Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

16 - Saint Lothar

The Oracle woke a-screaming that night.

Before she was done, she was joined by her sisters—Missy, who was waiting up during that part of the night anyway, hunkered in the crook of a fallen tree—and then Lily, who slept on the flat of a creek-side rock.

The three girls screamed until they lost their wind and paused, looking around blinking to see what attention it brought them.

It took time to find out. The rest of the Feegers were camped downstream, most all of them out cold from the labour of the past days, preparing the march and making that first hard climb, down rock-face and scrub slope, carrying all they needed. By the time they got down to the stream, a spot in the crook of two mountains like the bend of a lady’s middle, they curled up and slept like the dead.

And you don’t wake the dead with just a shout. So it took time, and that did not make the Oracle happy. She demanded to know where the Feegers were. Just to show she meant business, she swatted Lily a good one across the ear.

“I have word from Him,” said the Oracle Patricia. “Gather my people.”

And so Lily and Missy took off for the camp, and the Oracle was left alone a moment before they came. She calmed herself, hand on belly, walking into the rushing stream that was made dim silver by the moon. She caressed her belly, which was still small.

She dropped to her knees in the cold mountain water, felt the ice travel up her thighs to her middle, where the Host waited for their larder to fill. If it weren’t filling, they’d start in on her straight away—but they were wise enough to know that there was a proper time of things.

Oh soon, she thought, and smiled a little. You can thank old Lothar when the time comes. He will be a Saint for the part he plays in making you strong… .

And her smile fell away, as she recalled the cry that had awakened her—not a cry for help, but one of dying. A dying son; a dying grandson.

Murdered by the hand of ignorant heathen. Like those others, maybe, who stole the Son. Those ones though—those might be sinners: folk who, with strong application of word and stick, could be made to see to their God. To see to Him right.

Not like these killers… .

She stood now, and stared down the stream, where around the bend she saw the light of lamp and torch, as her Feeger kin made their way up the bed, to see what their Oracle wanted now.

When they got there, she made it clear that it was only a little thing, a few drops of blood, scarce an ounce of courage, and doing it would not take them long from their path.

“But there ain’t a choice,” she said. “Wicked heathen folk did a thing. They got to be shown.”

The sleepy-eyed Feegers didn’t know what to do with that at first, and for that instant, the Oracle felt a sliver of doubt.

But that doubt vanished, as a cry rang out. There in their midst, Lothar, eyes shining in the starlight, lifted his blade above his head.

“Wicked heathen!” he shouted, his voice cracking, and shouted again: “Wicked heathen!”

And the Oracle smiled upon him, and Lothar hollered some more. And before long, the rest did too.

He will be a Saint, all right, thought the Oracle. Lothar will do it for us fine.

17 - The Dauphin’s Women

The first morning after Loo’s death, Andrew Waggoner went to see her body intending to perform a post mortem examination.

He might even have done it. Good as their word, the families had neither burned nor buried her, but wrapped the girl up in a blanket and placed her back on that foul bed in the awful shack where he’d found her. He brought his physician’s bag and a candle to see her by as he went into the single room that stank so sweet of death; he shuffled in like an old, sick man, and he fell to his knees, as though in prayer.

He was not in prayer—not precisely—but as he crouched there he realized that he would not be able to cut into this girl’s body and learn anything from it. It was as much as he could do to lift the cloth from her head and look at her face. And even that, he could not do for long.

In some, death brings a final serenity. That was how it had seemed for Maryanne Leonard, whose face had been so pure and clear in death, above her mangled torso. One could have imagined that her fleeing soul had paused an instant to show a hint of the transcendence it sought. One could take comfort in such a thought.

There was no such comfort looking on Loo. Death had etched a final, leaden idiocy to her: no joy, no redemption signalled in her face. There was not even the pathos of surrender. In the end, she was just insensate meat.

Bergstrom meant to spare you from this, he thought.

Andrew knew, of course, that Bergstrom meant to do no such thing when he travelled here with his armed surgery. He meant to spare the race, his race, more abominations like Loo. But as for Loo?

The doctor was not caring for his patient; he was not caring for the unborn children she might make. He was caring for a larger body of patients than this girl and her young.

Which was something Nils Bergstrom had over Andrew Waggoner. When Andrew had made his cut, he hadn’t even been sure he could help her; he was in fact fairly certain that he could not. Andrew was looking after his own curiosity and nothing else.

And now, crouched in the darkness of the cabin, he was tending it some more. How hateful, he thought.

Norma came in to get him at lunchtime.

“Come on,” she said, laying a cool hand on his shoulder. “You’re in no shape for this.”

He looked up at her as she guided him to his feet.

“No,” he agreed, “that is true.”

He went back to Norma’s house, and drank down a tea of rose and mint and something else he couldn’t identify. He lay down in the bed while she changed the dressing on his older injuries and packed them with a compound of mud and twigs.

“What is all that?” he asked.

“Remedies,” she said.

“What kind of remedies?”

“Wild onion and ginger. Fireweed. Some yarrow. Rose and mint in the tea. Other things.” She squinted at him. “Good for body and for soul. Don’t argue. You’ll do better with them and a bit of rest. Now I got to go see to my kin.”

Andrew didn’t argue, and he did rest, and Norma was right: he did better by it all when he woke, in the pre-dawn of the second day.

He lowered his feet to the earthen floor and stood, flexing his hands in amazement. There was pain, but it felt as though it had aged, as though bones were knitting, wounds were closing. Norma was nowhere to be seen. That was fine—Andrew didn’t need to talk.

He thought that he might try another look at Loo.

Quietly, he pulled on his coat and found the physician’s bag, and made his way to the death house.

Standing outside in the crisp mountain air, Andrew thought a storm might have passed in the night—a storm that stirred up the scents of the forest floor—that somehow refreshed things, washing away the old. He shivered and gave his head a quick shake, and felt himself smile.

It didn’t take him long, however, to see that he might have a hard time conducting his examination. Lamplight flickered first between tree branches, and then as he drew nearer, from the windows of the house. Andrew could hear something like singing coming from inside, faint but certain. He slowed his step and crept closer.

In spite of his good feeling, he was not anxious to intrude, so he moved near one of the windows and tried to peer inside.

The space was almost as crowded as when he’d first arrived. But this time, things were busier. A couple of the women were going at the sheet with needle and thread, sewing it shut. Some others were sipping from mugs.

And it seemed like everybody was humming—some tune that Andrew couldn’t make out. He raised up on his toes to get a better look around, and that was when he felt the hand on his arm.

“Hem.”

Andrew turned. He was looking at Hank.

“I—I’m sorry,” said Andrew.

“You already paid your respects,” said Hank. “Time for us.”

“Of course.”

“Then go on.”

He let go of Andrew. Andrew nodded, and stepped away.

It was fine. He would not dissect the body at its funeral. He would not bother the families. He took a walk.

As Andrew walked, he found himself humming. Cheerfully. There was a tune to it, but Andrew did not think to try to place it. It was more like he followed it, as though he were listening a song some minstrel might have been playing in the woods downslope. A minstrel, or a choir.

He stepped around a copse of tamarack, onto a little shelf of rock, and when he was through that, the sun came up. There was no missing it, standing as he was on the east slope of the mountain. It gilded the rock-face—brightened the green of the moss and lichen and daubed the tops of the trees below with honey. Andrew blinked and squinted in the light, and fell back, and watched, as the breadth of the Kootenai River Valley below him was obliterated—by Heaven.

He blinked and his breath hitched, as he caught himself using his good arm against the rock.

There were gates in the sky: gates marked by two tall monoliths that bent toward one another at their peak. The gates themselves were covered in hammered gold and pinkish-white stonework and they hovered like storm clouds over the river valley. The sun rose beneath them like a straining bloody red bubble; yet within the gateway, another sun shone—this one of purest white, a light that tickled Andrew’s flesh where it touched. Andrew looked into its naked brilliance. He could not look away.

Things moved in that light—they moved, and they sang.

Andrew hummed along, and he realized that he was humming that tune that he’d half-heard in the forest, and as he did, it occurred to him that this was the same tune that he had heard coming from Loo’s death house.

Of course, a small part of him observed. It is a trick of the mind. The Juke is working on you and pulling things out of memory. The song’s part of the trick.

It was one thing to observe that in small measure, another for Andrew to entirely accept it, particularly faced with the spires and arches, the manicured gardens of the City of Heaven. A great Ferris wheel turned in its midst, carrying laughing cherubs nearer the sun, letting them fly at its crest. Marble bridges arched over canals lined with tall trees, carrying long boats painted a brilliant green.. Atop a great flight of stairs, a beautiful Dauphin sat on a throne of hammered silver in robes of white, surrounded by a dozen maidens wearing thin shifts with fine yellow hair tumbling to their waists. Wings emerged from behind him—great white expanses that Andrew first took to be part of the throne, then as they spread, he understood to be coming from the shoulders of the Dauphin himself.

As Andrew looked at him, so the Dauphin looked back. He must have been miles off—but it was as though they stood face to face, as though Andrew could feel his warm breath on his cheek. He looked into his eyes, the irises of which were at first a brilliant blue—then into the pupils, which were black as night sky.

Free thyself, Andrew Waggoner, of thy Earthly bonds.

And as Andrew listened, the irises narrowed, and the blackness of the Dauphin’s pupils became absolute, and he did as he was told.

Higher and higher, Andrew fell.

Shadows appeared and shortened on the mountainside and as they shifted, the colour changed too. Pink turned gold turned silver turned to nothing but the colour of tree and rock and blue, clear sky. There was a scream. Andrew Waggoner’s right hand twitched in its splint. A hundred wings pounded the air not far off, and then—another scream.

Heaven had come, Heaven had gone. Andrew had stayed put.

He blinked, and drew a breath, and squinted toward the sun. No gates. No city. No Dauphin.

Andrew let out a long, slow breath. “Redemption,” he said aloud. The Juke had offered him redemption. It had brought him low, and lifted him high, and it had offered him redemption from a Heaven of Andrew’s own devising. And that last trick…

His knees trembled as he stood up. He looked at his hands; flexed the fingers on both; his broken arm gave off waves of pain, but it was as though he were listening to the pain rather than feeling it. As though he were a larger thing now, that encompassed the trees and the rocks and the sky, that sun that was too bright to look at.

That last trick… that glimpse of forever…

“You clever beast.” The Juke—the creature in the jar that killed Maryanne Leonard, that had led him to the killing of Loo—the bastard had figured a way to a man’s soul. Or at least to the parts of a man that got agitated when he started thinking of his soul.

But it wasn’t a soul that a man would be thinking of—any more than it was sleep a man thought of when morphine moved in his veins. It was all chemistry; chemistry in the service of these animals, chemistry that they used to hold a man’s attention and hold it for the kill.

Andrew stood up. Whatever chemical smell this thing had put in him, it had passed. He was here in his body—his arm did hurt, his joints did crack. And as to his soul—he felt only muddle-headed, as he would in a morphine aftermath. He stretched his legs and headed back upslope, looking for the path through the trees to the homestead.

“Nigger.”

Andrew stopped and turned.

The voice was a girl’s. It had sounded close, as though the girl stood next to him and leaned nearer as he spoke.

“Nigger.”

She was not that close. She stood in the midst of a close cropping of young pine trees, maybe a dozen yards off. The needles intersected her nakedness, rustling as she moved in them. Her hands strayed up and down her thick naked middle like spiders.

“You the nigger that killed me,” she said in a voice clear as sky. “Killed the young one.”

“No I am not,” said Andrew. “A girl got killed. You’re just part of a clever trick. You here to show me the way to Hell now?”

Loo was not in an answering mood. The pine needles rustled and shifted, and Loo’s shade shifted and was gone.

“I guess not,” said Andrew, and he smiled grimly. This trickery—it wasn’t so different really than Klansmen, dressing up like ghosts, thinking they could put the fear in foolish Negroes.

Andrew made his way over to the baby pines, looked for the tracks, the trampled path through the underbrush that he knew would not be there. He knew, but he had to check, and check again. He was under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen—one that placed credulity on him. He pushed aside branches and looked down, and sure enough, there was nothing but needles and dirt.

“Doctor.”

Once again, the voice seemed right in his ear and it was the voice of a young girl, though not Loo. Andrew stood, and turned—and as he did, he stumbled and choked.

Thin, cold arms were wrapped around his neck from behind. A wet torso pressed against his back and a mouth blew warm, damp words into his ear with breath that reeked of formaldehyde:

“It’s me, Doctor,” whispered the shade. “Maryanne.

“Tell my brothers it’s good here.”

Andrew reached up with his good hand and locked it around the narrow wrist, tried to pull it away. The more he pulled, the tighter it seemed to grip. Sharp ribs broken by a bone-saw scratched at his back.

