Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian

Author:Chris Bohjalian [Bohjalian, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

19

Douglas looked at the photos that were spread, very much like the pieces of a collage, on the kitchen table in his apartment. They’d been printed on regular, eight-and-one-half-by-eleven-inch copy paper, but they were still crisp. Douglas could see what he wanted. Once upon a time, he had worked on his high school yearbook—one more thing for his college application, one more way to meet cute girls—and now he was having one of those Proustian flashbacks to being sixteen and back in Ms. Simonetti’s air-conditioned classroom in Dallas and looking at the photos they were going to use to create a two-page spread of students mugging around the cacti that lined the school’s front walkway. The images before him now, however, weren’t teenagers with backpacks and books and silly (or sheepish) grins. They were rats. Dead rats. There were nine of them, printed in vivid color.

He pointed at one, its brown fur lost to open pustules or matted with dried blood. Beside it was a ruler for perspective. “Look at the length of his tail. Look at his midsection. He was a big boy,” Douglas observed to the fellow beside him. It was just the two of them, and they were munching on bagels and lox. It was raining this morning, but not an especially cold and damp autumnal rain. It had actually been rather pleasant when he had gone to the deli around the corner to retrieve their breakfast. He’d worn a yellow slicker with a hood and had another of those flashbacks to when he was younger: he’d been a boy, perhaps eight, and he’d been sitting beneath the awning in their backyard, not far from their swimming pool—it was an inground pool, but it was modest, the sort everyone in that neighborhood had—while watching the raindrops on the surface of the water and examining the new baseball cards his mother had just bought him. He had been wearing a raincoat very much like the one he owned now, and he had been so happy that afternoon. It was one of his favorite memories from his childhood. “How long did it take?” he asked, once he’d swallowed another bite of his breakfast. The lox was pinker than the claret red of the blood by the rats’ pustules, but his mother was an amateur painter, and she would have grouped the paint tubes of the pink and the red in nearby slots on the rack she used to sort them.

“For the rat to show symptoms or for the rat to die?” the younger man asked Douglas.

“Both.”

“Hours.”

“Symptoms and death in hours?”

“Yes.”

Douglas thought about this. “Tell me more. Hours is…vague. I’m presuming you mean less than a day. Or days. But are we talking two hours or twenty-two hours?”

“Your rat scientist—Sinclair—said they usually showed symptoms in about two hours and none lasted more than a day. None. Some died within twelve hours.”

“And these were all vaccinated against the original plague strain?”

“Yes. But he says the new strain is pretty gnarly stuff.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.