Esmée Witsel

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I had expected guards around the city bars, possibly a forced turnaround. My pockets carry three times the tolls, just in case I need to bribe the vassals. Yet, I enter without anyone's notice. Guards, lords and peasants all run around moving provisions, either desperate for some last-moment trading, or in preparation for reaching loved ones. I move through the chaos with ease, as everyone rushes in big constellations around each other.
The walk has been long; I have come on foot, just to be safe. Not that I had much of a choice in the matter. The time for offering strangers a lift on your carriage is over. Given the grave faces, I assume the news has spread that the pestilence is only five villages away and that it has only taken a week for that entire village to fall. I am determined not to let it affect my cheer. I have a good feeling about my upcoming tryst. A real doctor is going to see the contraption that has been close to my chest this past journey. As I finally walk a path designed for walking, I fantasise about all of that being over soon.
I have been conducting experiments with some novel kind of detector, one that can reveal the death that hides within the pestis. It looks similar to a healer's mask, but instead of offering aerial protection, there hides a long lens; a magnifying glass pointing towards a tiny opening at the tip of the beak. Behind this lens lies no peering eyes, but a whole construction of tiny gears, in which yarn delicately spins. It sees what the lens is showing, and then weaves a replica. All I needed was a yarn that could recognise when the pestis is spun, and then, through some sort of signal, would warn whoever was wearing the mask. I have not figured that part out yet. But once I do... Though I couldn’t prevent sickness that had already fallen, we might actually be able to change our fate. It’s what keeps my heart singing at night.
Luckily, one of my regular clients and dear friend mentioned my contraption to their cousin, the doctor that I am about to meet. After telling her about my invention, she was curious to see it and optimistic that she could help me out.
It doesn’t take long to find the doctor. I guess in these times, everyone makes sure to get familiar with where the healers occupy their nights. 

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Though hesitant in giving directions to a traveller, I can tell it isn’t worth their while to chase newcomers away, so they go on their business as soon as they can. It is early evening when I find the doctor's house. The sun waxes old, and the heat of the day is letting go of the town, taking the stank with it. Warm animal waste reeks all around me. I am glad to find the doctor's house to be of brick, for alleviation on my eyes and lungs will come soon. The house of my town's doctor is made of the usual timber with a thatched roof, thus reeking inside and out.
When I open the door, my eyes wander around the shop. Usually, the products of a doctor's shop are of medicine; however, this room was covered in strange inventions. My heart relaxes; the tiredness in my legs lifts. My friend is worth her word. You may wonder why I travelled all this way, when there is already a doctor residing in my hometown; it isn’t merely a doctor I am seeking after; I seek an inventor like mine. 