The voice giggled. “I won’t tell,” she said. “Don’t worry, Dr. Nigger.

“I won’t tell—how you came to me that night—how you put your filthy piece in me—how you made your little nigger baby in my belly, then ripped it on out with a pair of pliers—I will not tell, Dr. Nigger,” she said. “I will not tell what an awful surgeon you are—one-armed and weak and stupid like a nigger was born. It’s between you and me, Nigger. Oh I won’t tell I won’t tell I won’t—”

And with that, Maryanne Leonard snaked her hand free from Andrew Waggoner’s fist, and her fingers cupped over his mouth and nose—and Andrew fell to a powerful sleep.

“Hello, Andrew.”

“Hello. It’s dark here. Norma?”

“It is dark. Yes. Norma.”

“Am I blind?”

“It’s dark.”

“Didn’t answer my question.”

A laugh for an answer.

“What happened?”

“You’re safe.”

“You’re not answering any questions, are you?”

“You haven’t asked a good one yet.”

“All right—here’s a good one. What part of the trick is this?”

Norma didn’t answer right away, but Andrew heard a rustling, as of wings. In the distance, he saw a pale bluish light—like a star.

“Well, I’m not blinded,” said Andrew.

“Follow the light,” said Norma. Her voice sounded farther off—as though she’d set off through the dark toward this light and were still walking. “Only there is your salvation.”

“Only there, hmm?” Andrew pushed himself up from the ground and stood straight in the void. “Will that take me to the Ferris wheel? The Dauphin, with his giant wings?”

“Follow the light.”

“Yes, the light. It’s the sort of thing you’d say if you were dead, Norma—a soul guiding me on. But you aren’t. You’re alive right now, looking after a dead girl’s funeral. You have been working me with such lies, such lies.”

“The Dauphin awaits,” she said.

Her voice was near now—he could smell her breath, which was sweet. And she had lost the rasp of years.

“I think,” said Andrew, “that maybe I’ll stay here. You can tell that to the Juke, Norma.”

He blinked as he spoke. It was later in the day: the sun was higher than it was when he’d seen Heaven in it. And he had moved a distance in that time. He sat next to a low stump on a plateau of stumps and small pine trees. His shirt and trousers were filthy.

The day had also marched on since he’d last looked. Andrew thought the sun had moved a good three hours. Andrew was tired—deep, soul-tired—but he was elated.

I defeated it, he thought. I faced that thing down, and I defeated it.

Andrew pushed himself to his feet with a wince. The land here was clear for four, five hundred yards around him. Downslope, he saw wide paths cut in the trees, starting to grow in with underbrush. Harper’s men had been at work here, but they had not been back in some time.

Still, he could follow one of those paths and eventually find himself back at Eliada.

Andrew marched upslope a few dozen yards. His doctor’s bag lay where he’d dropped it as he twitched and stumbled down the hillside. Miraculously, it was intact.

No, Andrew corrected himself. There was no miracle because there had been no battle. He had not been attacked by her, any more than he had encountered Loo in the trees.

The mechanism of this thing had simply preyed upon his own doubts and fears and aspirations. It had somehow aided him in isolating something that for lack of a better word might be called “sin.” And for a physician, sin was failure.

Andrew shut his eyes. Oh yes—the Juke had done its work with the brainless cruelty of a clockwork. It had done everything that it might, to draw him into its web—to ripen him for what amounted to a religious conversion.

All of which gave rise to another question: why hadn’t the strategy worked?

It should have. Andrew thought himself clever enough. He had been a good student and, recent experience notwithstanding, a competent physician. But he was under no illusions that he possessed heroic will or genius insight. What was it that saved him?

Norma said the Juke tended to make its deepest mark upon close families—through the amniotic fluid and germ plasm of the host mother, no doubt. And Andrew was far enough from the stem of that family tree that he was barely affected at all.

He flexed the fingers of his broken arm, and thought then about another possibility.

Perhaps it was something in Norma’s remarkably curative tea.

What was it she had said? Good for the body and the soul. Might she have discovered some root, some concoction that lessened the ability of this thing to rob men and women of their wills? It would explain how it was that she and her ilk had lived in this place for so long, without falling into the thrall of these creatures.

I will have to ask her for the recipe—as soon as I find my way back, he thought as he hefted the bag in his good hand and started to climb back up the slope. It wouldn’t be hard—there was a good plume of wood smoke climbing into the sky. Perhaps, thought Andrew as he climbed, they are cremating Loo now.

Or perhaps, Andrew thought as he first took sight of what was left of the Tavish’s homestead, the Juke hasn’t finished with me yet.

At the opening of the path was a body of a man, his intestines torn from his middle and stretched through the blood-quickened dirt, mingled with pine needles. More corpses were stacked in the middle of the common, in the same place that just a day ago, Andrew had worked his meagre skills to try to save Loo. The table was gone—perhaps locked in the still-smouldering ruins of the house where Loo had been kept in her last weeks.

Andrew knelt down by the first corpse and took a good look at the cut. Nothing had clawed its way out of this one and no creature had torn it either. The cut was crosswise across the gut, and it was neat enough to be from a blade, not neat enough to suggest a sharp one.

Andrew touched the man’s face. He stared with wide milky eyes up into the pines. Blood flecked his beard, and flies buzzed in Andrew’s ear. He let go of the man’s face, and touched his fingertip to the cooling tube of intestine, and drew a deep breath of the smell of this place—and uncertainly at first, he stood up, shaking with the realization: this was no chemical fakery. This was not something that Norma’s tea would drive off.

Andrew left the single corpse and made his way through a thickening cloud of flies to the others. Eyes stinging, he made a count: there were seven here, among them what was left of Hank, his skull split from the side. One eye hung out, its orb crusted with dirt where it touched the ground.

He wanted to cry out, to call for Norma—but he didn’t. The ones who’d done this weren’t in sight, but they mightn’t be far. So Andrew picked up his doctor’s bag, and propelled by the slimmest hope he struggled his way up the hill as quick as he might, to Norma Tavish’s cabin.

He didn’t have to get that far to find her. She was on her back, a great slash across her throat, beside a rain barrel next to the barn. Her hands were still clenched in fists, as though she were still alive, waiting for another fight to come.

Andrew reached down with trembling hands and opened those fists, uncurling each finger. He smoothed her hair back. He tried to lift her but that was beyond him. So he reached down and shut her eyes—the last grace he could give her. He left her there under the trees, and made for her house.

The door hung open when he came upon it. He approached it slowly, under the sensible assumption that whoever had done this could well be still inside. But the cabin was uninhabited. It had been ransacked; blankets tossed onto the floor, furniture overturned.

Just as Andrew had heard the call drawing him away from this place, the killers had heard a call drawing them here.

And they’d found what they’d come for.

The dead infant Juke in its pickle jar. All that was left of it were shards of glass and the now-familiar stink of it. Otherwise, it was as if it had never been there.

Andrew didn’t have to search long for the other thing he sought: the tea that kept the Juke at bay.

Norma kept a bin near the fire, and the killers had missed it. It made sense, as Andrew thought about it. They might not have any idea about what the mixture signified. And once they had the Juke—well, they had what they sought.

But the scent of the herbs was unmistakable—sweet and earthy and fine. He found a cloth, wrapped the concoction into a ball the size of a small roast, and put it into the medical bag. Then he went back outside.

He walked through the village not looking down or to the side, back to the path that had brought him here. He would make for the clearing where he’d fought off the Juke, and then the logging road beyond it back to Eliada.

It took all his will not to look down as he passed the barn—not to wonder whether it really was Norma’s spirit, freed from flesh by a slash across her throat, who had come to him at the conclusion of his battle with the Juke. A man might conclude such a thing; that the visitation coming after a true but yet-unknown demise, was evidence that Andrew Waggoner really had seen Heaven, really had been offered his salvation.

Andrew spat as he entered the woods. He would not entertain such thoughts. He would be no good to anyone—not himself, and certainly not Jason Thistledown, the boy to whom he owed his life and who, Andrew was certain, was in very grave peril indeed.

18 - Compassion. Community. Hygiene.

“It’s not infected,” said Annie Rowe. “Even with a half-working hand, Dr. Waggoner did well by you.”

She pulled the bandage back further, and Jason flinched, though the pain turned out less than he feared. “In a day or two we can take out the stitches,” she said.

Jason peered down at the wound. It was the morning of the third day since he’d sliced his hand in the quarantine, and it was indeed looking better; the flesh was pink and tender where the black stitches held it together. It itched more than it hurt.

“Hold still,” said the nurse, as she dipped a ball of cotton into a jar of alcohol and dabbed it on the wound. Now that stung. Jason looked away, up at the skylight of the operating theatre where Nurse Rowe had brought him to do the work. It was, she said, the cleanest place in Eliada, this operating room. It was also—next, maybe, to the storeroom behind the autopsy—the quietest.

Neither of them wanted to go down to the autopsy. So here they were.

“Thank you,” said Jason, and Nurse Rowe said: “Just doing my work here. Stop moving.”

“I’m not moving,” he protested. “I didn’t mean thank you for looking at my cut. I know that’s your job. I mean—”

“Hush. I know what you meant.” She eyed him over the spectacles she wore for fine work. She set his hand down on the table and reached around for a roll of fresh gauze. “He got away all right?”

“He did,” said Jason. It had been two days since Nurse Rowe had helped Jason gather the doctor’s bag and everything else. Jason had figured he could trust her, owing to their adventure the night of Dr. Waggoner’s escape, and she hadn’t betrayed that trust. But he hadn’t felt safe coming to see her after he saw Dr. Waggoner off. It might tip off Bergstrom, or those fellows who were responsible for breaking into the doctor’s rooms. Sam Green had promised to protect Jason best he could—but he’d given no word as to Annie Rowe’s safety. So Jason decided he wouldn’t talk to her again without an excuse.

That excuse came this morning, when after breakfast in the apartments he shared with Germaine Frost, his aunt suggested he have his hand seen to.

“I would change those bandages myself,” she said, as she straightened a stack of fresh index cards on the roll-top desk she’d been given for her work. “But I’m quite occupied with the catalogue. There are more than a thousand souls here. You should avail yourselves of the facilities.”

“You want me to go see Dr. Bergstrom?” Jason had been avoiding Bergstrom, lest he find some new pretext to toss Jason back into the quarantine.

Aunt Germaine might have been worrying about the same thing. “No,” she said. “Aside from everything else, Dr. Bergstrom has more to do than inspect stitches and change bandages. Go, Nephew. Go find a nurse. And then find some fresh air and exercise.”

So Jason went—and made it a point not to find a nurse until he located Annie Rowe, seeing to a couple of new mothers in the maternity ward on the first floor. They made an appointment to meet in the operating theatre an hour later.

Now, Nurse Rowe listened hungrily as Jason told the story of Andrew’s escape. He told her everything, except how he found out that Andrew might be in trouble. “That’s a promise I made,” said Jason, “and I keep my word.”

“I won’t make you break your word,” she said, and cut a square of gauze. “I just pray he’s safe.”

“Safer than here,” said Jason. “Everybody keeps talking about this place as Utopia. I don’t know about that.”

“You don’t like it here?”

Jason laughed. “Oh it’s fine,” he said.

He’d spent the previous day out of the hospital, wandering the town while Aunt Germaine did her eugenics work. He could see how someone had set down a plan for it. The workers all lived in fine little houses in three roads, not one bigger than another, with space in back for a garden and some livestock. The roads were muddy, but they were wide—wide enough for little gardens in the middle. What he’d first thought was a church was a town hall, with space inside for big meetings and that motto—Compassion. Community. Hygiene.—repeated again and again where the walls met the ceilings.

The fellow who seemed to run the place told Jason they ran lessons for the young people two days out of the week from there. When the children of Eliada got a little bit older there’d be a proper school for them. In the meantime: would Jason like to stop by and learn some things?

Jason got out of there as fast as he could. He spent a little more time inside the sawmill. He would have stayed longer, watching the men run logs across the great whirling saw-blades, thinking how this was a kind of family he could join, something he could be. But a foreman spotted him and ushered him out into the road and Jason put thoughts of being a lumberman aside for another day.

In the end, he had wandered the town like he had wandered the train from Butte—hoping to catch a glimpse of pretty Ruth Harper, and finding other things instead.

“It’s a fine town,” said Jason. “Yet look what happened.”

Nurse Rowe gave a wry smile. “There’s no such a thing as Utopia, really. Not on earth. And for a Negro, that’s doubly true.”

“If that’s right,” said Jason, “I have to wonder why he’d come here. Why you’d come here, come to think of it. Seems like a long way to go to live a life as hard as you’d find anywhere else.”

“Wise boy,” said Annie.

Jason shrugged, and she laughed.

“Just because this place isn’t Utopia now, doesn’t mean it can’t be,” said Nurse Rowe. “There are ideals at work.”

