In the quiet corner of a bustling town square, there was a little parlor, the curtains drawn in, blocking out the world outside. Inside, it was dimly lit by candles on the windowsills, and the walls were lined with mahogany shelves stacked with ancient books.
There was a little table at the center of the room, on top of a velvet carpet. There were two seats on each side, fancy antique pieces of wood that cost a fortune back in the day. They weren’t particularly comfortable, but they were expensive and the last sign of a previous generation, booming in prosperity. Madame Beausejour sat in one. The old psychic wore long dark robes, her gray hair pinned up and various jewels hanging from her neck. Her eyes were a scarily bright shade of green, and she had a mysterious air about her.
The door flung open, a stream of daylight entering. There were some bright laughs and a boy and girl, Dorothy and Lucio, stepped inside. They slid into the chairs opposite Madame Beausejour.
“Madame Beausejour,” Dorothy greeted. “Thank you for this.”
Madame Beausejour nodded. “My pleasure. Now, give me your hands.” They obliged. She studied the lines on each of their palms, then closed her eyes. Dorothy watched her closely, leaning forward in anticipation.
The old psychic looked up, a wide smile on her face. “I see. You two will have a splendid future together.”
Dorothy straightened, grinning. “Really? And we’ll survive the Plague?”
“I heard it’s really deadly,” Lucio added. “People in Brixton started to drop dead on the streets the second they started to experience symptoms. It snuck up on them. No one saw it coming.”
Madame Beausejour nodded. “It will affect your lives in many, many, ways, but not this relationship. Married in seven months. Four children: three daughters and one son. You will spend a long, happy life with one another and die peacefully in your sleep of old age. And as you know, I’m not one of those psychics who just tells you what you want to hear. I see the future, the true future, and I assure you, everything will be perfect. The Plague is nothing to worry about.”
“Aw.” Dorothy smiled, and kissed Lucio on the cheek. She reached into her pocket and handed Madame Beausejour a bag of coins. It was heavy and filled to the brim, the silver inside jingling as the psychic received it with a triumphant smile.
“Thank you, dears,” she said. “I would love to have you longer, but unfortunately, I have more customers to attend to. I’d love to have you again.”
They thanked her and exited, right as a frazzled man rushed in. He had a long scraggly beard and dark circles around his eyes, and he stank, like he hadn’t slept or bathed in days.
“Al,” Madame Beausejour said, frowning. “Is everything okay? Do you need anything?”
Al clung to the wall for balance. “I’m here for one thing only, Madame. You know it.”
She nodded. “Of course. Do you have the money?”
Al narrowed his eyes. “Do you really need my money?”
Madame Beausejour followed his eyes to Dorothy’s bag of coins, and she swallowed, concealing it in her robes. “I do, especially in hard times like these which have befallen us. With the Plague and all. Nothing in this world is free.”
“Yes, I know.” He groaned. “But I don’t have the money.”
Madame Beausejour rose from her seat. “Then I’m afraid I can’t do anything for you.”
“Please. I just want a short talk. One sentence, maybe. Then I’ll be out. I’ll repay you the second I can.”
Madame Beausejour didn’t budge. “All I can tell you, dear,” she said softly, “is that this has happened to so many people. I started this service ever since I heard about the terrible, horrifying deaths from the Plague, and I knew I had to help the struggling survivors. I have done this very task for many families, yet they have all paid me. It would not be fair to do this for free. I’m sorry.”
Al shook his head. “No. No! Please!” he cried out, voice hoarse and desperate, eyes glassy, tears threatening to spill onto his cheeks. “You understand that the Plague is tough, but you don’t understand the toughness of losing a child! Please, just this once! I just want him to know how much I love him because I never got to say it to him. The Plague struck in too fast. I blinked and then he was gone. Please. I can’t live like this!”
The door swung open and a frazzled-looking gentleman appeared, his spectacles slipping off his face. There were bloody gashes and dark bruises all over his face. He crashed inside onto the floor, his white hair clinging to his forehead from sweat.