Nothing could have prepared me for this. The walls, the cupboards, the tables, even the floor, are covered with moving clocks, gears and feathers -  it is an entrancing sight. I am startled as one of them moves.
  'Is that the mask?’
The doctor appears to me fully. She is a small lady, and doesn't give me much time to observe her further.
  ‘Oh, well, yes! Hello, lovely to meet you, you must be the doctor, cousin of my friend?
She speaks quickly. ‘Yes, oh, of course, very lovely to meet you, thank you for coming over.’ She pauses as if her conversing cogs were remembering which gear to shift into. ‘Tea?’
  ‘That would be lovely.’
She walks off into a little side room and comes back with a tea bag in her mouth and a teapot and mug in her hands. She manoeuvres through the clutter with ease.
  ‘Did the journey treat you well?’ She takes the little bag out of her mouth and starts dipping it in the pot.
  ‘Ah, yes, it went all fine, thank you for asking. Besides the crowded cities, which I tried to avoid, I didn’t come across anyone who had fallen ill.”
  ‘We have been lucky so far.’
  ‘Have you treated any yet?’
  ‘Oh yes, many. Always travellers. I isolate them in the stables. I make one trip a day, two if there is another traveller. Everyone who arrives in the town gets sent through me.’ She points at a bell that is next to the door, but I don't see anything that could make the bell ring. However, she doesn’t explain it. ‘I am surprised to see you got here on your own.’
  ‘I was wearing my mask the moment I reached town. Maybe they thought I was a doctor.’
  ‘No.. I fear people have realised they are too tired and hungry to fight what’s to come and are putting their efforts elsewhere.”
I glance over the wall. Where I see a bunch of feathers shaped like a wing, moving in circles.
  ‘May I ask, what is this rotating machine?’
  ‘Oh, well, that is the wing of a redpoll. I attached it to a motor. The sensors in the hairs pick up the temperature, which is then sent to the motor itself. The warmer it is, the faster it rotates.’
  ‘Wow! That is amazing. I would have never thought of using feathers directly!’
The doctor remembers she is holding a pot of tea and pours me a cup, then finds another mug somewhere between some papers, in which she pours some for herself as well.
  ‘So tell me, what inspired you to make this particular mask?’
  ‘Well, once a month, when I take the journey up to the farm to retrieve wool for our wealthier customers, I have to make my way to the city bars, and when I reach the staithes on the river, I always pass this particular flock of magpies. One day, I noticed that one of them was repeating what it saw. A little squirrel was moving up and down to try and reach this berry, and the magpie was repeating its movement. I was astonished. I started keeping my eye on it, and since then I have noticed they all do it. So I collected feathers every time I made the trip to see if I could turn it into yarn. Once I found out that the down feathers, the softer, fluffier of the feathers, were remarkably easier to turn into yarn than the regular ones, I was able to start my experimentations. After that it all went rather fast.’
  ‘Brilliant! Can I see?’
  ‘Of course, yes!’
I take the mask out of the bag and hand it to the doctor, who immediately inspects it from the inside by opening the upper beak all the way. ‘Ah, yes, yes.’ I point at the copper lens, and am about to explain the inner workings when she walks out of the shop into the back, still muttering. I am not sure if I should follow her, but then she comes back with a little vial.
  ‘Could you hand me that?’ she asks.
On top of a pile of strange contraptions, she points at something I also haven't seen before. It is a motor with feathers on it as well, four large ones in kind of a cross, and they are rotating even though there was no wind, nor lightning.
The doctor opens up the hazardous-looking vial, and I take a step back. She points at the wall behind me whilst she slips on her mask. I moved to the wall and quickly put one on myself.
She holds the vial in front of the mask and puts the wind machine in front of it as well. I finally understand what she is doing. Bacterial air was being moved up the mask.
Immediately, the yarn starts to do her thing, moving cogs and wheels, spinning away, until a shape emerges.
  I am relieved to see it work after the long journey and hopeful that the doctor can help me. She continues inspecting the gears.  ‘So I assume the problem is, you have the shape, but you don’t have a yarn that can recognise if it is harmful or not, right?’
  'Yes! Exactly. I have attached glasses to the beak, but I need something to activate a signal of some sort.’
  ‘Hm, yes.’
  The doctor goes into a cabinet with hundreds of little drawers that I haven't even noticed before. She takes a moment to find the one she is looking for.
  ‘Ah.’ She grabs a wooden spindle with some kind of yarn wrapped around.
  ‘The family of Paradisaeidae. This little one came all the way from Australia and glows in the dark. I think if we spin this together with your other yarn, we might be able to get a reaction when the pestis is found.’
  ‘Really? But neither bird possesses the ability to recognise pestis. And wouldn’t the bird need UV light to be activated?’
  ‘Yes! But that is why we also spin the yarn with this.’
The doctor opens her hand, which already holds another spindle. ‘This yarn,’ she pauses, ‘comes from a little side project of mine, which I can show you later.
  ‘No way!’
  ‘Did my cousin tell me correctly that you are a spinner?’
  ‘Yes, I am!’
  ‘Well, you ply these three together whilst I continue my work in the back, yes?’
  ‘Of course!’
    ‘Excellent. I will see you momentarily.’
She is gone as swiftly as she appeared. I look around the room in search of a spinning wheel, which I find sideways on a table, buried underneath all sorts of contraptions. I gently move some long beak with a rounded piece of glass around the tip. Carefully, I place it on the floor and take a mental note not to step on it when I am done.
I find a chair and the three yarns held before me: the magpie, the Australian and the doctor’s one of mystery. It doesn't look like any birds’ yarn to me. It is a lot stronger. It takes me a moment to get myself going. It is one of those moments where the much-long-anticipated excitement turns to paralysis. For the first time, I feel the stakes dawn on me. Once I start, I will be able to fail. I’ll have to face that chain that makes entire towns perish in droves. I close my eyes and squeeze my hands, no reason to succumb to one's fate before trying. Time to get to work.