Jason looked at Nurse Rowe sidelong. “Ideals. Like eugenical ideals?”

“Eugenical? Did you make that word up?”

“Maybe I did,” said Jason. “Eugenics is how I heard it. You know about eugenics.”

“I do. Mr. Harper speaks of it sometimes, as one of the pillars of Community. It’s all tied up with Hygiene.” She pointed to the door they’d come in. There were those words again, hung over the frame: Community. Compassion. And Hygiene.

“Mr. Harper?” Jason held out his hand so Nurse Rowe could wrap bandage over the gauze. “Haven’t met him yet. I met his daughter. Not him. I suppose I will at that picnic on Sunday. You two talk a lot?”

The bandage wrapped quickly, and Nurse Rowe cut it with a pair of scissors. “Oh no,” she said. “But I listen to him speak. He’s an inspiring fellow, is Mr. Garrison Harper.” She sat back on her stool, smoothed down her skirts. “It weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.”

Jason flexed his fingers and looked at the bandage. This one was better than the one Dr. Waggoner had put on him. That first bandage had started to peel back almost immediately. Nurse Rowe knew her bandaging.

“My aunt says she got inspired by a fellow like that,” he said. “Dr. Davenport was his name. He was lecturing at nurse school.”

“Well Dr. Davenport never came to lecture at my ‘nurse school.’ I heard Mr. Harper speaking in Chicago, in… the summer of 1907, I believe.”

“Didn’t know he went around making speeches. Did he have a tent like a preacher?”

“He might have in some of the other places he visited,” said Nurse Rowe. “He could get worked up as any evangelist. This one was in a hall. At the old World’s Fair grounds. I was accompanying my father, who had thought he might like to invest some money in Mr. Harper’s project.”

“Your pa was a rich man?”

“No,” said Nurse Rowe, and she tucked her chin against her neck as she rolled the remaining gauze back up and considered. “Not for lack of trying. But it seemed my father only ever had enough money to lose. He didn’t play cards, thank Heaven. But he fancied himself a speculator. When I was a little girl, he lost a great deal of money buying a stake in a gold mine in Montana that wound up a fraud. He had more success with real estate in the crash, and he was better at being a landlord. But that is not a rich man’s avocation. Not always.”

“So he got you worried,” said Jason, “that he might go and give Garrison Harper all the rest of your property—and you came along to see that he didn’t.”

Nurse Rowe covered her mouth to stifle another laugh. “You are a wise boy,” she said. “Young man. Excuse me. You’re a wise young man.” She looked up to the skylight, and leaned back on her stool. “I went along with him for exactly that reason,” she said. “And I wanted to see the World’s Fair, or what was left of it, one more time. You’d be too young to remember it—I am barely old enough. But my goodness… what a fantastical place it once was. The whole affair was strung with wires. Wires and electric lamps. It glowed like a fairyland after dusk. And in one of the pavilions—a scientist called Tesla put giant steel globes on poles and made lightning jump between them. You don’t forget a thing like that.”

Jason could see how. He’d first seen an electric light at work less than a month ago, in Butte. That tiny spark of brightness was enough to drop a fellow’s jaw. A man directing lightning from one ball to another? That was the business of old Zeus.

“Of course, by the time Mr. Harper set up his podium there, Dr. Tesla was long, long gone. The entire place had gone to seed. Many of the buildings had been torn down, and the pavilion that Mr. Harper had hired… well, it had seen better years. The paint on its entryway was peeling, and inside the plasterwork was crumbling. The pavilion still had some electricity, though. Enough to shine a very bright spotlight on Mr. Harper, and to run a projector to show some photographs on a sheet he’d hung from an archway.”

“Sounds fancy,” said Jason. Nurse Rowe smiled, like he’d been joking.

“I went in there thinking I’d just get my father out of there as soon as possible. As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. Nothing Mr. Harper said did anything to convince Father that the mill-town in Eliada was a sound investment. I remember the tram ride home; he listed off all the problems. Eliada would be a logging town with nowhere to market its wood: the Kootenai flows north into wilderness in the Canadian territory The railway stops fifty miles or more south of Eliada, and Sand Point was already filling whole trains with wood. And stacked against all that, he said that Harper’s scheme to pay and look after his workers—it amounted to charity! He figured Harper for a mad socialist. He used those words. ‘He’s just another mad socialist, Annie. Best keep clear.’”

“You call this keepin’ clear?” Jason gestured with his bandaged hand.

“Well, when he said that, it caused me to think maybe Garrison Harper was a mad socialist. And maybe I was too. It was a fine speech. You haven’t met Mr. Harper yet, so you don’t know how he can be.”

“He’s a convincing fellow is he?”

“He convinced me,” said Nurse Rowe. “I’d just finished learning nursing at the American Medical Missionary College and was starting work at the Hinsdale Sanatorium. Don’t suppose you know about those places either, coming from where you do?”

“I know about missionaries. They spread the word of Jesus.”

“Word and deed,” she said. “The college taught me what I know about nursing; the Sanatorium taught me the need for it. They were still working on it when I left it for Eliada, later that year. Made by good Christians, in a lovely well-off village, to minister and cure the fallen women of south Chicago. Some would come to the sanatorium. But we’d go visit more than that, in their homes… in their slums.”

“Slums?” That was a new word to Jason.

“Jason, I watched more babies born into filth and squalor—put those babies into the arms of their mothers, and left them in their cold, filthy shacks… more than I’d care to say. I don’t know if it was worse if their man had left, or if the cad was still sharing the roof. It broke my heart to see it, I swear.”

Jason put his hand on Nurse Rowe’s. “Better if they leave, if they’re that kind of pa.”

Nurse Rowe took a breath, and slipped her hand from under Jason’s. “And so,” she said, “when Mr. Harper stood in front of us, and said those three words—Community. Compassion. Hygiene.—it struck a chord in me. I remember how Father fidgeted beside me, when Harper explained how we could fiddle around the edges all we wanted—babies would still die in their mothers’ arms, until we got to work in the middle… fixed society up, top to bottom.”

“Or start a new one,” said Jason.

Nurse Rowe nodded. “That was when he had me. The missionaries… for them, the meek are rewarded in Heaven. It seemed to me that Mr. Harper was fixing to make a little bit of that Heaven right here. Before we left, I took down the address he gave—it was a lawyer’s office in Chicago—and a week later, I went there. To offer my services.”

“And you’ve been here since then. For—” he counted it in his head “—four years.”

“Nearly, yes.”

Jason thought about that. “You must’ve seen some things in that time,” he said.

Nurse Rowe shook her head and chuckled. “You are fishing, Mr. Thistledown,” she said. “You ask why I want to stay here in Eliada, and that’s a fair question. But I could ask the same of you.”

“I haven’t been here but two days,” he said.

“And yet—the things you’ve seen.” She bent forward and put her hand on top of his now. Her eyes found his, and he couldn’t look away. It may have been that, it may have been a shift in the cloud… but it seemed as though Nurse Annie Rowe was bathed in a strange light, like gold shimmering down from Heaven.

She went on: “You went into the quarantine,” she said, “and you drew your own blood. And you saw. And now you’re trying to find a way to talk about it.”

“I ain’t—” he began, but she stopped him.

“It’s all right, Jason,” she said, and gripped his good hand in hers.

Jason yanked his hand away. “No,” he said, “it ain’t.”

“It’s all right,” she said again, but she kept her hands to herself. “You’ve seen so much. You can let it go, in here. I won’t tell. It’ll be between you, and me, and Jesus Christ our Lord.”

“Jesus ain’t here,” he said.

Annie laughed once more and said, “Of course he is. All around us, Jason. Always. You know what Eliada means, don’t you?”

And then, for an instant, Jason thought that funny gold light showed him a row of teeth… Then he thought, No, I got her confused with someone else… and Jason pushed his bandaged hand underneath his arm, and pressed down hard.

“My aunt,” he said, through gritted teeth, “said I should see a nurse and get some fresh air. I have to go get some air now.”

Nurse Rowe nodded. And a cloud moved above the skylight—perhaps—and dimmed whatever light it was that rained upon her.

“I didn’t mean to press my beliefs,” she said. “I’m sorry. I thought it’d give comfort.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you like it here,” said Jason as he got up and headed to the door.

He spared a glance at the skylight—at the even ceiling of deep grey cloud—and he added, “Thank you for the bandaging and all.” He stepped out the door, and headed down the hallway toward the town, for his second tour of “Utopia” in as many days.

He wouldn’t run into Ruth Harper this time either, and Jason was fine with that. For the first time in many weeks, he thought of the solitude of winter on the farmstead, the quiet of Cracked Wheel in early spring… both places without God, or man.

Both places, right then, that he missed, with a soaring and unreachable ache.

19 - The Rite of Spring

Nowhere on the invitation sent from Ruth Harper to Jason Thistledown could Aunt Germaine find the words… and Mrs. Germaine Frost; and as the hours and days passed, no second notice arrived at the Eugenics Records Office in the Eliada hospital. But that did not dissuade her. When Jason awoke Sunday morning, his Aunt Germaine was dressed and ready to go, sitting impatiently in the antechamber to their rooms in the hospital, sour as old milk.

“We are going to worship,” she said simply as he buttoned his shirt. “Then to the Harper estate. Comb your hair, Nephew.”

He knew better than to argue. Aunt Germaine was as reasonable as sweating dynamite these days. For a time he thought it was because she disapproved of Miss Ruth Harper, but as the hours and days wore on, he realized it was a deeper trouble. She was offended, more deeply than he would have thought possible, that her name had been omitted from the invitation.

They went to the only church in Eliada. It was called Saint Cyprian’s, at the end of a row of workmen’s houses, along the road to the Harper estate. The service was underway when they got inside. Jason looked over the slumped backs of the worshippers to see the priest going on in Latin the way they did in this church. He and Aunt Germaine slid into a pew near the door, earning a couple of dirty looks for their troubles. Jason felt his heart twist, but not from that. He happened to spy Sam Green, decked out in a black suit, bowler hat nowhere to be seen, bent forward in fervent prayer. During the whole long service, he did not look over once and Jason was fine with that. It wasn’t as though he didn’t appreciate Sam Green’s help directed through him to Dr. Waggoner; he simply thought that conversations with the Pinkerton man came at too steep a price.

By the time the service was done it was nearly the noon hour and time for the picnic. It was turning into a good day; the sun was beating down and it was warm enough to walk without a jacket.

The road went a quarter mile before it led them to the gate, cut nearly straight through the rows on rows of blossoming apple trees that made up the Harpers’ orchards. Some of those trees were pretty tall, Jason thought, to have been planted when the Harpers were supposed to have come here ten years back. He wondered who was here before that, with the leisure to plant apple in fine old rows.

Surely it was not the same folk with the leisure to build a house like Mr. Harper’s. That place was something. It was huge—bigger than any two barns combined that Jason had ever seen—in the same class as the sawmill or the hospital.

The house was laid out like a horseshoe, made of cut stone near the ground, square-cut log higher up. Jason counted six stone chimneys, climbing high above the steep-peaked roofs. How many rooms could you put in a place like that? How many kin?

How many servants?

This would have been a sore point with his mama. She had unkindly views on the keeping of servants. A woman ought not live larger than she can sweep in a day, she would say. Every servant she used brought her that many steps further from looking after herself in a pinch.

It was hard to tell how many servants it took to run the estate by the time they’d made it through the gate. The grounds were filled with people.

“Looks like the whole town’s here,” said Jason, and instantly regretted it as Aunt Germaine spared him a severe look.

They walked in silence to the crowd of folk that were gathered on the lawn to the north of the house. The guests fanned out across the lawn, some sitting on blankets they’d brought, others standing and watching. A couple Jason recognized from the mill, but it was hard to tell on account of the lack of grime on their shirts and sawdust in their hair. They all stood quiet, listening to the moustachioed fellow in their midst, propped on something so he was a head higher than the tallest. Although it was sunny out, he was hatless, and his dark hair blew over a high forehead as he spoke.

“Our host,” said Germaine dryly, and nodded when Jason breathed: “Garrison Harper.”

Harper grinned as he spoke, and raised up his arms. “Rites of spring!” he shouted. “This is one of the things we’ve lost, in this new world of ours. We move through the seasons, one after another—and how do we mark them? Places on a calendar? The inching of the Earth ’round the Sun? Well not here. Not in Eliada!”

At that, a few voices shouted the name: “Eliada!” and like an echo in a canyon, more caught the gist and threw it back. Harper clapped and beamed.

Jason stopped and craned his neck to look around, and when he looked back down he saw that Aunt Germaine had moved on through the crowd. He didn’t hasten to follow—it was, to be truthful, a relief to be out of her sight.

