dropped into the mud and sifted through it with her hands, plunging in to search for the coin. But the whole place was swamped with rainwater, and she had no idea where the carriage had been when the coin was thrown out. It did not take her long to see how futile her search was. She stood up, ran back in the direction they had been travelling, peered up the road—maybe he had stopped. Maybe he would change his mind. She looked and looked. The rain had swallowed the carriage completely. Then at last she had exhausted all vain hopes. The desolate feeling overcame her.

To the sides, the empty fields; ahead and behind, the road. It all looked the same. She turned around and around, her feet sunk into the earth and her mouth quivering. That screaming noise—was it just in her head, or was the whole world making it? The rain kept getting fiercer. It would never stop.

'Oh no!' She sank to her knees and clawed at the mud. 'Oh God no, please, no!' She wept and shrieked in the middle of the road, clutching herself as if trying to tear her body apart. 'Oh God! No, no, no! It can't be! Help me! Oh please, somebody—please, help me!' But there was no one there.

She looked about like a wild animal, her face contorted with anguish. Then she clenched her eyes shut and grabbed the sides of her head, covering them with mud, and uttered a scream which she held until her lungs were empty, her throat burning, her head thundering, her whole body trembling with the force of it. Her bloodshot eyes opened again and looked up at the sky—her hands were still clutching at her head—then she took a deep grating breath and yelled, and this time it was not a pleading, pitiful, suffering noise that she made. Her eyes did not beg for mercy, they were black. And she yelled: 'Damn you! Damn you! Everything—everything! You will all pay! Damn all of you! You can't-' and she got to her feet again, 'you can't do this to me! You can't leave me like this! You won't!' She clenched her fists, bellowing at the sky. It answered with a low roll of thunder, which she did not hear. 'All of you will pay—everything—everything-' but she had no strength and began to trail off, 'damn you—all of you.' Her hands fell from her head to her sides. The pitiful look was back. 'It's not fair! Why—why is this happening? Damn all of you to Hell!' The sobs shook her once more. 'Oh Tom,' collapsing slowly into the mud, 'oh my Tom, my little—my poor Tom! Oh God. Tom, Tom! I'm sorry! I can't—I can't do it. They won't let me! Oh I'm sorry, Tom. Oh please, please God!' Her voice had sunk to a feeble moan. 'Oh no...oh no.' And with that, her fit was over. The rain was getting softer. Sparing her for a few moments.

After her turmoil, and with nothing to distinguish one horizon from another, Mrs. Lynch could not be sure that she was travelling in the right direction, but hoped that she would find out soon enough: they could not have left her village very far behind.

Though calmer now, she could not help crying as she lumbered (running was impossible under these conditions) along the road. She felt spent, hollowed out, too tired to think. Only the awareness of her son's misery occupied her mind, and the grief that brought with it. She knew that she wanted to run home, afraid that Tom would endure his death throes all alone in that dark house, with only the sound of the raindrops hammering against the roof and walls to comfort him. But after all, she wouldn't comfort him any better if she were there. She wouldn't help—only she wanted to see it, she wanted to know what he had been through, to hear his last gasp as she had heard his first, however it might pain her to do so.

The doctor's final word of advice haunted her, flitting through her mind as she pictured Tom as he must be at that moment. Her head was a tangle of images and sounds, some more pessimistic, more torturing than others.

Buildings were dimly visible in the distance, shrouded in a very thin mist. Mrs. Lynch recognised her own village and some of her anxiety left her.

But as she walked on, she noticed something else, closer than the village, lying at the side of the road: a dark mound shifting in the mud. She strained her eyes to see: the figure, all black, hauled itself to its feet—she could just make out the stick it used as support—but then, losing its balance, it doubled over and fell down again. Mrs. Lynch, herself dripping mud every step of the way, immediately sympathised, and diverted her course slightly toward the old man.

It became clear once she was very close that the figure was indeed an old man: he supported himself with his hands in the mud, recovering his strength, so she could see his squinting eyes and his short grey beard. He had clearly suffered even longer at the hands of the elements than she had.

'Hello?' She found it difficult to raise her voice to the required volume, especially with the noise of the rain obscuring it. 'Sir? Are you all right?'

The old man squinted up at her from the ground, panting with relief. He was too exhausted to speak, however hard he tried. Mrs. Lynch crouched beside him, held him by one arm, and pulled him up; he, burying his crooked walking stick in the mud, succeeded with her help in standing upright; she slipped his arm over the back of her neck and tried to hold him steady.

'All right?' she just managed to say. He was a large man, dressed in a very tattered black cloak with a hood pulled over his head. One of the sleeves was tied up with string in the middle, and inside Mrs. Lynch could feel something hard—a box, she thought. He grunted in his old man's voice as he stabilised himself. 'What happened?' she asked. He just grunted, still panting. Mrs. Lynch let him rest for a moment, the old man hanging onto her with all his weight—she was surprised to find herself still able to support such a weight after her ordeal. She was also agitated by the desire to let this stranger go on his way so that she could go on hers, painfully aware that every wasted second took her son a little further from her; but the man seemed in no fit state to travel alone. 'Who are you?'

'V...V-' The old man tried hard to pronounce his name: 'Vo - I'm, I'm Doctor...Vogler. Doctor Vogler...Thank you—oh thank you!' He coughed violently, this speech having cost him much physical effort.

'Come with me,' she said, dragging him onto the road and leading him toward the village. 'I'll take you home—you come home with me. It's all right. Come on.' She could hardly bear to travel so slowly, but had no choice. She stared ahead at the village as if it might disintegrate should they fail to reach it in time.

