CHAPTER SIX: BOOJUM

- Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"

Off the coast of Long Island, less than a hundred miles from New York city, there lies an small island with pristine beaches, high rocky bluffs, thick brambly forest and deep, still ponds. Deer and other wildlife thrive here, indeed, whitetails often swim across the two-mile wide strait. It is known as Plum Island, and on the few maps which identify it, it is marked US GOVERNMENT - RESTRICTED - DANGEROUS ANIMAL DISEASES.

Since the nineteen fifties, Plum Island's Animal Disease Center had been investigating threats to US livestock industry from foreign diseases like the foot-and-mouth epidemic that ravaged Europe. After Sept. 11, 2001, its focus has shifted to biological warfare.

Dutch duck plague, West Nile fever, the Rift Valley virus and Lyme Disease have all entered the ecosystem of North America from the same geographic locus, near this laboratory studying foreign germs with demonstrated faulty containment facilities and slipshod safety practices. The USDA, which runs Plum Island, takes no responsibility for these biological catastrophes.

In 1995, the badly rotted carcass of an unidentified large, predatory animal responsible for the deaths of several people in Manhattan was shipped to Plum Island for study. FBI Special Agent Pendergast, who had been investigating the deaths, had followed the lab's progress to the best of his ability, but he'd made enemies as well as friends in the government and he was not allowed access to most of the restricted material. The animal's dissected carcass was cremated, and no tissue specimens retained. Officially, it never was given a species identification. The papers had dubbed it "the Museum Beast". The natives of its original land called it Mbwun, son of the devil, He Who Walks On All Fours.

A few years later, the street drug "glaze" was responsible for an unknown number of deaths. Cultivated and refined from the same virus that affected the creature, it gave its users phenomenal strength and reflexes and an enhanced sensorium at the expense of terrible brain damage that caused fits of killing rage and eventual deforming physical effects. The supply of plants in which the virus incubated (and which the creature apparently fed upon) were destroyed, as were most of the glaze users when the subterranean tunnels beneath Manhattan where their photophobia had compelled them to retreat into flooded.

After that, no more was heard about Mbwun or glaze until early May.

* * * * *

House and Pendergast didn't say much to each other for the next several hours. There didn't seem to be anything left to say.

The snow continued to fall in the woods around them, gradually slacking off as night fell. By the thermal spring crickets chirped and once in a while the gently steaming water was disturbed by a surfacing fish or turtle. Pendergast faded in and out of a fitful sleep as House kept a vigil, holding his head out of the water. The Devil did not return, but then, he didn't expect him to.

At one point, Pendergast awoke long enough to direct House to rummage in his clothes and take out a small survival kit. There wasn't a great deal useful left in it except for a couple of the nastiest protein bars House had ever crammed in his mouth. He hadn't realized how hungry he'd become until they began eating, but even the sauce of starvation wasn't enough to make them taste like anything besides carob-flavored spackle.

There were flares, too, but the agent forbade him to use them until he heard people or engine noise nearby. When they'd finished off their meager dinner, House grudgingly complimented Pendergast on discovering the Devil's Spittoon.

"Plants," House asked sharply. "What about plants? I thought you were after serial killers."

But Pendergast had drifted off again, or was trying very hard to persuade House that he had. It was about as convincing as an artificial funeral wreath, but he let it drop. There would be plenty of time to pry when he had the agent strapped down to the bed for the next week, tethered to oxygen and IVs and doped up on painkillers.

It was almost an anticlimax when House heard the distant human voices and a dog barking. He shouted back, waited a moment to make sure he wasn't hallucinating, then set off a flare. A few minutes later and the Devil's Spittoon was invaded by a group of searchers with a German Shepherd straining on a leash. Trampling the grass, frightening off the salamanders which had crawled out to bask on the warmed rocks, they gawped at the thermal spring and the nearly naked man floating peacefully in its warm waters.

One of the rescuers took House by the arm and helped him upright. He found himself looking into a very familiar little goateed face. "Bet you're glad to see me again," Tzerkas said, grinning like a cymbal-banging monkey.