“Some of you are new members of this community,” said Mr. Harper from his podium. “A month, two, or three, no matter. You’ve bent your back to labour through a cold and hard winter; perhaps you’ve been to see the doctors at the hospital. But you may well have asked yourself: what makes this place so fine? Where is this great community you sought when you travelled so far from family and home? Well I can only say—look around you—to the man next to you, and the one next to him.”

Jason looked to his side, his eye caught by a bright flash of red. Two men stood there. One caught Jason’s eye. Smiled.

“He,” said Mr. Harper, “is Eliada.”

Wider and wider, his teeth sharp points beneath his lips.

In the distance, Garrison Harper was on to something else—something about the ties that bind, the height of civilization.

Jason scarcely heard it. Icy sweat broke out on Jason’s brow, and he could feel an awful crawling at the base of his spine. For that instant, he was back in the quarantine, looking at that tiny, leering face. Striking at it. Running. His hand itched where he’d cut it on a scalpel, and as he looked at this fellow he also looked into the tall, skeletal Juke’s eyes at the back of the quarantine and could not look away.

Finally, it was a touch at his elbow that drew him back. The man looked away, and smiled at someone else. The spell was broken. The touch at his elbow was from an older man, dressed better than most. He was one of those servants, Jason guessed.

“Mr. Thistledown?” he asked, and Jason nodded. “Miss Harper is awaiting your company. Perhaps best to join her?”

The fellow did not speak again, but led him to the top of a rise to the north of the main party. Downslope was a cleared-out area that edged on the orchards. Not far off was a barn. There, a small group of people milled together. From the crowd, an iron horseshoe flew out, and as it clattered against a spike sticking out of the ground, a girl squealed. Jason waved at them, and started down.

They were near a little iron table, topped with tall glasses and a pitcher of apple cider. Miss Louise Butler was there, sipping her cider in a light blue frock and looking well, Jason thought, compared to how she seemed on the river boat; and also there was Ruth Harper—dressed as outlandishly as Jason had ever seen on a girl, wearing very baggy pants of a deep green tied near the ankle, and a white shirt like a man’s. She was beaming.

“Jason Thistledown!” she shouted, waving the horseshoes above her head as she drew up to him.

“Thank you ever so for inviting me to your party Miss Harper,” said Jason, parroting what his Aunt Germaine had told him to say when greeting his hostess. He originally was not intending to follow her advice—the way Aunt Germaine had said to say it seemed prissy and girlish and he was sure it would make him out a fool.

But no one laughed. Ruth gave a little curtsy, and she smiled in a sly way at him—the sort of way that made Jason feel that he was in on the joke, not the butt of it. The smile also washed away, at least for the moment, that memory of a tiny face like hers but not, grinning with sharp little teeth and a perverse shine in the bead-sized eye. Jason felt himself exhale, and set about figuring a greeting for Louise Butler, who stood clutching her cider to her breast and looking stricken.

Ruth set the horseshoes on the ground and stepped lightly to the table, where she lifted the pitcher and began filling a glass. “Cider, Jason?”

“Of course you remember Louise.”

“Good afternoon,” said Jason. Louise finally smiled properly.

“It’s still morning,” said Louise. “But good day, sir.”

Ruth handed the glass to Jason, then set the pitcher down. Jason took a deep swallow of the cider. It was thick and a little tart, and burned his throat.

“Too strong for you?” she asked.

“I like it fine. Like drinking a pie.” Jason took another sip. “This is quite a party your pa puts on.”

“The first of many,” said Ruth. “Father feels celebration is essential to maintaining community. This summer, he’ll have a hundred.”

Jason laughed. “He’ll run out of Sundays,” he said, and Ruth said, “He’ll just send to New York for more.”

Louise interjected: “Do you play at horseshoes, Jason?”

“I do,” said Jason. He drained the rest of his glass of cider and set it on the table.

Horseshoes was a game that Jason played quite some with his ma. When he was small, she’d driven an old rail spike into the dirt behind the house. On summer evenings after supper, the two of them would sometimes haul out a rusted stack of horseshoes and toss them over that spike until the last of daylight had bled off. The Harpers’ horseshoe set was nothing like that—the horseshoes had not a speck of rust on them, and not one of them had ever borne the weight of an actual horse.

They played four games of it before the call to lunch, and Jason won three of them without even thinking. The last one, he started thinking—and that did it. He threw one horseshoe wild, and another dropped halfway between him and the spike. Louise took that game, and at the end of it, Jason found he had to sit.

“Why Jason—what is the matter? I’ve not seen you this pale since I accused you of being the son of a gunfighter!” said Ruth.

Jason shook his head. “Nothing.”

A single vertical line formed on Ruth’s brow. “Well,” she said, “I doubt that. What have you been up to since we parted ways at the dock?”

Jason might have told it—told Ruth everything of that night, from the creature at the window to the Juke at the back of it, from the sad fate of Maryanne Leonard to the less certain fate of Dr. Andrew Waggoner—his game of cat and mouse with the murderous Dr. Bergstrom in days subsequent—were it not for the exquisite timing of Garrison Harper. He stood at the top of the rise, his coat in his arm and the sleeves of his shirt rolled past the elbow—a huge grin on his face and the breeze teasing a long dark forelock like a torn strand of flag.

“Children!” he shouted. “Dinner! Hop to it please—plenty of time for horseshoes later!”

And then Ruth Harper stood, and between finger and thumb, she took hold of his little finger on his right hand, and by that lifted him to his feet.

“We are summoned, Mr. Thistledown,” she said. “Best we do not tarry. The guests shall become restless.”

“Quite a crowd, isn’t it?” said Ruth. “Have you ever seen that many people at once, Jason?”

“Sure,” said Jason, although he could swear there were twice as many as there were before they started playing at horseshoes.

“Ever seen so many so fine?” she asked.

Jason looked—but try as he might, he couldn’t figure what she was talking about. Were they fine? Finer than others? Mr. Harper seemed to like them—he was striding on ahead, into the midst of a group of men who had the hard look of lumberjacks, bellowing his welcome at them.

And with that, they headed down the hill and into the midst of Garrison Harper’s picnic, and as they jostled through the crowd, Jason thought Ruth was right. He hadn’t seen a bunch of folk like this before—and the number of them didn’t have anything to do with it. This place was supposed to be a Utopia—something like Heaven on earth, designed to fit with some grand idea that Mr. Harper had come upon. And as he wandered through the crowds of people with Ruth and Louise, making their way towards the food, it dawned on Jason that as much as his aunt had talked on about free medical care and good working conditions in the mill, he had never fully fathomed exactly what that idea was.

But as he was moving among these folk, he thought he might be getting a better inkling. They were tall—not one of them who was an adult was any shorter than Jason. They seemed pretty strong too. And as to the ladies? They were lean and comely, in the main—good matches for the men they accompanied. And Jason had spent some time with Aunt Germaine and knew of the infirmities that she looked for doing her work—there was no sign he could tell of idiocy or lunacy in their faces; nothing of the mongrel or the degenerate.

In fact, one might wonder just what profit Aunt Germaine and the Eugenics Records Office might find spending time here. Aunt Germaine told him that they were looking for the bottom ten percent of the world.

And here—at least judging by the strong arms and the clean brows—Jason figured there wouldn’t be anyone in that bottom percentage. And then another thought came to him—a recollection not of the quarantine, but of that other awful place, Cracked Wheel. Those days he and his aunt had hid out in the town offices, and she’d told him what was what about Dr. Charles Davenport and the ERO.

Why not look for the top ten percent? he’d asked her.

Why not indeed? That’d been her answer. Jason wondered now if he asked Garrison Harper the same question, he’d say anything different.

The sun had passed its height by the time Jason had himself a plate full of some of the finest food he’d tasted, but he had lost sight of Ruth. He spotted Louise Butler, though, at a long table half-full of folk, so went and asked if he might join her. She smiled and said he might, so he set his plate down, put a leg over the bench and asked her a bit about herself. She was more conversational on her own, but only a little, and Jason still had to draw it out of her.

Where was she from again now?—Evanston, Illinois, thank you. What business were her folks in?—Dry goods, Mr. Thistledown. And she and Ruth Harper attended school together?—Yes thank you. In Chicago?—Not far from Chicago. That is correct. Did she ever read the Bulfinch’s at that school of hers?

“The—Bulfinch’s? I am sorry, Mr. Thistledown. I’m not familiar with that text.”

“Mythology,” said Jason. “The Greeks and such.”

“Oh,” she said. “The Greeks. I’ve tried to read some of Homer. Not my cup of tea.”

Jason took a mouthful of mashed potatoes soaked in butter. He swallowed and set down his fork. “You figure where Miss Harper’s got to?”

“No doubt avoiding that man’s speech,” said Louise.

“Beg your pardon?” asked Jason. He followed the tines of Louise’s fork where she indicated, and added, “Oh.”

Nils Bergstrom had arrived. He wore a light summer jacket and a hunting cap, and he’d climbed onto a table in the middle of the crowd. He wavered on his feet, and Louise commented disapprovingly: “He looks drunk.”

Bergstrom might have been drunk, but if so, he wasn’t drunk in the way that Jason understood a man could get: first too familiar, filled with great love, which could change in an instant to a fountain of murderous rage. Bergstrom seemed to move too easily, his arms swung too slowly.

If he spoke, Jason might have been able to tell from that. For drunk men in Jason’s experience couldn’t quite say anything without stumbling and slurring. But it wasn’t speech that came from Nils Bergstrom’s open mouth.

“Is he whistling?” whispered Louise, and Jason shook his head.

“Mouth’s wide open. Maybe it’s some of those folk.”

Jason pointed now, at a couple of men at a table nearer Bergstrom, who were standing up now and swaying as well. Jason could hear the tuneless whistling and soon placed it. His eyes flickered shut, and he stood in the quarantine, before a great pair of barn-board doors—doors that were shut for now, but from which a terrible light might emerge… .

The whistling stopped.

“Is that your aunt?” said Louise, and Jason opened his eyes.

“It is,” he said.

Germaine Frost took Bergstrom by the arm, and helped him down from the table. Bergstrom shook his head as she patted his shoulder, and led him back toward the house.

“It would seem that she saved the day,” said Louise.

With shaking hand, Jason lifted his fork and dug into his mashed potatoes. They were like paste in his mouth, but he made himself swallow them. A fellow could see spectres in all sorts of places, even hear them, in a woodsman’s whistle.

“Why don’t you tell me about the Harpers?” he said finally, and Louise laughed.

“What an excellent idea,” she said.

“Well,” said Ruth Harper some time later. “Aren’t you two a pair?”

Jason looked up. Ruth stood behind and between the two of them. She held a dark wooden box under one arm and rested her other hand on Louise’s shoulder. Louise started at her school friend’s touch, like she’d been accused of something.

“Oh yes,” said Jason. “I have been learning all sorts of things about the Harpers from Miss Butler.”

“Have you now?” Ruth gave Louise a light slap on her shoulder. Jason winked at Louise—shocking her, and shocking himself a little bit. Seeing Dr. Bergstrom finally, in full inebriation seemed to have stoked Jason’s confidence. Maybe past what was reasonable.

If that were so, Jason had no problem with it. A few minutes ago, as the table was clearing and the other guests went off to join games that Mr. Harper had organized nearby, the notion had alighted on Jason: he was taking pleasure at the picnic. His aunt, the doctor—his dead mama’s ghost—the horror in the quarantine—all of that was tucked away. This was more pleasure than he had ever expected to see.

“For instance,” said Jason, but before he could continue Ruth interrupted.

“You can tell me everything another time,” she said. “For now—I’ve something I want to show you. Come.”

Jason stood up, but when Louise tried to stand, Ruth gently pushed her back down. “I think you have had enough excitement for today. Jason—come with me. We shall have a walk in the orchard. Would you carry this?” She handed Jason the box, and he took it. It was heavy—Jason guessed whatever was inside was made of iron. But he could not tell what it was.

He hefted the box under his arm, tipped his cap to Miss Louise Butler, and followed Ruth Harper through the crowd. He was grinning like a fool, but he didn’t care and figured he couldn’t do anything about it if he did. That grin stayed with him—when they ducked through a group of workers to avoid drawing Mr. Harper’s attention; when they hurried past the horseshoe spike and down a row of blossoming apple trees, over another rise and to a quiet place beyond.

It stayed on him right up until the moment that he opened the box, and found the gleaming silver Colt six-shooter nestled there, resting up in its blood-red bed of velvet.

20 - The Secret Terror

“No one knows,” said Ruth Harper, rocking from one foot to the other and grinning madly in the dappled sunlight of the orchard. “Not even Louise. Especially not Louise. I purchased it in Chicago—it belonged to Calamity Jane!”

Jason held the gun in two hands. It was a Colt Single Action Army revolver, and although it was nickel-plated with a fine walnut grip, it showed its age. The barrel was nicked in two places and the finish on the wood was worn where the heel of a hand would touch. Jason flicked the magazine open and sighed. At least it wasn’t loaded.

