Читать книгу The Pinocchio Syndrome - David Zeman - Страница 17

Sydney, Australia

November 27

Karen Embry’s plane landed at four-thirty in the morning, Australia time, after a total of twenty-three hours spent in the air.

It had taken lengthy politicking with her agent to get him to agree to this journey. She had told him much – but not all – that she had learned about the mystery illness. Sensing a book in the offing, he had finally given in.

Karen could not sleep on airplanes. By the time she arrived she had not slept in a day and a half. She had powerful uppers in her purse, given to her by a fellow reporter who was a speed addict. But she hadn’t taken any. So far the scent of a story was enough to keep her alert.

She took a local flight to Perth, and then a chartered Cessna into the outback, landing on an airstrip seemingly a thousand miles from nowhere.

According to the reports she had read, the mystery disease had gone undiscovered for a couple of months or more. It had not spread beyond the small tribe of Aborigines, but it had killed most of them and incapacitated the rest. There were only about fifteen survivors, most of them quarantined in a health clinic.

The reports about the illness were garbled, no doubt because of the remote location and the victims’ suspicion of the authorities. However, in one somewhat obscure report an Aborigine from a neighboring village had said, ‘When the people neared death, their feet and hands became hard and large, like the hoofs of animals.’ This had made Karen decide to see the syndrome for herself.

This would make a tremendous feature story, she thought. She could scale it up for the scientific journals, and simultaneously hype it with more dramatic wording for the popular media. If it was true that the disease involved bizarre deformities, the story could be important.

In the Land Rover Karen gazed for a few moments at the vast expanse of scrub land, punctuated by eucalyptus and occasional acacias. Then she opened the report, which included the testimony of the neighboring villager.

‘The people became silent and rigid. Those who were standing up remained standing until they fell. Those who were sitting did not move until fatigue and weakness made them fall over. They would not speak. They seemed stubborn and did not move. Then they became sick.’

Karen furrowed her brow in concentration. She twirled a strand of her dark hair with a finger. She barely noticed the exotic scenery around her, or the bumps and lurches of the Land Rover on the dirt roads.

The driver dropped her at the tiny hospital where the sick Aborigines were being treated. It was a battered old frame building that huddled under a shabby growth of gum trees. Emus languidly patrolled the scrub in search of small rodents. It was incredibly hot.

The doctor in charge was a tired-looking man in late middle age. His name was Dr Roper.

‘Thank you for seeing me,’ Karen said. ‘I hope my timing isn’t too terrible.’

‘I’m glad you got here quickly,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t much time left. Of the fifteen villagers we brought in, twelve are already dead. The three still living are critical.’

‘Can I see them?’ Karen asked.

‘Sure. But you’ll have to put on a hot-zone suit. We’re still not sure whether the disease is communicable, and we’re not taking chances.’

He sent her to a nurse who helped her put on a decontamination suit. She accompanied the doctor to a quarantined ward where the three remaining patients were being kept. All were attached to life-support systems, tubes connecting them to electronic machines of surprising sophistication for this remote region.

‘They’re completely comatose and unresponsive,’ the doctor told her. ‘They were that way when they came in. The vital signs have been steadily weakening. We’ve been concentrating on keeping them breathing and supporting the heart rate, but there’s nothing more we can do. They’re simply dying.’

The faces of the three Aborigines, one woman and two men, were wasted. Their dark skin seemed gray as death approached.

‘As far as we can tell,’ the doctor said, ‘the progress of the disease was much faster in the children than in the adults, and slightly faster in the women than in the men. But it’s hard to speculate with any accuracy. No one reported the outbreak until almost everybody was dead.’

Karen was looking at the sheets covering the hands and feet of the dying Aborigines. They were suspiciously distended.

‘May I look?’ she asked.

‘Get ready for a shock,’ the doctor said. ‘This isn’t easy to look at.’

He pulled back the sheet from the female patient. The hands were grossly distended and distorted. It looked as though the fingers had fused together in a gelatinous mass. But when Karen touched the left hand on the invitation of the doctor, it was hard. It had the appearance of amber, but darker, more opaque.

‘We’ve done biopsies,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. The cell structure looks human, but the tissue is a morphological monstrosity.’

He pulled back the sheet to show Karen the foot. It was even more distorted than the hand. The toes were fused, and the front of the foot had pulled back toward the heel, creating a bizarre hooflike impression.