'Thank you,' growled the doctor when he found the breath to speak, limping painfully forward with the young widow's support. 'Thank you—oh thank you!'

Mrs. Lynch, listening frantically as she was, could hear her son groaning before they reached the door of the house. Having opened it she abandoned Vogler on the threshold so that she could run to Tom's side—the doctor supported himself on the frame of the door, utterly finished by the journey—and see to what extent her fears had been justified.

'Tom!' She could do little more than mouth her son's name with the breath she had left. Moreover, the spectacle that met her eyes would have robbed any living, feeling creature, for some time, of its powers of expression. Mrs. Lynch sat by his bed and with her weak hands exposed Tom's body for inspection. Doctor Vogler closed the door behind him and collapsed onto the floor in one corner, watching his hostess' reactions.

It was immediately obvious that Tom could not live much longer, though he gave the impression of retaining much of his energy. It was a twisted impression. A patch of skin under one eye was black; there was black around his mouth, on parts of his neck, on his legs, on his sides. There were more lumps, some larger than others. The sheet and the boy's clothes were heavy with the bile, saliva and black slime he had coughed up; his mouth itself was perhaps the most ghastly sight on his body, his tongue a dark purple colour, his lips bleeding and curling, his teeth grinding together. His grey-and-red eyes were wide or tight shut, Tom could not decide which. And the sound that came out of his mouth—Mrs. Lynch had not heard it before, though her son had. She wondered if Tom were trying to say something, if those guttural vowels formed words, drawn out so long as to become incomprehensible.

He was very bad for a few minutes, during which Mrs. Lynch thought of nothing else. But he became calmer in time, his groans softer.

'Mrs. Lynch?' She started at the doctor's voice coming from the corner, and looked round.

'Doctor! I'd forgotten—it's Tom—he's—I didn't mention, did I?' Considering her state of mind, she was surprisingly articulate.

She took the candle into the storage room and filled a mug with water, placing it on the small table by the looking glass. Then she removed the loaf of bread from the cloth she had wrapped it in, took up the rusty knife and attempted to cut a piece off for the doctor. But, wielding the knife, she saw how violently her hands trembled, and paused for a moment, taking deep breaths. Her hands were the same afterward, shaking about as if slashing at something. After a little more labour she had a piece of bread in her hands, which she took up, with the water, to give to Doctor Vogler.

Upstairs the doctor was no longer slumped, half-dead, in the corner. He sat where Mrs. Lynch had sat only two minutes earlier, looking at her son. Eagerly she gave him the bread and water: he gulped the water down and tore into the bread. When he had swallowed his first mouthful he said, breathlessly, 'Thank you—thank you so much, Mrs. Lynch. I cannot tell you how grateful I am.' Then he went on eating and peering at Tom's naked body.

Mrs. Lynch stood back for a moment, also staring at Tom. The sight of his mouth gaping open again made her jump: she clutched her head with one hand and then, muttering fearfully to herself, rushed down the ladder to get her son some water of his own. When she came back she trickled it little by little into the gaping black hole; Tom hardly noticed, sometimes closing his mouth and causing the water to trickle down his cheeks.

'Doctor Vogler,' she began, 'I don't know—I mean...Tom has the plague—he has the Black Death. You can see—I didn't mention it. He—he needs help, but they won't let me—no one will—and I thought, perhaps,' tears trickled down her face, 'perhaps, Doctor Vogler—I don't know what to do. Please—you must help him. You will help him, won't you?'

'He has had it for a while, yes?' asked the doctor, finishing his bread. He had pulled back his hood, revealing the grey hair on his head to be of the same length as that which formed his beard. His face, too, was thin, his eyes blue, and he spoke with a tone of serious but casual understanding, as if he had seen many such cases before and only required the most basic information in order to know what must be done. He showed no fear of contagion as he gently touched parts of the child's body, lifting arms and legs to examine them.

'Yes—it was yesterday morning. It started then, yes, I found him—but it wasn't this way—he didn't have the—' she choked, 'he wasn't this way. But last night—I didn't sleep, you understand. I couldn't, not with Tom like this. But you can help, can't you?'

'How did you come to be travelling, Mrs. Lynch, in this weather,' and Vogler glanced at her clothes, 'and in this condition?'

'Travelling—I wasn't! I was going home. He wouldn't take me...no, wait.' She looked nervous, biting one of her fingers with alarming ferocity. 'Wait. I was travelling, yes.'

'Well, yes,' she admitted, 'I was thrown, of course. And didn't sleep last night, and my head—and with Tom like this. I'm sorry, Doctor Vogler.'

'Please don't worry, Mrs. Lynch. I can see that you have been through an ordeal, and I can hardly expect you to remember its every instant.'

'They won't let me—they won't let me help him. But he needs help, I told them that—he needs it now. But they won't stop—it never stops,' she shook her head and wept, 'however hard I try. We had an agreement. But I was thrown out—they keep hurting us...and it isn't fair. He's only a child!'

'But you won't hurt Tom, Doctor—you'll help us. You can treat him, can't you?'

'My dear woman, if you had the simple charity to stop for me in the road, with the rain pouring down, and to help me out of the mud—and when you had your son to care for at home, and after your ordeal—if you could stop to spare me, a complete stranger, an old man of no use to anybody, from drowning in a ditch, and give me food and shelter like this—how then could I turn my back on you and your son, when your need is so much more desperate than my own? How could I see this poor child in such agony and leave him to rot? What sort of callous animal could do that?'