Plying is all about storing and releasing energy, then finding the perfect balance. Just by touch, I feel that my magpie is spun too thick and too tight to be in balance with the doctor’s yarn. So the first step is to respin the magpie into a single strand. After that, it is an exercise to find the perfect amount of twist per strand that balances out a yarn in such a way that when I flick the spindle into motion, physics can take the lead. Then, intuitively, I can put as much twist in the yarn as needed. I am still without a clue on how I would have coped with these intricate and fragile strands without my years of being a spinner. I hope for this happenstance to mean fate is by my side.
After the three yarns are spun around this tiny piece of wood called a bobbin,  the moment comes to place it in the beak. Here I have carved a snug compartment for the bobbin to lie in. Two strands come off it, and follow both sides of the beak. By hand and with needle, I have to take the yarn and slide it through all the gears so the hooks can pull and push on the yarn, to spin its desired shape. This is the part that makes my shoulders ache. I force little breaks in between, since the mistakes of a weary mind take more time than a rested one. In those moments I find myself thinking about the doctor, and her strange character. The last step is to attach the tail end of the yarn up and around the insides of the glasses. The whole process must have taken a couple of hours.

Befitting the doctor, she comes back precisely when I am done.
  ‘Okay, let's see what you’ve got!’ she says. This time she doesn't grab a vial, but makes a swab of the coat she was wearing earlier. We put on our masks, which I almost forgot, excited as I am. We start the process again. The wind machine ushes the air in the mask. First, the cogs start turning slowly, and the yarn begins to spin its shape. Intricate little corners, pushing and pulling, always in motion, until it is done. A replica of the pestis; oval-shaped, with little strands constantly moving, almost as alive as the source itself. This time, however, it starts to light up. The copy of the pestis glows, and this light travels up the thread until it reaches the yarn around the glasses, making them illuminate with a soft light. The eyes glow as if the pestis itself is a living being behind them.
  'We did it!’ I shout.
  ‘We did at that!’ She grabs the coat and puts it safely away, taking off her gloves as well.
I blurt out, ‘I must know what yarn you used!’
  ‘Of course. Well, it’s me!’
I look at her questionably.
  ‘The yarn! It’s all from me.’
She sits down with a sigh as she finds her cold tea. ‘I know what  the pestis looks like under a microscope, I know each and every shape, line and corner by heart. So only I can produce the right yarn.’
I was astonished. Why had no one ever thought of that?
  ‘That is wonderful.’
Then a dread comes over me.
I can’t breed yarn from the doctor like the farm. I’d be too limited to her hair growth, which she obviously needs for herself. A widespread mask can never reach the population.
She seems to recognise the dread on my face without surprise.
  ‘Ah, well, it’s okay! You managed to create a wonderful machine. I can donate you some strands, so you can still use them for yourself.'
I am grateful, but can’t shake this feeling now that it has seeped into me. It is like this neatly packed liquid of despair got punctured with a needle, and now that it has, it could roam through and through. However, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, so whilst my limbs try not to drown, I humbly accept her offer.
She seems empathetic to my cause and feels like cheering me up.
  ‘Let me show you something.’

She walks into the mysterious door that she has been disappearing through all day, and this time, I follow her in. Inside, I see all kinds of projects. None of them I recognise, of course, nor can I describe them to you. I am too entranced with what I see in the middle.

Here, I see the biggest loom I have ever seen, and my factory works with the very best weaving equipment. The entire thing is made out of wood. Wooden beams go all the way up and through, with yarn being pulled through hundreds of gears. And there are cogwheels everywhere. Yarn is weaving itself, not on flat surfaces, but in three dimensions, coming together in the middle of the machine.

