Breakbone Fever
by FiendWithoutaFace
URL: http://www.bluecatsgraphics.com/pean/fanfics/55/

Chapter One: Red Dawn

Red of the Dawn!
Is it turning a fainter red? So be it, but when shall we lay
The Ghost of the Brute that is walking and haunting us yet, and
be free?

— Tennyson, “The Dawn”



The woman screamed again and again, short, shrill screams, as if someone was poking her with a stick. She was a stocky, middle aged woman in hunting camouflage, her face free of make up but her fluffy blonde hair incongruously well-coiffed. Breaking away from the medics who’d been evaluating her, she now stood there right in the middle of the crime scene, her boots planted in a puddle of blood, letting out staccato shrieks and jabbing her finger at the corpse, pulling her hand almost back to her ear and thrusting it forward with each scream. The EMTs hovered outside the perimeter wearing helpless expressions, clearly not wanting to trample potential evidence by fetching her back themselves.

“Get her out of sight of the body,” Sheriff Randall snapped.

The deputy officer, with a long suffering sigh, took the screaming woman by the arm, herding her around the splashes of gore and back behind the yellow police tape strung through the bushes. “Please, calm down, ma’am. Just take a breath and calm down.”

One of the field evidence techs glanced up from the corpse. “Victim’s wife?”

Randall nodded. “There’s blood all over her,” he said.

“Deer, probably. There’s a half-skinned carcass in the back of their truck.” He looked down at the victim in professional disgust, not at the condition of the body but at the contamination of the evidence. “I don’t know how much of this is his and how much might be deer.”

The forensics guy waved him closer. Randall complied reluctantly. It couldn’t be just another hunting accident, could it? One fat, drunk, out-of-state redneck hunter mistaking another bubba dressed in bright orange for a deer and filling his blubbery ass full of buckshot. Nice and simple. After everything that had been happening the last two weeks, he deserved a simple, straightforward case.

Something told Randall that nothing about this was going to be simple.

The dead man, one Thomas William Morgan, looked like he’d hugged a threshing machine. He lay on his back on the frost covered grass in a red puddle of his own making, arms and legs outflung. Half of his face had been ripped off, and numerous deep gashes covered his forearms, apparently defense wounds as he tried to protect his face from the attacker. A tactic that ultimately proved futile.

With prompt medical attention, he might have survived that grievous face injury, although he would have been hideously scarred and probably lost the eye. The killing blow, however, had been to his abdomen. What appeared to be a series of powerful downward swipes with a thick, sharp-edged weapon which had viciously eviscerated him. The murder happened less than a half hour ago. Steam still rose from his exposed bowels.

“Think it might have been a bear? Attracted by the blood scent, maybe,” Randall asked.

There hadn’t been an attack in the state forest for almost ten years, and that had been a hitchhiker from New York chased down and clawed by a bear interested in the candy bars in his backpack. The man had survived. Most of the bears in the Pine Barrens were blacks, smaller and shyer than the brown species, more likely to run than attack at the sight or scent of a human. Dog maulings were more common and caused more fatalities than bear attacks, but bears were of course more spectacular.

Randall could imagine the panicky news reports already, the feature stories on “what YOU can do to be safe” because the newscasters knew that their viewers, like any human beings, were basically self centered and could only be aroused to interest (and persuaded to sit through the local car commercials) if their own personal safety were threatened.

The FET stood up, putting his hands on his lower back and stretching. He left smeary red handprints on his overalls. “Might could be, but I doubt it. Those look like knife wounds, not claws. Two different weapons. See, here? Whatever made this was conical and pointed, like a tent peg maybe. You can see the shape of the divot. Stabbed into him at the corner of the lower jaw here and dragged upwards.”

He indicated the deep, ragged wounds gouged into the man’s face. Most of the flesh of one cheek had been ripped away, exposing teeth, shattering the cheekbone and leaving the eye dangling. Randall felt his stomach twist up, and tasted acid on the back of his tongue. It was the teeth that did it, gleaming and perfectly intact in the ruined mess of the face. He looked away, but the FET kept talking.

“Here and here, though, on the arms, those were made by something with a point and a sharp edge. Nothing that looks like bite marks, though. Unless the bears are carrying machetes nowadays, this wasn’t an animal attack.”

“Animal? It was no animal.”

For a moment, Randall was confused by the female voice. Then he realized it was the victim’s wife, Brenda Morgan. She sat on the bumper of the ambulance, daubing her streaming eyes with a wad of gauze.

He wondered how much she’d heard. Sitting down beside her, he took her cold hand between his and rubbed it, ignoring the greasy feel of what he sincerely hoped was deer blood. If it wasn’t, he knew they’d already gotten samples of it.

This was not something you were supposed to do, of course. One consoling pat on the back and the next thing you know, you’re slapped with a harassment suit. Mrs. Morgan had the look of a woman one thread away from snapping completely, though, and his instinct told him a little kindness might pay off big in information vital to the investigation.

“Do you feel you can make a statement now, ma’am,” he asked gently.

She sat there for a moment, her shoulders jerking with silent sobs, then said in a ragged, hoarse whisper, “I can.”

Randall gestured subtly for some of the other officers to approach. “Just tell us what happened in your own words. Take your time.”

Slowly, in fits and jerks interrupted by spasms of weeping, the story came out. Enthusiastic hunters, the Morgans had maintained a stand in this area for several seasons now and almost never failed to come home with enough venison to last them the rest of the year. But the weather had been unusually bad and the hunting poor, and knowing that a winter weather advisory was issued warning of impending blizzard conditions, they’d decided to pack it in and head back to their hotel. This was roughly forty minutes before sunrise.

Just as they’d made the decision, however, Tom spotted a nice young buck and brought it down with a single clean shot. Brenda field-dressed the kill while Tom gathered up their equipment. She’d had her back turned when the attack happened.

“Tom started shouting.”

“Did he say anything?”

“I’m not sure. Get back, go away, something like that. I thought it might be foxes or raccoons. They try to sneak off with bits of offal if you don’t watch it. All of a sudden, he was screaming, these terrible screams . . . ” Brenda Morgan stopped, gulping. Randall waited patiently but although tears once again spilled over her cheeks, she managed to continue. “My rifle was still loaded, so I grabbed it. I don’t know what I thought was happening. I just came running, and that’s when I saw it.”

“Saw what, ma’am?”

She raised her head for the first time, her eyes wide, bloodshot. “The devil.”

Almost before Randall could process this, she turned on him fiercely. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m not crazy! It was the devil, the Jersey Devil! I never believed it either, but I know what I saw. It was standing on its hind legs hitting Tom, tearing into my poor Tom, slicing him up and he couldn’t get away.”

The woman slumped forward again, dissolving into bitter tears. “Couldn’t . . . get . . . away . . . oh, god, why? Why?”

Randall stood and let the EMTs bundle her into the back of the ambulance. He’d get nothing useful out of her now. She was too distraught. Maybe later, in the hospital, after a handful of tranquilizers and some time to absorb the shock. Maybe never. It was hard to tell with these things.

As he gently handed her off to the medics again, Randall spotted a an unmarked and unfamiliar civilian car pulling up along the dirt road. He’d had never seen anything quite like it outside of a movie. Vintage whatever it was, a big silver monster of a vehicle meant for ferrying Rockefellers to and from society balls.

“Godammit.” Randall made a mental note to read the riot act to whoever had let it through. He stepped out and held up his arms, blocking the path.

The car purred to a stop, and a man in a severely tailored black suit emerged from the driver’s side like a whip uncoiling. He was as unusual as his ride, if not more so. Tall, slat-sided, with an angular, pale face and hair either bleached out or prematurely white - he was only thirty five or so, far too young for that color to be natural. Without a word, he stepped up to the police tape and crossed his arms behind his back, leaning over and giving every appearance of studiously examining the corpse.

“Hold on there, now,” Randall said, one hand reaching automatically for his belt.

Another man in a considerably cheaper suit stumbled out of the passenger’s seat, half-awake and miserable. He grinned apologetically at Randall.

“Sorry, Sheriff. We tried calling ahead, but I think your phone’s out of range, and Agent Pendergast wouldn’t wait any longer.”

“Agent who?”

The man in the nice suit drew a wallet out of the inner jacket of his suit and showed his badge for moment, then tucked it away again.

The yawning, mussed-up fellow with him flashed his ID, also. Agent Kittredge. He was local office, no doubt the liaison assigned to Pendergast. He didn’t appear terribly thrilled about the assignment, either.

“FBI?” Randall exclaimed in disbelief. “Well, I’ll be damned. You sure know how to make an entrance, fella.”

He stuck out his hand, but Pendergast kept his arms folded behind his back and bowed slightly from the waist, leaving Randall shaking hands with the thin air, looking and feeling like a dope. He jerked his hand back and shoved it deep in his pocket.

“How can I help you, Mr. Pendergast?”

“I don’t require any immediate assistance, I simply need to examine the crime scene.” The man’s voice was another surprise, unmistakably modulated by a rich, syrupy Southern accent, Louisiana or Georgia unless Randall missed his guess.

“Our forensics team is already going over it with a fine toothed comb. Anything you need to know, just ask them.”

“Thank you,” he said in a cool tone. “I prefer to work independently. We may not be seeking the same evidence.”

Just what in hell did that mean? Randall turned to the other man, Kittredge, who seemed refreshingly normal next to Pendergast. “So what do we need the FBI here for, anyways, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I’m not sure if I’m at liberty to say.” Kittredge looked meaningfully at Pendergast.

The man had crouched down on all fours, peering at a splash of dried blood on a patch of dry leaves. The tip of his long nose almost touched the ground. Randall wondered if he were nearsighted, or if they had actually missed something important. Either way, something about the man’s intense concentration was a bit eerie.

Kittredge cleared his throat. “Ah, Agent Pendergast here has been investigating what he believes to be a group of spree killers operating out of New York.”

“A group? Jesus! Some kind of Satanic cult?” Randall swore, and Kittredge swallowed again.

“He seems to think, ah, that some members of this group may have fled apprehension and are now sheltering in the state forest here.”

Randall turned and spat, carefully clear of the evidence. Cult killers. That just about figured. The Pine Barrens, extending roughly 1,700 square miles across southeastern New Jersey, had since the colonial times provided a natural refuge for those who wished to remain hidden. Religious dissenters, crown loyalists, criminals on the run, Revolutionary army deserters - all disappeared into the dense, shadowy groves of oak, cedar and pine, eventually forming their own isolated communities. It was from these folk, inbred descendants of fugitives, that legends like the Jersey Devil arose.

Devils and FBI agents. The sheriff saw his hope of any kind of simplicity in this case vanishing like the steam puffing from his mouth.

“He seems to think, huh?” Randall nodded at the man, who was now creeping forward in the pose of a bloodhound following a scent. In fact, Randall was dead certain the man actually was sniffing. The forensics team and half his officers had stopped to watch him, too. It wasn’t every day you saw such a weirdo. “What do you think, Kittredge?”

The FBI man clamped his mouth shut, obviously unwilling to say anything uncomplimentary about a fellow agent, but the unhappiness on his face was clear as a black and white line drawing. There was some kind of story here, Randall was sure of it.

Well, if this Pendergast was going to go crawling around like a dog, Randall was damn well going to put a leash on him.

He strode over to the agent and stood over him, rocking back and forth on his heels. Pendergast ignored him completely. His body was statue still except for a tremble of tension in his fingers. That sort of exquisitely rigid equilibrium might be excusable if perhaps he were aiming a gun for a difficult shot or attempting to surprise a suspect, but the agent was staring at an unremarkable patch of ground with no footprints, blood or any other kind of evidence apparent.

Randall coughed. “If I could interrupt—”

Pendergast’s head snapped up, and Randall took a startled step backwards. A rivulet of bright blood drained from the corner of the man’s mouth. His eyes flicked back and forth, tracking the erratic zigzag trajectory of something that was either invisible to Randall or purely imaginary. He looked quite insane.

Randall took another step away and bellowed for Kittredge. As the other agent came running over to them, Pendergast snatched something out of the air, then slowly pitched forward and landed on his face in the grass. He didn’t move again.

In the ensuing commotion, as the agent’s unconscious form was strapped to a backboard, subjected to a hurried exam by the EMTs and then bundled into the ambulance and borne away with sirens and lights, no one thought to check and see what Pendergast might have caught.

Chapter Two: Three Men Make a Tiger

So the doctors came on the evening train
With their flasks, and their caskets, and vials
“Mass psychosis” was the diagnosis
So we all cashed our checks and went wild.

— Squirrel Nut Zippers, “La Grippe”



The first thing the patient said when House walked into the exam room was, “I’m here against my will.”

“Join the club. We have jackets,” he replied.

Not only did the diagnostician find his required clinic hours beneath his dignity, what was far worse was that they were boring. There was the occasional mildly amusing case, like the teenage boy who’d set his cell phone on vibrate and stuck it where the sun don’t shine, but for the most part clinic duty was an endless trudge of drippy noses, mild coughs, and miscellaneous aches and pains that could be easily treated by the patient’s regular doctor. House blamed the internet for half the traffic in and out of the clinic.

He would love to personally lethally stab whoever was behind wrongdiagnosis.com, for example. Wipe your ass and find blood on the toilet paper? It could be a simple anal fissure or it could be (and here he always heard a cheesy drama chord) colorectal cancer! Of course, the patients who thought their ability to use Google meant they had a right to a medical opinion always decided they were in their death throes, because human beings have an innate sense of melodrama with no balancing sense of proportion.

And then, lucky him, he got to spend hours assuring them through gritted teeth that no, he didn’t need to give them a proctology exam, all they needed to do was lay off the fiber and switch to a higher grade of bog roll.

The new patient certainly was a change from the usual panicky schlubs House had to deal with. He perched on the exam table still fully clothed, not to mention dressed well enough to make anyone else look as though they had been wearing the same shirt for three days, which House had, in point of fact. He looked sublimely out of place in the cold, sterile little room.

“Let me guess,” House said. “Bad bit of pâté foie gras at the yacht club’s social? I see you came dressed for your own funeral, that’s encouraging.”

The man didn’t crack a smile. Did not, in fact, register any emotion at all. His ascetic face looked as if he were incapable of any expression besides a lordly disdain. Just add a pair of pointy prosthetic ears, and he’d be snapped up in a second by a casting director looking for a Vulcan or the King of the Elves.

House busied himself checking over the man’s chart. This AXL Pendergast - did he have three given names, or was he a Guns N’ Roses fan? - had collapsed while investigating a crime scene, which was admittedly interesting. Not a cop. FBI. He’d come by ambulance and been admitted with high fever, headache, and a hemorrhagic rash. Under questioning, he admitted in a quiet, uninflected voice that a few days ago he had developed tooth-chattering chills and a low grade fever, and that his muscles had felt sore and bruised.

“And you figured it would just go away,” House asked.

“I did. And I was correct. The symptoms disappeared. I’ve been under a lot of strain lately, Doctor. And even the most well-adapted human being can succumb to physical and psychological stress.” Pendergast turned slightly, fixing his gaze on a chart of skin diseases on the wall. “I enjoyed a few asymptomatic days, then woke yesterday with another fever spike, aching eyes, and a rash. When I flossed my teeth that morning I tasted salt.”

“Let me see that rash.”

Pendergast unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled them back, baring his arm. House noted that although the man seemed thin to the point of frailty, the muscles of his forearm were sharply delineated, defined without gym brat bulkiness, and he had the bulging, wide-bore veins of an athlete. But most of his attention was captured by the rash. Against the paper white skin, it looked as though someone had drawn shooting stars in purple ink.

“Normally, I would have tried to carry on,” Pendergast said as House continued to run through some quick exams. For his own amusement more than anything else, House shined a light into Pendergast’s eyes, holding it so the beam fell almost directly across. The man squinted painfully, and House was rewarded by seeing the silvery blue of his iris take on a distinct purple cast.

“However, one of my colleagues noticed my gums bleeding, and when I experienced a momentary faintness, he insisted the ambulance bring me here.”

Momentary faintness, my ass, tough guy, House thought. According to what the other FBI agent who’d accompanied him in said, Pendergast had suddenly exhibited delusional behavior, crawling on the ground, grabbing at something invisible in the air, then did a face plant onto the ground and remained insensible for several minutes.

“Good thing, too. Any episode of loss of consciousness should be checked out, and your other symptoms suggest meningococcemia.”

“A bacterial infection of the blood?” Pendergast looked mildly surprised.

“It can infect the meninges of the brain, which is the important bit, but actually, I have suspicions it’s something different. Ever hear of dengue?”

Pendergast frowned. “As I understand it, dengue is a disease of the tropics. Carried by mosquitoes, correct?”

“There are two potential mosquito carriers in the southern US and Mexico, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Do you recall being bitten?”

“I have been in New York since early this summer,” he said. “I arrived here a week ago.”

Now it was House’s turn to frown. Dengue did not lay dormant for very long. Pendergast must have been bitten in New Jersey, unless it were not dengue at all. But his symptoms did not quite seem right for meningococcemia.

He decided to bluff his way through it. After all, Pendergast was a patient. It was House’s job to figure out what was wrong and what to do about it; it was Pendergast’s job to shut up, lay still, and be cured. “At any rate, if it’s bacterial we can knock it out with broad spectrum antibiotics. I’m going to admit you for a few days until your lab tests normalize . . . ” he trailed off. Pendergast was shaking his head, no.

“I have work to do. I can’t be spared, I’m afraid.”

“No one’s irreplaceable except Hendrix, and you ain’t Hendrix.”

“Will you take responsibility for the next murder,” Pendergast asked.

House was taken momentarily aback. Murder? Well, why else would an FBI agent be poking around . . . and then he realized that no FBI agent in his right mind would be so loose-lipped about an investigation. Pendergast was attempting to bluff him.

If he hadn’t been endangering his own health, House would have admired Pendergast’s chutzpah. As it was, his primate subcortex was ooking and eeking at him that he needed to teach this guy you don’t challenge the alpha male on his own turf. To mix a metaphor, this silverback still had an ace up his sleeve.