House curled his lip. "I was hoping the Devil got you, but yeah, I am glad. Now I can strangle you personally."

"Whoa, there, grandpa. I was the one who told `em you were out here."

"Probably because someone realized you stole my ATV and left us to die."

He shrugged unconcernedly. "No, I borrowed your ATV to go get help. Not my fault you suckers wandered off into the woods. You must have frostbite on the frontal lobes."

House bent down and asked in a hoarse whisper, "So how'd the Devil get my cane?"

Tzerkas's eyes widened, and his grin warped into something closer than a grimace. It was like watching clay assume form under an artist's hands. "You saw it too?"

Further conversation was cut off by the arrival of a Medivac chopper setting down in a nearby clearing. The rescuers strapped Pendergast to a backboard and wrapped him up in a foil-lined blanket to retain body heat. Tzerkas, claiming exhaustion, scrambled aboard too. House would have dearly loved to interrogate him further, but the noise of the engine and rotors precluded conversation. He settled for glaring at him. Tzerkas smiled back beatifically.

The trip was short, setting them down near the road where several cop cars, fire rescue trucks, ambulances, and one news van waited. It was quite a little circus.

When House asked why they weren't getting airborne chauffer service all the way back to the hospital, one of the search and rescue workers said, "We need to free up the chopper for non emergency cases. You guys weren't the only nut jobs hunting the Jersey Devil."

"We weren't?" he asked, too surprised to correct her.

"Are you kidding? How long have you been out there?"

"Since early this morning."

"Then you must've escaped all the plague excitement."

"Dengue?"

She looked at him astutely. "Ah, you must be the missing Doctor House. You've got some people very worried about you back at Princeton-Plainsboro. Funny, from the description they gave us I was expecting a feeble old geezer tottering around in a senile haze."

"They love me there," he said. One of the other rescue workers offered him a cup of coffee. He took one for Pendergast, too.

"I guess it's a good thing that other guy had you with him, though," she said. "How the hell did you two find that thermal spring? I've been doing S&R out in the Barrens for years and I've never even seen it on a map."

"Ask sleeping beauty," he said, jerking a thumb at the ambulance where the emergency medical techs were working on Pendergast. "So, what`s going on with the dengue?"

"Don't worry about it, doc. The TV guys are blowing things all out of proportion as usual. Hey, ambulance is about to leave. You need a hand getting in?"

She opened the back door to the same ambulance that they'd loaded Pendergast into. Tzerkas ducked under the woman's outstretched arm and peered into the back of the ambulance. "Wait! Pandergloss, or whatever your name is. Did you find the monster?"

Before House could answer, Pendergast braced himself up on one arm. "No," he said firmly. "No monsters whatsoever."

The young man stared at Pendergast, then turned away with a disgusted, scornful motion and was shooed away by one of the police officers, none other than Sheriff Randall. Ignoring House, he pulled himself up on the fender and addressed the FBI agent.

"Who was it, Pendergast? Was it the guy who killed Kittredge?"

"I fear so."

"Dammit. God dammit," Randall said. "Bad enough I'm gonna be combing gun-toting loonies and frozen devil hunters out of the woods for the next month. Now I got a murderer to worry about?"

"If I may make a suggestion?" Pendergast coughed, then patted the blood on his lips away with a square of gauze. "One of your fine young officers informed me that Kittredge had fired at an actor wearing a monster suit shortly before he went missing. I would hazard that if the unknown suspect witnessed this, he might have perceived Kittredge as a threat to his own life. As, in fact, he assumed the doctor and myself to be also. We weren't in jeopardy until he found us on what he considered his own property, and I happened to be holding a small digital camera he might have mistaken for a weapon."

"I don't care if it was self defense, he's gonna be brought in and put on trial. This is America. There are laws."

Pendergast looked pained. "Delay much longer, and there will be no one to put on trial. The doctor informs me the unknown subject is dying of dengue fever. Isn't that right, Dr. House?"

