Biblical (23 page)

She stood, shaking, at the river’s shore for an hour, until the sky darkened. With the sunset, the river came to life and she watched as a mist rolled along its waters and a pair of birds swooped and wheeled. Except the birds weren’t birds, they were dragonflies with two-foot-long bodies and four-foot wingspans and the mist was billowing clouds of millions of mayflies. One of the dragonflies flew over to where Karen stood and hovered on gossamer wings three feet from her face. She found herself hypnotized by the two huge compound eyes set like a mask on the colorful head; each was a mosaic of tiny hexagons, an almost synthetic geometry so precise it looked like they had been designed by computer and assembled by a master glass-maker. Through her fear, she actually found the dragonfly beautiful.

Now Karen knew why there were no animal cries here. No bird song. This was the empire of insects. Her own private and very personal hell.

So there was no surprise when she turned from the river to
see a scorpion beetling towards her, its tail arched and sting ready, its claws raised as if prepared to attack.

A scorpion the size of a man.

*

Something happened to Karen in that moment. Something changed. Like when the giant dragonfly had hovered in front of her, she was able to see past her fear. This was not real. None of this was really happening: not a begging, terrified denial, but a rational, logical conclusion. This had nothing to do with her phobias or compulsions, this was about the epidemic of hallucinations.

She drew a deep breath and stood completely still. The scorpion’s eyes were directionless globes dotted on the creature’s skull plate and there was no way for Karen to tell what it was looking at, what it could see. She understood enough about natural history to know that there were different ways of seeing: some animals perceived heat or motion instead of or as well as light. For all she knew, the monster heading towards her saw in infrared and was looking deep inside her, watching the beating of her heart.

But this wasn’t real. The scorpion couldn’t see her because it wasn’t there. Or, in its world, she wasn’t there. Wherever or whenever this place was, life here was on a massive scale, and all of that life was insect. Insect. And Karen, the entomophobe, lost in an unreal world of giant insects, was making observations, was drawing conclusions, was using logic.

She remained still as the scorpion reached her, passing so close that hard, bristling hairs on its segmented leg scraped skin from the thigh exposed through her torn business skirt. Holding her breath, she watched the monster pass. She realized that although this was definitely a scorpion, it was more than its enormous size that made it different from any that Karen knew of. It had giant claws, but everything about it was giant and these claws were smaller in proportion to its body than
on normal-sized scorpions. Rows of spikes bristled from the claws, as if intended to sweep victims into the jaws, rather than simply seize them. Another anomaly: the rear set of legs were flattened out into blades, like the oars of a rowboat.

It’s aquatic, she realized. A giant, aquatic scorpion and we don’t belong in each other’s time. It can’t see me and it’s going to go past me and into the water.

Don’t move, she told herself. Don’t breathe. Don’t scream. This is all unreal.

Karen closed her eyes tight, shutting out this impossible tableau. It’s because you have a phobia, she forced the thought into her brain. You have picked up whatever virus it is that is causing people to see things, and you’re seeing insects because your mind is picking up on what scares you most. This is all no more real than a dream.

But even with her eyes closed, Karen knew the hallucination persisted. In the dark vault of her skull the scuttling of the scorpion still echoed, the abrasive kiss of arachnid leg on human skin still stinging on her thigh.

She felt strange. Lightheaded. Her legs gave way and she fell onto the mossy green mulch. The feeling of déjà vu overwhelmed her once more.

The air thinned. The light changed. The forest vitrified, became transparent, rippled glassily. She closed her eyes. The ground she lay on suddenly felt hard and unyielding.

When she opened her eyes, Jack Court and the others were leaning over her, their faces troubled. And above them she saw the ceiling of the Halverson Building restored. She heard their voices: anxious, urgent. She wanted to tell them she was okay, but for a moment she lay still, convincing herself that what she was seeing was the real world, and what she had just experienced was not.

The Schilder Neuroscience Research Institute was a tangle of glass and steel angles constructed on what had been, until a couple of years before, a parking lot for the other university-related buildings in the neighboring city blocks. Designed by some Finnish architect whose name was all vowels and umlauts, the Institute looked to Macbeth to be completely out of place with its neighbors, like some over-exuberant tourist visiting from Helsinki.