“Look, you’re shocky, you’re not thinking straight. As a matter of fact . . . ” House grinned evilly. “As a matter of fact, Agent Pendergast, you might not be in full possession of your facilities. I’m going to have to admit you against your will, for your own safety.”

“That’s illegal,” Pendergast said emphatically.

“And you’re free to contest it. Call your lawyers.” House dug out his cell phone and tossed it on the exam table. “By the time they spring you, you’ll be feeling so much better you won’t even want to sue me.”

Pendergast stood up - and immediately slumped forward.

“Insufficient blood volume,” House explained cheerfully, catching him by the arm. He felt Pendergast flinch under his grip. “Luckily, you’ll be so woozy we won’t have to do anything undignified like put you in restraints.”

The agent looked for a moment as if he were going to do something that certainly would get him placed in restraints, then reconsidered. Tightlipped, not meeting House’s eyes, Pendergast docilely allowed himself to be led out of the exam room.

Forty minutes later, House gathered his diagnostic team and presented the case to them. Although he would never admit it, something about this case was bothering him.

“So why are we meeting,” Foreman asked. “It’s dengue, isn’t it? The petechial rash is pretty clearly diagnostic.”

House shook his head. “Sadly, one bothersome little fact destroys your lovely theory. The patient hasn’t been overseas or anywhere he could have encountered a dengue-carrying mosquito.”

“Are you sure?” Chase persisted. “Maybe he just can’t tell us.”

“Can’t tell us? Jeez, is he deaf-mute, too?”

Foreman, who hadn’t seen Pendergast yet, leaned back in his chair and caught Cameron’s eye. He subvocalized, Too?

Albino,Cameron mouthed silently.

Foreman frowned, shook his head slightly and mouthed back, What?

Al-bi-no, she said, exaggerating her lip movements to distinctly shape each syllable.

“Wow, that’s sexy,” House interrupted, fanning himself with Pendergast’s chart.

They jumped, guilty.

“What she’s trying to tell you is that he’s hypopigmented; he has Type 2 oculocutaneous albinism, commonly called gray-eyed albinism. Slight amount of pigment present, enough to negate some of the visual acuity problems associated with OCA1a and OCA1b, but not enough to, say, tan.” He plucked invisible strings and hummed a few bars of Dueling Banjos, pulling a weird, cross-eyed face.

“Actually, he’s very good looking,” Cameron protested.

“He’s handsome the way a purebred dog is. His family tree probably makes the Hapsburg dynasty look like a pack of mongrels.”

“Are you suggesting he’s inbred?” Foreman scoffed. “Albinism isn’t necessarily a result of inbreeding, and inbreeding doesn’t always result in genetic damage, it just increases the chances of doubling up on bad chromosomes.”

“Yeah, I know.” House widened his eyes in mock innocence. “But how much do you want to bet he’s got a bug up his ass about it?”

“What I meant was,” Chase said, “If he’s FBI, maybe he’s working undercover on a case or something.”

“One unsolved murder does not a spree make,” House said. He looked at each of them in turn. “Thoughts?”

“Meningococcemia,” Foreman said with finality.

“Unless you can explain where Pendergast found a dengue-carrying mosquito around here, I’ll have to agree,” Chase added, shrugging. Cameron nodded.

“Have you ever heard of the ‘Three Men Make a Tiger’ fallacy? No? Apparently, some ancient Chinese emperor came up with it. If a man said he saw a tiger in a crowded marketplace, you’d think he was mad or lying. If two men claimed to see a tiger, you might have your doubts. But if three men swore they saw it, the emperor said he’d have to believe no matter how ludicrous the idea of a tiger was.”

Cameron said, “It doesn’t make a difference, does it? We’re sure it’s one of those two, so we just put him on the ampicillan. If it’s meningococcemia, he’ll get better, and if it’s dengue, it won’t hurt.”

As she spoke, House felt his pager go off. He glanced at the text scrolling across the tiny screen.

“Actually, we won’t do either. He’s gone.”

Pendergast hadn’t merely left against medical advice, he’d disappeared.

* * * * *


Now that the visiting Special Agent had been admitted to Princeton-Plainsboro hospital and the evidence from the Morgan case was in the capable hands of the forensic team, Agent Kittredge found himself at loose ends.

He had the vague idea he should stay with Pendergast out of courtesy if nothing else, but Pendergast himself had dissuaded him of that notion pretty quickly. Then he’d tried to corner the doctor in charge of him, but the tall, scrawny man with the jackdaw’s nest of graying curls and a three day growth of beard had limped past him without a word, leaving it to one of his underlings to explain what was going on.

Pendergast, he’d said, was suffering from some sort of infection they didn’t know the source of. If it was bacterial it could be treated with strong antibiotics, if viral there was nothing to do but make him comfortable and treat the symptoms as they occurred. Since it would be a few days until the lab work told them the cause for certain, they’d started him on antibiotics just in case. Either way, it involved keeping Pendergast in bed, quiet and watched over for some time.

Kittredge had thanked them profusely, phoned the FBI offices and informed them of what was happening, taken a last look at Pendergast, arranged to have the man’s small amount of luggage sent to his hospital room, and then decided it might be worthwhile to visit the crime scene once again.

The drive into the forest took over an hour, and the trip in Kittredge’s car was considerably less comfortable than in that silver beauty Pendergast drove. The Rolls might look antique, but judging from the excellent suspension the man had had it completely modernized. Kittredge, who’d for the last year or so spent his days off restoring a Harley Knucklehead, tried to have a conversation with him about vintage vehicles on the trip up, but Pendergast didn’t bite. Hadn’t, for that matter, hardly said two words to Kittredge since he arrived.

Cold bastard, Kittredge decided, and it was fairly clear he considered Kittredge himself a bit of a dingleberry (in both senses of the word). It had been like pulling teeth just to get the small amount of information about the cult killers from him. There was no paperwork to look at all. Pendergast more or less swooped down and snatched Kittredge away without a how d’you do. He got the strong impression that the man’s investigation was perhaps not entirely official.

He wondered if, in fact, Pendergast had been ill for longer than the doctors thought.

He’d heard about the New York headhunter murders, of course. They were the bread and butter of the all-news networks for a few days, until some blonde heiress had gone missing and an avalanche buried a small town in Argentina.

While the facts that a cult of killers had been chopping off people’s heads in Manhattan was indisputable, there was nothing in Kittredge’s opinion to link them with anything going on here in New Jersey. When Pendergast arrived, in fact, there had not been a murder at all. It was almost as if he were expecting what happen to Tom Morgan to occur . . . he’d appeared in anticipation, a psychopomp in a Italian suit.

Kittredge let out a morbid laugh. And he got what he expected, apparently. So far, the forensics team had come up with nothing that could be identified as traces of the killer, no bits of thread, no hair, just fur and blood and gobbets of flesh from the deer he had shot. The site hadn’t even yielded any valuable tracks except Morgan’s, his wife’s, and dozens of cloven hoof prints.

It was as if he’d been slaughtered by something insubstantial, supernatural. Ghostly.

Brenda Morgan still insisted that what killed her husband was neither human nor animal. She’d even made a drawing for them. Childish, probably useless, it depicted an upright figure with a long neck and narrow head, skinny arms with knifelike claws on its hands, legs with either too many joints or backwards knees, and cloven hooves.

Now, as he pulled off into the small clearing, Kittredge couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Pendergast was on to something. Perhaps his actions had all been due to illness, but when he last saw the other agent there had been no feverish befuddlement in his expression.

He stood for a moment, taking in the scene. In the arctic austerity of the late winter afternoon, the leafless trunks of cedars and oaks stained red by the lowering sun, the Barrens looked every bit as desolate as its name. Yellow police tape still marked off the crime scene, but even to Kittredge’s trained eye there wasn’t much left to see.

The dense carpet of fallen leaves, orange pine needles and straggly weeds had been swept away, and anything of interest bagged, labeled, and removed. Even the tracks of the Morgan’s truck were vanishingly faint in the permafrosted soil. Here and there were the shallow craters left from where footprints had been lifted in plaster casts.

Kittredge slowly walked the perimeter, bending low to get a clearer look at suspiciously bent twigs and trampled moss. When he recognized the spot where Pendergast had fainted, he even lowered himself onto all fours and sniffed the ground, wondering what the man had detected. There was only the faint scent of pine and the earthy mustiness of long dead leaves.

Feeling a bit ridiculous, Kittredge scrambled upright. Already the cold had soaked into his knees and palms through the thin cloth.

What did he think he was going to smell? Traces of sulfur from the hooves of the Jersey Devil?

He sighed. That had been the weirdest part of Pendergast’s visit. For the first few days he’d been ferried around to historical societies and libraries where he’d sat staring at the wall and wilting from boredom while Pendergast spent endless hours leafing through old maps and books printed before the Revolutionary War. He had no clue what the man was looking for, and Pendergast obviously did not care for him to know. Any offers of help he made were politely but firmly rebuffed.

He wondered if the agent were killing time until the murder he predicted would happen, or if there was some link between his research and the investigation. At the time, he had suspected the former, since among the other things Pendergast had done were stop at just about every little mom and pop shop and buy pamphlets and small press books on the Jersey Devil. It was a bit of a disappointment that Pendergast was as goofy over the stupid old legend as any other tourist. Maybe he had a Fox Mulder complex.

Kittredge was spontaneously and totally disgusted. Pendergast was playing him for a stooge.

The sun was almost below the horizon now, and a bitter wind rustled the branches and numbed his nose and ears. All he wanted now was to go home, order a meatball sub from the deli by his house, maybe watch some of his Tivo backlog or work on the Harley. There was absolutely no demonstrable link between Morgan’s death and the cult killers, hence no reason for FBI to be involved. If Pendergast wanted to chase devils, he could wait till he kicked this flu or whatever it was and do it his own self.

He was mentally composing a request to shift responsibility for Pendergast to some other sap when the wind died down a bit . . . and the rustling sound didn’t.

Instantly, Kittredge was on high alert. Of all the explanations he’d heard, he thought that bear attack was the most reasonable sounding one for Morgan’s death. He didn’t know much about bears. Shouldn’t they be hibernating at this time of year? That had raised the prospect of a bear that was sickened, maybe rabid. And here he was, a man alone in growing darkness armed with a standard issue Glock with laser sights he’d added at his own expense. He could bring down a human being, no problem. But a bear? He had no idea, and he didn’t plan on staying around to find out.

Keeping his gun aimed in the direction of the rustling, he backed slowly towards his car, shivering as he clenched his muscles against the atavistic impulse to run like hell. Could bears smell fear? What did that smell like, anyways? The sourness of sweat, a spike in adrenaline? Perspiration popped out over his forehead, moistened his armpits, trickled down his spine and pooled in the curve of his lower back. Hell, he probably stank like fear on rye with a side order of pickles.

It was probably nothing. A squirrel or a raccoon. Something small and cute and harmless, the sort of critter who’d be the sidekick to a Disney heroine. He was past the crime scene now, almost to the car.

Even as he felt his heel catch in a rut, as he overbalanced and fell flat on his back, Kittredge was able to think clearly. Stooge. It was the last lucid thought he had.

Something dark and demonic stepped from the trees into the clearing. Kittredge lay there on the cold ground, stunned, as if he’d stepped through brittle ice and plunged into a fast moving river.

He took the creature in a series of disbelieving glances, unable to focus on any section of its horrible aspect for too long. Humanlike in stance but animal in the details, goatish, apelike, dinosaurian. Huge, towering over eight feet tall on its crooked hind legs. Long sweeping tail, scaly and sparsely coated with coarse hair, like a rat’s. Eyes glowing an unnatural reddish-gold. Muscular arms raised up, thick mats of shaggy fur hanging down like clumps of Spanish moss. Gleaming, scimitar claws stretching out yearningly, then snapping closed like a trap.

The frost caves of Kittredge’s brain suddenly began to function with crystalline clarity. He seemed to watch, detached from his own body, as his arm raised the gun, waiting until the little red dot danced between those blazing eyes, his finger tightened and the gun jumped in his hand . . .

* * * * *


Wilson leaned on the front desk, flirting pathetically with the nurses who flocked around him like pigeons on a handful of crumbs. He was summing up the latest news with, “And House must be mad enough to bite nails,” when he felt an unfriendly hand clamp on his shoulder.

“I checked, but there aren’t any rust stains on my teeth,” House said from behind him. He grabbed Wilson by the sleeve and dragged him towards his office, growling, “Gossiping about me to the nurses? What is this, third grade? Should I check the back of my head to make sure Marjorie Harris isn’t flicking boogers at me again?”

Wilson, who knew House was well aware of his own reputation as one of the more gossipy fishwives at Princeton-Plainsboro, had the great good sense to try to look convincingly penitent and keep his mouth shut until the door slammed behind them.

“You know, it’s just funny. You can handle the patients not being able to grasp what you’re telling them, or disagreeing, or even flipping out and cracking you in the rear with your own cane.”

House grimaced. That had hurt more than he’d let on.

“But this guy just accepts, understands, and then completely blows you off and goes on his merry way, and you can’t cope.” He chortled. “It’s killing you.”

“No, it’s killing him.”

House flung himself in Wilson’s most comfortable chair and restively tapped his cane against the corner of the desk.

“Look, House. What does it say on my door?”

He glanced up at the glass door obediently and read, “Tsigolocno.”

“And what does that mean I do?”

“Treat recnac?”

“Exactly, and this secret agent of yours doesn’t have recnac. So what are you doing here putting dents in my desk? He has meningococcemia or possibly dengue, and if he stays outside for much longer he’ll likely have frostbite and severe hypothermia.”

“And dementia. Don’t forget the dementia.”

“From what I heard, the dementia is extremely debatable to the point of being delusional on your part. Pendergast is a grown man, he knows the risks of what he’s doing. There’s no point having his competence called into question and giving the hospital’s lawyers yet another reason to want to throttle you in your sleep.”

“Hah. You’re looking at the former high school debate club champion. Check these out.” Out of his jacket pocket he produced a handful of pamphlets, booklets and brochures, ranging from slick full color numbers to bad photocopies that had obviously been hand folded and stapled. All were on the same subject and all of them were heavily annotated in a tiny, cramped version of Pendergast’s distinctive copperplate hand. “Seems he’s a Devil fan, and I don’t mean the hockey team.”

“I hardly think interest in a local version of Bigfoot is a sign of dementia.”

“I’m not talking about interest, I’m talking about belief.” House leaned across Wilson’s desk, lowering his voice to a conspiring whisper. “I googled our buddy Pendergast. If that’s his real name, he keeps a low profile. Only one juicy link came up, in an excerpt from a book about the Museum Beast murders a few years back.”

“So you think he thinks the Jersey Devil is a real animal, and it killed that hunter and maybe some other people? I don’t know which of you needs the psych consult more.” Wilson sighed and massaged his forehead. “Come on, House. Let security handle this, it’s their fault he slipped out in the first place. Just admit what’s really bothering you is you think the guy outwitted you personally.”

Realizing no amount of reasoning would sway Wilson, House gave the innocent desk a final vindictive whack and leaned back, almost pouting. “How the hell do you lose a six foot three albino, anyway?”

“In a snowstorm?” Wilson glanced out the window, where a few tentative flakes were falling with a deceptively picturesque prettiness from ominous slate blue clouds.

House grunted irritably. The state troopers very well might, if Pendergast decided to go back and finish scouring the crime scene. Wilson hadn’t been joking about the potential for severe hypothermia. The cops could end up not finding Pendergast until the thaw, in the form of a cryogenically preserved corpse washed by the spring runoff into the cedar-stained blood red waters of the Mullica River.

“Unless . . .” House’s head lifted, his pale eyes suddenly alight. “Unless, of course, he weren’t albinistic at the time.”

“What?”

But House was already out the door at the closest gait he could manage to a sprint.

Chapter Three: Deviltown

I was living in a devil town
Lived my life in a devil town
Oh my lord, it really brings me down
About the devil town

— The Groovie Ghoulies, “Devil Town”



Agent Kittredge stared down at the monster’s head in his hands. His career was over.

He had frozen after his first shot, stunned into immobility by the shower of sparks instead of the expected blood and the cacophony of terrified screams and angry shouts from the woods beyond. A tall girl with a long brown ponytail and a moon face burst out of the underbrush and ran up to the prone creature. She knelt beside it, yanked off its head, and deftly unzipped its skin along the spine to reveal a terrified young man huddled inside.

Up close, he didn’t know how he could ever have mistaken it for the Jersey Devil or any kind of living creature. The monster suit was considerably better made than the average Halloween costume, but not nearly as sophisticated as what would be used in a big budget movie. The scorched bullet hole in the foam latex skin and clear vacuformed plastic skull revealed the inner workings, a confusion of tiny electric motors adapted from radio controlled toy airplanes that moved the glass eyes side to side, twitched the ears, flared the nostrils and pulled the lips back to bare dental acrylic fangs.

The only thing that kept this from being the site of another murder was that the actor’s head was actually situated in the monster’s neck. The suit head perched atop his on a helmet, adding to the suit’s overall height and leaving room inside the skull for the animatronics.

Eventually, it had all been sorted out. More of them streamed out of the woods, toting lights, cables, a microphone on a boom arm, odds and ends of equipment. These were film students down from New York for the weekend. Just kids, with no permits and no common sense.

They were shooting a class project, a documentary about the Jersey Devil. By sheer co-incidence they’d stumbled on the crime scene and been shooed away from the crime scene by the police. Regrouping at a distance, they’d waited for the cops to leave so they could resume filming. The suit actor had retreated into the woods for a shot of the Devil roaming in the distance, the crew remaining behind a thick stand of pine and being very quiet because Kittredge’s car pulled up. They wouldn’t have shot at all, the girl informed him, except they were “losing the light” and some of the crew had to return to New York for classes tomorrow.

And he, Agent Kittredge, had almost ventilated some poor freshman in a monster suit.