Mrs. Lynch did not hear a word he said, because he did not say he would help Tom. She just stared into her son's eyes, twisting her hands.

'However,' Vogler continued, 'I may have misled you when I referred to myself as "doctor"—that is, in the opinion of many I may have misled you, though in my own I have not.' He untied the string around his sleeve, reached inside and took out a plain black wooden box. Mrs. Lynch eyed it.

He showed her. The inside of the box was all black as well: painted black, and with a black object resting in it. The doctor removed the object, revealing it to be a black horn with a rough, ridged surface and a spiral toward its sharp point. Mrs. Lynch looked up at Vogler questioningly.

'It is taken from a goat, Mrs. Lynch. It is naturally this colour.' He stood up and walked across the room, carrying the box in one hand and the horn in the other. He was preparing to speak.

At that moment, however, Tom's eyes glared at the ceiling, he gasped—his mother gave a short scream of anxiety—and then he too began to scream—and his face twisted up, his arms clutched at his body—he screamed like a small child in unendurable pain—his eyes had the confused, pleading look of a small child—his mind burning up with pain and black despair—he did not understand why anybody should want to live for an instant in a world like this one.

Mrs. Lynch was frantic: she gathered her son in her arms and he was so tormented that he didn't notice, and then she screamed his name over and over again and kissed his face, covering it with her own tears, failing utterly to penetrate the wall of pain that had been erected between them.

'I will help, Mrs. Lynch,' said Vogler calmly, apparently unmoved by the childish screams. He put the box down on the floor, keeping the goat's horn in his other hand.

'Oh please, please!' said Mrs. Lynch, who did not take her eyes or mind off her son.

'But Mrs. Lynch,' the doctor went on, 'how shall I help Tom? What do you want to be done with him?'

'Make it stop, please! Stop it hurting—he's only a child—why must he suffer like this? Make the pain stop, please!'

'Yes,' said Vogler. He clutched the horn between the palms of his hands, closed his eyes, and bowed his head.

Tom had been screaming. But suddenly, within a second, his scream died in his throat and the whole room was plunged into an unnatural silence. Mrs. Lynch held her breath. She looked down at her son.

'Oh God,' she whispered. 'Oh dear God. His eyes—' A wail shook her voice. 'His eyes are open! Tom! Tom!' Then she exploded: 'He's dead! Oh Tom, Tom, please—no! No, Tom! Oh God, oh God, Tom!' Her son hung there in her arms, his face frozen in the look of confused agony that had just been twisting it. Whereas he had been tense and jerky in his movements before, now his limbs hung off him like weeds, and Mrs. Lynch could not stop his head from nodding backward. 'He can't be dead—please, Tom! Come back, please! Oh help me, please—don't leave me like this!'

'But he's dead—I didn't want him to die.' She still didn't look up from her son, whose hair she was stroking as if in hope of reanimating his brain. 'My son—my only son...it isn't fair. Oh Tom!'

She seemed to nod again. But really she had no idea anymore what Vogler said or did. She knew only that her son was dead, that all hope and purpose and goodness had at last and after the most appalling struggle been crushed to death. She was alone in the world. They had won, they had beaten her down so she could never get up again. And it was no comfort to hope that they would now leave her alone. There would never be any comfort without her son. Her whole world existed in his bloodshot little eyes, and now they were still and cold.

In the silence that followed, Doctor Vogler clutched the horn between the palms of his hands, closed his eyes, and bowed his head.

The limp flesh Mrs. Lynch held in her arms became tense. The childish scream re-emerged in her son's throat as if crawling back up from where it had been dragged to. Tom's eyes were glaring at the ceiling again, then clenching shut, then opening, and so on. He coughed like a dog being strangled.

A flickering, blinding pain flared up behind his mother's eyes as she watched him.

'You wanted him alive again.' Vogler spoke in a monotone, carefully replacing the black goat's horn in its box.

'Of course,' said Vogler with a hint of contempt in his voice, barely audible amid the child's screaming.

'Tom!' She knew, somehow, that she was beginning to feel the horror before she even understood it. 'Why—why—I don't understand!'

'I did as you told me, Mrs. Lynch. I granted your requests. Your first ended Tom's suffering; your second will stretch it out to infinity. The second cannot of course be reversed, having been fulfilled. I'm afraid there is nothing you can do for your son.'

Tom was screaming. But Mrs. Lynch heard Vogler's words, and gradually they sank into her mind, and so gradually she understood them.

She clutched Tom even harder. Her breathing, frantic, an endless series of quick, hoarse gasps sending her whole body into convulsions.... Soon she too was screaming. Her screams mingled with those of her son in a dreadful cacophony to which Doctor Vogler seemed utterly impervious as he tied the box back into his sleeve, took up his crooked stick, opened the door of the house, turned, said 'I'm sorry, Mrs. Lynch,' and walked out.

Mrs. Lynch grabbed her son's head in both her hands, holding it by the sides and massaging it roughly, pulling at the hair, stroking the face and neck. Her hands attempted comfort, clumsily and uselessly. Her face, however, seemed to have been stretched into a permanent expression of disbelieving horror.

It can perhaps be imagined that she had no idea herself how much time passed before she realised Vogler had gone—before some clicking sound in her head told her what had been done—and before she ran from her son's bedside into the rain.