House, who had dropped back to eavesdrop from a safe distance, started and then nodded. "I give him another day or two, tops, then it's pushing up daisies."

With a hand from Randall, House heaved himself up into the back of the ambulance. The EMTs had started a saline IV on Pendergast and injected him with nifedipine to dilate the blood vessels in his extremities and counteract some of the effects of frostbite. He handed Pendergast his coffee. Caffeine was a diuretic and a vasoconstrictor, which wouldn't help the frostbite, but getting warm liquid into his body core balanced out the drawbacks. The agent wrapped his hands around the Styrofoam cup gratefully but made no motion to bring it to his mouth.

"They found out what killed the hunter," House said, taking a scalding gulp from his own cup. "You'll never believe it. Apparently, the guy had spilled a bottle of deer attractant on his clothes. It's a mix of hormones, scent gland extract, that sort of fun stuff. The thing that attacked him was a just a whitetail buck enraged by the scent of what he thought was another buck in his territory. It gored him and slashed his abdomen open with its hooves. The wife must have seen it standing on its hind legs to attack. Hell, anyone seeing their husband shredded to pieces in front of their eyes is not going to be a reliable witness."

Pendergast's cracked lips skinned back from his teeth and he shuddered, making a strangled, staccato little coughing sound. After a moment, House realized he was laughing.

"Yeah, hah-hah. We almost both got popsicle-ized because you thought the Jersey Devil killed that guy, you lunatic!"

"Actually, I never did think that, doctor. I'm well aware that even a single kick from a deer can lay open flesh to bone. Their hooves are quite sharp, and the type of injury inflicted is not unfamiliar to me. Only three things seemed unusual at the crime scene - the presence of a very unseasonable mosquito, the smell of sulfur, and the fact that the buck was in rut at all."

House stared at him.

Blithely, Pendergast continued. "By this time of year, whitetail bucks should have shed their antlers. This is triggered by lowering temperatures, changing amounts of sunlight, and scarcity of food, but for some reason this buck was in an out of season state of mating aggression. Since the amount of sunlight could obviously not be a factor, it stood to reason the animal's biorhythms were being thrown off by other environmental factors. While examining its tracks I noticed a slight whiff of sulfur. I didn't understand at the time, and was distracted by the mosquito. Unfortunately, at that juncture my undignified collapse interrupted the investigation."

"You knew you had dengue before you even got to the hospital, didn't you?"

He inclined his head in agreement. "I had been in the vicinity several days already. A. aegypti is a day-biting mosquito, and I must have been infected on the first day. I had hoped the very remote chance of contracting dengue in New Jersey at this time of year would convince you I had a bacterial infection with a rash, as it did the other doctors. You proved a little too perceptive."

"Thanks?"

Pendergast raised the coffee to his mouth. The steam wreathed his face. "At any rate, the confirmation of my suspicion of dengue helped convince me I was looking for a thermal spring. I did try to throw you off with the witchcraft papers . . . again, I underestimated you. You came to the same conclusion I did. Mea culpa. I certainly did not expect you to follow me out into the barrens merely to win an argument."

"Yeah, well, remember when you asked me why I do what I do? It's simple. I like the way people expect me to be brilliant as much as I like amazing people with my brilliance. It's how I get a feel-good buzz, Snowflake."

One of the EMTs climbed in beside them and closed the door, and the ambulance took off for Princeton-Plainsboro.

* * * * *

The mosquitoes were hatching, both on the island and in the lab. Poppy seed sized eggs in Plexiglas containers had been injected with the transposon Hermes (or Minos, mariner, or piggyBac) carrying the chimeric gene and marker red-eye gene. Incubated in shallow dishes of warm water, they would emerge, be lovingly fed blood meals, mated, and their offspring would be inspected for the telltale red eyes.

