The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [57]
Deirdre didn’t know who the man in the picture was supposed to be. Wilde, or perhaps Tennyson. It didn’t matter. They had all drunk absinthe, hadn’t they? Half the artists of the time had been addicted to the bitter green liqueur. They had drunk it for inspiration, to gain artistic vision. And then after that, when the visions faded, they had kept on drinking, trying to forget their commercial failures, their debtors, their persecution. Their demons.
She clenched her jaw, then downed the rest of the absinthe.
Deirdre leaned back, letting her head hit the wall behind her. Why had she come to London? She hated London. For the last three months she had been trying to forget the past. But the past was everywhere in this city, a thing constantly on display.
Not that anyone seemed to see it. Slack-eyed tourists shuffled through the Tower of London in pink-plastic sandals and Anne Boleyn T-shirts like blood had never flowed over those stones. Hansom cabs bearing giddy brides and grooms clattered down cobblestone streets where thousands of corpses had once sprawled, dead from plague and alive with flies. Cheerful gardens covered plots blasted bare of buildings and people in the Blitz. Around every corner, down every lane, from the gray Thames to Hyde Park to the slowly melting obelisk of Cleopatra’s Needle, history lingered like smoke. Didn’t anyone else see it?
Or was that the point? The past weighed so heavily on this place that it would crush people if they let it. Maybe there were really only two things anyone could do in London; maybe that was the reason she had come here. To drink. And forget.
Just over two months ago, the spontaneous immolations plaguing two continents had ceased as suddenly as they had begun. And, not long after that, so had Deirdre’s desire to be a Seeker.
How could she have been so blind to their arrogance? They thought they knew so much, that their eyes were open to mysteries that mundane people never dreamed existed. But what had their musty files, their secret surveillance networks, their vast rooms of computers revealed to them? Nothing that those same mundane people hadn’t been able to read in the morning newspaper: People were burning, and no one had the slightest fucking clue why.
There had been ripples of panic for a time. People had begun to mutter that the turning of the millennium had been only a test run, that this was the real beginning of the end. True, most of them had been cultists, tabloid devotees, militia members. Then again, some were suburbanites, avid churchgoers, telephone salesmen. In the United States, where the majority of the immolations had occurred, the government had quietly mobilized a portion of the National Guard.
Then, just when the ripples had been ready to coalesce into a tidal wave of outright fear—just when the graphs compiled by the Centers for Disease Control predicted that the number burnt was about to leap from the hundreds to the thousands—the immolations had ceased.
For a moment the world had stood still, like a ball balanced on the edge of a chasm. Then all of humanity had let out a collective sigh, and the ball had rolled back. In a week, the news had returned to the usual parade of wars, political scandals, and celebrity-lifestyle pieces. Sure, there was the occasional businessman-turned-cultist who walked around with a placard, face stained with ashes. And most days there was a small article tucked in the back of the newspaper’s A section, telling how a remote Brazilian rain forest settlement had just been discovered, burnt to the ground, or how tests had shown that the DNA of one American burn victim demonstrated affinities with some Mediterranean populations—an incongruity given the victim’s Asian ancestry. However, all in all, it seemed the world was only too happy to forget what had happened.
So why can’t you, Deirdre Falling Hawk?
For a time she had. Working on Black Death 2.0 had left her no time to eat, to sleep—to think. Theories