July 27th, 1518 (Tuesday)

  Thomas’ practice, nestled near Tanner’s Gate in a narrow two-story building, saw a steady trickle of patients over the course of the 27th and 28th of July. There was no surge, no sense of panic in the city yet. But the questions had changed.

  Word had spread that he had helped some of the afflicted from the square. It brought in more than just the ailing or injured. Some came with an edge of nervousness, describing symptoms that didn’t quite fit the usual ailments. That undertone threaded through the otherwise ordinary rhythm of his days.

  Late in the morning on the 27th, a miller's apprentice, barely seventeen, sat at the edge of the cot, his arms trembling. They weren't just shaking, they were spasming in sudden, jarring bursts. He looked down at his forearms, bewildered.

  “It feels like ants,” he said. “Crawling through my veins. They always move forward, never back. It makes it impossible to stay still.”

  Thomas examined him closely. He noticed there was no fever and that his pupils were responsive. The tremors didn’t stop, even when the boy gritted his teeth and tried to hold still. His fingers fluttered, almost as if plucking at unseen strings.

  That afternoon, a merchant’s wife came in. She was visibly exhausted and sat stiff and upright.

  “I haven’t slept since Monday,” she said. “It comes to me at night, like a song, but it's without any sound. There's no melody, no words. But it presses on me. I can feel it. My legs start to jerk when I lie down. And sometimes it’s in my arms, too.”

  Thomas frowned and asked if she’d heard any music in the streets. She shook her head.

  “No, only in bed. I tried to pray, but it made it worse.”

  He observed her breathing – shallow yet steady. There was no fever or lesions. He gave her chamomile for calm, a vinegar footbath to cool the blood, and a light poppy tincture to aid sleep. Then he opened the black hardback notebook he had started earlier in the day and recorded her case.

  Woman, mid-thirties. Phantom music, nocturnally manifest. Limb spasms when supine. Insomnia. No fever. No lesions.

  Prescribed: rest, poppy draught, vinegar immersion. Monitor for escalation.

  ***

  July 28th, 1518

  On the morning of the 28th, a man arrived, anxious and unkempt. He didn’t wait to be invited in.

  “My wife,” he said, breath ragged. “She collapsed. You need to come.”

  Thomas led him inside instead. He listened carefully.

  “She started swaying the morning, three days back,” the man said. “She laughed at first. Said she heard a fiddler. But there was nothing. Then she started dancing. For two days. She fell into the hearth last night. Burned her arm. She said he was at the foot of the bed.”

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  “She saw him?” Thomas asked.

  The man nodded slowly. “Yes. Said he was playing. I never saw noone.”

  Thomas gave him instructions for cooling her burns and administering a sedative draught, then promised to try and visit. When the door closed behind the man, he reopened his notebook.

  "Young woman. Visual hallucination (fiddler), two days of sustained motion. Burn injury from collapse. No fever mentioned. Recommending draught, observation. Urge in-person assessment."

  He paused and looked at his notes for a good minute. Then he underlined one word.

  fiddler

  Gretchen had mentioned the fiddler too. So did the old man at the Neumarkt.

  As his working day drew to a close, he reflected on a rather busy day. The practice was quiet now, giving him time to think before he visited Gretchen.

  After some quiet moments, alone with his thoughts, he dipped his pen again.

  “Common threads: sun exposure, exhaustion, hallucinations (sometimes progressing from sensation to sound to sight, not always), involuntary movement. Breathing stable. No fever, at least in the early stages.”

  He closed the ledger and sat still, listening to the silence outside. His thoughts wandered around this strange affliction, and particularly Gretchen.

  She’d seemed lucid and coherent enough last morning. Tired, yes! And raw-footed. But she was able to smile able to speak with him. Yet even then, she’d admitted the sensation lingered. This contradiction troubled him – the desire to move versus the fatigue that came with it. What force could penetrate so deeply into the body and mind that it continued to resonate even in stillness?

  His thoughts shifted to the patients from the last two days. Based on his knowledge, so far there were not enough cases to call it an epidemic yet. But the patterns troubled him – hallucinations, a sense of rhythm in the limbs, and descriptions of music with no source.

  And always, it was the same shape – motion without cause, voices or sounds without origin, and in some cases, the image of a fiddler. That last detail spooked him. A shared figment. The human mind was capable of invention, but repetition suggested something more than coincidence. He didn't know where to begin thinking about that. It seemed to defy all logic. But it was hard to ignore. That old man pointed to the fiddler, yet he saw nothing. Gretchen heard him, even in the confines of her own home with her parents there as witness. The same pattern repeated with the woman whose husband had visited him earlier in the day.

  If this was indeed a hallucination, how could so many conjure up the same hallucination? He stared at the wall, pondering this detail for a good few minutes. It was perplexing, to say the least.

  He recalled conversations from his university days in Basel, held beneath vaulted ceilings and in candlelit seminar rooms. They referred to it as St. Vitus' Dance. Legend described a frenzy that swept through entire villages and towns. Professors discussed this phenomenon of hysterical dancing with a curious mix of ridicule and awe. However, none of them claimed to have seen it firsthand. There were always theories, though – vapours from the river, overheated blood, heresy, humours gone wry. But none had fully convinced him. And nothing had made it real, until now.

  The Church would soon take an interest. That much was certain. He had already overheard murmurs at the marketplace earlier that day – whispers of sin, of divine punishment, of spirits walking among the cobblestones. If the affliction spread, there would be sermons. Penitents. Flagellants, maybe, as in the old days. And that would bring more fear, more fervour, but not better treatment or understanding.

  And what if it didn’t end quickly? The woman who danced for two days had already collapsed. The boy, Hans, had bloodied his feet. If it continued, people would die – of exhaustion, of starvation, of broken bones or burns or worse. His stomach tightened at the thought. There were only so many vinegar cloths and tinctures in the world, only so much he could do.

  Thomas eventually got up and went upstairs. In the small washroom beneath the eaves, he splashed water from a ceramic basin onto his face, cupping it with both hands, letting the chill wake him fully. He studied his reflection in the iron mirror above the shelf. He noted the dark crescents beneath his eyes.

  After towelling off, he changed into a clean shirt and coat, more out of ritual than vanity. The day had passed with a dull, aching heat. He was hoping the evening would be cooler, maybe with a bit of breeze coming in from the Ill.