One of them had called the cops as soon as he heard gunshots, and now they were standing around in huddled groups, some talking to the police. Their faces were ashy-white, shaken. Kittredge was practically in shock himself. He’d only been an agent for seven months now, only trusted with inconsequential duties like ferrying around Pendergast. He’d never been in an actual gunfight in his life.

The boy was being tended to by the emergency medical technicians. He was weeping openly and still wore the bottom half of the suit like furry, scaly, pants with a tail, the legs ending in incongruous bright white sneakers.

Slowly, Kittredge became aware of someone looming over him. He looked away from the ruined animatronic Devil head.

“I’m not going to arrest you,” Russell said with dangerous calm. “I don’t want to make this look worse than it already is.”

Kittredge nodded, numb to the point of not even caring.

“What you are going to do is follow us down to the station . . . ”

Russell’s voice dissolved into the static sizzling in Kittredge’s head. He barely heard the rest, watching with glittering eyes as the kids were loaded into various cars and driven away. Several looked almost ill. One of them curled over and vomited profusely.

Russell had stopped talking and was glaring at him expectantly. The blood rising to his face mixed with his own dark coloration had turned him a very interesting shade of apoplectic purple. Kittredge realized he was expected to say something.

“Someone should tell Special Agent Pendergast.”

“Let me handle that. You worry about your own ass, you stupid son of a bitch,” Russell finished, then turned on his heel.

Kittredge stood automatically to follow, but one of the kids, the one who seemed to be in charge, had come running up to the sheriff. Short kid, dressed in thrift store eclectic like a catalog-perfect college age artist. Little black goatee, Buddy Holly glasses, head shaved except for a black thatch, a forelock that was streaked with purple dye and fell like a curtain over his face. Kittredge stopped, not wanting to confront him.

They were too far away for Kittredge to hear what the kid said, but he gestured elaborately as he spoke. Fingers wriggled as his hands flew away from his head to indicate an explosion. Then his hand, fingers folded back except for the index, miming the shape of a gun, lowered to his side, a comically dumbfounded expression on his face. He was mocking Kittredge now.

You can be me, he thought. I don’t want to be me anymore. The Devil in his hands grinned up at him. None of the film crew had tried to take it away. It was unsalvageable, or perhaps they were too frightened of him to try and retrieve it.

If it weren’t for that damned Pendergast and his ridiculous Jersey Devil obsession! Him and his insistence on hitting every ratty tourist trap and spending hours chitchatting with toothless, half-senile locals who insisted the Devil had dug up their Victory Gardens and eaten their straying cats, when he should have been looking for those cult killers. What did any of that have to do with the Morgan death?

Nothing, nothing at all. He should never have come back up here. Pendergast was getting to him. His insanity was more infectious than whatever had put him in the hospital.

Lost in thought, Kittredge did not notice he was the last one on the site, or that his pacing had taken him into the woods.

A huge, calloused hand clamped over his mouth and nose as the bare, muscular arm snaked around his neck. Kittredge twisted in his assailant’s grip, but with incredible strength he was lifted off his feet. The gnarled hand pressed harder, cutting off his air. Dirt-clogged nails, long and thick and curved as claws, dug into the soft flesh of his cheek and drew blood. Holding him in a tight bear hug, the assailant jerked his head back. Kittredge’s skull popped off the topmost cervical vertebrae. The bone splintered, severing his spinal cord.

He died instantly.

Letting Kittredge’s limp body drop into the bushes, the attacker shuffled over to the object he’d dropped. Lifted it, squinting in the darkness. Probed it delicately, lingering over the details of the face, the red glass eyes. Examined it, considered it. Wondered.

* * * * *


The Plainsboro Oddity Emporium was sandwiched between two other houses, an ordinary looking storefront with a small apartment above. There was no other place Pendergast could be, by simple process of elimination. He had flyers, booklets, pamphlets, brochures and ‘zines from just about everywhere else, but he had clearly been saving the best for last, and nothing beat the privately run little museum of sideshow exhibits.

House paused to admire a stunning collection of outré junk in the front window. Pride of place was a knotted wad of rubber bands the size of a medicine ball, flanked by various taxidermized freak animals: a chicken with six legs, a beautifully faked Fiji mermaid made from a fetal rhesus monkey and some kind of trout, a “Madagascar cannibal toad” with horns and a row of shark’s teeth, and a rather ordinary, if obese, orange and white cat mounted in a sleeping-sphinx pose.

He leaned closer, nose to the glass, scanning the cat for extra eyes, a parasitic conjoined twin, or wings.

The cat blinked, yawned and stretched. House stumbled backwards, almost losing his balance completely, then laughed as the cat jumped off the windowsill and disappeared into the murky depths of the Emporium. P. T. Barnum would have been proud.

House struggled up the steep front stairs and paid the five dollar entrance fee. There was quite a crowd there for a Sunday morning. Morgan’s death, which no one was yet calling a murder, had been all over the news. The Devil hadn’t been referenced directly, but other stories mentioned pranks like Christmas decorations being destroyed or stolen and rude snow sculptures springing up overnight in people’s yards. Kids stuff mostly, but it happened every time the Devil was brought up, and then there was the usual response from police. Like everyone was following a script had been written.

Inside, the Emporium gave the strong impression that they had just happened to wander into someone’s house. Authentic posters and photos of performing freaks of a long gone era covered the walls, and every surface was crammed with stuffed and bottled monsters both genuine and gaffed. A strong, rotting fish scent wafted from one corner of the room. House thought for a moment that one of the taxidermized animals had gone bad, but then the cat crouched down under a display of shrunken heads and he saw the stench was coming from a dish of moist cat food. Several more dishes were scattered under various exhibits, which explained the cat’s zaftig charms.

There were only a few people attending the Emporium’s slightly bemused looking owner, a bearded fellow who had nonetheless decided to take advantage of this unexpected surge in patronage.

“Right this way, right this way,” he called. The crowds obediently let him herd them around the mummified corpse of a Peruvian giantess in a glass-topped coffin like some sepulchral Snow White awaiting a kiss that would never come to a small open area.

“I am pleased and proud to present for the first tie for the delectation and delight of your jaded yet refined palate, a fable to chill the blood and send a shudder down your spine!”

He was an expect raconteur, rolling his rrrrs, drawling vowels and biting off consonants crisply. The crowd milled about, elbowing for position. House edged up to the front, where the man had a little lectern next to a cloth-covered plinth, a small piece of wrought iron fencing keeping the patrons a few respectful feet away.

House wedged himself in between a tall man in mirror shades with a Spider-Man bandage on his nose and a couple that reeked of tourista, the husband looking indifferent and bored, the wife browsing the souvenir counter and so volubly worried over the price of every purchase, House doubted that ownership could give her any feeling of pleasure.

“See nature cruelly compromised by a mother’s gruesome and repulsive curse,” the proprietor chanted, eyes scanning the crowd, no doubt mentally totting up ticket sales. More people were wandering in, most of them dressed in their Sunday best. Right on time - church had let out. The proprietor had an uneasy expression, but continued. “No one who draws breath can resist the strange and terrible tale of the creature born of man who walks the earth with strange powers far beyond those of mortal souls. If you have a sensitive nature, I implore you to leave now, for this gripping account of defiance of the almighty is not for the weak of will or faint of heart!”

The crowd rewarded him with a knowing, sardonic chuckle as he gestured theatrically, reaching behind himself to a switch that gradually lowered the room lights. “This narrative, once heard, can never be forgotten,” he warned. “A tale of a woman so sorely afflicted with poverty that when she learned she would soon be bearing a thirteenth child, declared, ‘Let it be a devil!’ . . . and it was.”

With a flourish, the proprietor whipped the cloth off the plinth, revealing a little diorama. About twice the size of a shoebox, it depicted the scene in a crude, one room log cabin. A little woman-doll lay in the bed tangled in sheets stained with red paint. Another woman, the midwife perhaps, was by her side, and several child-dolls huddled in the far corners. They were clearly dollhouse models of the kind that could be purchased in any craft store, but the faces had been repainted and subtly altered to give them expressions of fear and horror. All of their tiny glass eyes were riveted on the figure rearing up by the chimney. Whoever had sculpted the monster was a true artist. Even at only eight or nine inches tall it was a frightening thing, a humanoid form bestially distorted, spiky-edged wings outstretched and hooked fangs bared. The proprietor flipped a hidden switch and colored lights on the ceiling swept the room, strobes flickering and making the model Devil seem to writhe and twist in place.

The crowd was rapt, several people gasping in surprise at the unexpected power of the effect. All except the man in mirror shades, who had wandered over by the rack of tchotchkes, t-shirts and candy and become absorbed in a book of old newspaper clippings.

House poked the man between his shoulders with the tip of his cane, whispering, “See any relatives?”

He turned around, affronted. “Excuse me?”

Before he could continue, a woman near the front of the crowd let out a horrible shriek. She pushed past him, screaming, punching and kicking the others to get to the door. House was so fascinated by the sight of a well-dressed middle aged woman who’d suddenly gone inexplicably insane that he did not, at first, look around to see what she was running from.

The crowd surged, almost knocking him over. House braced himself against a mannequin covered with thousands of wads of chewing gum and craned his neck to see what was causing the panic. He was just in time to see a man at the front jerk forward, striking his forehead hard on the metal railing, then whip upright again. A bright spout of blood flew from his mouth, fountaining as he jerked his head back.

House recognized what was happening instantly. It was a classic presentation of a grand mal, or tonic-clonic seizure. An electrical storm in the brain caused uncontrollable vocalizations, and the arching of the back. His face turned blue-grey with cyanosis as his breathing temporarily stopped, and his bladder reflexively released, leaving a damp path on the front of his trousers.

But what was a perfectly routine seizure to House struck the other people in the crowd very differently. An elderly woman in a pastel dress and a pillbox hat frothing with lace, fake pearls and silk flowers pinned to her head raised her arms up and cried, “It’s the end times! It is a sign!”

The screaming woman stopped screaming long enough to add, “Praise Jesus!”

House struggled to get to the epileptic man. He’d slumped forward again and now lay across on the metal railing. His entire weight was suspended by his neck, and his airway was cut off. He shook and twitched as if he were being electrocuted, muscles twitching helplessly as he entered the clonic phase of the seizure. Blood poured from his mouth.

“He knows your sins! Pray, pray and be saved!” The church-going lady’s rolled back in her head as she was swept up in her own kerygmatic rambling. “Jesus is love, God is love!”

“Praise Jesus,” a few people in the crowd murmured. They had backed off, those god-fearing good folk, not one extending a hand to the man slowly dying in front of them.

House grabbed the man under his arms and hauled him off the railing. He was too heavy to support, and slipped out of House’s grip, collapsing bonelessly to the floor where he lay shaking, his head banging against the giantess’s case.

“Pendergast!” House shouted. “I can’t kneel! Pillow that guy’s head with your jacket before he gives himself brain damage!”

Later on, House would wish he’d had the presence of mind to have taken a picture of the face of man in the mirrored sunglasses at that moment. To his credit, the agent did not bolt, nor did he stand frozen. He obeyed without hesitation, whipping off the jacket and using it to cushion the man’s head.

“Put a spoon in his mouth so he doesn’t choke on his tongue,” a man yelled.

“Moron,” House shot back. It’s physically impossible to swallow your own tongue, but the gag reflex doesn’t work when you’re unconscious and he might suck blood or vomit into his lungs. “Pendergast, lift his head to the blood can drain out. How’s his pulse?”

He pressed his slender fingers into the rolls of fat on the man’s neck. “A bit fast, but steady.”

“Good, good. Can you see where the blood is coming from?“

“Inside of his lower lip. I believe he bit it when he hit his head.“

“That doesn’t look too bad, but he’s gonna have a hell of a contusion, and the bruised larynx might swell up.” House flipped open his cell phone and dialed 911.

There was a young man in a shirt that said ART DOESN’T KILL. ARTISTS DO filming everything avidly with a little digital video camera. House gestured angrily for him to put it away, but if he saw, he ignored him. The man’s seizure abated and he lapsed into a sleeplike state. Pendergast sat beside him, absentmindedly stroking his arm.

“Is he dead?” One of the onlookers asked.

Gradually, the man came to, blinking and confused. He sat up, gingerly probing the soft swelling on his forehead.

“Praise Jesus!” The church lady shouted, bending over Pendergast to lay hands on the man’s head. She beamed as if she felt personally responsible for his recovery. “Praise Jesus, oh lord!”

“Praise Greg,” House muttered. “Are there more at home like you, or did your parents get the lead pipes replaced?”

“I love Jesus,” the old woman stated, looking around at the crowd as Pendergast tried gently to fend her off. “Jesus is love. You know what I love, is that He teaches you . . . ”

“Teaches you to squeal like a pig under a gate and run around waving your arms when a man’s dying?” House rounded on her. “Maybe you should put down that Bible and pick up a first aid manual!”

The crowd stared at him. All that was missing from the picture was cud for them to chew.

“What,” one of the women finally asked.

“Look. This guy,” he pointed. “Had an epileptic seizure. Nothing mysterious, nothing satanic. All I see here is coincidence and basic stupidity.”

“Correlation does not imply causality,” Pendergast said, then added, “Ignore them. They’re simply upset you stole one from Jesus.”

House glared at him in disbelief. A joke, from Der Eiskonig? And at the worst possible moment. The crowd was muttering, and the church lady, shedding facile tears, let herself be embraced by the formerly-screaming woman.

“I get the distinct feeling we’re both persona non grata around here.”

“Agreed. Shall we take in that display?” He nodded towards an elaborately lettered sign, ‘This way to the Egress’.

Pendergast elbowed his way through the crowd, House discreetly adding a few whacks on various ankles with his cane. They slipped between Jake the Alligator Man (human from the waist up, reptilian from the waist down) and a gallery of paintings by chimpanzees and out a back door. It was an enormous relief to get back into the fresh air. It was still unseasonably warm outside, the low clouds holding in heat and moisture like a soggy woolen blanket, but the Emporium too stuffy, the smell of mildew and dust and damp and cat food made him nauseous.

“Clever, Pendergast,” House commented, taking a deep breath. “So, you stained your hair with Betadine solution? But you went a little overboard with the mirror shades. When I stood behind you, I could see your eyes reflected in the lenses. Your eyelashes are still white.”

Pendergast gave him a stare that, had it been one degree less warm, would have turned him to stone.

“How’d you get it, anyways? We keep stuff securely locked away.”

“I suppose the level of security is a matter of perspective.” Pendergast began removing the rest of his disguise.

Although he would rather have died than admit it out loud, House was rather impressed. Pendergast knowledge of how even subtle changes in facial structure can render a person unrecognizable, and he’d cleverly utilized items from the stolen purse to effect his disguise.

He’d bent paperclips into tiny rings and inserted them into his nostrils, making them wider and changing the shape. Graphite lightly rubbed into his skin gave him an instant five o’clock shadow far more conventional than the colorless fuzz he would naturally sprout. Chewing gum spread over his actual gums distorted the shape of his mouth, making his lips seem fuller. Besides staining his hair reddish-brown, he’d styled it differently. Slicked back, it looked short, but it was actually quite long, and he’d brushed it so it hung in neat sheaves on either side of his face, conveniently also shielding his profile from a side angle. As a perfect final touch, a bandage across the bridge of his nose masked the distinctive aquiline arch and provided a distraction. Potential eyewitnesses would be more likely to remember the Spider-Man bandage than the face of the grown man wearing it.

House peered around the corner. The ambulance had arrived, lights flashing but siren off. The church lady was talking animatedly to the paramedics, who were trying to politely ignore her and help the patient into the back of the truck. The crowd was still churning around the Oddity Emporium’s front porch. Some of them had linked hands and were singing.

House was disgusted. “Can you believe that? Church wackos. And that sideshow guy was deliberately egging them on.”

“Now, now. The choice of lighting was unfortunate in triggering that man’s seizure.“ Pendergast paused, thoughtful. “However, I see what you mean. Popular delusions and the madness of the crowds. They came primed to see devils where no devils existed. But why? Morgan’s death is puzzling but not to the degree that would cause such a reaction.”

“Why don’t you tell me, AgentPendergast,” House asked aggressively. “I know how this goes. Doctor Watson blathers out his theory, and Sherlock lets him make an ass of himself, then proves his theory, nice and neat. Who’s your suspect?”

“I don’t have one, at present,” he said with bland innocence. “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

“But you do have some suspicion. Otherwise why would you be so interested in a murder when it seems like no murder has actually taken place?”

Pendergast’s eyebrows arched up in surprise. “Very astute, Doctor. But you were saying, the proprietor of the research center?”

Clearly, the man was not going to spill. House said, “Well, yeah. I don’t think he’d kill a guy, but he’s fanning the flames of stupidity. It’s who stands most to profit, isn’t it? And he could only benefit from keeping the legend going.”

“An incident like this does not exactly constitute complementary news coverage.”

“Any publicity is good publicity. Did you notice the kid with the camera at the back of the room, videotaping him?”

“Very well. Against my better judgment, I do have my suspicions. Since you’re here, I shall make use of your medical expertise. The Emporium’s proprietor kindly photocopied some interesting documents in his collection for me. What do you think of these?” He pulled a sheaf of photocopies from inside his jacket and handed them over.

House boggled. He was here to drag the man back to the hospital and, if necessary for his own safety, put him in restraints and under guard, and Pendergast wanted his opinion?

“Doctor?” he inquired. “Your thoughts?”

House glanced down involuntarily at the photocopies. The typeface was old fashioned, with the “f”-like internal s, and the copies were dark and smudgy. He scanned the top page, quickly becoming acclimated to the irregular spelling and outdated grammar. Against his will, his interest was engaged.

It was an account of a witchcraft trial from the same general time period as the more infamous Salem incidents. This particular woman, Mother Leeds, was first accused by one John Hollander of putting a hex on his hogs. They’d developed blind staggers, and twelve of his herd of fourteen had died. The remaining two had gone blind. House felt his own eyes glazing over.

“My first thought is that I’m a doctor, not a veterinarian. Or a witch finder.”

