Free The Pesthouse by Jim Crace Page A

would miss for a day or two and then forget. All that mattered for the moment was the state of Ferrytown and her impatience for the sound of dogs and cocks.
    What first disquieted them, when they emerged below the hill from the thicket of junipers, laurels and scrub oaks that flourished on the lower slopes, was the smell — sour milk and mushroom, earthy, reasty and metallic. It was an unfamiliar smell that they recognized but could not name. It was as if this new experience was one that life itself had stored for them. Now from the access path they could see the mules and horses in the tetherings, not resting and expecting rain as Margaret had imagined, or at least hoped, but spread out and gaping, alarming and unambiguous, cold as stones. They were seemingly untouched, with no wounds except the fresh ones inflicted by the crows and jays and turkey vultures that had already abandoned the hills to gather on their bodies. Dead animals, still picketed.
    But their alarm was manageable until Franklin spotted what he did not mistake for long as dead, piebald goats. Jackson's coat was spread out in the middle of the tetherings beside a dead mule. There was no confusing its color and its length and who its owner was. No two mothers in the world could stitch together such a piece. The body underneath seemed small, but Franklin was sure, as he stumbled forward with Margaret bouncing on his back, that he'd discover no one else but his brother, dead drunk, he hoped, and not just dead. But the body rolled too readily as he pulled at the coat. Too light, too small. A boy. He tumbled out of the goatskins as easily and weightlessly as a dog might be rolled out of its blanket. Franklin was relieved and horrified all at once. 'Who's this?'
    Margaret had not seen, at first, what had induced such panic in her porter. She could barely see over his shoulder and had to stretch her neck to discover what had caused his sudden stumbling and his cry of alarm. She saw the puzzling coat in Franklin's hand. She was puzzled even more when he began to shake its creases out and smell the fabric. 'It's Jackson's coat,' he said. The brother's name. Then Margaret spotted the body at Franklin's feet and was in shock herself. This bundle was a neighbor's son, the nightwatch boy called Nash, a boy she'd known very well since he'd been a baby and she, barely out of her teens, had been his little nurse. 'What's happened — let me see him.'
    She was too firmly trapped to his back to release quickly, so Franklin kneeled down by the side of the body, twisting so that she could see it clearly. Already it was smelling a little, like cured bacon. There wasn't any blood on the earth or on the coat. No wounds. No sign of blows or bruises.
    'There's not a mark on him,' Franklin said. 'Just look at those.' He lifted his chin to indicate the carcasses of mules, horses and donkeys. There was, as well, a single dog. Franklin closed the boy's eyes, then cleaned his fingers in the soil. 'There's not a mark on him,' he said again.
    'There's something else,' said Margaret. She had to concentrate to hit upon the oddity. She was not familiar with human corpses. But still it came to her, a chilling absence. 'No flies. These tetherings are always full of flies. They love the horses. But there's not a single one. Can you see one?' Both she and Franklin put their hands across their mouths and stepped away. They held their breath. No flies.
    So Margaret's premonition had been correct: here was pestilence, or flux of some new sort, that did not care if you were man or fly or horse or mule or (now that they were hurrying into Ferrytown and discovering more beastly cadavers at every step) chicken or hog or dog or rabbit. The ground outside the stockades was scattered with animals. Even before they found the second human victim, Margaret had begun to blame herself. Who else? She'd been the first to host this current flux — so maybe she had passed it on to her grandpa and he'd brought it