The rain had grown fierce again, rendering much of the village invisible. Mrs. Lynch could barely see anyway. She staggered with her arms outstretched, her eyes peeled open, screaming out what she thought was the doctor's name, but was in fact as incomprehensible a sound as that of her son's wailing a few feet away. Still she reeled about the empty sodden streets of the village, staring through the blanket of rain to find the doctor, her head convulsing as she bellowed for help.

Mrs. Lynch didn't notice the rain and couldn't be sure whether or not she was alone in the street. Everything was not a blur, quite the opposite; everything was drawn in jagged lines. Every sound attacked her. The air she breathed, the water that trickled down her skin and clothes, the mud she had buried her feet in—they were not what they used to be. She did not recognise any of it. It didn't look different, it was different. This was her new world.

Her house, for instance, was different from the others: it had the aura about it now. The curse upon it was so extreme as to have altered its shape. There was something twisted about it now, just vaguely suggesting what might be inside. Inside, Vogler's blackness pervaded everything, except Tom: Tom was a glaring scarlet colour, a monster glowing, writhing on his bed, all his nerves lit up bright red.

This, this was forever now. Nothing else—just this. And it happened to her son. It was her son lying there, her son, who meant something—her son, whose name was Tom and who had never known a whole minute of joy in his life—lying there suffering forever.

And she could hold him all she wanted, until her corpse lay slumped over him, until it turned to dust, and still for her son it would be forever, forever to lay in agony, forever to wonder why the pain did not stop, why closing his eyes never made it stop, pleading somewhere in the back of his mind as it curled up into madness, pleading with the dim, featureless figure of his mother, pleading with her to help him, to comfort him, to give him water, to stroke his hair, to talk to him. And it was still her failure, her shame, that she could not help; but now it was hers forever. There would be no empathy. She would not understand. No one would. Infinite sensations were granted only to Tom, and they were all sensations of pain, and Mrs. Lynch was helplessly trapped in a body that could never sympathise enough. Even as the facts drove spirals through her brain she began to appreciate the futility of her own torment.

In terrible lurching movements the young widow crawled down the ladder into the storage chamber and snatched the rusty knife from the table.

Upstairs again and by Tom's bedside, Mrs. Lynch had no difficulty with the knife, no scruples. It was easy now to follow the first doctor's advice, to raise the knife high above the little boy's neck, to hold him still for a moment with her other hand, to stab down and slash his throat open and watch as his cursed life-blood gushed away into the mud and his scream fell dead once more, and he was saved, freed at last from his pain.

But in the second when the knife should have penetrated Tom's skin, Mrs. Lynch felt a shivering in her arm, and without meaning to, she flung the knife across the room, then gaped at her treacherous hand. Crawling like an animal, she retrieved the knife and made a second attempt: but the shivering sensation filled her whole body, throwing her back. She tried again. Maybe she had to try a hundred times for it to work. Maybe at last, if she suffered enough, if she tried until her hands were worn to the bone, maybe at last the curse would be broken, they would have pity.

They could not let it go on like this. They could not hold the thought in their heads—the memory of the little child they had made to suffer perpetual agonies—and ignore it, accept it. They must let her kill her son. There must be some grain of pity on earth that would let him die. One drop of pity, just one would kill him.

She felt the nightmare clawing at her from all sides, and for a moment was so overwhelmed that she sought only to save herself. Her hands shook as she picked up the knife and held it to her own throat; and then, deliberately, with a scream, threw it back into the corner. To think that she had even contemplated it... No, she thought, she must be alive. She must live for as many years as possible with her son, and think, and find a way. There must be something she could do, she must only take the time to discover it. His mother of all people must always hope. She must be alive.

Mrs. Lynch collapsed. All around her was Tom's voice, struggling to give expression to a mind that rapidly spiralled into complete insanity. She sat listening to it, her eyes closed. She could feel the four walls, the roof and the floor itself closing in, tighter and tighter.

Three days later. It had become necessary to confront practical difficulties, to develop a way of life removed from all actual sensations, in short to maintain the external reality from day to day. On some level, rational thought was required of Mrs. Lynch.

Mrs. Manders was returning home late at night with a downcast look on her face when she heard something hiss at her through the darkness.

'Mrs. Manders!' The figure that had spoken crept out of its hiding place, drawing very close and revealing itself to be Mrs. Lynch. The details of her face were shrouded in gloom.

'Is that Mrs. Lynch? What do you want?' Mrs. Manders seemed nervous, stepping back when she realised who was with her.

'Nothing—nothing,' said Mrs. Lynch eagerly. 'That is—I wanted to give you the money I owe you—I can pay you now. All those pennies.'

'You were wrong, I promise—why don't we walk to my house, or we'll wake someone up? Well, I wouldn't carry the money through the streets, at night. Yes—you were wrong, Tom is much better now. Come on.' Mrs. Manders joined her in her walk home. 'He's still in bed most of the time, but the worst of the fever has passed, and he can look after himself a bit more. That's why you haven't seen me lately—I found work.' Mrs. Manders gave her a doubtful look. 'Oh yes, I did—I did, I went to a farm, just a little way outside the village—it isn't much.'

'It was so kind of you, Mrs. Manders, when no one else—when everyone just turned their backs—and you didn't—just a little help meant so much to me, and Tom of course.'

'And I'm sure he would want to say something to you—you'll see how much better he is now. It was such a relief. The doctor you told me about—he looked at him, he didn't want to stay—but he told me what to do. Tom got better so quickly. I don't think I've ever been so scared.'

'You were the only one I could talk to. Everyone else around here, they think—well, I don't know what they think. But I knew I could ask for your advice—and you told me about the doctor. Have you been getting by?'