“Doctor Jacques!” Madame Beausejour cried, hurrying over. Al followed her gaze to the newcomer, studying him intensely. He wore a large coat that seemed to weigh on his shoulders, and as he shrugged it off, hundreds of tiny glass vials fell out and came crashing down onto the floor.
“I brought the cure,” the doctor said in between gasps. “I’m being hunted.”
Madame Beausejour didn’t seem to hear him. She closed the door behind the doctor and knelt to the ground, taking a vial. Al picked one up too, eyes wide, examining it closely. Inside was a pure, uncontaminated liquid, the blackest of all blacks.
“Thank you,” she said with a smile, reaching toward the shelves and taking a secret stash of coins out from behind a book. She handed it to Jacques, who stuffed it inside his shirt pocket.
“This is a cure?” Al asked skeptically.
Jacques nodded. “The only cure to the Plague.”
“I’ve never heard of this,” Al replied, astonished. “How much are you charging for these?” he growled.
“I can only make so many,” Jacques protested, shrinking away from Al’s sudden aggression. “I can only give it to those who pay me well.”
Al leapt up and grabbed the old man by the collar, his face turning red. His whole body shook with anger. “Seriously? You don’t understand anything, do you? You don’t understand what it’s like to just stand there and watch as you lose everything and you can’t do anything about it because you’re frozen. You certainly don’t understand what it’s like to see your son die and find out it could’ve all been stopped, if only the creator of the cure hadn’t been so greedy.”
Jacques stared at the man, too stunned to speak. Everything was still for a moment.
Al charged at Jacques, moving his fist into the doctor’s chest, pinning him up against the wall, arms wrapping around his neck and throttling him, Jacques’s body shaking and eyes pleading for help.
Madame Beausejour watched in horror as the life of the doctor started to slip away. “Stop it, Al!” she cried. “Let him go and I will let you speak with your son. For free.”
Al paused for a moment, considering, then released Jacques, who collapsed to the ground, regaining his breath. The doctor reached his hand into his sleeve, pulling something out as Al trudged over to Madame Beausejour. Her hands shook, but she composed herself and led him to a seat at the table.
She instructed him to take some deep breaths, to calm himself down, as she lit a candle and took his hands.
Al started to relax, as she began to chant something softly, over and over, and he could envision his son again, in his arms, smiling, happy and healthy and alive.
That was when Jacques drove the knife into his back.
Al’s eyes shot back open, jolted back to reality, gasping as he crumpled down, the blood gushing out and soaking his shirt.
Jacques panted, withdrawing the knife and tossing it aside. It fell to the floor with a clatter.
Madame Beausejour gaped in horror. “What did you just do?”
Jacques scoffed. “What did I just do? How about what he just did? You saw him. He was going to kill me for doing my job and providing a cure for this deadly Plague! He’s mad. He’d kill you the second you did what he wanted-”
“Oh, you don’t know that,” Madame Beausejour snarled. “You don’t know that! He just misses his son, and that’s not his fault-”
“I don’t care,” Jacques spat back, and pointed to his face, then his neck, still red from Al’s grasp. “You see this? Yeah. I don’t trust men who do this.” He looked down at the body. “We’ll hide it, and no one will know anything or care enough to investigate anyways. No one cared about this man. I can see it, in the way he moves and speaks. In his eyes.”
Madame Beausejour sighed but got up, blowing out all the candles with one breath. As Jacques dragged Al’s body off to the corner, Madame Beausejour crouched down by the black vials.
“I wonder,” Jacques murmured, “how did you ever manage to afford all this?”
“I make a lot of money from my craft,” Madame Beausejour replied. “I’m a psychic. People love psychics, especially when they’re hopeless and alone and they want to talk to someone gone. Just like people love a cure to a supposedly incurable Plague.”
Jacques’s head swiveled in her direction, just as there was a loud banging at the door. The two of them leapt up, Jacques grabbing the knife from the floor and brandishing it.
“I’m busy!” Madame Beausejour called. “I’m sorry, but something came up-”
“Shut up!” Jacques snapped. ”This isn’t your customer. Customers don’t bang on the door like that.”
She trembled. “You… you said you were being hunted? Why are you being hunted?”