“The ammunition is in a little compartment in the box,” said Ruth.

Jason flicked it closed and held it at his side, pointed to ground. “How much did you pay?”

“Twenty-nine dollars,” said Ruth.

“That seems dear.”

“I know,” said Ruth. “But it came with the box—and a certificate.”

“Have you fired it?”

“No.”

“That’s one reason nobody knows you got one, I guess. These things make a racket.”

“Like thunderclaps,” said Ruth.

“Although it looks like you could,” said Jason, sighting along the barrel. “Gun’s old, but it’s been cared for.”

“Would you like to?”

Jason looked up. Ruth had moved off to the base of an apple tree. It was too early in the season for apples to grow, but she must have had one in her pantaloons, because she was buffing it on her shirt now. She stood straight against the tree, and put the apple on her head so that it balanced.

“The bullets are in the box. A compartment near the hinge,” she said.

Jason gawked.

“Oh come along,” said Ruth, rolling her eyes in such exasperation that the apple nearly fell. “You can deny all you like. But I see how you handle that iron.”

“Iron?”

“Gun,” she said, and took the apple from her head. “It’s quite clear to me that you are simply being obstinate.”

“Obstinate, huh?” Jason let the gun dangle at his side.

“Obstinate. As Jack Thistledown’s true-born son, you should have no difficulty shooting the apple from the top of my head,” she said, and made her finger into that pantomime of a pistol again, pointed it at the apple in her other hand, and bent her wrist like she fired it. “You’ve got shooting in your blood. It is a eugenical fact.”

Jason looked at her. He drew a breath and counted a few before talking.

“First thing,” he said, “I have not shot one of these before. I’ve seen them. And I’ve seen them shot. So the one eugenical fact is this: if I tried to shoot the apple from your head, more than likely I’d shoot the eye from your socket. Then you’d be dead and I’d be in dutch.” Jason flipped the gun around in his hand so he gripped it around the barrel and the magazine, and presented the grip to Ruth. “This is a fine enough ‘iron’ you bought yourself—though I don’t guess it came from Calamity Jane or anyone else famous. You got the certificate?”

Ruth took the gun. “In my room.” She said it sullenly. “You know, everyone is convinced that your father was Jack Thistledown.”

She whirled then, raised her arm and pointed the gun at Jason.

“Ha!” she said. “See? Your nerves are steel. You did not even flinch!”

“It’s not loaded,” said Jason.

Ruth squinted at him. “Even knowing—a lesser man would have flinched,” she said. “The son of a gunfighter? Never.”

“You know,” said Jason, “you don’t know me well enough to make those sorts of guesses.”

Ruth stood still, lowered the gun, and crooked her head to one side in a way that was becoming familiar. “Why Jason Thistledown I do believe there is a tear in your eye.”

“Something in my eye. Not crying.”

“Ahem. Nerves of steel indeed.”

And she stepped up to him, dropped the apple to the ground and standing very close, touched his cheek with a fingertip. Her eyes held nothing but frank amazement.

“You never answered my other question,” she said.

“What question?”

She pulled back. “Whatever have you been up to since we parted ways at the dock?”

It came out fast—most of the story, and at the right point, the rest of the tears.

That point came early on, when Jason was telling about burning up his mama and the homestead and all, at the advice of Aunt Germaine. Jason did not want to tell that part, but it was the only way he could explain Bergstrom’s decision to lock him up in the quarantine the first night.

“Aunt Germaine figured that washing me down and burning up my mama would do the trick—kill the germ and make it right, and I went—” He was about to say, I went along, but he found he could not say anything else. He felt a fist close in his middle, and his mouth filled with salt, and he shut his eyes to try to will it away, but he could not. So he cried, and as he did he found he was no better at it now than he was when he wept at his mama’s deathbed.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. They were sitting at the base of a tree, cross-legged on the ground, Ruth facing him. He saw that she was tearing up too.

“Your mother died,” she said. “Do not apologize.”

“Not just my mama,” said Jason. “The town. Cracked Wheel. Everybody died.”

Ruth frowned and sniffed and swallowed. “The entire town. From this same illness?”

“A hundred folk,” said Jason.

“All,” she said, “but you—you and your aunt.”

“She wasn’t from town.”

“Yes. She was just passing through, you said.”

“Intending to visit us, she said.”

“In the middle of winter. Did she visit often in winter?”

“She never visited before this,” said Jason. “Winter or summer. It was a good thing she did, though. On balance, I mean.”

Ruth let Jason get on with the rest of his story: about how Dr. Bergstrom stuck a needle in him and put him in quarantine. Jason did not cry for this part, although it was a memory that he had been doing his best to forget since freeing Dr. Waggoner and he thought it might be a thing to make him weep. But thinking about it now just made him mad, and egged on by Ruth’s encouraging nods, he told most all of the story the way it had happened. All of it, but the fact that the creature looked like Ruth Harper in miniature. He could not figure out a way to say that.

“Your aunt gave you a scalpel,” Ruth said. “To cut yourself free.”

“Else I’d have been done for.”

“May I see your hand?”

Jason extended it. The bandage was off now, but the stitches were still in place, little black sutures running up the heel of his thumb. She took his hand, cradling it in her own palm, while she ran a fingertip along the sutures. She made a tsk-tsk sound, then set his own hand back in his lap.

“So she knew about the creatures.”

“She—” Jason had seen her talking with Dr. Bergstrom like they were old friends. But he had not yet let himself think that she actually knew all the things that were to befall him in that quarantine.

“She must have known about the Juke,” said Jason. “Before I got there.”

“What a wonderful aunt you have, Jason,” she said acidly.

Jason told about the autopsy room and the state of Maryanne Leonard’s corpse in better detail, expecting that Ruth would at some point beg him to spare her. In fact, she asked Jason if he’d kept the samples someplace safe and seemed appalled when he told her he’d sent them off with Dr. Waggoner.

“You entrusted them to the Negro?”

“He’s a doctor,” said Jason.

“He’s a runaway Negro doctor. I understand he stole clothing and medical supplies before he ran off.”

“He stitched up this cut. He’s my friend. I should’ve done more.”

“More?”

Jason looked at Ruth—and wondered whether he ought to omit the next part of the story the same way he left out the little be-fanged Ruth Harper that crawled up his leg that night. He had given Sam Green his word, after all, that he would keep their meeting—his own involvement in this thing—a secret.

“What more do you mean, Jason?” she demanded. “What did you do for Dr. Waggoner in the first place?”

“I helped him get out,” said Jason. “Before the attack. I stole those things.”

Ruth looked at him hard, and she must have read something in the pained expression in his face, because she did not ask him the question that he could not answer: who warned him that the Ku Klux Klan were planning to break into the hospital and murder the doctor?

Instead, she finally asked: “How did you get away with it?”

“Mostly luck and good graces. I did get caught,” he said. “When I was fetching the doctor’s bag, Annie Rowe came by. Caught me red-handed.”

“But she didn’t turn you over.”

“No. She asked what I was doing—I said I was gettin’ something for my aunt. I could tell she didn’t believe me. But she didn’t stop me, neither.”

Ruth shook her head and smiled slightly.

“Otherwise, I kept to the quiet places,” said Jason.

“Hum. Move over, Jason.”

Ruth got up, picked up the Colt and the box it had come in, and settled against the tree trunk, close enough so their shoulders were touching. Jason shifted to give her room, but she closed the gap. She put the gun in the box, and shut it.

“So what did you find when you returned to the quarantine?”

“I haven’t,” he said. “Not since that night.”

She turned the clasp on the box shut, and set it on the ground beside her. She looked at Jason very seriously.

“Have you been back down to the autopsy room?”

“I been laying low.”

Jason looked right into her unblinking eyes. He felt that fist in his middle again, but this time it opened up wide. Ruth Harper’s eyes drew closer, and fluttered shut, as her lips touched his, and held them as her fingertips moved up the back of his neck to the base of his skull and teased the fine hair there. Her mouth opened and he felt her moist breath pass his own parted lips. And then she pulled away, her hand resting only a moment longer at the nape of his neck, and she apologized for her forthrightness, and said she hoped he did not regard it as an affront to his manhood.

Jason took a deep breath and swallowed. He had a feeling in his middle that a fellow gets when he is falling in a tumble: one instant, he’s facing the ground—the next, the pure blue of Heaven. And the whole short time of it, his stomach’s in his throat.

“Do you know why I did that right now?” Ruth was looking at her hands as she spoke. She sounded flustered.

Jason shook his head.

“Because it terrified me.”

“More—” he cleared his throat. “More than having an apple shot off your head by a farm boy?”

“I didn’t really expect you to. But yes. More than that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well—I think it terrified me about as much as it terrifies you—to go back into that quarantine, or go down to the autopsy room, or confront that aunt of yours. Perhaps to face up to—” She looked up at him now, one side of her mouth crooked up in a grin. “Well. You want to do all of those things. It will be better for you if you do. And all that it takes is one reckless moment—”

And then her expression changed, and for an instant her eyes left his and glanced over his shoulder, and narrowed. Jason would have asked what it was, but he had no chance. Ruth turned back to him, parted her lips, and leaned toward him. This time she did not hold onto his head, which Jason figured meant he’d better do his part, so brought his mouth to hers. Her lips were open, and his were too, and their teeth clicked together as he felt the softness of her tongue on his. Her hand this time stayed clear of his neck and rested on the inside of his leg, fingertips playing with a fold in his trousers, inches from his parts.

She pulled back from him then, and rested her chin on his shoulder, and whispered:

“We are being watched.”

Jason started to pull away, but stopped when she made a shushing noise.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “This is what he’ll be expecting us to be doing. There won’t be more questions if we’re simply found doing it.” And then she pulled back and said at volume:

“Boy! Come out and stop spying on us!”

Now Jason did turn away, and look up the slope where Ruth was looking. Sure enough, at the crest of the rise, someone was moving. But it did not take long to tell that Ruth had guessed wrong. This was no boy.

This fellow had dark hair, and a wide face, and he was huge. As he climbed up over the rise, Jason saw that he was wearing a white robe that came down to his ankles. He was carrying a thick branch in two hands. Jason thought he might recognize the fellow, and as he started down the hill, Jason figured he knew from where.

“Nowak.”

The last time Jason had seen Nowak had been four days ago, outside the sawmill just before he met up with Sam Green. Nowak was changed from that afternoon. Watching as he moved stiffly down the hillside toward them, Jason was put to mind of something his mama had taught him early: the way she put it, men-folk could change from one fellow to a completely different one, in as much time as it took to drink a jug of whiskey. And when they did, you had to watch them. You could not let them get too close.

“Do you know him?” whispered Ruth.

“I met him. It ain’t right.”

“It’s not—” Ruth took a sharp breath. “He’s wearing a Klan robe. Oh damn. Let me—”

She reached around beside her. Jason could hear the box with the Colt inside opening. He didn’t look at what she was doing. He stood up, and kept his eye on Nowak. He was grinning widely. As he started to close the gap, there was enough of a shift in the breeze, and Jason caught a whiff of something rotten. He was carrying the branch across his middle, bouncing it in one hand while the other gripped it hard, like he was getting ready to swing.

Jason kept his eye on the man. That was the trick, his mama said. Don’t let them see you back down or look like you might take what they’re planning on giving out. Because they’ll see that as an invitation. Show them you’ll look them in the eye. Show them you’ll fight.

“You want something?” said Jason.

Beside him, Ruth whispered: “Damn. Damn damn damn it all!”

Jason heard the metallic click and spin sound that told him she had opened the magazine. He cursed too, but to himself. It would have been better if she’d just handed him the gun empty. Jason thought he might have bluffed. He stepped in front of Ruth, so at least when Nowak rushed them, he’d hit Jason first.

But Nowak stopped about a dozen feet from them. He didn’t say anything and didn’t move—just stared at Jason. It was mesmerizing.

“What do you want?” said Jason.

“God,” said Nowak. “I want to show you God.”

“I seen God already,” said Jason. “Why don’t you run off?”

But as Jason spoke, he saw that wasn’t going to happen. It was as though a cloud moved across Nowak’s face—and as it passed a whistling came up—and Nowak said: “God wants to see you some more.” And then he stopped bouncing the stick, and lifted it, and started again toward the two of them.

And at that, Jason lost the contest. He flinched, expecting an arm-smashing blow, or something that would end up on his skull, and finish him.

But before that could come, he felt a hand around his right wrist, and the cool walnut grip of the Colt.

He didn’t even think past that. He brought the gun up and held it two-handed—waited the instant that it would take to know whether the gun would cause Nowak to stop—with a thumb drew the hammer back, with a forefinger squeezed the trigger—screwing his eyes shut and bracing against the kick—

—then finally, when it was all over, thinking to himself:

You were right, Ruth. It’s a thunderclap.