“And your second thought?”

“There aren’t enough pennies in the world, Pendergast.”

Silently, the man handed him another photocopy. It was a warrant for Leeds’ arrest. This time the victims were human.

“You are in theyr Majestyes Names hereby Required to Apprehend & bring before us (upon Tuesday next being the Seavententh day of this Feburay by Tenne of the Clock aforenoone) the body of Abigail Leeds, widow woman, whoe standeth charged in behalfe of theyr Majestys w’th high Suspition of Sundry Acts of Witchcraft done or Comitted upon the Bodyes of Eugene Hollander Rose Hollander Mercy Hollander whereby great hurt hath bin done them: And hereof you are nott to faile.”

Pendergast watched him closely. House tilted his head, scrunching his mobile face into an exaggerated scowl, rolling his eyes and flaring his upper lip back from his prominent incisors as he continued to read.

Next was the case against. The young son and two daughters of the hog farmer were the victims. “The Jurors for o’r Sov’r: lord and Lady the King and Queen present That Abigaill Leeds Widowe of Ebenezer Leeds In & upon the Eighth day of September last in the Yeare aforesaid & divers other days & Times as well before as after Wickedly Mallitously & felloniously hath used practised & Exersised Certaine detestable arts Called Witchcrafts & Sorcerys aforesaid upon & Against the children of John & Martha Hollander by which Said Wicked Arts the Said Eugene Hollander Rose Hollander& Mercy Hollander the day & year afos’d & divers others days & times both before & after, were & are Struck with Blindess sorely Afflicted by Visions of Hell Consumed Staggered Wasted and Tormented Against the peace of o’r Sov’r lord & lady the King & Queen their Crowne & dignity & the laws & Acts in that Case made & provided . . .”

“Loss of vision, ataxic gait, bizarre behavior, apathy and coma. Some kind of brain inflammation, it has to be one of the viral encephalitides,” House said, then checked the top of the page. “Except those are spread by ticks or mosquitoes, and this was midwinter. And no mention of a fever. They knew about fevers back then, right? But the hogs, they’d been struck a few months earlier, in warm weather. You think there’s a connection, that it’s a zoonosis the kids contracted from the hogs or eating the pork?”

“As Voltaire once noted, doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd,” Pendergast said.

“Why do you even care?”

“You should care, too,” Pendergast said gravely. “I believe there may be a connection between these bewitched hogs, the human deaths, and this rather puzzling case of dengue now.”

“I don’t think so, Pendergast. Dengue hadn’t moved that far north in the 1700’s.”

“Obviously, the mosquito colony was restricted to a very narrow locale. The Pine Barrens are not conducive to farming. Losing twelve hogs would have been a financial disaster for the Hollanders, not to mention the emotional distress of the children’s illness and bizarre death. Likely the farmer moved away after the witch trial, and no one else settled near enough for the mosquitoes to reach.”

“And your hypothetical mosquitoes survived this long, through two centuries of New Jersey winters? Show me where they could find a pool of warm water to overwinter in, and maybe I’ll agree with you.”

The rest of the pages were of little interest. There was an account of finding the devil’s “marke” on Leeds by one James Barton, Chyrurgen, who had “By dilligent search discovered a preternathurall Excresence of flesh between the pudendum and Anus much like to Tetts & not usuall in women.”

Imagine that, finding a small blemish, probably a benign skin tumor, on an old woman. And then there was another witch involved, a local midwife who seemed eager to sell Leeds down the river.

“After Several Questions Propounded & Neagative ans’rs Returned She at last acknowledged that Goody Leeds made her a witch & that Some time last Sumer She made a Red Mark in the Divels book w’th the fore finger of her left hand & the Divel would have her hurt Mercy Hollander Eugene Hollander& Rose Hollander w’ch She did on Satterday & Sabbath day last. She Confesses She was at the Witch Metting at Whitesbog w’th Goody Leeds, there was a grate many there. She S’d ther was Such a load & weight at her Stomack that Hindred her from Speaking & is afrayd She has Given up her Self Soul & body to the Divel. She Says She promised to Serve worship & beleive in him & he promised to pardon her Sins but finds he has deceived her & that She was left of god & all good people & that Goody Leeds threatned to tear her in peices if she did not doe what She then did. She further Said that She had Seen no aperance Since but a fly w’ch did Speak to her & bid her afflict those poor Creaturs w’ch She did by pinching With Clinching of her hands for w’ch She is Sorry & further the Divel told her it would be very brave & Cliver for her to Come Dwone among those acused persons. She promised to Confese what more She Shall hearafter Rememb’r.”

House grunted. She sounded like a young woman possibly in the early stages of schizophrenia but more likely terrified and confused and being led on by a primitive interrogation technique, the same sort of thing that created the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria trials in the 80’s and early 90’s. No doubt the so-called witch recalled some more repressed memories under grilling.

He handed the photocopies back to the FBI agent, who folded them neatly and tucked them into jacket again. “It occurs to me you’re asking a lot of questions, Pendergast. I have a few of my own. For one, what does this have to do with whatever killed that hunter? He wasn’t gutted by a virus. And for another, am I going to have to drag you back to the hospital kicking and screaming, or are you coming quietly?”

“Oh, quietly. I don’t wish to cause a scene. I give you my word that I shall return as soon as I find what I am looking for.”

“Soon as ah faahnd whut ah’m lookin fo’,”House mocked. “The Jersey Devil?”

Unperturbed, Pendergast simply said, “If you insist.”

House had the uncomfortable suspicion he’d been outmaneuvered somehow. Pendergast was lying, that was crystal clear, but he didn’t even care enough about being caught to bother doing it well.

Everyone had more or less the same big shiny red buttons. Sometimes you had to push a few before you found the one that would make them freak out so badly their emotions would overcome their intellect and they’d blurt out the truth or otherwise do something to give the game away. House was the expert at finding that button, but Pendergast was impenetrable. It was absolutely impossible to get a rise out of the man.

“Come on. I’ve reserved an extra drafty gown especially for you.”

Pendergast affected a La Giaconda smile as House took him by the arm and guided him to where he was parked by the curb. He’d only known Pendergast briefly, but he’d gotten a strong enough impression of the man to realize that this sudden meek compliance was not typical. Unfortunately for him, House attributed it to illness, not deliberate disingenuousness.

He kept a death grip on the FBI agent as he unlocked the door, then gestured for him to climb in. Pendergast stood a moment surveying at the mess of empty soda cans, coffee cups, CDs, fast food wrappers, video game cartridges, magazines and other detritus piled on the passenger seat. House scooped an armload up and dumped it on top of the junk in the back, and Pendergast slid into the seat with fastidious grace.

“May we have some music,” he inquired, gesturing to the radio. “I don’t care for the local stations.”

“Sure. Uh . . . ” House twisted around, digging awkwardly through the slag pile. “I don’t think I have anything you’d like. Let’s see, got Steely Dan, Tommy - the original, not that new Broadway abortion - Meatloaf, some Nick Cave . . . ”

He felt something like a wasp’s sting jab him in the carotid artery.

Pendergast’s soft, sincere voice whispered in his ear, “The Betadine was not all I borrowed from your supplies, Dr. House. If it is any consolation, I regret these measures, but I believe circumstances warrant them. I hope you’ll see it in your heart to forgive me someday.”

* * * * *


Tzerkas was kicking himself wondering if he should have hung around and interviewed the asshole who blew a hole in the monster suit.

He’d have hell to pay for that when he got back to school. That suit was his buddy Nate’s final project, he’d sworn up, down and sideways he’d be extremely careful with it if he let him borrow it, and what happens? Matthew’s not in it for an hour before Agent Asshole uses it for target practice. Nate was going to pulp him.

He’d worry about that later.

It was pure luck he’d come by the Oddity Emporium just as some sort of nutjob Christian thing was going on. Christards were always good cinema, and this crowd didn’t disappoint. Some guy had a spazz attack and they thought the judgment horn had sounded. It was hilarious, and a little bit scary, like next they’d be sacrificing their firstborn children or something. Yikes.

Still, it was primo stuff. A few questions here and there, stir the pot a bit, and he might have a full scale riot. It would be great.

He wondered if the local news channel would pay for the footage of the old guy with the cane and the weirdo saving the spazz like that. Human interest glurge. Local news would lick it up, but hey, they might try to buy the rights from him and no way in hell was he gonna give up footage like that.

He almost tore himself in two. Stay and try to whip up the christards into a batshit frenzy or try to get comments out of the crip and the weirdo? Best way to cap off a human interest story was the victim being grateful and the heroes being all humble and saying that anyone would have done the same in their place (patently untrue: witness).

He followed the dynamic duo, and hell if it didn’t get more interesting. All that shit they were saying about the Devil and witches and the dude that got gutted and something - deen-gee? - he didn’t know what THAT was, but he was gonna find out.

And then they get in the car and weirdo stabs the crip with a hypo and things were just too exciting and wonderful and perfect not to stay at a distance and keep filming.

Weirdo dumps the old guy and takes off in his car . . . old guy was a doctor or something, he was the one who was giving orders. So who was the weirdo?

Pendergast. The crip called him that, and the asshole mentioned a Pendergast, too. Weird name. How likely was it that two guys named Pendergast were tangled up in whatever was going on? Not fucking likely.

Special Agent Pendergast, no less. He didn’t look like a special anything, but hey, maybe he was undercover. If so, he should work on his disguises. That dye job was so fake you could spot it from space.

So this guy was some sort of government agent.

What was going on here?

This wasn’t a hoax, no Loch Ness Monster, or Alien Autopsy or any of that Uri Gellar crapola. This was . . . what?

Something secret. Something amazing. X-Files shit, but real life.

He was sure of it.

Weirdo was pulling out of the lot, leaving the crip conked out on the sidewalk. Tzerkas didn’t hesitate. He gunned the Omni’s engine, which resulted in a cloud of blue-black smoke, a lot of shuddering and the forward momentum of a arthritic turtle on Percocet. He winced. Tailing the weirdo was not going to be easy in his little piece of shit rollerskate.

Weirdo wasn’t getting away that easy, though. Tzerkas was on him like shit on a monkey’s butt. Nothing like this ever happened to him, and no way was he letting the opportunity wriggle away. His documentary project was going to ROCK.

* * * * *


House was woken by the digitized but distinctive chords of Iron Man. For a long moment he had no awareness of where he was or how he’d gotten there, just that his ass was frozen solid.

His head cleared, and he realized he was sitting on a thin layer of newspapers at the bus stop not far from the Emporium, wrapped up in his own jacket and the old, torn, oil-stained beach towels he used to line his trunk. His car was not where he’d left it parked.

Pendergast.

The agent had blindsided him with a hypodermic full of some fast acting tranquilizer, then made absolutely sure no one would be alarmed by the sight of an unconscious man on the sidewalk by propping him against the nearest building and arranging him to look like a bum, right down to the little Styrofoam coffee cup with a few coins in it beside him. A piece of cardboard shakily hand-lettered with “Gulf War Vet” was propped against it. Very cute.

Black Sabbath played again. House scrabbled in his pockets and finally came up with his cell phone.

One of the people in line for the bus stared at him, looking from the cup to the cell phone and back again with undisguised disgust. He leaned over and with a loud snorking noise spat eloquently into the cup.

“Jeez,” House snarled. “Wounded in the service of my country, and this is the respect I get?”

The bus patron sniffed and turned away.

“What?” The voice on the phone sounded irritated. “House? Can you hear me?”

“Yup.”

It was Foreman. “We need you back here.”

“I have Pendergast.”

“Who? Oh, the runaway. Great, we need him, too.”

“Well, had him. He scampered again. I swear to god, catching this guy is like trying to wrestle with a greased cobra.”

“Three more cases with symptoms matching his have come it. It’s bizarre. The CDC has already been notified that we might have an epidemic.”

“Dengue?”

“We’re sure now, yeah.”

House narrowed his eyes, thinking. Dengue, in same family as deadly diseases like Lassa, Marburg and the well-publicized Ebola virus, was nothing to screw around with. Genus Flavivirus has four strains, or serotypes. Infection with one of these serotypes does not provide cross-protective immunity. In fact, re-infection could cause a severe and potentially fatal hemorrhagic fever.

If Pendergast had been infected in New Jersey, it would have been almost a week ago. And say he was re-infected in the woods . . . it would only be a short time until the critical period set in.

Chapter Four

For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t
Be caught in a commonplace way.
Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t:
Not a chance must be wasted to-day!

— Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark”



Randall had always hated the inevitable statements to the press, but this promised to provide such a neat closure to a shocking death that he couldn’t help feeling a little thrill of anticipation. The crowd of reporters was larger than he expected. Morgan’s story had attracted some out of staters, probably hoping for a connection with the recent killings in New York. It would be a moment of supreme satisfaction to disappoint the vultures.

As he ascended to the podium, he was flanked by Alan Nagle from Fish and Wildlife, who he’d never met before, and Paul Snyder, the police commissioner and a damned fine guy. Agent Kittredge was supposed to have been there, too, but neither he nor his department had been able to raise the man on the phone and in the scramble to arrange the press conference, tracking Kittredge down had gotten lost in the shuffle.

Sheriff Randall tapped the mic, making himself relax as he began with the perfunctory welcoming of them all here today.

He hoped to god Kittredge hadn’t done anything stupid like try to make a run for it. The police department hadn’t made any mistakes beyond the initial confusion. In fact, everyone had done their job admirably. The Morgan fiasco was settling down into simplicity again, and the squirrelly Kittredge and his corn pone friend were just sideshow acts. At any rate, he couldn’t send any men after him at the moment. He was going to be needing every officer soon.

“I want to assure you, there’s nothing to the rumors about a serial killer from New York operating in our woods. Thomas Morgan died in a hunting accident. We’ve determined he was attacked by a whitetail buck in rut. As I’m sure you know, during the mating season bucks become highly aggressive, and Mr. Morgan unfortunately happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Randall gave the reporters a wide, confident smile and let his voice roll out with a bit of that sonorous James Earl Jones warmth. “It’s a tragedy, but a freak occurrence.”

“Sheriff, what about the animals that escaped from that genetics research lab?”

Randall’s smile froze into a grimace as he squinted into the lights. Who was asking? Escaped lab animals? He hadn’t heard anything about that.

The pause stretched out. Finally, the police commissioner stepped up to the mic. Randall backed away, grateful for the save.

“This was a deer,” Snyder said firmly. “A plain old local deer, nothing mysterious and reason for starting an panic. We’re not talking about some transgenic Bambi-monster here.”

The other reporters sniggered, but the questioner persisted. “Why was it in rut, though? It’s out of season. That’s very odd.”

Nagle from Fish and Wildlife leaned over and spoke into the mic. “It’s not uncommon for some bucks to have seasons that last longer or shorter than average. This one was just on the far end of the bell curve. As the sheriff said, unfortunate but not mysterious.”

Snyder muffled the mic with his hand and said out of the corner of his mouth, “None of this is live. We’ll have them cut it out.”

Randall nodded and took over again. “Now, has anyone got any relevant questions?”

“Isn’t there an FBI agent on the case?” Another reporter called out. “Why would you need the FBI if a deer killed Morgan?”

Back on solid ice again, Randall let a smidge of condescension into his voice. “An agent was in the area investigating an unrelated drug enforcement case and merely stopped by the scene as a professional courtesy. He was in no way involved with the investigation.”

It was a white lie, but allowable. Pendergast had been struck down with the flu or whatever it was before he could officially become part of the investigation. “One more question. You?”

“Sheriff Randall, are you at all concerned with the Devil sightings?”

“Believe me, our FBI agent was not Fox Mulder.” Randall had never watched that show, but his two sons had been rabid fans when they were teenagers. The obliging press laughed. Randall let them, then said sternly, “However, we have had problems with kids running around the woods in Halloween costumes. I will not hesitate to arrest anyone pulling that sort of prank, for their own safety. We don’t want anyone getting shot.” Anyone else, he amended silently. So far, they were keeping Kittredge’s mistake under wraps. Well, he’d burn that bridge when he came to it. “The same goes for anyone going devil-hunting. It’s out of season.”

The reporters laughed again, and with another flash of his best reassuring smile, Randall ended the conference by saying, “The only real danger are the blizzard conditions forecast for tonight. Stay safe.”

The image shrinks into a little square on the corner of the screen. The newscaster looks up from the papers on the desk and turns to her co-host. “Strange, eh, Dave?”

“Strange and sad,” he agrees. “But at least we don’t have to call in an exorcist.”

He chuckles woodenly at his small joke, and she gives him the barest minimum of smile, shifting her gaze slightly left, into camera 2.

“Coming up,” she says. “A baffling illness is filling the emergency rooms of local hospitals.”

Quick shot of the Princeton-Plainsboro ER. All the seats are filled. Patients are sitting on end tables and the floor, and leaning against the walls. The reporter on the scene flags down a harried looking young doctor. He’s tall and stocky, with a handsome, round face, shaved head and pencil sketch goatee.

“We’re looking at a few isolated cases,” Foreman snaps as he tries to dodge the outthrust mic. “Most of these people just have a bad cold. There’s nothing to panic about.”

Back to the camera 2. “What is this mystery epidemic, and should you be worried?” The newscaster frowns prettily, looking concerned for you, her valued viewer. “Also, after the break Scott Masterson shows you how to prepare for that winter storm.”

Over stock footage of the empty shelves in a grocery store’s bread aisle, a man shoveling out his driveway and cars skidding along an icy highway, the station’s theme music plays. Cut to commercial.

* * * * *


At times Pendergast’s hyperacute hearing had been more affliction than boon, and it had taken him years of strict disciple to learn to filter out distractions. But he was well served by it. The snap and rustle of a large animal walking through the underbrush had the unmistakable cadence of a biped. What’s more, one leg was being dragged, which matched the information he’d gathered from the prints - of bare feet - that he’d been following. Somehow, his quarry had circled round behind him.