‘Apparently the distortion comes on not long before death,’ the doctor said. ‘Those who died the quickest had less deformation than those who lasted longer. Whatever the cause and mechanism are, we haven’t got a clue. My colleagues are talking along the lines of Elephant Man’s disease, acromegaly, things like that.’

Karen was looking more closely at the distorted foot. ‘Or some sort of scleroderma,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps one of the collagenous tissue diseases like dermatomyositis or even lupus erythematosus.’

The doctor raised an eyebrow, impressed by Karen’s knowledge.

‘Are you a physician yourself?’ he asked.

‘No.’

He took her to a makeshift pathology lab in an adjoining building. There were bodies of several villagers there, women and children as well as men. The macabre hooflike fusion and distension of the hands and feet were obvious in all the cases. In the two children it looked particularly cruel and unsettling.

‘Were there other physical changes?’ Karen asked. ‘Internally, I mean.’ Karen knew enough physiology to know that a change as bizarre as the distorted extremities of these victims had to be accompanied by some sort of massive anomaly at the cellular level.

‘We’re not equipped to deal with that here,’ the doctor told her. ‘The pathologists in Adelaide are working on the two patients we sent there. I’ll give you their names. They’re doing complete autopsies with cell studies. They may have something for you.’

Back in his office the doctor showed Karen a strange object, apparently fashioned out of clay. It was a doll or talisman in the shape of a person with enlarged hands and feet.

‘This was made by the medicine man,’ he said. ‘It was found by one of the health officers in the village. We think it represents the illness. Apparently the medicine man tried to use the icon to propitiate the gods.’

Karen held the object in her hands. Though crudely designed, it radiated a sort of force, born obviously of the medicine man’s intense faith. The creature held out its oversized hands as though in a gesture of acknowledgment, or perhaps prayer.

‘Have you ever seen an icon like this before?’ she asked.

The doctor shook his head. ‘Never.’

He wrote down the names of the physicians in Adelaide who were working on the bodies. Karen thanked him and went to a small lodge that catered to hunters, hikers, and the occasional brave tourist who came to this remote area. On the way the driver pointed out a wombat that Karen was not quick enough to see as it waddled out of sight in the brush. Rock wallabies, some carrying infant joeys in their pouches, were surprisingly plentiful.

Her exhaustion and jet lag were catching up to her now. She had difficulty filling out the guest form. By the time she reached the little cabin where she was to sleep, she was moving slowly and her eyelids were drooping.

She left her overnight bag and briefcase unopened on the floor and lay down on the bed. The old comforter that covered it smelled of mothballs and stale food, but to Karen it felt wonderful. The minute she closed her eyes dreams began to crowd against the conscious thoughts in her mind. She breathed deeply, floating mentally over the impressions of the last ten days. It had been a busy time, full of breaking stories, garbled rumors, and well-kept secrets.

A distant motor coughed into life. A dog barked. The calls of strange birds sounded far away. Dream thoughts transported Karen to the bed of her childhood, with its colorful afghan and stuffed animals. She reached out reflexively for the blue teddy bear that no longer existed.

She plummeted quickly toward deep sleep. Her dreams took her further and further from this time and place, as though she were on a magic carpet. But something woke her up suddenly. She lay rubbing her burning eyes and looking at the unfamiliar room. What had awakened her?

Hands and feet.

She got out of bed with a sigh and went to her briefcase. She took out the portable computer and turned it on. She clicked through the various folders, searching for something she could not quite remember. She cursed herself for not finding better titles for her icons. It was time consuming to open them one by one, searching for a mere hint or an overheard clue.

Then, fighting off sleep, she remembered. She closed a folder, opened another one, and found the icon she was looking for.

‘Jesus,’ she said.

She called the airline, made a reservation for tomorrow night, and made a note of it on her computer’s desktop.

She would go to Adelaide first thing tomorrow morning and see what she could learn from the pathologists there.

Then she would fly to New Hampshire.

After looking at her watch she lay down under the comforter and closed her eyes. There was time for a few hours’ sleep.

Hands and feet, she thought. Hands and feet.

Exhaustion put her under before the thoughts in her mind could produce insomnia. But the dreams that filled her sleep were cruel and frightening.