The transgenic experiment was designed to boost the mosquitoes' immune system and make it resistant to the diseases it would otherwise pass on. Red eyes are a marker for a designer gene which heightens the production of the immune protein defensin. The idea was that they would be deliberately released into the environment, breed with wild populations and eventually displace them. In the meantime, they were being infected in the lab with various diseases, including dengue, to test their inherited immunity.

So far, the project had been kept very hush-hush for fear of public reaction to transgenic mosquitoes being set loose. There were already protests against genetically modified food and cloned livestock by a public unaware of how much modified food it was already consuming. The scientists involved tend to scoff at layman fears and despaired of their work being understood and appreciated by Joe Six Pack.

They feared a situation similar to the one in Africa when the World Health Organization were going to release male mosquitoes sterilized by radiation to breed fruitlessly with wild females, after which the females would die without laying fertilized eggs. Villagers thought it was a plot to sterilize them via mosquito bite and drove the health workers off at gunpoint.

So when the first human cases of dengue began showing up on Long Island, Plum Island scientists did not jump to claim responsibility. Wealthy tourists were returning home for their winter retreats in tropical countries, and it was expected they should bring back with them fevers and angry tummies.

Most of the cases were caught early, and although the antibiotics proscribed by their personal and emergency room doctors did no good, they also did no harm. Slowly, the unidentified viral disease was passed from one person to another. Fall came, and the wild mosquitoes began to die off. As they did, so did the mystery virus.

Did a wild mosquito get in or a lab specimen escape? Was a dose of experimental vaccine contaminated with live virus? Did it perhaps infect a staff member who simply strolled out the door unknowingly becoming a walking disease vector? Afterwards, no one will be able to figure out how, exactly, the disease escaped the confines of the lab.

Except in a limited geographic area in New Jersey. Somehow, the mosquitoes - and the disease - managed to survive long after the cold had killed off all the others. And Agent Pendergast worried the mosquitoes may have carried something out with them far more insidious than a mere tropical fever.

* * * * *

He had ordered in expensive food from restaurants out of state, insisted on his own sheets and pajamas which he sent out to be dry cleaned every day, smelled up the rest of the floor with his scented candles, indulged himself with so much candy it was amazing he remained as thin as he was, had an apothecary's collection of various skin creams, hair oils, and other sundry unguents. But Pendergast stay at the hospital was peculiarly isolated.

Tellingly, House saw no flower arrangements, no cards ordering him to get well soon, no porcelain cherubs or teddy bears from the gift shop conveniently located in the main lobby. He finally broke down and bought Pendergast the most egregiously hideous tchotchke the shop offered, a huge stuffed purple lizard with googly eyes, a dangling red felt tongue and a stethoscope.

The agent cradled Dr. Lizardo on his lap now as a grim man pushed his wheelchair to the entrance. Still a bit wan and tired, Pendergast was otherwise polished to his usual lapidary perfection. There seemed to be the general whispered impression among the staff that he was a celebrity incognito or someone politically important's relative, and as he was rolled down the halls he garnered his fair share of frankly desirous glances from some of the nurses. House would never have believed anyone could appear dignified in a wheelchair, but there you go. If sex appeal were pheromones, House mused, Pendergast would reek like a fire in a tire yard.

He stepped into the path of the wheelchair, sticking the tip of his cane in the spokes so it came to an abrupt stop. The man pushing it glared as if he would`ve preferred to simply run him down.

"Pendergast? A word?"

"Delighted, Doctor House," Pendergast said with prevaricating sweetness. "Proctor, would you leave us alone for a moment?"

The man parked Pendergast inside House's office, then went outside to wait, glancing significantly at his watch.

"I did some reading while you were busy soaking your insurance company," House began without preamble. Although he would never admit, the Devil had gotten its hooks into him pretty bad. "I'm convinced it wasn't dengue or any other brain inflammation-causing virus that killed those hogs and the hexed kids, Pendergast. I think that's all, ah, hogwash."

Officially, the Jersey Devil sighting had been blamed on encephalitis-fueled hallucinations. Kittredge, delusional, had fallen and broken his neck. Randall didn't seem inclined to investigate more closely that that, but House knew something more of the truth and remained unsatisfied.