Pendergast stopped moving. It was not a freeze, the startled immobilization of a frightened animal. Just a controlled, relaxed split second pause for thought. Then he moved again, balanced and easy, dropping to his knees and rolling into the underbrush in a swift, almost soundless motion. Before returning to the pine barrens, he’d stopped off briefly in his rented room and picked up his winter camouflage, and the streaks of muddy brown and grey on white made him all but invisible against the snow-strewn forest floor.

The dragging footsteps came closer, and he heard his pursuer’s stertorous breathing. It was making no attempts to be stealthy, but then, if it was what Pendergast suspected then it would have the confidence of territorial advantage. He slipped his gun, a custom Les Baer .45, out of the holster and braced his elbows on the ground, drawing a bead on the swaying bushes.

Even closer now.

The creature was not just breathing heavily, it sounded as if it was muttering to itself. Pendergast sniffed, detecting a wave of cologne soured by a day’s worth of sweat. He frowned. That couldn’t be right.

A tall, gaunt figure crashed through the underbrush, and Pendergast stood up, smoothly reholstering his weapon.

“Doctor House. I’m rather surprised to encounter you so far from your offices, considering you are not, ah - “ He inclined his head politely, “Altogether well.”

House leaned heavily on his cane, catching his breath. “I could say the same about you.”

Pendergast turned away, his mouth drawing into a thin, compressed line. “I did give you my promise that I would submit to treatment, but I also made it quite clear that I would have to complete my investigation.”

“You’re not stupid, so stop acting like you are,” House cut him off. He removed his knit cap, mopped his face, and pulled it back down firmly over his sweat-matted curls. “And I don’t appreciate the cuteness, either. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Cuteness?”

“You left that Mardi Gras float of yours parked a few blocks away from an ATV rental, for one thing. For another, half the places around here are named Devil this or Devil that. Devil’s Point, Devil Hollow, the Devil’s Spittoon, Devil Leap Road. And this is the old Devil Cabin, Shourds House.”

He gestured around them, indicating the sad heaps of piled rocks laced with thick ropes of dead ivy that were the only remaining evidence of what had once been the walls of a small cabin. The corners were heaped with windblown trash, shattered beer bottles, and the cleaned bones of small animals, all sugared with a delicate covering of fresh snowfall.

“The phrase ‘no shit, Sherlock’ comes to mind. Stop thinking you’re the smartest boy in class, Pendergast.”

“Thank you for the advice. I shall.”

They faced each other silently, glaring and bristling like tomcats. A chilling wind blasted through the swaying trees. Ice-coated branches creaked and stridulated. A handful of tiny stinging ice particles sandblasted them in the face. House had only a basic acquaintance with meteorology, but he remembered the forecasters describing how the warm, moist air mass that had been squatting over the town yesterday was being lanced by a vicious cold front stabbing downward from Canada, and the combination of the two was going to result in some serious snowfall.

Pendergast was the first to speak.

“There is a severe blizzard forecast, as I am sure you know. Twenty to thirty inches overnight. Snow has already begun to fall. If I wait any longer, the tracks will be obliterated.”

“And you’ll be dead,” House said flatly. Pendergast was flushed rose-red, all pink without the usual complement of yellow in the mix, his eyes glazed, his lips dry and cracked. He trembled slightly, not shivering from cold but with the strain of standing up.

“It is not safe for you to be out here, either,” the agent temporized. “I was under the impression you typically sent your young associates on forays like this.”

House grunted. Someone, probably Foreman, had been telling tales. “In the words of that great American philosopher, John Rambo, this time it’s personal.”

Pendergast looked momentarily at a loss. “Very well. We seem to be at an infrangible impasse. Since you’re here, though, would you be so kind as to once again lend me your expertise and give me a professional opinion about these tracks, Doctor?”

“Fake,” he said, barely glancing at the prints crisscrossing the bare ground between the broken-down walls. “Kids do this sort of thing all the time. Like Sasquatch. The whole load of crap started when some college kid carved a pair of giant wooden feet and stomped around the woods with his buddy on his shoulders to make the impressions deeper.”

“I must respectfully disagree. Please, take a closer look.”

“Back off fifteen feet, and stay there.”

Pendergast complied, leaning up against a tree. He managed to make it look as though he were resting and not overcome by dizziness. With the staining solution washed out of his hair and dressed in winter camo, he almost did disappear into the background.

House bent over as far as he could without toppling, warily keeping him in his peripheral vision. A thin, crisp layer of fresh snow coated the ground, preserving the trail as clearly as black and white line drawings. The prints were shaped like a combination of cloven hooves and human feet. Overall they were y-shaped with what appeared to be a single large toe at the end of each fork. The prints were almost twice the length of House’s own feet, even in boots.

The clearness of the preservation showed the startling size wasn’t created by a scuffing step, and it had been too cold for the snow of a few days ago to melt, distorting and enlarging the shape. It had gotten steadily colder as the sun sank into a cloudbank, and the woods had never warmed up as much as the town. Even now, House felt the runnels of sweat that coursed over his face and moistened his palms, armpits, soles and the small of his back beginning to freeze.

“Could be acromegaly.” He took on that peculiarly inward expression of a man thinking at full mental capacity, head cocked to one side, eyes vague. “That’s an excess of growth hormones, usually caused by a pituitary tumor. It produces gigantism in children, but in adults the long bone growth plates have fused so only the face, hands, feet and ribs start growing again. Usually the first symptom is the shoe size increasing. Also causes some nasty cancers. But it wouldn’t give the prints this weird cloven effect. Traumatic injury? No . . . no, no. It’s too symmetrical. Maybe something like ectrodactyly, but not quite.” He stared at the print silently, his brow knotted up with ferocious concentration.

“What is that,” Pendergast interrupted. He took a step forward, and House waved him back. “Ectrodactyly?”

“Lobster claw syndrome. Jeez, you must’ve had some relatives in sideshows, you can’t tell me you’ve never heard of it. Albinos were always popular, like bearded ladies or midgets. Nothing really gross to make ladies and people of delicate constitution faint.” He winked at Pendergast.

If the needling bothered the FBI agent, he gave no sign of it, just a slow blink of those colorless chatoyant eyes and a patient wait for House to continue his explanation.

“It’s an inherited dominant mutation with variable expression in the hands, feet or both together. There are two tribes in Zimbabwe that have been passing the mutation down for several generations. They call them ‘ostrich-footed’ people, for obvious reasons. Wadoma, Kalanga, something like that. Yeah, familial foot ectrodactyly. Couldn’t be anything else.” House straightened up. “Well, there you go, Pendergast. You’ve got a really skilled prankster with a interest in freaky mutations.”

“Or an individual suffering two rare, disfiguring diseases. What are the chances of the conditions occurring simultaneously?” Pendergast appeared troubled. Before House could answer, he said, “If you’ll take another look, Doctor, I’m sure you’ll notice that the heel and toes have dug in deeper than the rest of the print and there is a midline mound from the forward thrust of the step, which argues against a hoax. The print is so much larger than a normal foot that if it were fake, the wearer’s weight would be distributed evenly, like a snowshoe.”

As he spoke, Pendergast had again taken a few steps forward. House watched, tense, waiting for the right moment.

“Also, you’ll see that the toe end of both forks have dug in and curled under here where the maker skidded slightly on a patch of mud. If the inner fork was an addition, this would not have happened.” He stretched out his hand, pointing.

It was the perfect opportunity. House grabbed his extended arm in both hands, squeezed hard and twisted in opposite directions. Pendergast flinched like he’d been touched by a brand and raised his free arm, but before he could strike, House released him.

“You can deck me,” he said roughly. “But first, take a gander at your forearm.”

Pendergast fixed him with a direct, evaluating stare, then slowly complied, unsnapping the cuff of his jacket and pushing back the sleeve. The imprints of House’s fingers were visible as pure white marks on his skin, an absence of perfusion. There wasn’t enough blood in his veins to refill the capillaries. Tiny starburst patterns were erupting across the skin of his inner wrist.

“Petechiae. Pinpoint bruising from burst capillaries. In case you hadn’t guessed, that ain’t normal, and this is only what we can see.” House took a shaky breath. For a moment there, he thought Pendergast was going to hit him.

“Doctor, there isn’t time—”

“You’re bleeding internally, which is causing low blood volume, rapid heartbeat, and the lightheadedness. Where’s that blood that’s supposed be in your veins going, you ask? All over the place. I notice you’re having trouble catching your breath. Probably an indication of pleural effusion. Blood’s oozing from the membrane lining your chest cavity and taking up the space your lungs need to inflate.”

“Doctor - “

“I’m not done yet!” House barked. “It’ll get worse, Pendergast. You need to be on IV fluids and Dilantin in case you start seizuring. Otherwise, little bits and pieces of your brain are going to start dying. Which may qualify you for the US Senate, but is probably a bad idea if you want to keep working as an FBI agent.”

“Dr. House, I cannot afford any further delay.”

“And I told you, you’re not irreplaceable!”

“Did you inform Agent Kittredge?”

Pendergast lifted his sharp chin, indicating a dark object huddled against a broken down wall. With a sick shock, House realized that a man’s body lay crumpled on its back under a thick tangle of briars. He was not unaccustomed to cadavers, of course, but there was something particularly chilling to come upon one out in the woods, forlorn and forgotten. And with the killer possibly still on the loose.

Suppressing a shiver, he pushed some of the thorny branches aside with his cane and leaned over to brush snow away from the face. House had barely glanced at him in the hospital, but he recognized the corpse as the young man hovering nervously over Pendergast’s bed until the agent had shooed him away.

The man’s flesh was stiff as a chunk of frozen beef, the skin a pearly blue-white, the eyes open and staring. Dead for hours. His head was turned too far to one side, and it was not a result of tendon shrinkage. Blood crusted the corners of his mouth and dark bruises mottled his throat. House probed the back of his neck and felt the jumble of broken, misaligned cervical vertebrae. Most strangulation deaths are caused by cutting off the supply of air or blood to the brain. Kittredge’s murderer had twisted his skull off like a bottle cap.

“What killed him was not what killed Thomas Morgan,” Pendergast said in a near-whisper. “But it was what left those tracks. The bruising on his face indicates deformities of the hand similar to those in the feet. The tracks are still relatively fresh. I intend to follow them.”

“And if you do find the killer without keeling over, what good are you going to be?” House said.

All of a sudden, Pendergast looked tired. Intolerably, burdensomely tired. He wavered, and House was barely fast enough to catch him before he fell over.

He lowered Pendergast to the ground, trying not to drop him. Thin as he appeared, the agent was surprisingly heavy, all bone and limp, slippery muscle, like a sleeping cat.

“Hell,” House said, making it sound less like a epithet and more like a description of the circumstances. “Great time for you to go belly up, Pendergast.”

His pale eyes fluttered open, revealing red-scrawled sclera. “What is our situation?”

“We’re not alone.” House hunkered down beside him on the cold, hard ground. The tallest of the brittle weeds barely stood higher than the top of his head. “I saw something skulking around just now. They had to have seen us, so why hide? At least it’s no Devil.”

“Are you certain?” His voice was a low rasp.

House chuckled scornfully. “Not unless the Devil leaves size eleven boot prints.”

“Assuredly not.” Pendergast’s head sagged back, his eyes drooping closed once more. All that was needed to complete the picture was a lily on his chest. “Direct me to the prints, Doctor.”

House took him by the wrist and guided his hands to the prints, only a few inches from where he was laying. Pendergast removed his gloves and with excruciating slowness and care ran his long, sensitive fingertips over the impressions in the frozen mud, like someone reading Braille. He nodded, as if this only confirmed something he’d suspected.

He gave the man a slap on the shoulder, a little too hard for it to be a reassuring pat. “It’s your lucky day. No way could I drag your carcass back home on my own.” Planting his cane securely in the icy mud and levering himself up, he called out, “Who’s out there?”

A long silence from the woods, then a young, rather high voice quaveringly answered, “Don’t shoot!”

“I don’t have a gun,” House yelled back. He felt it wasn’t precisely necessary to mention Pendergast was packing heat, considering he was about one firing neuron away from being unconscious at the moment.

There was another nervous wait, then a short, goateed young man in a black trench coat emerged from the tree line and hurried over to them.

“Wow, damn, man,” he exclaimed. “There are all kinds of crazy people running around out here today. Some dude almost filled my ass full of buckshot. Gotta be careful. You got a cell phone? Mine won’t get anything this far out.”

He held out a hand to help House upright, glancing worriedly at Pendergast, who lay on the ground, pale and limp as a worm on a rain-drenched sidewalk and whimpering quietly under his breath.

“Jesus, are you hurt?” The young man bent down, peering curiously at him. “Is he okay?”

With a lithe twist upwards, Pendergast threw himself on the trench coated stranger. The motion was so swift, so vicious and unexpected that House yelled as if he were the one being attacked and staggered backwards. He didn’t see what Pendergast actually did to the boy, just a noiseless blur of speed. Something small, metallic and gun-shaped flew out of the trench coat’s inner pocket and disappeared into a pile of leaves.

By the time House managed to sit up again, Pendergast had the boy pinned, twisting his cuffs in one hand, the other gripping the back of his head and grinding his face into the dirt, one knee digging viciously into his spine. House could barely make out a stream of muffled invective.

Pendergast turned to him. For an instant his face was distorted into a terrible, heart freezing snarl - a cat’s face, predaceous, ferine and capable. The instant passed and his expression relaxed once again, and he asked smoothly, “Are you uninjured, Doctor? I apologize if I startled you.”

“Good enough.” If by that he meant his heart was not quite fibrillating badly enough to kill him, it was the truth. The adrenaline flooding his bloodstream would keep him on edge for several more minutes.

“Would you be so kind as to retrieve the young man’s camera?” He nodded toward the object House had mistaken for a gun. In fact, it was a small digital camera with a pistol grip.

“Hands off my property, @ssh0le! I have rights!” The young man made a mighty effort and lifted his face. “You f*cking piece of crap! That’s mine.”

“And you would be?” Pendergast inquired.

“Mike Tzerkas, and that’s my property, sh!the@d. You can’t touch it without a warrant or something, and I know that! “

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth,” House asked.

Tzerkas spit out a mouthful of dirt and snow. “I kiss your mother’s c - “

Pendergast shoved the boy’s face into the ground again, cutting him off, then said in that same uninflected voice, “Now, now. None of that. You seem to be well-acquainted with law enforcement procedures, Mr. Tzerkas. It might interest you to know that I’m an FBI agent, and you’re impeding a murder investigation.”

That shut the kid up for a few moments. Pendergast let go of him, and the boy sat up, rubbing his wrists. His eyes darted around, but he didn’t seem likely to want to mess with them again.

Pendergast fiddled with the camera, unfolding a small screen. “Doctor, look at this.”

House nudged up beside him, squinting down at the screen. It showed a shot of the forest floor, then jigged sideways and up to reveal a cleared area. A graveyard.

The camera zoomed in to pick up details. The headstones were incredibly ancient, skewed and cracked, the inscriptions obscured by lichens, moss, and erosion. Centuries of erosion. House could make out a date beginning in 17-. The camera panned slowly. Carefully stacked piles of rocks took the place of the headstones. The picture jumped erratically as the cameraman stepped closer, then pointed the camera directly into a freshly dug hole.

House realized his hands were curled into fists so tight his nails drew blood from his palms.

The body in the grave was human, but just barely. Already badly decayed, it had been tied up with dried vines in a curled position, knees drawn up to chest and arms wrapped around itself. The body was thinly coated with long strands of colorless, filament-like hair, the slender limbs were twisted with rickets. A hand reached into the shot, wearing the same orange and black ski gloves Tzerkas had one, and brushed away loose dirt and leaf mold, zooming in even closer on the face.

The image blurred momentarily, and House squinted so hard his head started to ache. He ignored the double rows of misshapen teeth studding the shrunken gums, the cleft palate that almost split the upper lip and nose in half, the still apparent reddish color of the sunken, desiccated eyes. Its skin was blotched by the same petechiae, the rash of burst capillaries, that marred Pendergast’s skin. This unfortunate individual had survived an astounding collection of birth defects only to be killed by dengue hemorrhagic fever.

He looked up at Pendergast, grim as death.

There was the sound of something whizzing through the air at high speed. Pendergast’s head snapped back, his mirror shades shattering in a spray of blood. He lashed out, knocking House flat to the ground, then spun and drew his gun, firing blind.

House lay on the ground struggling to catch his breath as Pendergast squeezed off three shots, then dropped to his stomach and wiped the blood from his face with the back of his arm. In the distance, something bellowed, then crashed away into the woods. Anyone else might have cursed, but Pendergast only let out a little hiss. He leapt up, eyes slitted almost shut, and ran towards the source of the agonized howling with his gun pointed in the air.

House rolled over onto his side, reaching for his cane. Tzerkas was faster, however, scrambling to his feet and snatching it away. House managed to get a grip on the very tip and pulled it back.

“What are you doing?”

That little pointed goatee made him look like a short, chunky Lucifer as he grinned. “You know what they say. You don’t have to outrun the tiger, you just have to outrun the other two guys the tiger is chasing.”

Reaching the edge of the clearing, Pendergast knelt and fired again. Tzerkas’s head jerked up, his face contorting in dread. House realized the boy had been checking the woods the whole time. The quarter dropped in the slot.

“It’s after you,” House said.

The boy’s stricken expression confirmed it. Whatever was attacking them, it followed or was led by Tzerkas. With a sudden terror-inspired strength, he yanked the cane out of House’s grasp and leapt over the low wall, running hard back in the direction of the crime scene.

“Pendergast!” House wrenched himself up in a sitting position and cupped his hands around his mouth, bellowing, “Pendergast! I left the keys in my ATV!”

The agent spun around, but it was too late. He fired into the air once, but the boy was far more afraid of whatever had followed him to the Shourds House than of Pendergast.

He limped back to the ruins and crouched down beside House, sheltering in the low remains of the wall and the weeds growing around it.

“I apologize for my poor aim,” Pendergast said. The plastic shards of the mirrored lens had sliced into the flesh of his forehead, and the deep gash was spilling blood he couldn’t spare. Oddly, his breathing was no more disturbed than it already had been by the dengue.