'There's my house, just there,' said Mrs. Lynch, pointing the way. 'I suppose you and your husband must have been worried—I mean with the plague—with thinking it was—'

'Are you sure Tom is all right?' Mrs. Manders stepped tentatively into the hut, Mrs. Lynch following.

'Yes—yes, of course,' said the latter, raising her voice, closing the door behind her and hurrying to a corner of the house, behind her guest, who peered into the blackness of the room, trying to make out objects. 'The doctor said he would be, and sure enough—and it looks like no one else has it in the village, I think—is that right, Mrs. Manders?'

Tom's groaning was clearly audible, even through the slate that covered the hole just by Mrs. Manders' feet.

Mrs. Lynch hit her, from behind, in the side of the head, with a charred piece of wood, spraying charcoal dust into the air. Mrs. Manders had time for nothing more than a strained gasp before she collapsed, then lying still—then she began to move again, struggling to get to her knees, and moaning. Mrs. Lynch, meanwhile, had lit a candle and pushed aside the slate, sharpening in the two women's ears the terrible noise coming from below. Mrs. Manders' blood trickled from the slightly blackened wound on her temple; she was crawling a little, but not nearly strong enough to scream out for help, or to struggle to any effect when Mrs. Lynch picked her up by her arms and slumped her into the hole; it then cost only a little effort to push her feet along until her whole body disappeared into the storage room with a sharp cry. Mrs. Lynch carried the candle in one hand as she descended the ladder.

In the underground chamber, Tom lay sprawled out on the floor to one side, clutching at the sheets that enclosed him, oblivious to the intruders. In three days his screams had lost their high pitch, travelled through an impotent period of near-silence, and by now settled into a growl originating deep in the throat, apparently never pausing for breath—always, always scraping at the air, the tone barely wavering, the contortions of the little boy's mouth little affecting the noise that emerged from it.

Mrs. Manders had hurt herself on the way down and now lay on her back, clawing at the air, trying to speak. When she turned onto her side and looked into the blood-red eyes of Tom Lynch, and they looked into hers, and his black mouth gaped, her movements became more desperate.

Having set her candle down on the small table, Mrs. Lynch caught her victim under the arms, dragged her up and carried her—she struggling with renewed but still ineffectual energy—over to the barrel of water in the corner. Holding Mrs. Manders up, pushing her against the barrel, Mrs. Lynch then freed her own right hand to force her neighbour's head into the water and hold it there. Mrs. Manders found yet more strength to thrash her head and flail her arms, scratching at her murderer in futile attempts to loosen the grip; but Mrs. Lynch was more determined and, grinding her teeth, watching the bubbles swarming, listening to the muffled screams, was able to keep the other submerged.

Tom turned over onto his side, his growls uninterrupted, then onto his front, tangling himself in the sheets.

'Sorry, sorry, sorry,' said Mrs. Lynch, her eyes blazing. 'Sorry...sorry, Mrs. Lynch.' Clearly Mrs. Manders was fading fast. 'Sorry, Mrs. Manders. I'm sorry.' Completely still: Mrs. Lynch let her go and her head lolled in the barrel, the chin scraping against the inside rim. 'Just words, Tom. None of them...all of them...we'll see, we'll see. We'll find something, Tom.' She pulled Mrs. Manders' head out of the water, let it go in mid-air and watched the corpse slump down in a heap on the floor. She searched the woman's clothes until she found a small silver coin—nothing else on her.

Next she attended to her son, turning him over and disentangling him from the sheets, not that these kindnesses did him any good.

Then she went back to her victim, pulled her body—which somehow had become heavier—to its feet, dragged it across the room, and with some difficulty arranged it on the stool in front of the looking glass. She held Mrs. Manders upright, clutching her chin and examining her face in the glass, by the light of the candle.

The damp face stared vacantly back, gleaming in the candlelight, dripping sparkling little drops onto the table. Mrs. Lynch pulled the hair back, combing it with her fingers, making it look less dishevelled. Then she caressed Mrs. Manders' skin, feeling about her face, neck and arms, holding her wrists and sensing the stillness in them. Her mouth gaped in wonder as she felt, ever so gently, about the dead woman's eyeballs. How white they were. Nothing changed in them when she pressed them with her fingers. They were still a little warm.

'Quiet, Tom,' she said as she felt them, tears trickling from her own eyes. 'Quiet. Please, Tom. Quiet.'

When Mrs. Lynch's eyes were open, more often than not they fed upon her son's agony, examining with a morbid obsession the details of his livid face. When they were closed they saw nothing but that same face: only different, as it had once been for a few moments, closed up, empty, the eyes staring wide but cold and lifeless. This vision not only caused her acute pain, it seemed also to sustain her—it felt, much of the time, as if her heartbeat ran on such pain. With such pain and with the memories that provoked it, she became angrier. Violent dreams came to her at night; nor did she allow herself any escape or comfort in her daytime fantasies, but fixed upon all that brought pain and fuelled her anger. Because as she crawled through weeks, then through months, failing to register their passage, it was her fury, her deranged lust for revenge, that made her life possible. In the course of staying alive herself, she would nourish this fury by any method that presented itself.

