Chapter Twenty-One Frankie
TWENTY-ONE FRANKIE
Benjamin Stoddard’s face was gouged. It looked as if it had been done by a farming implement, but Benjamin insisted it was only his wife’s fingernails.
Claws, I thought.
The woman had grown claws.
I pushed the thought out of my head, holding a lantern close to Benjamin’s face while my uncle gently examined his ruined eye, the white sclera so red with blood it was difficult to make out the iris and pupil.
His pupil was no longer round, but teardrop-shaped, the black seeming to bleed into the murky blue of his iris.
I doubted Benjamin would ever see out of it properly again.
The lantern sputtered, the flame jumped. Benjamin’s shadow on the wall beside us seemed large and monstrous, a thing of its own looming and watching.
Benjamin was breathing fast and hard, his pulse racing. He was obviously in a great deal of pain but had refused my uncle’s offer of morphine.
“Globe rupture,” Uncle Thomas said to me. “See the extrusion of vitreous?”
I nodded, seeing the drop of thick gel that leaked from the tiny rip in the surface of Benjamin’s eye.
Benjamin squirmed beneath my uncle’s touch and spoke rapidly through gritted teeth. “Just patch me up so I can get back out there, Tom. I’ve got to find Clarice.”
“Hold still, Benjamin,” Uncle Thomas instructed as he continued to examine the eye.
Uncle Thomas packed bandages gently against Benjamin’s eye, wrapped everything in place with a roll of gauze.
I assisted my uncle with cleaning and bandaging the scratches, the small bite on Benjamin’s forearm.
Pearl watched us from the edge of the room, rocking slightly, her arms wrapped around herself. Her eyes were glassy, her face as pale as I had ever seen it. I longed to go to Pearl, envelop her in my arms, but all I could do was cast furtive glances her way.
“Did Clarice speak?” Thomas asked. “Was she lucid?”
“She spoke but she was not lucid,” Benjamin told him.
“It was like she was sleepwalking. She kept insisting she heard someone outside calling her name, saying she had to go. I took her hand, tried to talk to her, to keep her in bed, but it was as if she wasn’t really there. Like she was… possessed.”
Pearl seemed to jump a little, made a small, barely discernible squeaking sound like a captured mouse.
Uncle Thomas nodded grimly. “I would like you to rest, Benjamin. I’d like to give you something to help with the pain, to knock you out for a bit.”
“Like hell,” Benjamin said. “I’m going back out there. I’ve got to find my wife.”
“She’s only in her nightgown!” Pearl cried, her voice so high, so frantic I hardly recognized it. “She has no coat or boots.”
“You’re in no shape to be out there,” Uncle Thomas told Benjamin. “We’ll round up a search party. Get some of the men from town to go look. It’s nearly dawn. It’ll be easier to track her in the light.”
Benjamin sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed to the floor. “I’m going, Tom. I’m going to find my wife and bring her home.”
“I’ll go with you, then,” Uncle Thomas said, relenting. “Frankie and I both. Without shoes or a coat, she can’t have gone far.”
“Same with Emile,” Pearl added, her voice higher still, the words spoken in a great rush. “Wasn’t he barefoot as well?”
“Also without a coat or even a shirt, as far as I can tell,” Uncle Thomas said.
“Emile?” Benjamin winced as he stood. “I heard he was unconscious… I thought…”
“Apparently he woke up,” I said.
“Like Clarice.” Benjamin sounded far away now.
“But he didn’t attack anyone,” I added.
“No,” Uncle Thomas said. “But we weren’t in the room with him, were we? We didn’t try to stop him from leaving.”
“Pearl.” Benjamin was rubbing his arm where his bite had been bandaged. “Go get my gun and hunting bag.”
Pearl immediately went off down the hall and I fought the urge to follow, to tell the men I’d go help her to gather supplies. But I felt Benjamin’s one good eye watching me. I stayed right where I was.
Benjamin turned to Uncle Thomas, his clawed-up, bandaged face looking grave. “I’m next.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“This… sickness. If it’s passed on through bites and scratches—”
“We don’t know…” Thomas wanted to comfort him, but trailed off.
I looked at my uncle, said nothing. We both knew Benjamin was right.
“If it is,” Benjamin continued, “the victim develops a fever, cough, and jaundice within the next twelve hours, correct?”
Uncle Thomas nodded.
“They become sicker and sicker, begin hallucinating, become irritable, drifting in and out, losing consciousness and coming close to death,” Benjamin went on.
“Then, hours later, they appear better. They can get up, speak, walk. But they aren’t the same.
They are a person capable of doing terrible things. A person sick with madness.”
“Now, Benjamin, two or three cases isn’t enough to come to any real conclusions,” Uncle Thomas countered, and I knew he was doing his best to hold on to what was rational, to hold on to science. But the science and medicine he had been taught had not prepared him for anything like this.
Benjamin’s shadow on the wall seemed to grow larger and I watched it, wondering what the sickness inside him was doing to him right now, what he might become in a matter of hours.
“It’s enough for me,” Benjamin said. He reached out and took Uncle Thomas’s hand, and as he reached, the shadow on the wall showed long, sharp claws and his head seemed to lengthen until it was clearly the outline of a horse’s head, mouth open, teeth bared.
I blinked hard. The sickness, the lack of sleep, the dark room and smell of blood were all too much.
“Tom,” Benjamin said, “when I get sick, I want you to bind me to this bed. I want you to use ropes, whatever it takes to hold me here.”
Uncle Thomas grimaced.
“If you don’t, I might lash out and hurt someone. You don’t want that on your conscience, do you, Doctor?”
Uncle Thomas said nothing.
Now Benjamin looked at me with his one good eye. “Think of Pearl,” he said. “The one thing you and I may have in common, Frankie, is that neither of us would ever want to see her get hurt, isn’t that right?”
I drew in a jagged breath of air, both at the thought of Pearl being injured and the knowing way he was looking at me. I understood that Benjamin had heard enough in the pantry to comprehend what was between his daughter and me—to guess at it, at the very least.
He turned back to Uncle Thomas. “Perhaps the illness will progress to the next stage, will burn itself out. But whatever happens, you’ll be able to monitor my condition. And keep me from harming myself or anyone else.”
Thomas glanced at me, then back to Benjamin.
“Do it in the interest of science,” Benjamin pleaded. “Maybe what you learn from me can help someone else.”
“All right,” Uncle Thomas agreed at last. “But not until you’re ill with fever. And perhaps it won’t come to that.”
“Perhaps not, but if it does, it means I have less than twelve hours. And I need to find my wife.”