Even with all Casey had told him about anti-science fanatics, and after his bizarre encounter with an FBI man with a serial killer’s name, the level of security at the Institute still surprised Macbeth: airport-type metal detectors at the entrances and uniformed security wearing sidearms. There hadn’t been a single door he’d passed through without needing a member of staff to swipe the lock with their IDs.

“We’ve had all kinds of threats and a couple of improvised devices mailed to us,” Steve Edelman explained. Edelman – one of the Institute’s directors and Macbeth’s main contact – was a small, overweight and enthusiastic man in his fifties. “We have to be on our toes.”

Macbeth spent the Monday and Tuesday in the Institute, discussing the prearranged Project One agenda, but he could tell, as the Schilder’s chief scientists sat around a conference table listening to his presentation, the hum of the projector’s fan emphasizing the silences between bullet points, that they
were just going through the motions. Copenhagen Project One had ceased to be the focus of the Institute’s attention and he guessed that, as a major psychiatric research unit, much of its effort would be going into resolving the phenomenon that had hit the Institute’s native city.

His suspicions were confirmed when the meeting wound up and Edelman steered Macbeth into the hall.

“There’s something else we’d really like your opinion on,” he said, allowing his habitual smile to fade.

After Edelman security card-swiped the way through several sets of double doors, Macbeth found himself in a part of the Institute he hadn’t been in before. Eventually, Edelman swung open a meeting-room door.

The four people at the table stood up as Macbeth entered. The first was what Macbeth would have called the corporate science type: more Lacoste than lab coat; expensive, branded, black polo shirt, smartphone in a belt holster, sand-colored chinos, expensive side-parted Ivy League and smiling with perfect orthodontic confidence. He looked to Macbeth as if he’d stepped straight off his Cape-anchored yacht. Edelman introduced him as Dr Brian Newcombe, a syndromic surveillance specialist from the World Health Organization.

“This is Professor Margaret Freeman, our Delusional Disorder specialist …” Edelman introduced a middle-aged woman in a white surgical coat over a kaftan-type, ankle-length dress. “And this is Dr Frank Gebhardt and Dr Sonia Reynolds, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Gebhardt and Reynolds were both dressed in the dark suits and had the look of government functionaries rather than physicians. Macbeth guessed that, whatever the show was, they were running it.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“The people around this table,” explained Gebhardt, “represent the management team of a task force that the World
Health Organization have put together. The focus of this task force is the event that took place last week in Boston, and other similar occurrences around the world. I assume that you experienced the so-called Cape Ann Ghostquake first hand?”

“I did,” said Macbeth.

“I take it that as a professional psychiatrist, you would lean towards the event being the result of some kind of mass delusional episode?”

“I don’t know what to believe, if I’m frank. But if I were to hazard an opinion, I would say that it was some kind of conversion syndrome or MPI episode, although I’ve always found Mass Psychogenic Illness a very loose diagnosis.”

“We’ve considered MPI,” said Brian Newcombe. “And there are parallels with previous events, like the West Bank Fainting of 1983.”

“I’m aware of the other examples of MPI, but they’ve all been typified by the eruption of common physical symptoms across a large group of people, like in the West Bank case. Some have caused people to have hallucinations, but I have never, ever heard of an instance where people share exactly the same hallucination.”

“The closest comparison we can find predates reliable medical records,” said Gebhardt, the Disease Control man. “The Dancing Plague in Europe in 1518. People started to dance bizarrely in the streets, hundreds at a time, until they died of exhaustion or heart failure … but even that is a clutched-at straw. We simply have no historical analogs.”

“But we’ve got plenty of examples happening right now,” said Brian Newcombe. “We’ve had reports of delusional episodes all over the world: not just earthquakes but all kinds of event, some innocuous and mundane, others terrifying and dramatic. These episodes are hallucinations experienced by individuals, shared between two people or small groups of four or five, or occasionally the type of mass delusional episode that we’ve seen here in Boston.”