Jacques swallowed. “I… The King has sent an assassin after me. He’s highly trained, and I don’t know how I’ve managed to evade him so far.”
“Why does the King want you dead? You’re the only one with a cure.”
“He…” Jacques gulped. “He tested the cure on his dying daughter. It didn’t work.” He inhaled sharply. “But that was a fluke! He didn’t use it correctly, I swear! He says it killed her, but it was the Plague, and the cure isn’t perfect, obviously…”
The banging kept on going, and Madame Beausejour looked around for somewhere to hide. “What do we do?”
Jacques gripped the knife. “Hide in the back. I’ve got this.”
The door burst open. It was Lucio, Dorothy sobbing and clinging to his arm. Jacques paused midswing, as Madame Beausejour gasped. Lucio looked terrible, nothing like the doting, bright-eyed young man just an hour earlier. His face was swollen and disfigured, and there were red boils all over his skin. His veins were bright blue and seemed to pop out of his forehead and arms. Gashes were forming on his skin, ones that weren’t there a second ago. Dark blood oozed out from his orifices, and he clawed at his throat, fighting for air, but to no avail. He collapsed to the ground, as Dorothy wailed in despair.
Madame Beausejour’s breath caught in her throat. She could do nothing but stare. She had never seen anything so horrifying.
The girl looked up, her eyes moving past Jacques and his knife, and onto Madame Beausejour, her eyes accusatory, blameful. “You,” she snarled. “You lied.” Tears streamed down her face. “You didn’t see this one coming, did you?” She began to laugh, manically. “You’re a fake psychic, yet you claim to be the only real one here and charge a hundred times more and steal our money. You will pay.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Madame Beausejour challenged, eyeing the black vials on the ground. She considered helping the poor girl for a moment, but decided against it. “Kill me?”
Dorothy laughed. “I would. I would if I could.” She fell to her knees in the middle of her walk, as she shrugged off her coat, revealing a blister, starting to swell up. “But I’m too sick. You liar!” she cried, and another gruesome scene occurred, another one Madame Beausejour could not quite tear her eyes away from. The blue creeping in on her face, the veins tangling around her body like they were strangling her, the lifeless eyes, the thrashing around before everything stopped.
Jacques and Madame Beausejour stared at the three dead bodies. “Help me clean this mess up,” Madame Beausejour grumbled, but Jacques stayed still, knife out, body tense, like he was sure it wasn’t over yet. “Jacques? What’s wrong?”
“He’s coming,” Jacques whispered, eyes wide. “He’s found me. He’s finally come, to end me.” He turned to Madame Beausejour. “The King punishes liars with death, Madame. He’s going to kill me.”
“Who’s going to kill you, Jacques?”
There was a rumble outside. After what seemed like a moment of deliberation, the doctor dropped the knife and bolted out the door, running for his life.
There were blood curdling screams from the street outside. Madame Beausejour hurried to the broken-down door, peeking outside. The doctor was nowhere to be seen, his fate up in the air, but there were numerous bodies littering the ground, blue and bloody and mangled.
The Plague. It was spreading, worse than ever. This was what Lucio talked about occurring in Brixton, but never once had she thought it would get here. Just in case, she’d ordered Jacques’s so-called cures. The King must have thought it was fake, yet Madame Beausejour had faith in Jacques. He was the smartest doctor in all of the land. Maybe it would bite her in the back. All of this seemed to have turned on its head, but there was no other option.
Affording the cure was a hard journey, but her family line was filled with self-proclaimed psychics. Alas, just telling fortunes would not be enough to afford a stash of the most wanted cure ever. She had to reach deep, touch what the people really wanted, deep in their hearts, like Al.
She sank to her knees, feeling a hot lump forming on her chest, her heartbeat slowing and vision blurring. She would have to hope now, pray, that Jacques was honest, when she wasn’t. She picked up every bottle left of the cure, slipping it into her robes, the hundreds of glass vials clinking against each other and weighing her down as she limped past her parlor, past the lacerated bodies and petrified loved ones, past the homes of many families she claimed to have “connected” with their dead ones, and into the woods beyond.