The White Plague Read Online Free PDF Page A

feeling somewhat foolish but relieved. Panic? If this thing proved to be true, there would be worse than panic. He stared at the letter, focusing on the signature.
    “The Madman.”
    Coleman shook his head slowly, recalling the tale of the Irish coffin-ship survivor who, making a cross of shovels over his wife’s grave at Grosse Isle, Quebec, had vowed: “By the cross, Mary, I swear to avenge your death.”
    O’Neil’s wife had been named Mary. And now, if this was O’Neill, he called himself simply “The Madman.”
     

 
They are a torture, my memories – a lovely torture.
– Joseph Herity
     
     
    T HE PATTERN of change built itself slowly in John Roe O’Neill. It set him trembling unexpectedly at odd moments, his heart pounding, sweat breaking out all over his body. At such times, he thought of the old beliefs in possession. It was like that – another personality taking over his flesh and nerves.
    Much later, he came to a personal accommodation with this Other, even a sense of familiarity and identity. He thought of it then as partly his own making, partly a thing rising out of primal darkness, a deliberate creation for the task of revenge. Certainly, his Old Self had not been up to such a deed. The kindly teacher-of-the-young could not have contemplated such a plan for an instant. The Other had to come into being first.
    As the change progressed, he came to think of himself as Nemesis revived. This Nemesis came out of Ireland’s bloody past, out of the betrayals and murders, and even carried with it a retaliation against the Celtic extermination of the First People, the Danaans, who had been in Ireland before the waves of invaders from Britain and the Continent. He saw himself then as a spokesman for all of the accumulated wrongs suffered in Ireland. It was Nemesis blaring:
    “Enough! Let it end!”
    But the Other asked: “Why should Ireland shoulder it all alone?”
    The terrorists who had killed Mary and the twins had been trained and armed in Libya. And there was England’s filthy hand in the whole mess – eight hundred years of cynical oppression – “Ireland, the guilty conscience of the English ruling class.”
    As this change became fixed in its purpose, John saw an astonishing alteration of his appearance. The old almost plump self went stringing down to a slender, nervous man, who avoided old friends, refused to answer the telephone and ignored appointments. People made allowances at first – “The awful shock of such a tragedy…” The foundation that had sent him to Ireland gave him an unrequested extension on the project with a polite letter asking if he wanted to turn it over to another researcher. The school extended his leave of absence. Max Dunn, who managed the family pharmacy, took over more of the business decisions and told John not to concern himself with anything except getting his life back in order.
    John merely noted these things in passing. The change within him had become an obsession. Then he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror one Saturday morning and knew he would have to take action. Mary and the twins had been dead and buried four months. The Other was strong in him now; a new face, a new personality. He stood in the upstairs bathroom of the home he and Mary had bought when they had first learned of her pregnancy. The sounds of the old college town drifted up to him through the open window. There was a feeling of fall in the air but the forecast was for another two weeks of “warmer than normal” weather. John could hear Mister Neri down the street running his power mower. A bicycle bell went jingling past. Children shouted on their way to the park. It was September already; he knew that. And he remembered how Kevin and Mairead had shouted at play in the yard.
    Neri shut down his mower. Mrs. Neri had been one of the most persistent callers. “You’re wasting away to skin and bones, you poor man!” But Mrs. Neri had a younger sister, unmarried and getting