They had only a moment to themselves after that. Nowak was on his back, bleeding into the sheet from his shoulder where Jason had clipped him. He was not in such terrible shape that he could not get up again, but the one shot had taught him respect for the gun, which Jason kept trained on his head—so he stayed down.

Which was a good thing, because Ruth had only managed to load one more bullet before she’d handed the Colt over. Jason did not wish to shoot a fellow just for trying to stand up, though he knew he would have to.

During the moment before the riders crested the hill, Jason only asked him one question. Later, he would come to regret that he had not followed that with more questions, because when the two Pinkerton men ordered him to surrender the gun and pulled him away from Nowak, they made sure Jason did not have another chance to speak with him alone again.

For the next few hours, Jason didn’t have a chance to speak with anyone alone. Sam Green showed up and hauled Jason and Ruth back to the house, and then Jason found himself in a big sitting room, face to face with Mr. Harper and Mrs. Harper and Aunt Germaine. That was when he found out how lucky he was not to have been shot by the first fellows to arrive at the scene.

“They found you standing over a bleeding man with a gun in your hand, son,” said Mr. Harper. “I would not have blamed either of them if they’d put a bullet in you as a matter of precaution. Now tell me, son—why did you bring a firearm to this home? What possessed you?”

“I’m sorry,” said Jason, and saying that, he realized that he was willing to lie to protect Ruth Harper. He was willing to because he had—same as he’d shot that fellow without thinking.

“I did it,” Ruth blurted. Jason looked at her in amazement.

She confessed to everything—even going so far as having the certificate brought downstairs from her room. She explained that she had brought the weapon out because she wanted to see how Jack Thistledown’s son could shoot.

“And as it turned out, he is a remarkable shot,” she said.

“Jack Thistledown.” Mr. Harper shook his head.

Then Ruth went at her father on another tack. “That man was deranged, father. He was a Klansman! If Jason—Mr. Thistledown had not fired upon him, Heaven knows what he might have done to us both!”

Mr. Harper went quiet and thoughtful at that, and although Jason did not know him well he could see the arguments turning in his head. He wondered when it would come to the point where he asked to know what the two of them had been doing back in the orchards.

Jason regarded Aunt Germaine. She was seated away from them on a high-backed stuffed chair, hands folded in her lap. Light from the tall windows reflected in her glasses, making it difficult to tell where she was looking.

“Jason,” said Mr. Harper finally, “look at me.”

Jason looked at him.

“Dr. Bergstrom thinks that Piotr Nowak will live. So you have not killed a man today, although you might well have. For that, you can be grateful.”

“I am grateful for that.”

“And I must tell you that I am grateful you had the presence of mind to use my daughter’s ill-gotten toy to protect her life and honour.”

Jason nodded.

“Now I am going to send you home. You and Mrs. Frost both.”

“Father,” said Ruth, standing up, “Mr. Thistledown should not go back to the same hospital as that brute!”

“I am not speaking of the hospital,” said Mr. Harper. “I mean to say, it is time that both you and your aunt left Eliada. The steamboat is downriver just now. It returns late tomorrow. On Tuesday, you shall both be on it.”

Aunt Germaine leaned forward. “I beg your pardon,” she said in a tone that suggested anything but begging.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Frost. You may convey my apologies to New York, if indeed that is your next stop.”

“You are suggesting that we leave,” she said. “Now.”

“I am insisting.”

Aunt Germaine stood, and walked over to Jason. She put a hand on his arm.

“He rescued your daughter, sir. From, if I may say, a difficulty that is of your making—not his.”

“Is that so?”

“The Klan. They were here before us, sir. They injured your Negro days before we arrived.”

“My Negro.”

Mr. Harper drew a breath and paused, as if collecting himself.

“Madame,” he finally continued, “I will not be swayed. Do you not see what danger you are in now? Both of you? Are you not afraid that this fellow’s friends will try to take vengeance?”

Aunt Germaine took Jason’s arm. “We shall see,” she said. “Come Jason—we are returning to the hospital.”

Jason stood up, but Mr. Harper shook his head. “I would not recommend that. Ruth is right—the hospital is not safe.”

“Then what would you recommend?”

Mr. Harper sighed. “Mrs. Frost, I don’t bear you ill will. You or young Mr. Thistledown. I’d ask that the two of you remain here as our guests for the next two nights. We have spare rooms aplenty, and I think you will find that Harper hospitality exceeds that at the hospital. I do not think that anyone would dare strike here.”

“We shall send for your things,” said Mrs. Harper in a kindly tone.

Aunt Germaine was having none of it. “Do not think this makes things right!” she said, so fiercely that Mrs. Harper gasped, Mr. Harper looked away, and Jason felt the blood in his face as he briefly met eyes with Ruth. He recalled as they arrived that Aunt Germaine had not wished to be embarrassed. He wondered now, somewhat nastily, if she even had the wit to be.

The picnic carried on long into the evening but Jason stayed clear of it. He had a good view from the bedroom the servants had put him up in. It was an attic room, but pretty fine for that: the bed was wider than the hospital bed that Jason slept in, and softer too. And there was a little window that cut out from the eaves, and a place where a fellow could sit and look out. It was also advantageous, in that the room was a floor up and a wing away from the quarters where they’d placed Aunt Germaine.

He had only two visitors during the day.

Sam Green stopped in about four in the afternoon. Outside, some fellows had gotten with their instruments—one with a guitar, another with a fiddle, and another fellow with a harmonica—and started to play a tune together. Sam Green knocked twice on the door before letting himself in. Jason nodded welcome.

“You ever learn to dance, Mr. Thistledown?” said Sam, bending his head to look out the window over Jason’s shoulder.

“Not much call for it,” said Jason.

“Are you sure about that? Nothing a young lady likes better’n a fellow who’s quick on a two-step.”

“Mayhap I should learn that then.”

Sam tilted his head. “Mayhap,” he said.

Jason slid out of the window. “How is he?” he asked.

“He?”

“Fellow I shot,” said Jason.

“Oh,” said Sam, “you’re interested. That’s something. Wouldn’t have thought that of a Thistledown boy. Particularly one as you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Sam smiled and set down in the window where Jason had been. “You shot a man today. You shot him right, just where you needed, to take him down but not kill him. And then you held him—kept that gun on him steady until my men could show up.”

“Wasn’t much else to do.”

“Well you did the right thing—exactly the right thing—and that is something most fellows would not have been able to. I know because I’ve seen how most fellows get when they start to shooting. Some of them keep shooting, doing all sorts of harm and you got to calm them down or shoot ’em to make ’em stop. Others—well, they shoot the once and miss, and then start shaking so bad they can’t do it again and they get themselves shot often as not as well.

“And then there’s another sort. Like you.”

“Like me.”

“Ice in your veins, boy. I could tell the minute I showed up, and looked you in the eye.”

“What did you see?”

“What I’ve seen in your pa’s eyes.” Sam was nodding slowly as he looked at Jason, and things got quiet. Jason did not take the bait.

“You going to tell me how that fellow’s doing?” he said. “The one I shot so well?”

Sam smiled and chuckled deep in his chest. “He’ll be fine soon as the doctor sobers up enough to work on him. Then I will talk to him. We found some other sheets in the orchard—dropped, like their owners heard the gunshots, dropped the costumes and bolted—not far off. Did you happen to hear or see anyone else?”

“No. Just him.”

Sam nodded. “Figured you’d say if you had. That wasn’t what I came here for, though.”

“What did you come for?”

“Tell you thanks,” said Sam. “Thanks for keeping that matter between us. And thanks for taking care of Ruth. That was a near thing.”

“Well, you are welcome sir,” said Jason.

“And son,” he said as he pushed himself off the windowsill and headed for the door, “you might want to take my advice and learn that two-step. More reliable way to impress a young lady than shooting folks with a borrowed six-gun, you want my opinion.”

The second visitor was a mystery—just a knock at the door, and a wax-sealed envelope slipped beneath it. By the time Jason opened the door, the footsteps were going down the stairs.

So Jason opened the seal and pulled out two folded sheets of paper and an empty, unaddressed envelope. One sheet was blank, one was full of fine handwriting. He did not have to look to the signature at the bottom to know who it was from.

Jason read the letter from Ruth Harper twice before he could put pen to paper and make up a reply. Lord, but the girl was verbose. She used up not one but four sentences describing how much she liked being kissed by him and kissing him back. She felt less kindly toward her father, and she took three more sentences to say how awful he was for making Jason leave town so fast. She was also cross with Miss Louise Butler (although on this she did not elaborate), which was why she had imposed upon Harris, one of the servants, to deliver her letter instead. He would be by later in the evening, to collect any reply that Jason might wish to write, which was what the blank sheet of paper and empty envelope were for. She apologized for not sending along a stick of wax, but it would not have fit under the door.

Jason did reply, but not to any of what she had written, other than to say that he had liked kissing Ruth Harper fine too and hoped they might do so again before he left.

On the final points of her letter he was more specific:

You are welcome for saving your life, although I should thank you for loading the gun or else I would be dead. I am sorry you lost your Colt.

I do not want to go to the quarantine again without a gun at least. But I will meet you at the place you wrote in your letter this night and we can talk about it.

And then he set the pencil down and thought for a moment and wrote:

I am terrified of this too but you were terrified of kissing so I will be brave like you.

He thought about changing that sentence—it was not at all as pretty as the sentences that Ruth had set down in her long letter, and it was not made any prettier by his awful handwriting. And there was that other question—one that he should have an answer to by now. So he wrote his name at the bottom, folded up the note paper, slipped it into the envelope, and settled down to wait for the servant’s return.

Jason kept Ruth’s letter and read it over a couple of times more. His eye kept moving to that single question—the one that he could not figure.

She wrote: I cannot yet fathom why you asked him that question: “Who sent you to murder Dr. Waggoner?” I have been beside myself with wondering—how you would have thought this fellow had gone to murder Dr. Waggoner? Will you not tell me, Jason my darling? Is there another piece to this mystery you have kept from me?

And what of his answer, Jason? What of that? What is this “old man” of whom he speaks? Is it Dr. Bergstrom? That creature you described in the quarantine? Some other man? Do you know? Pray write me & say!

Jason read the letter over and over, until the hour struck three, and it was time. He folded the letter, put it in his pocket, and with a shaking breath, slipped out through the door and padded down the corridor.

How in tarnation was he supposed to know who the old man was anyhow? All he knew was what Nowak had said, lying in his own quickening blood and spitting through the pain:

“The Oracle is on the march. She deliver God.

“She deliver God.”

21 - The “Germe de grotte”

“You are ever punctual, Mr. Thistledown,” Ruth said.

Jason didn’t see her, but he felt a warm hand on his arm as soon as he stepped through the doorway of the cider house. She drew him further along, and the door swung shut. In the dark now, Jason leaned over to where he thought the voice came from with another kiss in mind.

Fortunately, Ruth Harper was deft enough to move aside, so when Louise Butler struck a match and held it to a candle, they stood blinking in the flickering light a respectable distance from one another. Louise granted Jason a bare smile and set the candle on a wooden shelf behind her, and gave Ruth a look of ambiguous meaning. Jason nodded a how-do-you-do and Ruth let go of his arm.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Ruth’s voice was taut as a banjo string. “Louise has elected to join us.”

“Pleased to see you again,” said Jason. Then to Ruth: “You sure you want to go to this place?”

“Soon enough,” she said. “But not right away.”

Jason’s eyes narrowed. “We have only a little while to sunrise. You want to figure out a mystery, we best be on our way.”

“On your way where?” said Louise. “I thought—”

“Yes,” said Ruth quickly. “There’s work to be done here first. Jason, why don’t you sit down a moment.”

Jason looked around. They were alongside the curve of a huge wooden barrel that he guessed was for pressing apples. There was a bench along the wall underneath where the candle was. As he looked around, he saw a dark shape on the plank floor. He squinted and stepped closer.

“That’s my aunt’s bag,” he said, bending down to touch the handle.

“Indeed it is,” said Ruth.

“Ruth stole it,” added Louise.

Ruth scoffed: “Oh, hardly.”

“She ordered the help to bring it to her,” said Louise. “They wouldn’t bring the guns though.”

Jason looked at Ruth. She wore a pair of dark trousers and high laced boots, her blouse concealed underneath a small woollen jacket, and in the light, Jason might almost have thought he was kneeling beside a fellow.

“We will give it back,” said Ruth. “After we’ve given it a proper search. I trust that won’t present a problem?”

“I—I looked through it at Cracked Wheel,” said Jason. “She was pretty upset when she caught me.”