No more than a few people were ever to be found patronising Mr. Bailey's tavern at the same time, but Mrs. Lynch often made one of their number, sitting there in the evenings with a mug of ale that would see her comfortably through several hours. Tonight the place was as dim and depressing as always, but aside from the thick-skulled peasants drowning their sorrows away from home, there also sat in one corner a respectable-looking gentleman, lit up by a small candle on his table: grey-haired, thin, drinking. Reminiscent of the unnamed doctor who had once stayed the night upstairs (such a long time ago) though skinnier and more self-absorbed, with smaller eyes. Mrs. Lynch had been carefully watching him all evening, listening to the conversations he had with Mr. Bailey.

'I don't think I've seen you passing through before, sir—I wonder—where did you say you came from?'

His voice was thin and dissatisfied, Mrs. Lynch thought. At his feet lay a handsome black sack, free of embroidery.

'And you won't be...you wouldn't want to spend the night here? There's a room upstairs.'

Mr. Bailey ignored her. He went upstairs. No one else was looking. Mrs. Lynch walked over to the shopkeeper's table and sat down opposite him. She tried to look nice. Neither of them spoke for a minute, as if each were unaware of the other's presence.

'I heard this village was infected?' asked the shopkeeper, staring down at his mug.

'I'm not a local,' said Mrs. Lynch, a shiver of anger (rather than satisfaction) unsettling her for a moment after the doctor's words, 'and anyway, I had it when I was a child.'

'I'm reasonable. You can drop me off at the next village and I'll find my own way from there.'

Tonight there was no rain. The shopkeeper rode in a very respectable-looking conveyance, drawn by two horses at the front, with a man at the top to drive them, next to whom hung a glowing lantern. The shopkeeper opened the door, waited while Mrs. Lynch took her seat, then climbed in with his sack. They set off at a fast pace.

After a couple of minutes, the shopkeeper pulled aside a hatch in the roof and shouted at the driver to slow down. Then he turned back to Mrs. Lynch and began to remove her clothes.

He loomed over her, unbuttoning her tunic: his face was like a rock, his mouth set, his eyes thin and calm, his hands soft to the touch but cold and meticulous.

As the right sleeve of her tunic fell from her arm, Mrs. Lynch pulled something loose from inside it, holding it concealed in her hand. When the shopkeeper laid one hand on her bare shoulder she pushed the rusty knife into his abdomen, eliciting from him a bellow of pain. His hand gripped her flesh, his legs buckled against hers. Mrs. Lynch, breathless with excitement, made rapid stabbing motions with the knife, covering the front of the shopkeeper's body with holes, battering down all his defensive impulses in seconds—he had no time to resist her. She could just make out his pained expression in the darkness as his cries rang out loud and shrill.

'Sir?' she dimly heard from outside; the horses slowed down, then stopped altogether. She pushed the dying shopkeeper away from her and he fell backward, arms outstretched, onto the floor of the carriage. She buttoned up her tunic.

Mrs. Lynch threw the door of the stagecoach open and jumped into the mud, then ran round to the front to look up at where the driver sat. But he did not sit; he stood, brightly illuminated by the lantern, scraping at the hatch in the roof, trying to open it to see what had happened; and so he did not notice Mrs. Lynch's swift advance—the rusty, bloody knife gleaming impatiently in her grip—until she was almost upon him. Once he had seen her, however, the driver was not slow in realising her intent and so, crying out in terror, kicked at her hands as they gripped the wooden platform, at the same time lashing feebly at the horses with his whip, to make them run; they responded by shuffling forward. But Mrs. Lynch would not loosen her grip, nor be weakened by the pain in her knuckles: she lifted her feet off the wheel of the carriage just as it commenced turning, and—impervious to the driver's efforts—loomed up, dragging herself to within clawing distance of him. As she lunged with the knife he screamed again and leapt from his seat, rolling into the mud below, bringing the lantern crashing down with him and plunging the scene into utter darkness. The horses were still.

Mrs. Lynch jumped down after the driver, landing roughly and losing her knife; but in a moment she had snatched it up again and was on her feet, shambling toward her victim who, unwisely, in the darkness, had attempted an escape toward the open fields on one side of the road; he stumbled into the deep ditch, stood no chance of getting out again in time. Just as he buried his fingers in the mud and tried in vain to drag his way to safety, Mrs. Lynch was behind him, the knife stuck into the back of his neck, his whole body going limp. She pulled the knife out and lowered him into the ditch.

No use in getting her breath back: in the driver's pockets she found a few pennies; the shopkeeper dead, halfway out of the door of the stagecoach; a purse full of silver and copper among his belongings. Mrs. Lynch dragged him out, dragged him, grunting with the effort, to where the driver lay and arranged him in the same part of the ditch; then she spent some minutes heaving mud out of the ground and covering their bodies, not completely but sufficiently to make them invisible to all but the more alert passers-by, at least until it rained; then she ran over to the horses and slashed one of them lightly over its ribs, so that it snapped its teeth at her; she cut it again, growling, and both horses set off down the road at a gallop; Mrs. Lynch watched them until she saw their silhouettes slow down far off in the distance, a long way from the bodies.

Then at last everything was silent except for the noise the wind made as it blew across the fields. Mrs. Lynch looked up at the dark sky, empty of stars, and thought that it probably would rain soon. She walked home, weighed down with dirt and money.

But the years passed and Mrs. Lynch could not be satisfied, not when for her son the pain was infinite. How then could any of her mortal fury hope to do justice to his cause? Anger and pain gradually withered her body and mind, and she became aware that—quite apart from the deep insanity that had determined her every move since she had fallen into the trap—the unrelenting frenzies inside her would in time destroy her reason. What chilled her most of all, what caused her to decide on a new and drastic course of action, was the day when she found herself looking at Tom's side of the room, and seeing it empty—the sheets spread flat over the ground, deathly silence all about her. The hallucination lasted a very few seconds. But she realised that it was not enough simply to stay alive if by doing so under these conditions she were to become irrevocably detached from her senses, and so from her son. Once again she became desperate to know what to do.

