Biblical by Christopher Galt Page A

cognitive function. My recall is actually excellent, almost eidetic, when it comes to semantic memory. But my autobiographical memory is crap. It’s real life I struggle with … It’s something I work around. My brother Casey’s the same. Not as bad, but his head is never in the here and now, either.”
    “Well,” said Corbin. “If you ever need—”
    “Thanks, Pete, I’ll bear it in mind. But now that I’ve shown you mine, you show me yours.”
    “What do you mean?” asked Corbin.
    Macbeth took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. “My God, do they use this stuff to get confessions?” He put the cup down. “I’m talking about you being so strung out and tired; about whatever it is that’s going on with your work and that you spent half the evening avoiding talking about. And before he jumped, all of that stuff Gabriel was feeding you about angels and visions. I could have sworn he hit a nerve.”
    Corbin gazed into his coffee cup for a moment. “You’ve done some work with psychiatric epidemiology, right?” he asked. “I mean before you got into the brain-mapping thing?”
    “Some, yeah. Why?”
    “Well … I’ve never before come across case clustering likethis. There’s been this weird sudden upswing in presentations of a particular set of symptoms. Like some kind of outbreak. If I were a virologist or even an oncologist, I’d look for environmental factors to explain it, but that’s just not something you come across that much as a psychiatrist.”
    “What’s been presenting?” Macbeth asked.
    “Delusions. More hallucinations than delusions, I suppose … and in people with no history of psychological or psychiatric problems.”
    “And the delusions are similar in nature?”
    “Yeah. Completely different in content, but similar in nature. Visions. Ghosts.”
    “Ghosts?” Macbeth pushed a laugh through the curtain of his tiredness.
    “Not just ghosts. All the presentations involve the subject seeing events, items or people from the past. The descriptions of the episodes all begin with a feeling like déjà vu, but instead of it remaining a sensation or a state of mind, they experience what can only be a hallucination, but is completely indistinguishable from reality.”
    “How many are we talking about?”
    “Over five hundred in the last two months within Boston city limits.”
    “What? That’s an average of eight or nine a day …” said Macbeth. “And the patients presenting … there’s no obvious connection between them?”
    “Nope. Different ages, ethnicities, classes, professions. The cases are spread out pretty evenly across Boston and there’s no developmental timeline. No epidemiological evidence of a source. No Patient Zero.”
    “And you say the delusions are different in content?”
    “One case was an elderly man. He’s lived in the same house for the past forty years and his wife died five years ago. Retired Boston beat cop, not the neurotic type or given to emotion anda person of very regular routines: up at six-thirty every morning, breakfast at seven. Except he comes down one morning and finds his wife alive and well in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. But not his wife as she was before she died, but the way she had been when they first married and moved into the house. Like I said, this guy is not the emotional type, but seeing his long-lost bride nearly cracked him up.”
    “Yeah, well, Pete, you know only too well that seeing a recently deceased loved one, or hearing their voice, is by far the most common form of hallucination. And not a sign of any kind of mental health issue.”
    “But I told you – his wife’s been dead for five years. She’s not recently deceased, so why would he start to hallucinate her presence now? And bereavement hallucinations tend to be fleeting. This was sustained and vivid. And it wasn’t just his young bride he saw … he swears the kitchen had changed back to the way it was when they first got married.”
    “Did