“Yes. Well, Mr. Thistledown, why would she be upset if she had nothing to hide? I have been considering the tale you told me about your sad adventures at Cracked Wheel—and the more I considered it, the less sense I could make of it. Consider the fabulous coincidence: a terrible sickness strikes your community, and in its aftermath—this long-lost relation arrives to spirit you off to… here! Where she consorts with that awful Dr. Bergstrom, who subjects you…”

“Subjects him to what?” said Louise.

“Well my point,” said Ruth hastily, “is that your Aunt Germaine, if that is who she is, seems a most sinister presence.”

“All right, Miss Harper, Miss Butler,” he said. “Let’s have a good look inside and see what we can see.”

Jason had hauled that bag across hundreds of miles it seemed, since the winter’s end. As they pried open the clasp and began their inventory, he was amazed with himself that he had found so little when he looked inside it the first time—and that he had failed to take a second look during the rest of the journey. Was he that afraid of inciting his Aunt Germaine’s displeasure?

Ruth felt no such compunction. She wasted no time in pulling out Germaine’s box of eugenical index cards, removing one after another and reading the contents out loud in an unflattering impersonation of Aunt Germaine’s overly precise east coast diction. Louise looked at some cards too, but more quietly—her brow creased as she tried to decipher the numeric code.

Jason helped her: “Epilepsy,” he said. “That’s the fainting sickness. Congenital criminal. That’s—that’s folks born bad.”

Ruth gave him a light slap on the thigh at that. “You’ve already explored these then,” she said, and dug further. After pulling out some garments and a small ivory box that contained small amounts of cosmetics, she reached to the bottom, and looked at her hand in the bag and then at the floor.

“There is,” she said, “another compartment in this bag. Between the bottom and the floor, there is a good four or five inches.”

“Let me see,” said Jason. Ruth leaned away from the bag and Jason took her place. He felt the bottom of the bag. He tapped at it.

“Sounds hollow,” he said, and ran his finger around the edge as Ruth smirked and Louise, in spite of herself, moved in closer.

“A secret compartment,” Louise whispered.

“Not much of a secret,” said Jason as his finger stopped at what felt like another clasp. He twisted it, then when the bottom wouldn’t budge moved to the other side of the bag and found another. He pulled the bottom out, and set it on the floorboard. Ruth stood and brought the candle down from its shelf.

Jason peered into the compartment. There were two things there: a sheaf of paper bound in string, and a small wooden rack, perhaps ten inches long and five wide. It had two circular holes cut in it. One was empty. The other held a small, earthenware jug fired with a reddish glaze. Its top was sealed with deep red wax that drooled down its edges. As Jason lifted it carefully from the bag, he could see no writing or seal on it to say what might be inside. Whatever was inside shifted when he turned the jug upside down to look on its bottom.

He set it down on the floor between himself and Louise, while Ruth busied herself untying the string on the papers.

“Careful,” said Jason, “to remember how she tied that up. We got to put it all back.”

“Quite,” said Ruth. She set the string back on the bag and began to leaf through the papers. Many of them, though not all, were in envelopes that had been neatly cut. Ruth squinted at these.

“Do you know of an M. Dulac?”she asked.

“No,” said Jason.

“Well,” said Ruth, pulling a sheet of paper from one of the envelopes, “your aunt appears to. Ooo-la-la, he is a Frenchman.”

“Let me see that,” said Louise, and snatched letter and envelope from Ruth’s hands. “Remember I sat alongside you in French Grammar classes.” Then to Jason: “She is hopeless at it.”

“You are not much better,” said Ruth, as Louise squinted.

“Well, I am versed enough in World Geography, to know that M. Dulac is no Frenchman.” She held up the envelope, and pointed to the return address. “He is writing from Africa—the Belgian Congo. That means that he is Belgian.”

“How do you know?” asked Jason.

“Because,” said Ruth, “it is a well-known fact that the Belgians don’t let Frenchmen into Africa any more. Particularly not their precious Congo, wherever that is.”

“You were correct, however, about Mrs. Frost’s intimacy with this fellow—or at least his intimacy with her. See?” Louise pointed to a paragraph. “Tu! Not vous. Tu! He is addressing her as an intimate. And could this be chère?”

“Love letters.” Ruth gave a low laugh. “Well that is one secret that we’ve uncovered. Are you shattered, Jason?”

“No,” said Jason.

“And what’s this?” said Louise. “Germe de grotte?”

“Perhaps an affectionate nickname?” offered Ruth.

“It can’t be that affectionate,” said Louise, frowning. “It translates as Germ of the Cave. Or Cave Germ.”

“Well, you know the French,” said Ruth.

“I do not,” said Louise. “And in any event, this fellow is Belgian.”

“Does your French Grammar learning let you read more than a couple words? What’s the letter about? Aside from being intimate I mean,” said Jason.

Louise fixed him with a glare. “I am more than capable of translation,” she said, “but it is not a simple matter.”

“No, it surely is not,” said Ruth. “Why, I can recall you spending entire nights translating filthy French poetry from that Rimbaud fellow.”

“Ruth! I did no such—”

Ruth interrupted. “We do not, however, have time to wait for a translation. It’s only a few hours ’til sunrise. So I propose this: you remain here and complete a translation of those letters. We, meanwhile, shall investigate the mysterious quarantine—then rendezvous back here an hour before the sun comes up, and share our discoveries.”

Jason could see that Louise was thinking about objecting to this; Ruth was, in her plan, brushing Louise aside. But from the way that Louise kept glancing down at that letter and the other ones still in their stack, Jason could tell that she was maybe more curious about what was going on with M. Dulac and Germaine Frost than she was about what was going on in the quarantine. So when she finally sighed and acquiesced, Jason was not surprised.

“Splendid!” said Ruth, standing abruptly. “Then we shall be off.”

She disappeared into the dark for a moment, and before Jason could follow far, returned with a lantern and a hatchet, the second of which she handed to Jason. “It’s not a six-gun,” she said, “but it’s better than nought.”

Louise shook her head absently, as she leaned over the first of the letters from M. Dulac, and Jason and Ruth slipped out into the night.

They could not have been more than ten paces from the door when Ruth stopped, put a hand on Jason’s neck and touched his lips with hers. This kiss lasted longer than the other two, and when they parted, she sighed. “I think that I’m no longer afraid,” she said. “Of kissing, that is. Are you still frightened of the quarantine?”

Jason was, but he didn’t say so. Ruth laid her palm on his chest and looked up at him. The moon was past full, and low in the sky, and it filtered into a silvered filigree through the branches and leaves of the apple trees. She was smiling, mouth open. He couldn’t see her teeth.

“Your heart is thundering,” she said. “You are still afraid.”

Jason lifted her hand from his chest and stepped back. He was afraid. But it was not the quarantine that made him so.

It was that vision of Ruth Harper, small as a doll, mouth filled with sharp teeth and eyes black and mischievous. It was a mad fear; he knew that, but it was a true one—like she was some terrible Gorgon. He could not keep looking at her, but he couldn’t look away.

“May I help, Jason?” She closed the distance and took his hand. “Think of the first time we met. Do you remember? On the train?”

“Sure,” he said. “Although we didn’t meet on the train. It was after.”

“That is when we spoke. We saw each other some time before. I’ve been thinking on that, all this long evening. It was remarkable, don’t you think? That the two of us should, amid all those other passengers, lock our gazes across a rail platform?”

“I didn’t know our gazes locked,” said Jason, and Ruth laughed.

Jason swallowed. Ruth took his hand, opened the fingers and placed it against her cheek. Jason found her birthmark with his thumb, ran his finger along it. She lifted her chin and moved it so she nuzzled his hand, and that was all it took: the panic that had run up and down his back gave way to something finer.

“And here we are,” she said, “mere days later, off on a grand adventure—at one another’s side.”

“That’s something,” agreed Jason.

“Something,” she murmured. “Hmmph. I will tell you what it is, Jason Thistledown. It is fate.”

She peeled Jason’s fingers from her cheek. “Fate,” she said, “has seen us this far. It helped me overcome my terror at your touch. It helped us, through the good fortune of that mystery in your aunt’s bag, it distracted Louise from our adventure so we might have a few hours alone before you must leave. Now, let it help you.” She intertwined her fingers with his, and twisted so they were alongside each other.

“Come,” she said, leading the way along a path. “I know a way past father’s guard. Let’s be on our way.”

They headed into the orchard, along a row and then they turned and went along another, and it wasn’t long before he was entirely turned around and lost. He hoped that Ruth was not trusting entirely to fate to see them through the orchard and had some idea where they were going. Jason had read enough of the Bulfinch’s to know that not all fate was the helpful kind.

Before he could worry too much about that, they stepped out from the trees and back into moonlight. There was a rail fence in front of them, and past that, a gentle slope leading down to some back gardens, and then to a row of what Jason pegged for worker houses.

Ruth set the lantern on the ground and hoisted herself up on the fence so that she straddled it. Jason followed her over.

They headed down a footpath between beds of vegetables. Jason moved low to the ground and Ruth copied him, and kept up with him when he sprinted for the road. It was only there that Jason took a good look down the slope to the town, and noticed the lights.

Ruth stopped short beside him, huffing and clutching her lantern. “Oh my,” she said. “That is queer.”

They had a good view of the main streets of the town, and those streets were easy to tell, because they were lit up with lamps, bright like star-points, swinging and twinkling up and down the avenues. More light came from windows, shining squares of light that flickered with flame and intersecting shadows. That was strange—all those lights and activity past three in the morning—but that wasn’t what made him worry so.

It was the whistling.

The whistling was everywhere—and it was the same kind of sound as he had heard that first night, that filled the whole of the quarantine and got into the back of his head. The same as came up at the picnic, when Bergstrom made such a scene.

As he listened now, Jason wondered if maybe he’d been hearing it all through the night, since he snuck out from the house and made his way down here—got to wondering if maybe it had granted Louise the fascination with the love letters from Africa and Ruth her sense that fate decided everything. It was the sound, after all, that had nearly robbed him of his will, when he saw the thing—the Juke, whatever it was—in the quarantine.

And then, as fast as it had come, the whistling faded. And there were just the lights. Hundreds of lights.

Another light appeared beside him, as Ruth struck a match and held it to the wick of the lantern she carried. “I don’t know what they’re doing. But we won’t be able to sneak past them. We may as well hide in plain sight.”

Jason sighed. He slid the hatchet into his belt, and lifted his shirt so it covered the blade. He wished that fate, if it were watching over them, would have at least seen fit to provide him with a decent gun.

The street was empty, but it was lit by the flickering lamps in the windows and on the porches of the worker houses. Jason started, as he saw one of those lights blacked out for a moment—blacked out by something that was moving in the dark outside. Ruth didn’t notice that; she was too busy trying to hide in plain sight, as she’d said. She held the lantern in front of her like a banner in some parade.

“Jason,” she said, as they approached St. Cyprian’s, “I should thank you for your kind reply to my letter.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“And you answered many of my questions. But not everything.”

She stopped at the path to the church. “I can remember very specifically in fact, a particular question I put to you that you did not answer.”

“That so?”

“That’s so, yes. I asked you: why did you think that this fellow was sent to murder Dr. Waggoner? And you wrote me back a fine letter about many things besides that.” She lifted the lantern to shine it on Jason’s face, and peered into his eyes seriously. “Don’t think you can avoid all my questions, Mr. Thistledown, now that we have become intimates.”

Jason looked back at her. He was on the edge of telling her the whole thing: how Sam Green had warned him of the attempt on Waggoner’s life, and how Dr. Nils Bergstrom was tied up in it, and everything else. It would be easier to betray Sam Green to Garrison Harper’s daughter, he thought, than it would have to tell Aunt Germaine the truth about what had happened in the quarantine. Jason wondered about that: this was a betrayal, pure and simple—not just keeping a secret from someone he’d stopped trusting anyhow.

But it was betrayal to Ruth Harper, who was, as she’d put it, an intimate.

“Well, Jason?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry but I can’t.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked at him more closely. Jason was sure then that she would become angry and stalk off, leaving him alone in the road. But she surprised him.

“I see that’s so,” she said. “I’ll not press the point. You can tell me about that when you tell me more about your papa.”

“All right,” said Jason.

“All right,” she said, and pulled the lantern away.

The whistling started up again as they passed the sawmill. Jason by this time had one hand clutched around the handle of the hatchet, his grip all the tighter for the fact that he knew it would be of scant help, if all those folks turned their attention away from the mill and its maze of lumber. He leaned to Ruth and said that he thought it was time to snuff the light and she agreed.

The crowd around the mill was prodigious; there were easily as many people there as had attended the picnic that afternoon. Their attention on the mill was absolute; they stood facing the walls and between the stacks of lumber, as though waiting for someone to emerge from it.

“Why are they whistling?” whispered Ruth.

“I don’t think they are whistling at all,” said Jason, and then looked to his feet when a woman dressed scandalously in a long nightgown, turned to him and made a shushing noise. Ruth shuddered, and hurried toward the hospital.