'Oh, that is not it, come over here.'
The doctor is standing in the back of the room, in front of a very small piece of machinery. It is the only thing I have seen so far with a table all to itself.
'What is it?'
'This, my new friend, is what happens when you weave your very self with the black death itself.' I expect the doctor to start explaining, but I guessed she wants me to figure it out myself.
It isn’t much. A little string, held tensioned between two blocks made of a silverish-looking metal.
I want to have a closer look.
'Is it safe?'
'Oh, entirely, I’ve gone in many times before, and every once in a while, I show one of my patients, especially the ones that have a hard time dealing with being cured, when they didn’t expect to live.'
I don't understand why someone would not be happy to live, but I didn’t have time to give it much thought. Did she just say went in?
I come even closer to the string, until it is right in front of my nose. Then I smell it.
  'What?! How in the world?’
  'You smell something?'
  'Yes. Gingerbread and honey. Just like home on our birthdays.'
  'Ah, how wonderful.'
  'I don’t actually know why there is a smell attached to it. I think it is some sort of side effect, given all that was woven into this contraption.'
I can’t believe my eyes.
  'Then what is the purpose of this machine?'
  'Would you like to see for yourself?'
I feel hesitant, but I will not refuse such an opportunity.
  ‘Of course.”
  'Fantastic.'
  'Do you play music, my new friend?'
  'Uhm. A little. I play the lute once in a while.'
  'Well, it is simple, all you have to do is pick at the string. And then, you listen.'
  'That is all?'
  'That is all.'
 

*

And what happened next is why I am writing this letter, to whoever survives what the doctor rightfully called the black death. What was experienced in that moment should be known to at least one more. Maybe when humans survive this epidemic and rebuild, they will read what I have written. I urge you to go find the machine and see if it lived as you did.
What came next is what kept me through the next weeks, when the pestilence inevitably reached our town. I wasn’t sure if the doctor was with me during the experience. But it felt like I was alone when it happened, so as is the story.

*

When I pluck the string, a sound fills my ears, and the universe, it talks. I hear voices, not any voices. Mine. It is like the sound unleashed a barrier that had been in my head. And all these people that seem to reside inside, I can see them. And some, they look back. Peaking through this barrier, which I can only call a door. Oh, how words are unsufficing me at this moment.
Behind the door, some were powerful, some were weak. Some of the voices, I call them voices, though they didn’t really speak, are ancient and have lived through this moment many times before, unfazed, uninterested as they look at me. Some look young, but are very, very old. Whereas some of them barely know what is happening, filled with anger about what’s to happen, angry not to come out and take my place. Through this cacophony, I hear some are joyful to see me again. They are in abundance for those unfazed. However, they all seem to understand something that I don't. And the longer the sound plays, the more I start to understand what it was that they know. I am only a few seconds away from understanding when the sound ends.

It takes me a few moments to get my grip back on reality. Confused by the random objects around, I feel angry. I turn around to find the doctor. She is leaning against the back of the room, fiddling with a little gear. She looks up from her glasses, but doesn’t say anything.
  'How?'
  'I couldn’t tell you'
  'I saw myself old. Does this mean that I survive?'
  'I cannot answer that question either.'
'But the yarn.. It's made of you... How could I see myself? Why didn’t I see your…' I didn’t know what word to use.
She walks towards me. 'It seems like our link is louder than presumed.'
                              

*

I didn’t understand what she meant by that at the time. Oh, how I wish I had more time to contemplate the meaning of what I saw.
Now I know that they are there, I can still feel them.
I have taken the walk many times more in the next two weeks. Often I turned around before I had even reached home. Every time I pleaded to go again. She even let me, a couple of times. But it didn’t solve anything. The sound just wasn’t long enough to understand. Every time I got close, the sound would end. She warned me not to come back; travelling had become very dangerous. It is probably how I got ill. I guess knowing contamination was inevitable, I was hoping that if I could find the answer as to why something so inherently, rightfully called the black death could show so much life, it might make the wait during contamination a little less frightening.
I reckon I have a few more hours before I cannot write anymore. And a few more hours before I will be dead. I have thought about that over and over, and suddenly I am unsure if I really ever can be. I think I’ll be one of those behind the door, eager to come through. It may have been me already. Oh, how I wish I had more time to contemplate. Please fulfill my wish and do what I can’t. 

This whole town will probably be dead by the end of this week.
But the sound lives on, that I know.