Mrs. Lynch had taken to staring at herself in the mirror. The fault, after all, was in her.

The candle on the table lit up her face; a second candle glowed in the opposite wall, just above Tom and beyond his reach, in case there should be an accident; in one corner, a pile of candles she had obtained, as replacements. Tom no longer seemed to mind bright lights. Therefore Mrs. Lynch used the candles: they dimly illuminated the whole room.

Faces stared out from the walls. Mrs. Manders looked confused, featureless by now, scraps of flesh hanging down with fear—and still alive. Yes, Mrs. Manders still watched the two of them in there. She was not entirely skeletal; she inhabited other parts of the room. There was no order to their arrangement, and why should there be? Faces just hung there, on the wall, and still alive after all this time.

There was a leg from which withered flesh had hung, which itself now hung, mainly skeletal, and still could be seen as withered in the bone as much, it seemed, as it had been in the flesh. The widow's discoloured face stared out from another wall. She was still alive.

There were other women, other parts of bodies. Some were new, some still had the blackened flesh crawling over their bones, the black bile still caked around their mouths. Women, men, and their little ones, but really there was not enough space.

But they hung there on the walls, staring out, hanging there quite still—but they were alive. If not, they could not feel the pain, so they must be alive. Everyone, every living thing, every dead thing, must feel it. Tom writhed on the floor, his lungs screaming to escape from his body, his nerves screaming to fall dead and silent, his brain turning around and around in its prison. And unless the others were alive and trapped as he was, there could be no balance; and there must be balance, things must make sense. The world must be made to empathise. So Mrs. Manders and the others, however dead they seemed, were alive.

Yet there was something distant about them, as they were, and for a long time Mrs. Lynch felt strangely compelled toward the immediacy of her own face, in her treasured looking glass.

She stared at her face in the glass, forgetting her villagers for the moment. How grey she herself looked now, how rough and shrivelled her skin was, her hair no longer what it had been, but thin and wispy and greying in places, thinning on her scalp in others.

She pulled up the sleeves of her tunic, one at a time. She tore at the scabs in her flesh, scraping the burn marks with her fingernails, grinding into the naked wounds, complete indifference engraved in her face.

Then she rested her hands on the table again, sat up straight and faced herself in the mirror, her right hand lying next to the rusty knife. Her eyes were the worst. Bloodshot, the eyelids wrinkled and grey; Mrs. Lynch had done everything she could with her eyes and still they were the biggest disappointment. She peered more closely into their depths and despaired to see how unresponsive they were. In the end, after all, what were those things in her head but balls of lifeless flesh? The eyes of a madwoman, not mad in themselves, feelings were not in the eyes. She struggled to find some trace of feeling in them, but there was none.

The faces in the walls gaped at her, Tom growled behind her, the candle flickered, as she put the rusty knife to her left eyeball. The point of the blade filled, then blurred, then swallowed up her vision in utter blackness as she closed her right eye. This was hard work. Digging into the hard matter. Carving it. She had encountered the same challenge in other people's eyes. That was the very problem: the eyes were so tough, defensive, unsympathetic. What use could they be to Tom? But at last the knife did penetrate, clear fluid seeped out. Mrs. Lynch could not help trembling as she did this and her breathing had become frantic. But she must go on. She looked, through the moisture coating her right eyeball, into the looking glass at her blurred, disfigured face for a moment, before drawing the candle nearer, bowing her head over it and allowing the flame to flicker into the mangled eye and its socket, taking care not to bow too low and snuff the candle out.

It was so important to concentrate on the feelings. She must not think of the others that hung on the walls, watching her critically, nor listen to the hissing noise her eye made as she held it, shivering, over the flame, nor to her son. Because his feelings were not contained in that awful groaning sound he made, and it was no use peering morbidly at his black skin and bloodshot eyes. One must concentrate on the feelings inside. It was in her own head, not in the world outside it, that she must discover the sensations and finally empathise.

Her head jerked and snuffed out the candle. The eyeball continued to hiss. Tom hadn't changed and neither had she. Nothing had. It was no good.

Mrs. Lynch knew Mr. Bailey to have grown, in recent years, and thanks to poverty so stifling as even to prevent him seeking more fertile territory, old before his time. She knew that, as the plague had slowly strangled his village, killing or scaring away his neighbours and customers, and as he had failed, from day to day, to cope with loneliness or with his inability to escape his wretched and futile little life, what few grains of sense he might once have possessed had shrivelled with his body, until realising that he had (at last) been stricken with the Black Death and should hang himself was all he had the wit to do. She knew that he had hanged himself some days ago, so leaving the village entirely to the rats, to the fleas, to Tom, and to her. She had searched his body and his home for money and food, taken all there was, although these days she scarcely knew what to do with such things.

Nevertheless, tonight she had returned to Mr. Bailey's tavern to stand and watch the man's corpse dangle from the rafters, a stool lying on its side some feet away from him. In his understandably distracted state he had been close to misjudging the length of rope needed, and the soles of his feet now hung so close to the floor that, were it not for the stark silhouette of the noose leading up into the rafters, Mrs. Lynch might, in the darkness, and if she hadn't known better, have believed the old man to be standing bolt upright before her, measuring her wealth; she might also have mistaken him for the Mr. Bailey of a decade ago, standing upright indeed, his head held straight and high, as he had done then, rather than lumbering about, hunched over, as he had done more recently. In the daytime his face, the end of his purple tongue protruding from in between the teeth that had bitten slightly into it, the red ulcer on the back of his left hand—these were plain indicators of the truth. Moreover, his body swung gently when touched, and his arms hung down at his sides in an unnatural fashion.

