The Living Blood Read online

  And it had taken Rachel. Today was its victory day.

  Through the gray haze of the screen door, Lucas watched Jared fling a free throw toward the backboard built high against their house’s gable. From the familiar chunk-whoosh sound, Lucas guessed the shot had found its target. The ball bounced directly back into Jared’s chest, and he tossed it up again without hesitating, his lanky arms loose, eyes turned upward, face blank. The kid was still a good shot, just like always. One part of him was still untouched.

  “Hey, want to take on your old man?” Lucas called to Jared through the screen. “See who misses first?”

  Jared’s head whipped around with a grin. “Yeah!” he cried. Though it couldn’t possibly be true, it seemed to Lucas that he had never seen his son look so happy.

  • • •

  Too tired to climb the stairs after midnight, Lucas settled himself on the leather love seat beside his desk downstairs, atop an uncomfortable layer of back issues of Healing Touch, The New England Journal of Medicine, and outdated CDC bulletins. The open-air layout of the house meant that the downstairs served as living room, dining room, and work area in a vast space without walls. He’d gotten used to sleeping down here after Rachel couldn’t manage the stairs, when he’d brought her a hospital bed and made the living room a dying room. Gazing at the two-story picture window that made up the entire west wall of his house, Lucas felt he might as well be sleeping on the floor of the woods that brooded in front of him in the dim wash of moonlight. He could not even see the glass pane separating his living room from the naked night.

  The woods were an indistinguishable tangle of pine, oak, and flowering dogwood trees both living and dead; some upright, some leaning for support against their neighbors, swathed in moss, kudzu, and aerial roots dangling toward the soil. At night, the dark silhouettes of hulking trees seemed to glower. No wonder Rachel had never slept well down here.

  It was a hell of a house, though. His father had spent a small fortune to buy the Frank Lloyd Wright house in 1975, soon before he died, and its unique crescent-shaped layout made it the neighborhood’s showpiece. Too bad the goddamn woodpeckers were having a field day with the exterior, and the birds didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by the plastic owls Lucas had mounted on a second-floor ledge, even when the sun flashed against the aluminum panels he’d aimed at the owls to give them the illusion of movement. Not all creatures were as easily fooled by appearances as humans, apparently.

  Lucas had figured Rachel would be left here chasing woodpeckers away long after he was gone. The fifteen-year age difference had always bothered him just a tad; not so much because of sneers from observers who thought the young white bride on his arm was his midlife crisis on parade, but because he felt guilty at the prospect of depriving a woman with Rachel’s passion and energy of her mate so soon. Morbid, she’d called him. Not morbid enough, as it turned out. She was all of thirty-six when she died. There had just been no sense to it. Not a goddamn bit of sense.

  And as Lucas thought about her in the moonlit living room, suddenly Rachel was there.

  She was sitting at the dining table only six feet from him, resting her head on her palm as she gazed at him. It took a moment for a dim part of his brain to register that he must have fallen asleep, that the only way Rachel could be there was if he was dreaming.

  In his dream, he stood up and walked to her. His hands found her bony shoulders and squeezed them. “We’ll beat this. This time, I promise you, we will.”

  Rachel rested her cheek against his hand. “What about the blood, Lucas?”

  The blood.

  A steak knife was on the table, poised near the edge. Lucas picked it up, gazing at his muddy reflection in the blade, and suddenly he understood. Without pause, he sliced the center of his wrist with the sharp blade, making a deep laceration that bled in ribbons down his arm, dripping to the table. Rachel watched, not frightened, only entranced by his flowing blood. When she spoke, her enraptured whisper was more like a hiss: Yessssssss.

  He brought the soiled blade to her wrist, cutting her delicate skin gently, making an incision half the length of his that was deep enough to bleed. Then he pressed their wrists together, allowing their bloody wounds to mingle. Of course! What a fool he’d been. Why hadn’t he thought of this long before now?

  “It’s not too late,” he said, his voice shredded with emotion. He was doing it! At last, he was healing her. “I can do it, Rachel.”