Pendergast leaned forward, pressing his fingertips into a steeple. "Yes?"

"It was chronic mercury poisoning. Makes a lot more sense than a tiny colony of dengue-bearing mosquitoes surviving here for hundreds of years. And there were plenty of details of the old account that didn't match up, if you assume they were reported accurately. The onset was subacute, and even for a sparse population the outbreak was too limited geographically. And Leeds . . . the other name for the Jersey Devil is the Leeds Devil." House glanced over at his whiteboard, and Pendergast followed his gaze.

"Mother Leeds should have been showing symptoms, too - and she did. No one would think failing vision, uncoordinated movements, or slurred speech were unusual in a very elderly woman, and any mental impairment she evidenced was either chalked up to senility or her being a `witch'. That devil's mark was probably a tumor. But there's one symptom that connects them."

"The Devil himself."

"Her child. Who was suffering from birth defects due to mercury poisoning."

Pendergast tilted his head inquiringly, one peaked eyebrow quirked high.

"The hogs and Mother Leeds were drinking the water from the hot spring, and hot springs are known for carrying dissolved minerals. Some goiterous morons think they have healing properties. In fact, they're more dangerous because of minerals in suspension, in this case mercury. It caused severe birth defects in Leeds's son, and probably lots of others. The midwife knew about this, too, the other one who confessed to witchcraft. She was probably a bit simple herself, or credulous, or maybe she'd suffered from neurological effects of mercury poisoning as well."

"I can see that," Pendergast said. "If all the children she were delivering exhibited to some degree or another the devil's mark, she might very well have felt responsible in a way she would have struggled to define."

"Too bad we don't know more about Leeds. Must have been an unusual old biddy. We know one thing, she was incredibly devoted to her son."

"Ironic," Pendergast said quietly. His long fingers toyed with the stuffed lizard`s frill. "Considering most versions of the legend have Mother Leeds' sins directly responsible for the Devil's appearance."

"Well, history is written by the winners, and legends are passed down by the ignorant masses."

"Then perhaps she had a proprietary interest in other children born with deformities and mental impairments, feeling they deserved to be protected as she had protected her son? It's all conjecture, but imagine if she persuaded the midwife to save the afflicted children, perhaps bring them to her. She might have inadvertently formed a community of them."

"Take mercury poisoning, add some genetic damage from that and a little duplication of mutant genes due to inbreeding, and you have a tiny colony of devils, concentrating their deformities with every generation, fueling the legend." House scratched his chin. "So what were you really looking for, Pendergast? Why would an FBI agent care about dengue carrying mosquitoes? Isn't that something the CDC should take care of?"

"Always direct and to the point. I admire that. No, the late Agent Kittredge was correct, actually. I was in fact looking for killers I believe had formerly been operating in New York City. The conditions at the thermal spring would have created near-perfect growing conditions for the plant, a species of water lily, and the drastic physical changes caused by use of the drug might have spurred the spate of Devil sightings. Junkies will go to incredible lengths to satisfy their cravings, doctor, as I`m sure you know."

House bristled, wondering if this was a deliberate insult.

Oblivious, or perhaps just not caring, Pendergast added, "Instead, I find a very different and completely unrelated set of circumstances."

"Drastic physical changes? What are we talking about here?"

The agent said nothing, merely toying with the lizard.

"I should know. I might be on the front lines of identifying this if your addict killers are here. Hell, I may be the only one who could help you when everyone else is chasing butterflies into traffic!"

"They are not," he said. "I'm certain of it. I would go so far as to stake my good name on it."

"I don't play penny ante poker, Pendergast. What was that you said once about certainty being absurd?"

"Something it would do you well to remember, Doctor House." Pendergast's mouth stretched out in a way that did not quite pass for a smile. Settling the stuffed lizard comfortably in his lap, he gestured for his man to come and wheel him into the hallway and out the door.

*end*