“Yeah, remind me to shoot you in the head the next time you challenge me to a game of darts.”

Pendergast narrowed his eyes, then dug around in the leaf litter, plucking out a small, round, blood-covered object. “Look at this.”

“It’s not a bullet?”

“It’s a stone. Whoever attacked us was using a slingshot, I believe.” He rolled it between his fingertips consideringly, then let it drop and fastidiously wiped the fresh blood off on his pants leg. “You had noticed the accumulation of small animal bones, I take it? Several of them have small bore holes in the skull that could have been made by just such a weapon. I suppose I should consider myself lucky.”

“There are some advantages to being thick skulled.” House dug around in his pocket and came up with a packet of moist towelettes. He ripped it open and began daubing at the blood flowing freely down his face. “See, Pendergast? You should listen to ol’ Doc House. You wouldn’t have gotten very far even if your brain weren’t slowly being tenderized and cooked alive. Know what homozygosity for a 2.7 kilobase-pair deletion in the P gene means? No? You should. It means your gene that should be making the protein that packages and transports melanosomes is fucked up.”

“If this is the set up for another albino joke, I believe I shall take a pass,” Pendergast snapped. The flashpoint irritability would’ve been routine in any normal person, but in that ice sculpture of a human being, it was probably another disquieting symptom of worsening dengue fever.

“No joke. The mirror shades weren’t just to conceal your eyes, were they? You’re really being bothered by the snow glare.”

Pendergast didn’t answer.

“Of course,” House persisted, mainly talking to himself now as he continued cleaning the wound. “Hardly any pigment in your eyes at all, is there? Not with that pale grayish blue color. Lack of pigment lets light leak into the retina through the iris muscle instead of just through the pupil. That’s why they showed up purple-red under a low angle light. The color comes from the exposed blood vessels. Normally this causes only minor visual acuity problems which you’ve obviously managed to compensate for, but the high albedo of the ice and snow and cloud cover is bleaching out your retina. You’re almost blind.”

He patted the last bit of oozing blood away. “Well, that’s my last wet-nap. You know, in the Amazon, the natives use a species of ant to close wounds instead of stitches. The soldier ants have these huge, oversized mandibles, you see. They make the little guys bite down on the wound, then twist the bodies off. Reflex action holds the mandibles shut. Works pretty good, actually. I saw it on the Discovery channel.”

Pendergast seemed to be ignoring him, or perhaps he was growing lethargic. Not a good sign. That little display of sharp shooting must’ve taken far more out of him than he would like to admit. House could see an blotchy maculopapular rash creeping across the bare skin of the man’s neck, and with thrombocytopenia robbing his blood of oxygen-carrying red cells and a collection of myalgias and arthralgias assaulting his muscles and joints with searing inflammation, Pendergast couldn’t be more than an hour or two away from total collapse.

But now he pushed House’s steadying hand aside and stood up, checking his gun before replacing it in the holster. He squinted into the wind, scanning the woods in the direction their attacker had fled.

As annoying as the guy was, House had to admire that. He was stubborn, he was prideful, he was opinionated, he was totally convinced that not only was he right, but that delegating responsibilities into the hands of lesser beings meant certain disaster, and he wasn’t about to let himself be stopped by a few things going drastically haywire in the meatsack his exquisitely developed mind was obligated to drag around.

Hell, it was like looking into a funhouse mirror.

“Say, Pendergast. Ever see a movie called El Topo?”

He probed his wound, then sighed. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Cultural heathen,” House said amiably. “Look, I can’t walk without support for more than a few yards, and you can’t see what the hell you’re doing. On our own, neither of us is getting out of here before the blizzard kicks in. How about I lean on you and direct you?”

“And if we’re attacked?”

“Give me your gun. Don’t shake your head at me, junior g-man.”

“Have you ever fired a gun, Doctor?”

“Do paintball rifles count?”

Pendergast seemed to be struggling with some inner quandary. With a shuddering moan, the wind blasted through the trees, kicking up a whirlwind of loose snow. House closed his eyes, but snow swirled into his ears and nose, melting instantly. When he opened them, he saw that the snowfall had commenced in earnest. Huge flakes tumbled down, each as distinct and ornamental as a Christmas decoration. The first few melted as soon as they touched the stones of the old Shourds House, then, as more and more fell, they began to stick.

Pendergast seemed to come to a decision. He pulled a different gun from a hidden holster. It was beautifully made, with a long, narrow barrel.

“This is a German Luger. It has the least kickback of anything I’m carrying.” With brisk economy of motion, he slapped in the clip and yanked up the toggle, loading the chamber. “It’s ready to shoot now. This is the safety.” He pushed it on. “Just shove it forward and up, and pull the trigger. You have eight shots. It is not an Uzi, so remember you must pull the trigger for each shot. And be sure to put the safety back on when you’re through.”

House took the proffered gun, gingerly hefting it.

“Maybe I should take a test shot?” He aimed at a distant tree. Pendergast reached out, put his hand on the barrel and gently lowered it.

“You’re inexperienced, and it’s likely that after the first shot you’ll flinch. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, it’s a natural reaction to the sound and the recoil.”. He unbuckled the holster and handed it to House. “We have no idea how good of a shot you are, and flinching will throw your shot even wilder. It would be best if you fired as though you only had a single bullet. At any rate, aim for the abdomen, not the chest. A perfect heart shot is nearly impossible and the ribs will protect it, possibly deflecting the bullet.”

“Yes, teacher,” he said truculently, strapping the holster on. Deadeye Greg and his sidekick, Kid Albino.

Devils, beware.

Chapter Five: The Devil Himself

“I believe you are the devil himself.”
“Not far from him, at any rate,” Holmes answered with a polite smile.

— Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”



All things considered, evolution had done a damn good job taking a quadruped creature, wrenching it up onto its hind legs and making a biped of it. Workable, but not perfect.

The dinosaurs, for example, had a better form of bipedalism in that the spine was still kept horizontal to the ground. Human beings walked with their spines erect, all their weight on a teetering column, like balancing a pumpkin on a stick, and this jury-rigged design led to things like lower back pain, slipped discs, hernias, and so on.

But a pain free existence was not the point, nor was perfect function. Evolution had no interest in perfect, only passable. As that obnoxious little twit had pointed out, you didn’t have to be faster than the saber-toothed tiger, only faster than the other primitive hominid it was chasing. As long as a creature could manage to pass on a few more genes than the next generation, evolution was satisfied. Until a better solution was happened upon, this would do.

Try explaining that to someone in agony, though. So to make up for obvious deficits in the human form, the human mind came up with wonders like pain pills, which had their own attendant problems.

House had been walking for hours now. He’d never realized how little ground he traversed in the course of an average day. It always seemed like he was rushing here and there, but the actual distance covered was very small, the floors perfectly level and mostly slip-proof, the temperature controlled, and there were chairs everywhere in case he felt the need to stop for a few moments.

There was the dead muscle in his thigh, of course. Over the years that had become an almost familiar pain, but now were added all the little supernumary pains that were a consequence of shifting his center of gravity to the other side, twisting his spine, forcing his good leg to bear more than its proper load, shunting some of that weight down his arms . . . stinging wrist, aching forearm muscles, sore shoulder, stabbing pain in the lower back and between the shoulders, a blister he’d felt form on his right foot, burst, and leave his sock sopping with serous fluid and possibly blood.

Pendergast, however, was doing far worse. It wasn’t for nothing that dengue was known colloquially as breakbone fever. The disease was characterized by torturous joint and muscle pain, and worse, he’d visibly developed symptoms of dengue hemorrhagic fever. Wasted and shaky, his skin blemished by the raised, itchy lesions of maculopapular rash, he looked like a shadow casting a man.

The snow fell thicker now, filling the air with fluffy drifting flakes like feathers at a co-ed pillow fight in a bad 80’s sex comedy. The wind changed direction every few minutes, blowing snow into their eyes, ears and noses. Visibility only extended about fifteen feet, but Pendergast still insisted he knew where they were going. The GPS of his cell phone was useless, as the battery had died in the cold, but he had a small compass and would bring it out every once in a while, squint painfully at it, then reorient them. House had never seen anything quite like it. The man was suffering intensely, but although his body was in pain, his brain wasn’t. His eyes remained searching and sharp.

House slipped a hand into his pocket, reassuring himself for the tenth time that the little prescription bottle of Vicodin was still safely tucked away. He stopped, and Pendergast sagged against him.

“What is it,” he asked.

House took the bottle out and shook a few pills out onto his palm. The pain had gone from the usual dull throb to the sensation a bear trap clamping onto his quadriceps femoris. He counted how many were left, then picked out a single pill and offered it to Pendergast. “Here, take this.”

He eyed the meds. “Thank you, no. I prefer not to use artificial means to dull pain. At some point I will inevitably be in a position when I will not have access to them, and I don’t want to become dependant.”

“I can hide it in a piece of cheese.” He rattled the bottle. “C’mon, you’ve got to be in excruciating pain.”

“Excruciating specifically refers to the pain Christ felt on the cross.” Pendergast raised his head for a moment. House thought he detected a glint of amusement in the man’s reddened eyes. “Despite any melodramatic self pity I may have felt for myself when being aggravated by the likes of you, I cannot say I’ve ever in reality been nailed to a cross. Therefore, I have no basis of comparison.”

“I’m not singling you out, y’know,“ House said, resignedly recapping the bottle and shoving it deep into his pocket. “Ask anyone who knows me, I’m an equal opportunity bastard. I‘d eat my own young if I had any.”

“And yet you devote yourself to the healing arts, which would indicate some impulse towards altruism.”

“Not even a bit. Look, at the core people are basically selfish, asocial and filled with hostile instincts. Altruism and co-operation are subtle deceptions that ingratiate you with others, boost your status in the group and trick others to your advantage. People just don’t like to admit that to themselves. I do. Like Mother Teresa. She was the most selfish bitch you can imagine. Using all those poor people just to give herself a feel-good buzz.“

Every inhalation was like an icicle stabbed in his chest, and even his teeth felt like they were beginning to freeze, but House kept talking, trying to keep the agent distracted from what had to be incredible pain. He hadn’t really expected more than grunts in reply. As he chattered he mentally evaluated Pendergast’s condition. The man was deteriorating rapidly.

“You, for another example. What did your little school buddies call you? Whitey? Frosty the Snowman? Casper? Bunny rabbit? Ah, kids can be so cruel.“ He shook his head sardonically. “So now you’re overcompensating. What better way to show off than to save someone’s life? To avenge their death. Someone gets killed, you come charging in and do your detective act, get a hard-on from the praise, and then off to the next case, am I right?”

“My superiors — ” Pendergast paused slightly, as if letting him know the word was meant in the hierarchal sense only. “My superiors did not authorize me. I have experience and interest in these types of murders.”

The way he said interest gave House a chill that had nothing to do with hypothermia. Perhaps it was only because he was used to people dying of neglect, stupidity, and things they had no control over, but the idea of one human being deliberately setting out to injure another bothered him so much.

“What sort of interest? What short circuit in your brain compels you to seek these things out?”

“I don’t have much interest in omphalopyschism.” Pendergast coughed, a ragged, retching sound. Blood flecked his blue lips.

“Afraid of what you might find?”

“Simply that what I might find is irrelevant, or useless.”

“Or incriminating? Probably for the best. When I’m navel gazing I usually just find lint.”

They continued on. Higher up, the thick interlaced branches of the pine trees had blocked most of the falling snow. Here, though, the flakes fell unimpeded through the mostly bare branches of cedars and oaks. The ground sloped down and was laced with roots that churned up stones and clogged with dead tufts of weeds and thorn studded vines all masked by a layer of sifted snow.

House considered the situation. Pendergast was nuts, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew where they would be going and if he passed out, they’d lost their one chance. The best way to keep him alert was to keep him angry, and he refused to rise to House’s usual bait. Therefore, time for a little conversational schrecklichkeit. What are the three utterly taboo subjects? Art, politics and religion. House didn’t know squat about art, didn’t care to follow politics.

“So, do you believe in a higher power? All the horrible crap that’s happening to us happens for a reason we just aren‘t privileged to know?” A snowflake landed on his eye, and he blinked furiously to dislodge it. “I’d love to calculate how much karma I’m building up for this.”

To his surprise, Pendergast seemed to be taking the question quite seriously. “If you mean do I believe in an anthropomorphic god with human emotions and goals, a god of edicts and punishments, intimately concerned with the minutiae of human lives — no.”

“God is dead. Time to party.”

“No,” Pendergast rasped. “It is not that god is dead but that we must live each day as if god were dead. For practical purposes, religion and magic are blind alleys. You can’t cure disease by praying the spirits, putting on a mask, burning incense and shaking a rattle over a patient.“

House made a mental note that if he got out of this damned forest, he would check eBay for a rattle and a mask as soon as he got home. It would be entirely too much fun to do a spirit dance next time one of his little band of Boswells offered some batshit diagnosis.

“Natural things have natural causes, and if one is smart enough to ask the proper questions, nature will not withhold its secrets. And yet, it‘s folly to think any one person can comprehend the universe. Doctor, I believe in complexity.”

“You’re saying the universe is so big it’s impossible to understand, so we should just give up?”

“No.” Pendergast took a deep, wheezing breath. House felt a brief and entirely unexpected twinge of pity. It hurt him to talk — but staying awake was vital, and the only way to keep him alert was to keep him talking. “I am saying . . . suggesting . . . to concern ourselves with . . . human things.”

“Why bother? The human race is made up of individuals who are mean, nasty, vicious, deadly, covetous, greedy, deceitful, distrustful and violent killers.”

Pendergast didn’t answer. His jaw muscles bunched at the cheek and temple, as if he were testing them, or as if he were afraid to open his mouth for fear of biting the person he was speaking to.

“Me, I think if you put your faith in something you don’t understand it lets you override all common sense, compassion, peaceful diplomacy, and the evidence of your senses. It’s a get out of jail free card for thinking.” He shrugged, hoisting Pendergast up higher. House had long ago decided he was as much of a god as existed in the universe. “Human beings are complicated enough without trying to fathom the motives of the divine.”

Pendergast twisted his head around. The two men stood nearly eye to eye, and he fixed House with the same look a snake might give to a bird it meant to hypnotize into its coils. “Ah, but the only way . . . of knowing . . . one’s own true beliefs about any matter of complexity . . . “ Another bout of violent, hacking coughs bent him double as his body struggled to expel the excess fluid soaking his lungs. The cold, astringent air he sucked in only irritated his throat and made him cough harder. “Process . . . by process . . . arguing with others. Quite clever.”

“That’s me. A song, a dance, an argument.” House gently let Pendergast slide down to the ground and propped him up against a tree.

The man‘s head lolled, and he fought to focus. “What? We can not stop!”

“Just rest for a minute. I’ve got to go write my name in the snow.”

* * * * *


Back at Princeton-Plainsboro, the diagnostic team found themselves struggling to handle the influx of potential dengue patients. Blizzards had closed the airports, and the team from the CDC was stranded on the ground. They’d divided them into groups and were trying to dismiss the cases that obviously didn’t fit the dengue profile. Lab results would take days, but PPTH’s trauma center was overflowing, and there were the expected bad weather casualties on top of the dengue.

Foreman poked his head into an exam room where Chase was trying to examine a young man in his twenties.

It wasn’t going well. Despite Chase’s protests, the man hopped off the table then staggered, gripping his head. “Wooo, head rush!”

“Orthostatic hypotension, actually,” Chase said, shoring him up. “Little help here, Foreman?”

He came in and took the young man’s other arm, gently wrestling him back onto the table. “Have you finished the neuro evaluation yet?”

“No, but he’s not being cooperative. Disoriented, possibly shocky. Where have you been, anyway,” Chase groused. “Cameron’s been bogged down for an hour with some insane mother convinced her snotty-nosed brats are dying.”
“Looking for House. Have you heard anything from him?”

“What? He’s not back yet? Is he still out looking for that albino fellow?”

Foreman frowned worriedly. “I was thinking of calling the cops and putting out a missing person’s on him.”

“Oh, House would love that.” Chase snorted. “Ever consider he knows damn well what this dengue scare would do to the clinic and cooked up the whole thing to weasel out of helping?”

“Well, think about it. He’s on the far side of fifty, he’s physically handicapped, he’s on pain medication, and we’re supposed to get a couple feet of snow dumped on the tristate area tonight.”

“All right. It’s your funeral if they find him and his FBI friend holed up in sports bar somewhere, drinking beer and laughing at us.”

“Hey,” the patient interrupted. His voice slurred noticeably. “Did you hear the one about the doctors who couldn’t agree what was wrong with a patient? The gastroenterologist had a gut feeling about, it but the neurologist said he had a lot of nerve. The obstetrician felt they were laboring under a misconception and the cardiologist didn’t have the heart to disagree. The dermatologist said not to make any rash diagnoses. The urologist thought the diagnosis didn’t hold water, and the radiologist said he could see right through them all. The surgeon decided to wash his hands of the whole thing. And in the end, the proctologist just didn’t give a crap.”

Foreman rolled his eyes. “He’s fine.”

“No, wait.” Chase let go of the young man’s arm. A perfect white handprint remained on his skin, and tiny bruises broke out as pinkness slowly returned to his skin.

“What’s that,” the patient asked, his voice sharpening with trepidation.

The doctors exchanged complicit glances.

“Just wait here a moment, Michael,” Chase said. He and Foreman left the exam room to grab Cameron. Neither of them paid any attention to the patient slipping off the table, grabbing his coat and shoes and heading for the exit. After all, it was a very busy night.

* * * * *


In the forest you are far from home, from fireside warmth and kindliness and the settled accustomed order of things. In the forest you are lost. In the forest trees put out roots to trip you, and reach for you with crooked, skinny fingers. In the forest lives the big bad wolf.

All considered, such thoughts were making it very difficult to urinate.