Equally disconcerting were his eyes, tightly shut in pain. Mrs. Lynch, breathing with some difficulty, a black eye-patch secured on her head, her face covered with little scars, her hands severely mutilated, limped toward the body, which at the moment hung still. When she reached for its eyelids and dragged them open, it moved slightly away from her, and when she had finished it moved closer. She left it to turn from left to right and back again very slowly—to glare at the shadows.

Mrs. Lynch did not consider how the pitch blackness outside might complicate her homeward journey. She wandered at random through the empty streets of the village and listened to the rats squealing and the mud sucking at her feet, until she recognised the very faint glow around the door of her shack. By that time it had begun to rain.

Some villagers lay sprawled out on the floor inside the house, their eyes wide open, waiting. Mrs. Lynch stepped over their bodies to retrieve the candle from the table and carry it down to her screaming son. She laid it on the floor by his side, at enough of a distance so that his lurching head would not unsettle it. She knelt there watching.

'Quiet, Tom,' she whispered, stroking his forehead and brushing the hair out of his eyes. Everything had changed but Tom. He had been the same growling, coughing, plague-ridden little boy all this time, through all she had done. 'There, there, Tom. Quiet now.' Even to Mrs. Lynch's distracted mind it seemed like a long time, especially when she saw her own reflection in the looking glass, or when the daylight illuminated old Mr. Bailey's corpse, or when she visited the corpse-strewn houses in the village. Yet it was barely even the beginning for Tom.

'Don't worry,' she said. The words rasped painfully in her throat and she strained for breath in between phrases. 'Don't worry, Tom—just wait. You'll see.'

Who knew what Tom saw through those red eyes of his, when they were open, or when they were closed? It would always be the beginning for him. Always or never, she had no idea which.

'I promise you, Tom. You'll see. Here—come on.' She picked him up by the shoulders and placed his head in her lap, where it twisted about, unresponsive. She gathered him up and held him to her chest, taking long, hoarse breaths. 'I'm sorry, Tom...I'm so sorry.' She wept, explaining things to him, so that her sobs interrupted her or garbled her words. 'It's my—my—fault. It's because of me this is happening—I'm sorry. I—I did it to you. But it was—it was a trap, I didn't mean it—I didn't mean it! I only wanted to—help—you—I wanted it all—to end. But it never—never—oh Tom! Please forgive me!'

'It should be dawn soon. You'll see, Tom—I promise you, you'll see. They trapped me—oh dear Tom—they did it to you—they wouldn't let me—let me... But now—you'll see—I'm going to make them. I know you can't hear me, Tom. But you'll hear them. I know you can't hear me—so I'm—I'm so sorry, Tom—I'm going to leave you. I'm going—to leave—and—find—I'll find—him. I'll find him, Tom. And I'll make them all pay. Don't worry, Tom—just wait. They won't—they won't get away with it. They're all around you—the ones that did it—they're everywhere—in here, in the ground, in the sea—they're in the air you breathe. They're asleep now—dead asleep—but I'll make them wake—wake in—in torment! And you'll hear them, Tom! You'll feel them all through you—and they'll all pay—oh Tom! I promise you—I'll find him! You won't be alone anymore. I promise!'

She went on talking to him throughout the night, holding him tightly, kissing him and stroking his face, tortured by the knowledge that she would never see him again.

But a little after dawn she stood up, her bones crackling, ascended the ladder, pushed the slate back over the hole (muffling Tom's cries) and left the house for the last time, twitching violently with her sobs. She did not think to take any provisions on her journey. She carried only the rusty knife, concealed in the sleeve of her tunic.

Her feet dragged in the mud outside, her face twisting beneath her hood with the physical effort of the journey, the rain gradually getting harder.

After a while, having left the village, she found herself faced with an unending road closed in on either side by fields and overshadowed by a grey sky. The road receded into a horizon totally obscured by mist and rain. Mrs. Lynch travelled doggedly along the very centre of the road, her eyes fixed straight ahead.

It was simply a question of walking, limping, slowly dragging herself through the mud for months, for years. It didn't matter how long. There were no practical difficulties, nothing to stand in her way, if she would only go on walking, searching the road. Her pain meant nothing. The aches in her bones, the water and mud dragging her down, her struggling lungs, the eye-patch scraping against the blackened scar behind it, all these Mrs. Lynch ignored automatically. The search for the witch doctor was a very simple matter, requiring only physical determination, and she did not doubt for a moment that she could, in time and with small effort, fulfil her promise to Tom.

But Tom himself lay in her way, his tangled figure hovering before her in the rain, so that she had constantly to suppress her guilt and her desire still to be with him. Having been forced, throughout her life and especially during the last ten years, to cultivate not only physical but also mental determination, this was not impossible; and, despite everything, she had enough rational sense left to persuade herself that whatever guilt she felt in abandoning Tom should be dwarfed by the guilt she felt in kneeling by his side, stroking him more for her own comfort than for his, incapable of empathy or sympathy, doing nothing really to help him. Tom was, as she knew all too well, closed off to her world, she to his. Any sense she had that, by being there in that squalid little shack with him, she provided him w