  “You’re sure?” Rachel asked.

  “I’m sure.” He realized, with elation, that he had never been more certain of anything. “I’m absolutely sure.”

  But then, as Lucas spoke, he noticed that a hulking shadow seemed to have risen and molded itself from the darkness of the woods outside his picture window. In an instant, the living, moving goliath shambled forward, oozing through the glass pane into his living room. As it pitched toward him, it drank up all the light until the moon vanished, until Lucas could no longer see Rachel. He held up his bleeding wrist, and the shadow swallowed that, too, crawling across his arm like a mammoth snail leaving a trail of stewing blackness. Lucas could even smell it; it was the unmistakable scent he’d encountered when he’d been exposed to corpses releasing the gases trapped within their cavities. A smell from beyond death.

  “You’re sure?” a voice said again, so close to his ear that he could feel a cool breath tickle his earlobe, but this time the voice wasn’t Rachel’s. It was not any voice he knew.

  Lucas tried to speak, but his voice had frozen. He could only watch, mute and horrified, as the shadow reeled, with its rhythmic treading, toward the stairs: BUMP-bump BUMP-bump

  Toward Jared. Hunting.

  With that, like a drowning man swimming furiously toward the surface, Lucas willed himself to wake up. When he opened his eyes, his mouth was open soundlessly and his throat was sandpaper, as if all his breath had been sucked from him. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he whispered, just to hear his own voice, to erase the too real memory of the faceless thing speaking into his ear. He even wondered if he couldn’t smell traces of the stench from his dream. He stood woozily, like a drunkard. Lucas waited for his head to clear.

  No, Rachel was not here. And there was no shadow climbing the staircase. The shadows were outside the window, in the woods where they belonged. It was just him, alone.

  Lucas had dreamed about the blood before, too many times to count, especially right before Rachel had died. The image of wounding himself and then Rachel used to frighten him, but not anymore. He knew it was the wishful thinking of his subconscious. Only natural, after what he’d witnessed.

  The blood had been real, not a dream. That much he knew.

  A malaria outbreak. That was what he’d been told was raging in a village only two weeks after he’d arrived in the Congo in 1965 as a Peace Corps volunteer. His supervisor had asked if he’d be interested in joining two English physicians and a team of native nurses on their way to treat the sick. Not only had Lucas been interested, he’d been eager. About fucking time. He’d only joined the Peace Corps after his recruiter promised him opportunities to work in tropical medicine, and up to that point all he’d done was till soil and teach grinning teenagers dirty words in English.

  He’d begun to wonder if the Peace Corps was a mistake, if he shouldn’t be back at home at Howard University where he belonged. He’d been stoned when he signed up for the Peace Corps, stunned by Malcolm X’s assassination, disgusted with both his people and his country. His bad knee from high school basketball had saved him from Vietnam, and now maybe the Peace Corps would save him from a complete sickness of the soul. Give him a sense of hope, of usefulness. A malaria outbreak was a damn good start, he thought.

  There, he’d learned the first law of tropical medicine: Expect the unexpected.

  Eight of the village’s inhabitants had contracted a disease at once. There was no way in hell it was malaria; the symptoms were much more severe and chloroquine was useless against it. Antibiotics, too, did
nothing to lower the patients’ raging fevers. They bled in their vomit and their bowels. A mother and child died the day he arrived, and another two, teenage brothers, had suffered convulsions and lapsed into comas. The village was hysterical with fear. Secretly, speaking among themselves, even the nurses wondered if a curse was responsible for this strange disease that killed members of the same families.

  His third day in the village, a tall stranger, as tall as Lucas, came carrying an emaciated woman in his arms, walking past covered bodies as if he did not see them. Even as a newcomer to this country, Lucas could tell that the princely African man was not from the Congo, and he was not a bush-dweller. His singed-copper-colored face was rigid as he carried his human load. He walked past the white doctors without the timidity of other local Africans. He lowered the woman to a cot inside the tent of their makeshift clinic. “My daughter is dying,” the man said in clear, natural English, washed of any recognizable accent. “Use whatever you have for medicines. Help her.”