House craned his neck backwards, gazing up into the low, scudding clouds and tried to do multiplication tables in his head, but fear pinched his bladder shut. Rather than lose anything of possible future importance to frostbite, he zipped back up and turned around.

Although he would never describe himself as shy, House had walked a fair distance away before he felt comfortable enough to let loose, not that that had helped. As he followed what he’d assumed would be a clear trail of churned up snow back to where he left Pendergast, it dawned on him what an incredibly stupid thing he’d just done.

Maybe he himself was worse off than he realized. He’d been concentrating on Pendergast’s illness and ignoring (perhaps deliberately, a small inner voice admitted) that he might be disoriented due to hypothermia of his own. Besides the falling snow, a thick fog had rolled up, making visibility even poorer. His trail blended into the rest of the dips and crests of snow whipped up by the wind.

Godammit. He was lost.

“Pendergast?” he called tentatively. There was no answer but the hiss of falling snow.

He yelled again for Pendergast, but the wind clawed away his words, and even when it died down between gusts, the snow muffled him in a thick eiderdown of silence. Even if Pendergast were still within shouting range, he might very well be unconscious by this point.

It had been a long time since Boy Scouts, but House was almost certain that running around like a chicken with its head cut off was the worst thing one could do when lost in inimical weather. Then again, the manual probably also recommended against leaving the one guy who seemed to know a way home passed out under a tree and wandering off into the woods because you were too prissy to take a leak where he could see you.

House cast about hopelessly. This was worse than trying to find a gray four door sedan in a mall parking lot. Remembering that they’d been going steadily downhill, he picked a direction where the ground appeared to rise. The bear trap was now hooked up to a powerful generator erratically shooting intense crackling reanimating-Frankenstein bursts of electricity into his flesh. He’d hit a piece of nearly vertical slope, and the footing was crumbly and treacherous.

The ground fell away again, and House realized he was not retracing his steps, he’d merely found a small hill. As he turned to go back, his good foot skidded on a outcropping of icy slick stone hidden under the snow. Both legs crumpled beneath him and he slid ten feet, only stopped by a tangle of deadfall propped between two living trees. Muttering and cursing, he hauled himself up to a sitting position and tried futilely to shake some of the snow out of his coat. The sound of approaching footsteps crunching in the snow brought him up short, and he peered out through the deadfall.

Fog drifted low to the ground, giving the scene an unreal quality. The first thing he noticed was a tall, burly man in a thick brown coat almost directly below him, hunkered down and pulling or digging at something in the snow. A moment later he realized the man was tugging at Pendergast, nearly invisible in his damn winter camouflage suit. No wonder House had thought he was lost — he had indeed misplaced an albino in a blizzard. He made another mental note, this time to buy Wilson an act-of-contrition donut.

He was just about to call down to the man when Pendergast jerked awake, shock distorting his face as he looked up at the man in the fur coat. He lashed out, knocking the hood of the man’s coat back.

The man staggered backwards, and House saw it was not a coat at all but a sort of bearskin cape that fluttered behind him like wings in the strong wind, the raw underside greasy and ragged. The man was wrapped in a what appeared to be a collection of filthy scraps of cloth tied around a body so malformed no ordinary clothes could ever fit around it.

Only the head was bare, a lump of warty bruise-colored skin, half covered in spongy tumescent growths, half in bristly gray hair. Mucus clotted around the flared nostrils, and sagging lips drew back from teeth like an ivory recreation of Stonehenge as the creature growled. A face made for radio. It clutched House’s missing cane in one hand composed of two huge fingers like lobsters claws made of flesh.

Meanwhile, Pendergast had rolled away and scrambled upright. The Devil swung the cane at him and missed by a whisker. The handle cracked into the tree behind him and splintered off a chunk of bark. If it had landed, it would have split Pendergast’s skull. The agent bent down and drew a small, efficient looking pistol from a concealed ankle holster, but the Devil struck again with frightening speed, smacking it from his hand with a knuckle crunching whack of the cane.

Moving as if he hadn’t been practically dead a few moments before, Pendergast snapped a low branch off a nearby tree and aimed a blow at the Devil’s head. It raised the cane, guarding high. He bounded forward, passing his left hand over the Devil’s right forearm and his right hand against its thick wrist, seizing his own right hand in his left. With the advantage of leverage, he forced the Devil’s hand towards him with his left arm at the same time twisting his right hand down. The Devil howled in agony but did not let go of the cane.

House shook himself. He’d been so fascinated by the Devil’s appearance it had taken him a moment to grasp exactly what was happening. He tried to stand up, but he was tangled in the barbed bramble of the deadfall.
Bulling forward, the Devil broke Pendergast’s grip and knocked him to the snow. He rolled onto his hands and knees, but not before the Devil stooped down and engulfed him in a bear hug, lifting him clear off the ground. Pendergast struggled like a worm on a hook. His arms were trapped, and he rained inconsequential kicks to the Devil’s columnar shins.

The agent gasped for air, bloody froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth. He switched tactics, swinging his sharp elbows backward alternately with the muscles of his shoulders and midsection, jabbing the Devil hard in the short ribs and solar plexus. It grunted loudly, and fumbled with him. His arms slipped free but the Devil still had him by the waist, holding him up as easily as if he were a child.

Pendergast stabbed his elbow towards the Devil’s gruesome face, not so much to attack but to make him flinch backward and lose his balance. He kicked out forward, throwing the Devil even further off balance — those mismatched legs were quivering now — and then immediately hooked his leg behind the Devil’s knee and jerked it forward.

The Devil pressed its lumpish head between Pendergast’s shoulder blades and fell backwards, a sacrifice fall, rolling to one side so the first thing to hit the ground was the back of the agent’s head. Pendergast abruptly went limp.

House grabbed the trunk of the dead sapling and yanked. The spongy rotten wood broke loose from the bracing trees. He pinned it under his arm like a battering ram and half-fell down the short slope. With a shock that wrenched his arms and slammed the end of the sapling into his ribs, he smashed the sapling into the small of the Devil’s back.

The air went out of it in a gust and it dropped to its knees. So, unfortunately, did House. Only momentum had kept him upright, and now the pain hit him like and oncoming locomotive, skewering him through the heart. Tears of agony blurred his vision, and acrid bile flooded the back of this throat.

The Devil recovered quicker, dragging itself closer to him. This close, he could smell the creature, the foul stench of unwashed flesh, the rotting uncured bearskin it had draped around its shoulders, and the hideous spoiled egg scent of brimstone. It raised itself over him like the crest of a tsunami, those deformed but capable hands eagerly snapping open and closed.

Cursing himself, House remembered the Luger Pendergast had loaned him. He really must be half-lobotomized by hypothermia. He fished it out and, holding it high, fired into the sky.

For a moment he was deaf as a blue eyed cat. He caught a glimpse of the Devil’s mouth gaping wide in horror, then it dropped down almost to all fours, knuckle walking gorilla-style, and lurched off in an explosion of snow.

Gradually the ringing in his ears faded. He spat stomach acid into the snow, drooled and spit again to clear his mouth. What he wanted more than anything at the moment was to upend the bottle of Vicodin into his mouth, swallow the whole damn thing and just drift off into a endless black sea of oblivion, but he’d never be able to keep them down long enough for them to work. Pendergast was tugging at his sleeve. He looked over at the man.

“Good work. I appreciate your restraint in not firing sooner and risking hitting me as well,” he said.

“Yeah.” In fact, he had forgotten the gun until that last moment. “And I’m glad you keep faking you’re worse off that you actually are. Fooled Tzerkas and the Devil. Oscar winning performance there, you even fooled me. You‘re wasted in the FBI.”

“Ah, Doctor, but I am afraid I am now truly at the end of my strength,” he said. He melted back down into the snow, weak and white and draggled, his eyes sunk into shadowed sockets, his face a bloodless, pain-etched mask of tallow.

House grabbed his shoulder and shook him hard. “Pendergast? Pendergast,” he snarled, a good deal of despair mixed in with sarcasm, “If you die, I swear I’m going to stuff you myself and sell you to the Oddity Emporium!”

Panicking. That was another the thing the Boy Scout manual discouraged when finding oneself lost in the wilderness. House had a very distinct vision, almost a hallucination, of a fat, pipe smoking man wearing a too tight Cub Scout uniform. He sat in front of an old fashioned typewriter in a snug, bookshelf lined den with a roaring fireplace, typing out the manual with the contented arrogance of the absolutely safe and comfortable.

How he would love to drag that smirking bastard out here into the middle of the frigid, stinking woods and . . . House lifted his head, inhaling deeply. The awful sulfur scent was even stronger now. He refused to consider that the gates of Hell had opened up to let out the Devil, and there was no way there could be enough rotten eggs anywhere near to create that bad of a smell. So what was the only logical source for sulfur?

Removing his coat, House spread it on the ground and rolled the unresisting Pendergast onto it. He shivered, feeling the wind cut like surgical steel through his thin shirt, but if he was correct he wouldn’t need the coat much longer anyway. Snuffling like a bloodhound, he stumbled toward the source of the sulfur scent.

It lay only a short way further on, almost hidden behind a densely woven scrim of brambles. Where all the other underbrush had been dry and brittle, these branches were leafless but springy and full of sap. He pushed his way through eagerly, ignoring the minor pain of scratches, and found himself on a rock overhanging a sunken pond. It was tiny, perhaps half the circumference of a backyard swimming pool, although the turbid water was no doubt far deeper. Dense white steam boiled off the rippling surface, adding an even more fantastical and surreal appearance to the place.

The Devil’s Spittoon.

The thermal spring was a pocket sized microenvironment, something out of a fairy tale, like a little jewel of eternal summer dropped down in the middle of the harsh Pine Barrens winter. There was a sharp temperature gradient as he approached it, like walking into a sauna. The snow dissolved to nothing several yards around it, revealing luxurious spring like growths of grass, weeds and moss. A fat, black and yellow salamander wriggled out of his path. Animal prints crisscrossed the oddly colored mud on the banks; deer, fox, birds of various sizes, and the oddly humanlike prints of skunks and raccoons. Tiny insects skimmed low over the dark surface of the water.

House felt a twinge on his neck and slapped at it. His hand came away smeared with the crushed remains of a mosquito. Well, that at least explained where the dengue carrying mosquitoes had been hiding out.

Hanging on tightly to an overhead branch, House edged out onto the muddy banks of the pool. The humid blast of heated, rotten-egg scented air enveloped him. It was like being breathed on by a tyrannosaur with halitosis, but the warmth was a blessing. Gingerly, he dipped his hand into the water. Although he could see bubbles sizzling near the surface in the middle, it felt lukewarm here near the edge.

Carrying Pendergast those last few hundred yards to the thermal spring was more like a desperate uphill wrestling match than breezing toward the finish line. Semi-conscious at best, he couldn’t support any of his own weight, and his weakly flailing arms and legs interfered more than helped. House would take two or three steps, a colossal effort, then rest with his bad leg shuddering beneath him. Walking barefoot across burning coals dragging a sack full of bowling balls could hardly be less exhausting. He was crawling on all fours the last few feet, shoving Pendergast ahead of him through the mineral-painted sludge. House, who sometimes watched more Animal Planet than was good for anyone, had a stray thought about dung beetles, but kept it to himself.

The agent groggily pushed away House’s hands as he tried to undress him, but this was merely dementia. Pendergast had, after all, been heading toward the Devil‘s Spittoon the whole time. He had to have realized that submerging himself in the geothermically heated waters was the only way he could survive frostbite. The real question was how he’d known it was here at all. The legends of the Devil’s Spittoon were supposed to be just that, as fictional as the Jersey Devil.

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna do anything that would make Wilson jealous,” he mumbled, manhandling the nearly nude, protesting Pendergast into the shallows and slipping an arm under his head.

Even to himself, his voice sounded strange. In the confusion and disorientation of severe hypothermia, victims sometimes experienced an illusory sensation of overwhelming warmth and would remove their clothes. He worried for a moment that hypothermia had prompted him to fantasize the thermal spring and perform a sort of paradoxical undressing by proxy.

His concern was fleeting. If he possessed a fraction of that kind of imagination, he was in the wrong profession entirely. And surely even his own subconscious wouldn’t be cruel enough to populate his delusion with the dark, vaguely human figure looming towards them in the fog.

Swearing quietly to himself, House fumbled in the holster for the Luger. It was gone, no doubt having fallen out while he was struggling with Pendergast. His hands clenched into useless fists, his heart stammered into overdrive.

The misshapen creature took a step forward, past House, its gnarled, two-fingered hand stretching out slowly for Pendergast’s face.

House gradually became aware of a burning cold sensation on his stomach that had nothing to do with the blizzard. He patted the lump in his shirt, then snuck his hand inside. His fingertips touched smooth metal. The gun had fallen out of the under arm holster into his shirt. He was lucky all that fighting with the insensible Pendergast hadn’t accidentally hit the trigger and shot him in the stomach.

The Devil seemed utterly enraptured with the agent, shuffling closer to crouch at the water’s edge. Pendergast stared back with a surprisingly calm, lucid expression, and made no move to protect himself.

With agonizing care, House shifted the Luger around in his shirt so the muzzle pointed out, careful not to make a quick move that would draw the Devil’s attention.

“Drop it,” Pendergast whispered.

“But — ”

“Drop it!” An entirely uncharacteristic note of pleading tempered his sharp command. “Trust me.”

The Devil was watching him, too. Its bearskin hood had fallen back, giving him his first clear, close look at their legendary stalker. Round pupils, dark hazel irises flecked with green, surrounded by white sclera. Human eyes.

Even in this dire situation, House tried to classify the face of the creature, the person, before him. His brain flipped through diagnoses, selecting, examining, discarding. Paget’s Disease of the Skull, Neurofibromatosis, Craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, severe Treacher-Collins Syndrome . . . nothing quite explained every distortion. He even briefly considered the effects of the dominant gene mutation Disorganization, which some biologist had given what was surely the understatement name of all time. He’d only ever seen its result in mice, and it was so rare it was only the subject of three papers in English.

Finally, he just gave up. Either this person suffered from a disease of such unparalleled obscurity that even House had never heard of it, or he was an incredibly improbable walking miscellany of several different genetic malfunctions.

House opened his hand and let the gun fall into the water. It sank instantly, swallowed up by the dark silty mud.

The Devil’s hand gently patted Pendergast’s head, brushing the straggling bangs back from his face. One finger, tipped with a nail so thick, ridged and yellow it resembled a claw, extended and touched him near the eye, with fastidious delicacy. Still resting one hand gently on his head, the Devil leaned over with a grunt of effort and picked House’s cane up from the snow. It turned it back and forth consideringly, brought the handle to its lopsided nostrils and sniffed a few times, then laid it back down next to him.

With a rumbling groan, the Devil stood upright and pulled his bearskin hood tightly around his face. He turned, his gait stiff and asymmetrical. The bare legs were terribly warped, one shorter than the other, bones curved, joints swollen, massive feet split into two lumps of fused toes. Even under the fur cloak the scoliosis of the spine that hunched one shoulder up until it almost touched the back of the head was clearly visible. But the Devil had survived a long, long time. His muscles were bulky and corded, his skin mapped with old, healed scars. Without a backward glance, he limped off into the forest.

“What,” House asked, “Was that all about?”

Pendergast took a deep, wheezing breath. “I believe he decided we were not his tormenters.”

House could feel the pieces start to click together in his mind. Kittredge must have fired his weapon at the Devil, although how he could have missed such a huge, slow target was difficult to understand. His murder was a case of justified self defense. Tzerkas violated the grave of its companion. Child, sibling, it was impossible to know. Fellow Devil. When it shot at Pendergast back at Devil Cabin, he had been holding Tzerkas’s camera, which the Devil no doubt mistook for another gun.

“But you shot at it, and so did I, and it caught us dunking in its . . . in his private pool. How’d he know we weren’t a threat?”

“We’re, ah, irregular specimens also, Doctor. I think he recognized a certain kinship.”

“We’re all freaks together, huh? Not flattering, but advantageous.” House stared after the Devil‘s retreating form. “It’s human, you know.”

“Yes,” Pendergast said, his voice lilting faintly with surprise.

“I noticed petechiae on the skin of his wrist. He’s got dengue.”

Chapter Six: Boojum

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—-
For the Snark WAS a Boojum, you see.

— Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark”



Off the coast of Long Island, less than a hundred miles from New York city, there lies an small island with pristine beaches, high rocky bluffs, thick brambly forest and deep, still ponds. Deer and other wildlife thrive here, indeed, whitetails often swim across the two-mile wide strait. It is known as Plum Island, and on the few maps which identify it, it is marked US GOVERNMENT — RESTRICTED — DANGEROUS ANIMAL DISEASES.

Since the nineteen fifties, Plum Island’s Animal Disease Center had been investigating threats to US livestock industry from foreign diseases like the foot-and-mouth epidemic that ravaged Europe. After Sept. 11, 2001, its focus has shifted to biological warfare.

Dutch duck plague, West Nile fever, the Rift Valley virus and Lyme Disease have all entered the ecosystem of North America from the same geographic locus, near this laboratory studying foreign germs with demonstrated faulty containment facilities and slipshod safety practices. The USDA, which runs Plum Island, takes no responsibility for these biological catastrophes.

In 1995, the badly rotted carcass of an unidentified large, predatory animal responsible for the deaths of several people in Manhattan was shipped to Plum Island for study. FBI Special Agent Pendergast, who had been investigating the deaths, had followed the lab’s progress to the best of his ability, but he’d made enemies as well as friends in the government and he was not allowed access to most of the restricted material. The animal’s dissected carcass was cremated, and no tissue specimens retained. Officially, it never was given a species identification. The papers had dubbed it “the Museum Beast”. The natives of its original land called it Mbwun, son of the devil, He Who Walks On All Fours.

A few years later, the street drug “glaze” was responsible for an unknown number of deaths. Cultivated and refined from the same virus that affected the creature, it gave its users phenomenal strength and reflexes and an enhanced sensorium at the expense of terrible brain damage that caused fits of killing rage and eventual deforming physical effects. The supply of plants in which the virus incubated (and which the creature apparently fed upon) were destroyed, as were most of the glaze users when the subterranean tunnels beneath Manhattan where their photophobia had compelled them to retreat into flooded.

