Dr. Francis Tumblety's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Francis sat at his desk in the private examination room and opened the journal to the earliest pages. His hand throbbed where the marks had spread across his palm. He turned past diagrams of club feet and twisted spines, past sketches of tumors hidden beneath silk shirts. Then he found it. A page dated four years earlier, drawn at the old monument where the Freemasons used to hold their private examinations before the lodge moved downtown. The stone building with its carved medical diagrams had been abandoned for years, but he remembered standing there with his first high-paying patient, documenting the branching marks that spread from wrist to fingertips. The illustration showed the exact same pattern now growing across his own skin. Francis set the journal down and pulled the iridescent flower from his coat pocket. He placed it beside the old drawing. The petals shimmered and cast colored light across the page, and the lines in the illustration seemed to pulse in response. He had documented this deformity once before. The patient had paid him three years' wages to forget what he'd seen, to burn the page, to never speak of it again. Francis had taken the money and lied. He turned to the lodge's directory — a thick volume bound in decorated leather and gilt edges that listed every member by name, rank, and medical history. The book sat on every examining table in every Freemason facility, a record of their brotherhood. Francis flipped through the pages until he found the entry. The patient's name was still there, marked with a small notation in red ink: deceased, six months ago. The deformity had killed him. Francis stared at the entry and felt the marks on his palm burn. He had been paid to forget, but he had kept the evidence. Now the evidence was spreading through his own flesh. He closed the directory and looked at his journal again. The old illustration and the new sketches matched perfectly. The flower sat between them, glowing faintly in the dim light. Francis picked up his pen and wrote a single line beneath the original drawing: "Pattern confirmed. Source identified. Immunity required before disclosure." He had spent four years holding this secret, waiting for the right moment to spend it. Now the flower had made him part of the pattern he'd documented. The leverage he'd kept had become the proof of his own infection, and the only way forward was to offer it up — but only on his terms.