  Lucas and the physician were certain he’d said daughter, despite the fact that she was in her midtwenties and he’d looked to be in his twenties himself. He looked more like her twin.

  The stranger stayed by the woman’s side during her examination, refusing to wear a mask or gloves. The supervising physician, Ian Horscroft, pronounced as gently as he could that she was near death. She was comatose, her lungs filling with fluid. She would need a respirator, and their camp wasn’t supplied with one. He promised the stranger he would do what he could, but . . .

  “We have limitations,” Ian told the stranger, whose expression did not change as he listened. “We have no treatments for this fever. I’m afraid we can’t help her.”

  Only Lucas, who’d been surprised to see a flashlight beam glowing inside the woman’s tent when he got up to piss in the middle of the night, saw exactly what happened afterward. He saw the man produce a pocketknife from a pouch he carried at his waist. Lucas had cringed, watching him cut his own wrist with a flick, as though he were shaving from a block of wood. He bled in a startling gush. Then he lowered the knife to the woman’s bare forearm and cut her skin the same way, deeply. Lucas opened his mouth to speak, but within an instant the man had pressed his bleeding wrist against the woman’s wound, holding it there purposefully, steadily. For the first time, he raised his dark eyes to Lucas, as though daring him to object.

  At that instant, Ian had appeared. “What the bloody hell are you doing?” Ian said, red-faced, shoving the man aside. “Good God, you’ll infect yourself.”

  The man gazed at the physician dolefully, stepping away. “She’ll heal,” he said, and they would all agree later that those were the exact words he had spoken, in a certain, nearly condescending, tone.

  By dawn, the stranger was gone. At noon that same day, the woman he’d brought opened her eyes. She called out a word one of the nurses told them meant “father.” Her temperature had returned to normal, and her lungs were clear. She was the sickness’s only survivor.

  Lucas and Ian recounted the anecdote for years, debating what had happened, second-guessing the gravity of the woman’s initial condition, wondering at the significance of the strange blood-swapping. No one should have healed that quickly. Even the woman’s lacerated wrist, which they had dressed each day as she recuperated, healed at a remarkable pace, reduced to a bloodless scar within two days. There was no explanation for any of it.

  Believing the victims cursed, the village’s elders agreed to forgo the usual burial rituals and allow the bodies to be burned. Tragically, in an act of vandalism, the blood and tissue samples the doctors had collected were also destroyed by flames, probably at the hands of angry relatives who blamed the white doctors for their loved ones’ unceremonious disposal. By the time a CDC investigator arrived, all clues of what had killed the villagers were gone.

  Even the sole survivor, whom the CDC tracked down after she had left, had no clues remaining in her bloodstream. She also refused to talk about the mysterious man who had brought her to the camp, who had claimed to be her father, the one who had rescued her from death with a strange blood ceremony. Lucas had seen it himself, which made all the difference to him, he realized. His first lesson in that ill-fated village had been to accept the limitations of science, and to respect the endless possibilities of forces he knew nothing about. Lucas had never again seen anything like it since, nor had anyone else he’d interviewed.

  It simply remained a mystery.

  During Rachel’s illness, Lucas had dreamed of it often. Once, he had been close enough to literally touch it, but now it seemed so remote that it might as well be imaginary. For all he knew, he told himself in more whimsical moods, the man could have been an African deity who spent only one night on earth, then vanished from sight forever.

  But, no. Lucas didn’t believe that. He believed in explanations, not deities. More likely, the man had been some sort of shaman performing a ceremony Lucas had never seen before, giving his own blood potent enough antibodies to eradicate the woman’s virus. The explanation might lie beyond accepted science, but Lucas was convinced it was not beyond human.

  Unless . . .

  In the dark living room, Lucas’s groggy imagination made a leap: Unless whatever was in his blood also made him look half his age. But Lucas shook the useless thought from his head, deciding to go to the downstairs bathroom to try to move his reluctant bowels.