After that, no more was heard about Mbwun or glaze until early May.

*****


House and Pendergast didn’t say much to each other for the next several hours. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say.

The snow continued to fall in the woods around them, gradually slacking off as night fell. By the thermal spring crickets chirped and once in a while the gently steaming water was disturbed by a surfacing fish or turtle. Pendergast faded in and out of a fitful sleep as House kept a vigil, holding his head out of the water. The Devil did not return, but then, he didn’t expect him to.

At one point, Pendergast awoke long enough to direct House to rummage in his clothes and take out a small survival kit. There wasn’t a great deal useful left in it except for a couple of the nastiest protein bars House had ever crammed in his mouth. He hadn’t realized how hungry he’d become until they began eating, but even the sauce of starvation wasn’t enough to make them taste like anything besides carob-flavored spackle.

There were flares, too, but the agent forbade him to use them until he heard people or engine noise nearby. When they’d finished off their meager dinner, House grudgingly complimented Pendergast on discovering the Devil’s Spittoon.

“It wasn’t a difficult deduction,” he answered. “The Pine Barrens sit on top of an enormous aquifer, an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock containing some of the purest water in the United States. It is heated at a depth, returned to the surface quickly through a fault, creating a spring considerably hotter than the surrounding air. I’ve been looking for a warm fresh water source where certain plants can grow.”

“Plants,” House asked sharply. “What about plants? I thought you were after serial killers.”

But Pendergast had drifted off again, or was trying very hard to persuade House that he had. It was about as convincing as an artificial funeral wreath, but he let it drop. There would be plenty of time to pry when he had the agent strapped down to the bed for the next week, tethered to oxygen and IVs and doped up on painkillers.

It was almost an anticlimax when House heard the distant human voices and a dog barking. He shouted back, waited a moment to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, then set off a flare. A few minutes later and the Devil’s Spittoon was invaded by a group of searchers with a German Shepherd straining on a leash. Trampling the grass, frightening off the salamanders which had crawled out to bask on the warmed rocks, they gawped at the thermal spring and the nearly naked man floating peacefully in its warm waters.

One of the rescuers took House by the arm and helped him upright. He found himself looking into a very familiar little goateed face. “Bet you’re glad to see me again,” Tzerkas said, grinning like a cymbal-banging monkey.

House curled his lip. “I was hoping the Devil got you, but yeah, I am glad. Now I can strangle you personally.”

“Whoa, there, grandpa. I was the one who told ‘em you were out here.”

“Probably because someone realized you stole my ATV and left us to die.”

He shrugged unconcernedly. “No, I borrowed your ATV to go get help. Not my fault you suckers wandered off into the woods. You must have frostbite on the frontal lobes.”

House bent down and asked in a hoarse whisper, “So how’d the Devil get my cane?”

Tzerkas’s eyes widened, and his grin warped into something closer than a grimace. It was like watching clay assume form under an artist’s hands. “You saw it too?”

Further conversation was cut off by the arrival of a Medivac chopper setting down in a nearby clearing. The rescuers strapped Pendergast to a backboard and wrapped him up in a foil-lined blanket to retain body heat. Tzerkas, claiming exhaustion, scrambled aboard too. House would have dearly loved to interrogate him further, but the noise of the engine and rotors precluded conversation. He settled for glaring at him. Tzerkas smiled back beatifically.

The trip was short, setting them down near the road where several cop cars, fire rescue trucks, ambulances, and one news van waited. It was quite a little circus.
When House asked why they weren’t getting airborne chauffer service all the way back to the hospital, one of the search and rescue workers said, “We need to free up the chopper for non emergency cases. You guys weren’t the only nut jobs hunting the Jersey Devil.”

“We weren’t?” he asked, too surprised to correct her.

“Are you kidding? How long have you been out there?”

“Since early this morning.”

“Then you must’ve escaped all the plague excitement.”

“Dengue?”

She looked at him astutely. “Ah, you must be the missing Doctor House. You’ve got some people very worried about you back at Princeton-Plainsboro. Funny, from the description they gave us I was expecting a feeble old geezer tottering around in a senile haze.”

“They love me there,” he said. One of the other rescue workers offered him a cup of coffee. He took one for Pendergast, too.

“I guess it’s a good thing that other guy had you with him, though,” she said. “How the hell did you two find that thermal spring? I’ve been doing S&R out in the Barrens for years and I’ve never even seen it on a map.”

“Ask sleeping beauty,” he said, jerking a thumb at the ambulance where the emergency medical techs were working on Pendergast. “So, what‘s going on with the dengue?”

“Don’t worry about it, doc. The TV guys are blowing things all out of proportion as usual. Hey, ambulance is about to leave. You need a hand getting in?”
She opened the back door to the same ambulance that they’d loaded Pendergast into. Tzerkas ducked under the woman’s outstretched arm and peered into the back of the ambulance. “Wait! Pandergloss, or whatever your name is. Did you find the monster?”

Before House could answer, Pendergast braced himself up on one arm. “No,” he said firmly. “No monsters whatsoever.”

The young man stared at Pendergast, then turned away with a disgusted, scornful motion and was shooed away by one of the police officers, none other than Sheriff Randall. Ignoring House, he pulled himself up on the fender and addressed the FBI agent.

“Who was it, Pendergast? Was it the guy who killed Kittredge?”

“I fear so.”

“Dammit. God dammit,” Randall said. “Bad enough I’m gonna be combing gun-toting loonies and frozen devil hunters out of the woods for the next month. Now I got a murderer to worry about?”

“If I may make a suggestion?” Pendergast coughed, then patted the blood on his lips away with a square of gauze. “One of your fine young officers informed me that Kittredge had fired at an actor wearing a monster suit shortly before he went missing. I would hazard that if the unknown suspect witnessed this, he might have perceived Kittredge as a threat to his own life. As, in fact, he assumed the doctor and myself to be also. We weren’t in jeopardy until he found us on what he considered his own property, and I happened to be holding a small digital camera he might have mistaken for a weapon.”

“I don’t care if it was self defense, he’s gonna be brought in and put on trial. This is America. There are laws.”

Pendergast looked pained. “Delay much longer, and there will be no one to put on trial. The doctor informs me the unknown subject is dying of dengue fever. Isn’t that right, Dr. House?”

House, who had dropped back to eavesdrop from a safe distance, started and then nodded. “I give him another day or two, tops, then it’s pushing up daisies.”

With a hand from Randall, House heaved himself up into the back of the ambulance. The EMTs had started a saline IV on Pendergast and injected him with nifedipine to dilate the blood vessels in his extremities and counteract some of the effects of frostbite.

He handed Pendergast his coffee. Caffeine was a diuretic and a vasoconstrictor, which wouldn’t help the frostbite, but getting warm liquid into his body core balanced out the drawbacks. The agent wrapped his hands around the Styrofoam cup gratefully but made no motion to bring it to his mouth.

“They found out what killed the hunter,” House said, taking a scalding gulp from his own cup. “You’ll never believe it. Apparently, the guy had spilled a bottle of deer attractant on his clothes. It’s a mix of hormones, scent gland extract, that sort of fun stuff. The thing that attacked him was a just a whitetail buck enraged by the scent of what he thought was another buck in his territory. It gored him and slashed his abdomen open with its hooves. The wife must have seen it standing on its hind legs to attack. Hell, anyone seeing their husband shredded to pieces in front of their eyes is not going to be a reliable witness.”

Pendergast’s cracked lips skinned back from his teeth and he shuddered, making a strangled, staccato little coughing sound. After a moment, House realized he was laughing.

“Yeah, hah-hah. We almost both got popsicle-ized because you thought the Jersey Devil killed that guy, you lunatic!”

“Actually, I never did think that, doctor. I’m well aware that even a single kick from a deer can lay open flesh to bone. Their hooves are quite sharp, and the type of injury inflicted is not unfamiliar to me. Only three things seemed unusual at the crime scene — the presence of a very unseasonable mosquito, the smell of sulfur, and the fact that the buck was in rut at all.”

House stared at him.

Blithely, Pendergast continued. “By this time of year, whitetail bucks should have shed their antlers. This is triggered by lowering temperatures, changing amounts of sunlight, and scarcity of food, but for some reason this buck was in an out of season state of mating aggression. Since the amount of sunlight could obviously not be a factor, it stood to reason the animal’s biorhythms were being thrown off by other environmental factors. While examining its tracks I noticed a slight whiff of sulfur. I didn’t understand at the time, and was distracted by the mosquito. Unfortunately, at that juncture my undignified collapse interrupted the investigation.”

“You knew you had dengue before you even got to the hospital, didn’t you?”

He inclined his head in agreement. “I had been in the vicinity several days already. A. aegypti is a day-biting mosquito, and I must have been infected on the first day. I had hoped the very remote chance of contracting dengue in New Jersey at this time of year would convince you I had a bacterial infection with a rash, as it did the other doctors. You proved a little too perceptive.”

“Thanks?”

Pendergast raised the coffee to his mouth. The steam wreathed his face. “At any rate, the confirmation of my suspicion of dengue helped convince me I was looking for a thermal spring. I did try to throw you off with the witchcraft papers . . . again, I underestimated you. You came to the same conclusion I did. Mea culpa. I certainly did not expect you to follow me out into the barrens merely to win an argument.”

“Yeah, well, remember when you asked me why I do what I do? It’s simple. I like the way people expect me to be brilliant as much as I like amazing people with my brilliance. It’s how I get a feel-good buzz, Snowflake.”

One of the EMTs climbed in beside them and closed the door, and the ambulance took off for Princeton-Plainsboro.

*****


The mosquitoes were hatching, both on the island and in the lab. Poppy seed sized eggs in Plexiglas containers had been injected with the transposon Hermes (or Minos, mariner, or piggyBac) carrying the chimeric gene and marker red-eye gene. Incubated in shallow dishes of warm water, they would emerge, be lovingly fed blood meals, mated, and their offspring would be inspected for the telltale red eyes.

The transgenic experiment was designed to boost the mosquitoes’ immune system and make it resistant to the diseases it would otherwise pass on. Red eyes are a marker for a designer gene which heightens the production of the immune protein defensin. The idea was that they would be deliberately released into the environment, breed with wild populations and eventually displace them. In the meantime, they were being infected in the lab with various diseases, including dengue, to test their inherited immunity.

So far, the project had been kept very hush-hush for fear of public reaction to transgenic mosquitoes being set loose. There were already protests against genetically modified food and cloned livestock by a public unaware of how much modified food it was already consuming. The scientists involved tend to scoff at layman fears and despaired of their work being understood and appreciated by Joe Six Pack.

They feared a situation similar to the one in Africa when the World Health Organization were going to release male mosquitoes sterilized by radiation to breed fruitlessly with wild females, after which the females would die without laying fertilized eggs. Villagers thought it was a plot to sterilize them via mosquito bite and drove the health workers off at gunpoint.

So when the first human cases of dengue began showing up on Long Island, Plum Island scientists did not jump to claim responsibility. Wealthy tourists were returning home for their winter retreats in tropical countries, and it was expected they should bring back with them fevers and angry tummies.

Most of the cases were caught early, and although the antibiotics proscribed by their personal and emergency room doctors did no good, they also did no harm. Slowly, the unidentified viral disease was passed from one person to another. Fall came, and the wild mosquitoes began to die off. As they did, so did the mystery virus.

Did a wild mosquito get in or a lab specimen escape? Was a dose of experimental vaccine contaminated with live virus? Did it perhaps infect a staff member who simply strolled out the door unknowingly becoming a walking disease vector? Afterwards, no one will be able to figure out how, exactly, the disease escaped the confines of the lab.

Except in a limited geographic area in New Jersey. Somehow, the mosquitoes — and the disease — managed to survive long after the cold had killed off all the others. And Agent Pendergast worried the mosquitoes may have carried something out with them far more insidious than a mere tropical fever.

* * * * *


He had ordered in expensive food from restaurants out of state, insisted on his own sheets and pajamas which he sent out to be dry cleaned every day, smelled up the rest of the floor with his scented candles, indulged himself with so much candy it was amazing he remained as thin as he was, had an apothecary’s collection of various skin creams, hair oils, and other sundry unguents. But Pendergast stay at the hospital was peculiarly isolated.

Tellingly, House saw no flower arrangements, no cards ordering him to get well soon, no porcelain cherubs or teddy bears from the gift shop conveniently located in the main lobby. He finally broke down and bought Pendergast the most egregiously hideous tchotchke the shop offered, a huge stuffed purple lizard with googly eyes, a dangling red felt tongue and a stethoscope.

The agent cradled Dr. Lizardo on his lap now as a grim man pushed his wheelchair to the entrance. Still a bit wan and tired, Pendergast was otherwise polished to his usual lapidary perfection. There seemed to be the general whispered impression among the staff that he was a celebrity incognito or someone politically important’s relative, and as he was rolled down the halls he garnered his fair share of frankly desirous glances from some of the nurses. House would never have believed anyone could appear dignified in a wheelchair, but there you go. If sex appeal were pheromones, House mused, Pendergast would reek like a fire in a tire yard.

He stepped into the path of the wheelchair, sticking the tip of his cane in the spokes so it came to an abrupt stop. The man pushing it glared as if he would‘ve preferred to simply run him down.

“Pendergast? A word?”

“Delighted, Doctor House,” Pendergast said with prevaricating sweetness. “Proctor, would you leave us alone for a moment?”
The man parked Pendergast inside House’s office, then went outside to wait, glancing significantly at his watch.

“I did some reading while you were busy soaking your insurance company,” House began without preamble. Although he would never admit, the Devil had gotten its hooks into him pretty bad. “I’m convinced it wasn’t dengue or any other brain inflammation-causing virus that killed those hogs and the hexed kids, Pendergast. I think that’s all, ah, hogwash.”

Officially, the Jersey Devil sighting had been blamed on encephalitis-fueled hallucinations. Kittredge, delusional, had fallen and broken his neck. Randall didn’t seem inclined to investigate more closely that that, but House knew something more of the truth and remained unsatisfied.

Pendergast leaned forward, pressing his fingertips into a steeple. “Yes?”

“It was chronic mercury poisoning. Makes a lot more sense than a tiny colony of dengue-bearing mosquitoes surviving here for hundreds of years. And there were plenty of details of the old account that didn’t match up, if you assume they were reported accurately. The onset was subacute, and even for a sparse population the outbreak was too limited geographically. And Leeds . . . the other name for the Jersey Devil is the Leeds Devil.” House glanced over at his whiteboard, and Pendergast followed his gaze.

“Mother Leeds should have been showing symptoms, too — and she did. No one would think failing vision, uncoordinated movements, or slurred speech were unusual in a very elderly woman, and any mental impairment she evidenced was either chalked up to senility or her being a ‘witch’. That devil’s mark was probably a tumor. But there’s one symptom that connects them.”
“The Devil himself.”

“Her child. Who was suffering from birth defects due to mercury poisoning.”

Pendergast tilted his head inquiringly, one peaked eyebrow quirked high.

“The hogs and Mother Leeds were drinking the water from the hot spring, and hot springs are known for carrying dissolved minerals. Some goiterous morons think they have healing properties. In fact, they’re more dangerous because of minerals in suspension, in this case mercury. It caused severe birth defects in Leeds’s son, and probably lots of others. The midwife knew about this, too, the other one who confessed to witchcraft. She was probably a bit simple herself, or credulous, or maybe she’d suffered from neurological effects of mercury poisoning as well.”

“I can see that,” Pendergast said. “If all the children she were delivering exhibited to some degree or another the devil’s mark, she might very well have felt responsible in a way she would have struggled to define.”

“Too bad we don’t know more about Leeds. Must have been an unusual old biddy. We know one thing, she was incredibly devoted to her son.”

“Ironic,” Pendergast said quietly. His long fingers toyed with the stuffed lizard‘s frill. “Considering most versions of the legend have Mother Leeds’ sins directly responsible for the Devil’s appearance.”

“Well, history is written by the winners, and legends are passed down by the ignorant masses.”

“Then perhaps she had a proprietary interest in other children born with deformities and mental impairments, feeling they deserved to be protected as she had protected her son? It’s all conjecture, but imagine if she persuaded the midwife to save the afflicted children, perhaps bring them to her. She might have inadvertently formed a community of them.”

“Take mercury poisoning, add some genetic damage from that and a little duplication of mutant genes due to inbreeding, and you have a tiny colony of devils, concentrating their deformities with every generation, fueling the legend.” House scratched his chin. “So what were you really looking for, Pendergast? Why would an FBI agent care about dengue carrying mosquitoes? Isn’t that something the CDC should take care of?”

“Always direct and to the point. I admire that. No, the late Agent Kittredge was correct, actually. I was in fact looking for killers I believe had formerly been operating in New York City. The conditions at the thermal spring would have created near-perfect growing conditions for the plant, a species of water lily, and the drastic physical changes caused by use of the drug might have spurred the spate of Devil sightings. Junkies will go to incredible lengths to satisfy their cravings, doctor, as I‘m sure you know.”

House bristled, wondering if this was a deliberate insult.

Oblivious, or perhaps just not caring, Pendergast added, “Instead, I find a very different and completely unrelated set of circumstances.”

“Drastic physical changes? What are we talking about here?”

The agent said nothing, merely toying with the lizard.

“I should know. I might be on the front lines of identifying this if your addict killers are here. Hell, I may be the only one who could help you when everyone else is chasing butterflies into traffic!”

“They are not,” he said. “I’m certain of it. I would go so far as to stake my good name on it.”

“I don’t play penny ante poker, Pendergast. What was that you said once about certainty being absurd?”

“Something it would do you well to remember, Doctor House.” Pendergast’s mouth stretched out in a way that did not quite pass for a smile. Settling the stuffed lizard comfortably in his lap, he gestured for his man to come and wheel him into the hallway and out the door.