Night Illuminated

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From Flies to Wanton Boys: Book Four of the Night's Dream Series. Spoilers below.

The press called it the Spanish Flu because that was the only country not censoring their press as the Great War geared up. Those in power believed that the truth that this flu afflicted every populated continent would catastrophically lower morale, already in short supply. Spain was neutral in the war and did not care about propaganda. They cared only that Alfonso XIII, their king, suffered from the flu and very nearly died from it. They had nothing to hide and, because they reported honestly, they were the recipients of maligning.

The flu tipped the balance of power in the war toward the Allied forces. In some platoons, it killed more men than fighting, as many as eight in ten.

It reached Red Hook in the middle of March 1918. A more virulent strain attacked Paris, Sierra Leone, and Berlin by August. Some claimed it was a sign of the End Times, a concept easier to believe with war raging abroad. The world needed only a resounding famine to have a complete set of the Horsemen.

Few people would have been aware enough to realize that the daemons died off by the thousands. It was their nature then to keep to themselves, if possible, in what might be termed ghettos. The Norse did not mix with the Yoruba. Satyrs would not willingly rub shoulders with leprechauns. The factions blamed one another, but it became all too obvious that it spared no group from agony and near extinction. Those who sought to flee its effects only assured that the plague spread throughout this world, and those below who had erstwhile dwelt too close to the surface.

It is from the daemons that the virus took on its most lethal aspect, the over-excitement of the immune system. The more fortunate and purest, those first infected, blinked out of existence. For the rest, this curse dragged them down, stealing away the life of beings made to be deathless aspects of their gods.

The symptoms in daemons mimicked that in humans: intense fever, hemorrhaging from mucus membranes, debilitating weakness. Humans blamed it on the illnesses they knew best: dengue fever, cholera, and typhoid. It was hard to mistake an infected person, as they would bleed from the nose, stomach, mouth. Few could remember a more brutal illness in a time barely removed from massive infant mortality being the price of admission to life. Whereas most flu epidemics claim the very young and very old, the flu of 1918 slew those who seemed healthiest, those in their teens and early twenties. In the end, it slew thirty million. Some claimed that should its mathematical progression have persisted, there would have ceased to be a civilization to save.

Few humans believed that this flu could have proved so fatal, for the century began with science triumphing over one malady after another. A reverend Billy Sunday hit the closest to the truth of the flu, claiming that the Purging originated in sin, though he doomed his parishioners by assuring them that they could pray it away.

Steam shovels gouged mass graves. Death carts roamed major cities. Those patients who made it to a doctor before their deaths were preemptively fitted with toe tags. The government banned all public gatherings. Throughout the nation, sprung up signs reading "This street is quarantined, do not stop."

Where medical science failed, people futilely attempted folk remedies, wearing mothballs around their necks or swallowing turpentine-infused sugar cubes. Orphanages stopped feeding the sick, seeing it as a waste of food on those who would only die. Children roamed the hungry streets, their parents lost to the flu. One father slit the throats of his wife and children, reasoning that he would cure them his way. There were several reports of health inspectors shooting those who would not wear masks.

By the time it receded, three percent of all humans and easily ninety-five percent of pure daemons had died, unaware of the origins of the plague.

On the thirteenth of May in 1917, in a field in Portugal, a young girl named Lucia Santos, along with her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, tended sheep. The most susceptible of the three, Lucia was the first to see a vision of the Virgin Mary brighter than the sun.

They gathered pilgrims. One day, to prove themselves, they made the sun dance. People reported having seen it dozens of miles away. Others there say the sun did not dance, just radiated indescribable colors. Some, though confident believers, saw nothing.

The visions returned on the thirteenth of June and July. The Virgin demanded sacrifices. She preferred ritual flagellation using stinging nettles, though she also forced the children to abstain from drinking water to bring them closer to death. To keep up the ruse, she insisted that the children repeat the rosary as many times as they could stand, consuming their minds as they were led into a delirium.

Their story became too compelling for those suffering from the effects of the first World War. Even when a provincial administrator jailed the three children to forestall their continued and potentially political disruption, their acolytes came for them. When the administrator threatened to boil them in oil if they did not confess their secrets, the children remained far more terrified of a glowing woman than a frustrated bureaucrat.

In their cells in Fatima, the three saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, who told them three secrets.

The first was a vision of Hell, of fire and mortification of the flesh. This secret was a ruse to gain the children's trust, to terrify them into sharing the secrets as prescribed. There was a grain of truth, the awareness that the perpetrator knew the abomination she was about to set forth into the world even in this secret. The vision talked of both daemons - described as frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent like the energy of the Purging itself-and souls in human form. Though she meant to kill the daemons, she accepted that humans would burn with them. So ghastly this first vision was that the children said they would have died of terror had they not clung to the illusion of the Virgin.

The second secret was how to save souls from Hell and turn the world into Roman Catholics. Having seen this fabrication of a realm, the vision told the children to instill a singular devotion to their god in the world. There would be a war, but the children could bring peace if they did as demanded. God would punish the world with a "night illuminated by an unknown light" for crimes against the Church if they did not. To forestall this atrocity, the vision ordered the whole of Russia consecrated to Roman Catholicism, to mime the requisite rituals. Russia instead fell to Communism and atheism, possibly from sheer contrariness.

Lucia's cousins both fell to the Purging in reward for this. They brought the sickness into this world and could not survive the translation, though the Pope venerated both. Jacinta, when disinterred in 1935 and again in 1951, was incorruptible, the full effects of the Purging too great for even bacteria to bother with her. Francisco, however, was dust.

The third secret-one so terrifying as to reduce those who saw it to tears, to blanch utterly, to scream-remained under lock and key for decades. Once Lucia died, it was unceremoniously revealed that an attempt would be made on the life of the sitting Pope. This passed with little fanfare. It was plain that the revelation of the third secret was a lie, no matter many believers assume it to be the gospel truth in a literal way.

The true third secret was this: God is not great or unique. However, He will be, and untold millions will die to make this happen.