  The crossroads of Lucas Shepard’s life was waiting for him—not on page thirty-eight, but ten pages before, on page twenty-eight—in the Atlantic Monthly he took with him to read in the bathroom. As soon as he opened the magazine, Lucas saw the words that had been so elusive before: “Miracle Workers.” It was not a full-length article, but a tiny story boxed inside of the piece that occupied the rest of the page under the heading “South Africans Embrace Hopes Both True and False.” In all, the piece Cal had brought for him was only a few paragraphs long.

  In KwaZulu territory, even fanciful folk symbols can be good medicine. Local blacks claim a tiny new clinic is performing miracles wholesale. The clinic, reportedly run by two American women, charges nothing except the price of hope, which is abundant here today.

  The claims, while fantastic, are surprisingly consistent, as well as telling: The clinic is for the children. The clinic can cure any malady. The clinic can bring the dead to life.

  Bring the dead to life. Suddenly, Lucas’s hands were trembling slightly.

  Lucas stared at his wan, red-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, trying to steel himself for what it would be like to finally say good-bye to Jared. With Rachel, two days before she’d died, he’d held her hand and told her he would be okay without her. It had been a terrible, damnable lie, but he’d seen a shift on her face when he’d said it, nearly a smile. Jared would need those words, too, when it was time.

  But Lucas was not ready for that, and he never would be. He couldn’t do it, not again.

  Lucas began to shake so violently that he had to sit on the edge of the commode to wait until he would have the strength to stand. “I won’t let you go, Jared. I won’t,” he said, losing track of how many times he repeated it.

  He would say it all night if he had to, until all the shadows were gone.

  3

  After only two days, Lucas Shepherd was a believer, too hyped up on adrenaline to sleep. He’d warned himself he couldn’t afford to get his hopes up, but it was too late for that now.

  First, he’d found out what he could about the “miracle clinic” by calling his former mentor, Ian Horscroft, who now worked for the South African Health Ministry. He felt sheepish making the call, because Ian could be brash and wasn’t shy about laughing at Lucas’s metaphysical pursuits. But this time, Ian hadn’t laughed. “The American clinic in KwaZulu/Natal, you mean? Is that the one?” he’d said over the uneven phone connection, as if the clinic was common knowledge.

  Ian said he’d inspected the clinic himself about eighteen months ago. A Zulu physician named Floyd
Mbuli had first brought it to Ian’s attention, with a fantastic claim that a child with life-threatening leukemia had been completely cured after one visit to the clinic. The boy’s mother said all he’d had was a single injection. He said it was bright red, like blood, Ian had told Lucas, consulting his notes.

  Injections of blood. That was all Lucas needed to hear. Somehow, it just felt right.

  But the myths were the only unusual thing about the clinic, Ian had told Lucas; Ian had found only malaria treatments, aspirin, and a few herbs during his inspection. The two American women who ran the clinic fled soon afterward, apparently. Vanished.

  Lucas had written down the women’s names as Ian recited them: Dr. Alexis Jacobs and Jessica Jacobs-Wolde. Both names had sounded vaguely familiar to Lucas, especially the latter.

  Now, he was about to find out why.

  Garrick Wright was the director of the journalism program at Florida A & M University, Tallahassee’s historically black college, and information was his trade. If anyone could help Lucas with some quick detective work, it was Garrick. But Garrick had laughed at him when he’d called, and now he was laughing again as they made their way to their table in the faculty dining hall, near a window overlooking the campus’s red-brick buildings. A thick, bound accordion folder Garrick had brought from his office became the centerpiece.

  “Doc Shepard, if you can’t remember who Jessica Jacobs-Wolde is, you must be the only one,” Garrick said with a chuckle, sliding a generous pat of butter into the belly of his roll. Garrick was still as hefty as Lucas remembered him, easily eighty pounds overweight, and Lucas heard those extra pounds in his lumbering breathing pattern. “I don’t mean to laugh, ” Garrick went on, “but that’s like asking ‘Who was Monica Lewinsky?’ or ‘Whatever happened to O.J.’s wife?’ ”