Macbeth nodded as he processed this information.

“You don’t look surprised,” said Sonia Reynolds.

“I’m not. I have a colleague here, Dr Peter Corbin working out of Belmont. He’s had a rash of patients who are completely rational and with no history of psychiatric conditions presenting with the type of hallucinations you describe. Dr Corbin thought that it was something confined to Massachusetts, but that’s clearly not the case. What exactly is the geographical spread?”

“Global,” answered Gebhardt. “Every continent, every culture. The majority of the reports are from the developed world, but that’s maybe just because reporting mechanisms are better. We’ve applied epidemiological analyses, but there is no pattern emerging and absolutely no sense of an outbreak source.”

“But you are treating this as some kind of viral outbreak?”

“That’s all we can do at the moment,” Edelman answered. “The usual diagnostic criteria don’t apply and these episodes manifest in all four delusional forms: mood-congruent, mood-neutral, bizarre and non-bizarre. The personality type, the schizotypy, the age, gender, race and cultural background of the subjects are all totally variable. But the sheer spread of these events suggests either some kind of virus or an environmental agent.”

“So you don’t go with this vestibular system virus crap?”

“Whatever this is,” said Gebhardt, “it affects all the senses, either singly or in combination, so no … we don’t buy into a balance-disturbing agent. Listen, Dr Macbeth, we are assembling a team of experts to monitor and analyze these incidents. We would appreciate it if you joined the team.”

“I have my work on the Project …”

“We’ll explain the situation to your university in Copenhagen. We need someone capable of seeing through systems and patterns – looking beyond the stats. You have a reputation for just that.”

“There are better candidates, I have to say. Josh Hoberman, for one.”

“We’ve been trying to reach Professor Hoberman, but have failed so far. Even if we had him in the team, we’d want you on board too.” Gebhardt pushed a red file across the table to Macbeth. “The most important information is in there. You’ll see that there have been several incidents, going back a couple of months, that were not originally attributed to these phenomena.”

Macbeth picked up the file and flicked through it. He found a world map flagged with initialed tags. “What does MDE stand for?”

“Mass Delusional Event. IDE stands for Individual Delusional Episode.”

“Shit … there’s thousands of them …”

“And the frequency is increasing, exponentially,” Brian Newcombe answered. “The hallucinations are becoming more frequent, more spectacular, involve more people – and they’re lasting longer. And they’ve gone polymodal – engaging all the senses. The subjects now experience the hallucination as if it were real life.”

Macbeth looked though the file. A common pattern had been established: the subject’s normal routine suddenly interrupted by a sense of unreality and a particularly strong and unpleasant feeling of déjà vu. To start with, they knew something was wrong, that they were having some kind of neurological or psychological episode, but then they began hallucinating so vividly they lost all objective insight. The hallucination would become a delusion as they started to believe in its reality.

“The problem we have is that we believe there are milder forms of these episodes occurring all the time: hallucinations integrated into the real world,” Sonia Reynolds added. “Transduction of distal object to percept is mimicked perfectly – the real and the unreal are indistinguishable.”

“There’s another development we should tell you about,” Edelman said gravely.

“Yes?”

“A hallucination is a hallucination, of course. An unreal thing that should have no real physical effect. The fatalities and injuries during the so-called ghostquake here in Boston were all attributable to the victim losing balance. But there is one instance that is causing us great concern: a woman who suffered a broken arm. The fracture was caused by falling masonry from one of the buildings affected by the earthquake – except there was no earthquake and no structural damage. No falling masonry. She suffered a real injury from an unreal object.”

Macbeth stared at the surface of the table for a moment. “We all know a delusion or hallucination can result in psychosomatic injury. Delusional religiomaniacs often develop stigmata – sometimes open, bleeding wounds – on their hands and feet where Jesus was supposed to have been nailed to the cross. Formication is common in drug withdrawal and entomophobia, and in some cases, where the patient believes they are being bitten by the insects they hallucinate are crawling over them, they develop bite-like lesions on their skin.”