People were still raining out of the sky, but none fell so close to Peter as the first two had, and he couldn’t tell from far away if any of them were his lady. He got up and ran toward one, leaping over the sheaves or just running right through them, violating the law of the maze, but before he ran a few yards, another would fall a little closer, and so he would turn to them, shouting, “Help them!” all the while. He didn’t know how long he continued like that, running all over while everyone else was just standing and watching, until the noise came, something that broke in on the quiet burning, a roar and a scream that seemed the perfect sound to match the singular vision. Just as he was sure no one had ever seen such a thing as a body broken like that man’s, or a tower such as this burning in the sky, certainly no one had ever heard a noise like this. A voice familiar to him cried, “Beware the angel!” When he turned he saw that it was Sara, standing not twenty feet from him, pointing away south, where something enormous was rushing through the sky. He supposed it might have been an angel — surely they were this fast and enormous. It passed over in an instant, and the noise and presence of it pressed him to the ground. With his chest pressed against the bloody grass he lifted his head and saw it collide with the unburnt tower — quietly, its huge noise disappeared into the fire it made. Then the only noise was Sara’s screaming. The night came back in a snap, and only the torch and the bonfires were burning, illuminating a different chaos — twelve children caught in the maze, kneeling and weeping or screaming or trembling violently, their parents holding them or hopping and shouting at their sides. Someone was saying his name, not Sara but his mother, standing next to him. He became aware that her hand was on his shoulder and pushed it away. “That hurts,” he said, because suddenly it did, there was a wild aching there.
You wrote that you are tired of being sick. Tired of your bones hurting and the mysterious bruises, and tired of Tercin. For someone so stupid his deprivations are clever, and he has a certain cruel genius. Sometimes I think he is not stupid after all, only distracted by laziness and spitefulness, and if he devoted but a quarter of the time he spends torturing you to studying, he would grow up to be President. But never mind him, dear friend, and never mind the fevers and the sores beneath your tongue. One day you will be free of him, and one day you will be free of this illness. Good or bad, brothers depart, and so must sickness. And I don’t mean either that we will be free of it in death.
We missed you in church yesterday. Or I did, anyway. . I do not think Wallop noticed your absence — for all that he prayed for us with increasing fervor all afternoon — Let this sickness be lifted, let it depart from them forever! — he hardly ever looked our way, as if it were catching at a glance, and as if it had made anybody sick yet who was older than nineteen years. I did miss you, though. All of us on two benches (Wallop said it was so the healing could find us all at once — does the hand of God need that help? I wanted to ask. We all knew it was quarantine). Eleanor sat between me and Sam Finch. We mortified her with our whispering, and she tried to quiet us with great vigorous shushes from out of the bottom of her belly, and made such a noise finally that Wallop turned to her and asked, “Ms. Crowley, can you tell me the meaning of this afflicting vision?”
Eleanor blushed so hard I could feel my own cheeks burning from the heat in her face. In her panic she looked at me and then at Sam, and then clear across the church at her mother, but the lady only stared into her lap. Then she looked back to Wallop and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in a tiny, frightened voice. He let her finish and said, “Indeed. Is there any other answer but prayer, in the face of such a question, and in the face of such an affliction?” I’ve never liked the man but never hated him till then, because I understood all of a sudden that my life (and yours, and Sam’s and Edgar’s and Aaron’s and Lily’s and Elizabeth’s and Connor’s and even Eleanor’s — unless she is faking!) depends upon the answer to that question. Wallop would have us paternoster on it but I think the answer will require a more vigorous and dangerous pursuit. Yet he was right about that one thing. It doesn’t happen for nothing — we are not transported so fantastically for no reason. The vision is a challenge and its meaning is a cure.
“An upsetment in the blood,” said Dr. Herz, summoned all the way from Cleveland by Sara’s father. For her he prescribed opium and antimony and cinchona, and though Arthur Carter was the only man in town who could pay him, he visited every sick child — by August 20, a week after the Lammas feast, there were sixteen of them lying about in various states of torpor. He came to Peter last, and over the objection of his mother, who had already formulated and initiated a plan of treatment. “Does he know lady’s mantle?” she asked Peter, her captive audience, and anyone else who would listen. “Does he know motherwort or neem? And what’s a nettle to him but a weed and a nuisance?” But her husband insisted.
“A grand and severe upsetment,” the doctor continued, stoppering up the little glass vials he’d filled with specimens — every fluid or ichor he could coax from Peter he sampled and stored for analysis back in Cleveland. “That explains the visions. Heaps of blood in the brain block up the sinuses that usually drain away overheated thoughts — hence a vision of flame. Didn’t you mention a burning tree, my boy?”
“A tower,” Peter said, staring out the window at Tercin, seated on a rock and worrying a carrot with his nail.
“Ah — no doubt it’ll be a tree in a few days, and then the other children will see a tree. It propagates, you see, like a ripple in a pond.” He made a motion to illustrate the spreading effect, pushing out with his two hands and then sweeping them apart so it looked like he was trying to swim through the air. “Do you see?”
Peter said no, but his father nodded, and asked again, “How do we make it better?”
“That’s simple enough,” said Dr. Herz. “I’ll have my elixir made up in a few days, and be back with it by Friday. Mr. Carter has kindly agreed to purchase enough to supply the whole town, though I suspect if we treat Peter the other cases will resolve on their own.”
“God bless him,” his mother said blankly.
“God bless us all,” said Dr. Herz, “when we are subjected to trials, and sickness is always a trial. But what’s a trial but a test, and how else do we become perfect except through examination, and what’s perfection except the accumulation of mastered adversity?”
“We must wrap him in olibanum and meadowsweet flower,” his mother said, and Peter stopped paying attention when she and the doctor started to bicker back and forth. He watched Tercin instead, who suddenly ate his carrot in three huge bites, then leaped up to roll and tumble in the grass, turning cartwheels and somersaults and running to jump off the woodpile and turn a forward flip. It was a display of perfect health and freedom meant to gall, but it only made Peter sigh, and wonder at his brother’s malice. “It doesn’t hurt,” he’d tell him later. “You shouldn’t bother with it ’cause I don’t even notice.”
Something popped in the room — there was a noise like a whip snapping, and then a rustle like heavy curtains in a strong wind, and a stab of pain in Peter’s hip. He winced and drew up his legs. His mother opened her mouth and put a hand on his chest. She opened her mouth and spoke a question to him, and even though he couldn’t hear a word of it he could tell what it was by the shape of her lips—“Is it the pain again?”