It wasn’t far—indeed, they came upon it sooner than they might have thought, because unlike most of the other buildings in Eliada, the hospital was dark. Jason pulled the hatchet from his belt.

Perhaps they both could feel it: the darkness was only an indication of what was truly going on there. They hunkered low as their eyes adjusted to the lower light.

There was movement around the hospital’s perimeter. Maybe more of Sam Green’s men, perhaps guarding Nowak. But they moved different. There was a flutter, like a skirt.

Jason touched Ruth’s shoulder and pointed. She whispered: “I see.”

Jason leaned to her ear, so near her hair tickled his cheek. In a few short breaths, he relayed a plan that he thought might work. When he was done, she nodded, brushed his jaw with her fingertips, and got to her feet.

Absent sheets and masks, Jason gave up the notion of hiding in plain sight. Better to creep up on the quarantine through the woods surrounding it, emerge from the farthest point from the hospital, and wait until the guards had moved ’round the corner to make the final rush.

Thinking about it made it seem easy. Doing it was something else.

The underbrush was thick with high, curling ferns that came past Ruth’s waist and that combined with the darkness made it difficult to move quickly; nearly impossible to move quietly. So to avoid getting spotted, they decided to go back farther into the woods.

This turned out better or at least easier: under the canopy of the trees, the underbrush thinned, and they were soon walking between pine and fir trees on a floor of needles. Jason’s eyes were well-enough fixed to the dark that he could navigate, stepping around a deadfall here and spotting a little spring-bed there—and still keep an eye on the clearing where the quarantine sat.

Finally, he judged them far enough around to make the plunge back. They stood on a small rise of rock and moss, in a spot near a clear sky that made a lonely patch of ferns behind them.

“All right,” he whispered. “You ready, Ruth?”

There was no answer.

“Ruth?” he said again, and turned.

Ruth stood with her back to him. He thought she was saying something, but it was hard to tell: her head shook and bent side to side, but the words weren’t clear. Jason stepped beside her, and as he did so she bent to her knees, peering down from the rocks. Something was moving down there, in a nest made of crushed ferns. He couldn’t tell what it was. He knelt down too, and put his hand on Ruth’s shoulder. Her back was twitching, like she was sobbing. He looked at her, but she shook her head, and pointed down. Jason looked.

It was a girl. Jason thought she might be a little bit older than he and a bit older than Ruth. She had dark curly hair. Far as he could tell, she was naked. The sweat on her breasts and collarbone caught errant rays of moonlight as her chest worked up and down. Her eyes were only half-opened, looking up at the little space of star canopy, and she had a sleepy smile like she was dreaming up a fine night for herself, there in the ferns.

Except it wasn’t just her in the ferns this night. Looking down her stomach, Jason saw something else curled there. First it reminded him of a raccoon, or some other small animal—but it hunched below her navel, and in between her legs was where it rested—and it seemed to be moving, with the same rhythm that Ruth’s shoulder moved when she sobbed.

Jason let go of her and half-slid down the rock. He raised up his axe.

“I’ve seen this thing before,” he said to Ruth.

Oh yes, Jason had seen it before. Last time, it had been crawling up his own stomach, making a run for his privates. Tonight, it had latched onto this girl’s parts—and it was eating or tearing at them or fooling them.

Whatever it was doing, Jason wasn’t about to let it finish. He made his way up close, reached over and grabbed at the thing’s pulsing back. He grasped smooth flesh that felt like pig, and he tried to yank. But the thing wouldn’t budge—it had itself hitched in there somehow.

Jason had to restrain himself from taking the hatchet to it; he knew if he did he’d hurt this poor girl. No, he had to get hold. He turned back to Ruth, to ask her to give him a hand.

He couldn’t see her.

“Ruth?” he said. He stood up and peered over the rock face. In the distance he could see the squared shapes of the quarantine and the hospital. He thought he might be able to hear the sound of someone scrabbling through underbrush, but it was hard to tell over the whistling.

Jason felt his heart hammering. Ruth had run off. She’d panicked, fled. He looked back down. The girl was writhing, her hands on the rolling back of the thing as it snuffled deeper between her legs. Her back arched and her knees bent.

Jason swore, and turned back to the thing. He buried the hatchet in the ground beside him, got down on his knees, and with both hands grasped the creature. The girl screamed as he pulled, tugging back with all her might, and Jason nearly lost his grip before he reached around and threw his weight backwards.

And all at once, the thing came away. The girl screamed again and scrabbled away—and Jason held the creature to his chest and rolled in the opposite direction. It was like wrestling a hairless raccoon, with claws and teeth tearing at his shirt.

He pushed it away, and found himself face to face with the beast. This time, there was no chance of mistaking the thing for a tiny Ruth Harper. The alternative was nothing short of demonic—the thing’s black eyes glittered in the light and its sharp teeth snapped as he held it back.

It slashed out, running a claw down his cheek—and as he held it, something else pricked at his ribs. He pushed the thing away so hard that he convulsed in so doing, and the creature rolled away. As it rolled, he saw briefly something that looked like a dagger, only knobbed and twisted, point into the air. That, he was sure, was the thing that tried to pierce his belly. It may have been the thing that it had used to hang onto the girl.

He reached behind him, found the handle of the hatchet and pulled it from the ground. As he did this, the thing that had previously seemed the size of a raccoon began to unfold itself. It stood on thin legs, a small hunched body and dangling clawed arms, the height of a child. It seemed to convulse then—like it was coughing. Jason’s eyes stung, and he felt like he wanted to sneeze.

He didn’t. Instead, he swung the axe.

It was a wide swing, and it nearly sent him to the forest floor, but the blade hit the thing where its shoulder might have been. It felt as though Jason had cut into a sapling.

Jason twisted the handle and pulled it free, and for a moment he stood straight, wobbling like a drunk, and the thing stood still too. They stared at each other, as though waiting to see which one would fall first. Jason was sure the creature would go down, but it surprised him. It twitched, and bent, and with impossible speed dove into the shade underneath the ferns.

Jason sneezed. His heart was hammering in his chest as he looked over to the girl, who now sat holding her knees to her chest. She was rocking back and forth.

He turned to her, to see if she was all right, but she hunched her shoulders closer in. He touched her shoulder, started to say something like, “You should get away from here ’fore that thing comes back,” but he couldn’t get out a word before she looked up at him, opened her mouth wide, and screamed.

The scream was like a slap across the face—the kind of slap that sometimes a fellow needs, to put him back on course.

He had helped this girl on a whim. But Ruth, who he’d met in the middle of the night and accompanied on this dangerous adventure across Eliada—who he’d kissed… she was gone.

“Ruth,” said Jason.

He hefted the axe and headed up over the little ridge.

“Ruth!”

He didn’t even take the time to see if there were any guards before he started across the open. Ruth was there—he could see her clearly, by the light of her newly lit lantern, at the edge of the building itself. And the door closed on her and that light before he was half the way across.

What was she thinking? She’d taken off, lighting up her lantern like she was walking back to her pa’s house and not that Devil-Infested quarantine. She stepped in through a door, leaving Jason outside to deal with that thing in the forest, help that poor girl. What a no-good—that was his first thought.

He didn’t keep it long in his head, though. Because about the time he was thinking back to his own dizzy time in the quarantine—when it had taken a cut to his hand so deep it still hadn’t healed to bring him back to himself—he thought how quick and easy it was to give yourself up to old Mister Juke, giving not a thought for anything other.

If that is what had happened to her—if she was following some wicked siren call from within—

—like mayhap he was himself. Jason took a sharp breath, and reminded himself of where he was: out in the open, in a yard where men wearing sheets were keeping guard. That thing he’d fought had coughed something in his face, and sure he’d fought it, but now wasn’t he walking into another kind of trap?

He figured he should maybe go back to cover, and thinking that chanced a glance over his shoulder.

The thought was enough to save him—he saw the first of the things mid-leap, before it had a chance to hit him.

This one was almost as big as he was, though skinnier by far. Its scarecrow body blacked out the sky as it jumped over him, scythe-claws spread. Jason ducked and slashed up with his hatchet. He felt the blade graze something and the thing landed a few feet beyond him—one hand clutched at Jason’s middle as it steadied itself.

Jason rushed at it and slashed out again, but this time the creature ducked to the side and it was all Jason could do to keep his feet beneath him. He didn’t get a third swing, because at that moment, something bit into his ankle. He looked down—a smaller creature, no bigger than a newborn, had latched onto his foot and was gnawing at his Achilles tendon. He didn’t let it get far, first kicking out then stomping down on his ankle. The thing squealed and dislodged, rolling back. Jason thought he could see things like porcupine quills roil across its back.

The big one had meantime recovered its wits, and slashed out at Jason’s back. Jason was expecting it, however, and whirled around with the axe at arm’s length. He caught it in the chest more by chance than anything else, then yanked the hatchet free and swung it again. This time it bit into the thing’s head—and as Jason pulled the blade out again, he drew the head close to his.

“God-damn you,” he swore as he looked it in the eye and saw the thing that it had become. His mama’s eyes rolled in sockets that looked like hers, and a black tongue emerged from between lips like hers. He swore again and pushed it to the ground, then kicked it hard with his bad foot even though that hurt like hell to do it.

“God-damn you!”

He turned back to the woods and raised the hatchet.

That was how they did it, these Jukes: they put the face of the thing you loved or wanted most at the top of your mind, and using some kind of magic put it on their own flesh. Or maybe just made you imagine it. Jason felt his eyes heat up with tears. And even if you know it can’t work—if you know it can’t be true—it doesn’t make it any less hurtful, to put an axe-blade in your dead mama’s skull.

Another of the things leaped out of the darkness at him, and Jason swung at it—too wide, and the thing latched onto his arm. The pain was bad enough that Jason’s hand opened without his meaning and the hatchet fell to the ground.

“Damn!” he shouted, and tried to yank the tiny Juke off his arm. It glared up at him with Aunt Germaine’s tiny, magnified eyes and held tighter. But if that was meant to make him pull his punch, it was the wrong trick. Jason punched it straight on the back, and it came undone like a leg trap.

But by then two other things had hit him in the legs, and there was nothing for it. Jason went over. The ground came up fast and he coughed away his wind, and then he felt another thing on his chest, while something else forced his fist open on his good arm and another thing, no bigger than a barn cat, jumped onto his groin and started scrabbling there, like it was trying to hook a claw into his belt.

And then there arrived one other—a big one, like the creature he thought he’d finished.

It had the girl’s face—a face covered in dirt, with pine needles in her hair—and that face leaned over him, to look in his own face. The creature had made those eyes wide and angry, and its lips curl back with a kind of mad hunger—and as a hand lowered over his mouth, and two fingers pinched his nose to cut off his air, and she said, “You the boy who drove the Baron from my bed.” It dawned on Jason then that this was no Juke at all.

This was the girl—and she was finishing the Juke’s work. He tried to pull away, but his strength was sapped. She leaned close to him, so they were eye to eye, and said: “I ain’t never going to forgive you that, so quit your begging.”

I was helping you, he thought, as the rest of his wind ran out.

22 - The Prodigal

A long sleeve of cloud had scooted across the Kootenai River Valley in the early hours of the day, so that when the sun approached the horizon, it made but scant impression. Andrew Waggoner was fine with that. He’d been marching through the night as best he could, but it was slow and dangerous going in the pitch black. He needed light, but not the sort of light he’d seen the morning before. That light was a lie; it would not take him where he needed to go.

The dull, sickly light that came through the pine trees now… that was fine. He could see the deadfalls before he came on them, he could tell when the slope turned too steep and he had to go around. He could see if there was anything pacing him, or know it was just his fevered imagination at work in the midnight forest. Just to be sure, he kept a mouthful of Norma’s herb mixture—proof against the ache in his healing bones and, he was reasonably sure, the trickery of the Juke.

He hoped it were so. There were no voices that whispered in his ear as he made his way through the dark woods. They were easy to dismiss. But as the light grew—sickly as it was—Andrew wasn’t going to assume the same about Heaven. That…

That was a lure; a sharp, shining lure the same as the real Paris had been, when he boarded the steamer in New York. His father had taken the train with him to Manhattan, and waited with him and his trunks in the gathering crowd at the East River docks for nearly three hours in drizzling rain as the steamer prepared to let its passengers aboard. Elmore Waggoner had never been so proud, and he didn’t mind saying so.

“It’s always a fight for men like us,” he’d said, exhaling a lungful of apple-scented smoke from his pipe, “and we’ve fought it hard. Now, Andrew… for a little while, it’s not going to be such a fight for you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Andrew replied. He was not twenty years old then, and his French was mostly from books, and he couldn’t imagine a harder job than learning the ways of the scalpel from Frenchmen. But his father explained it, how much easier it would be there than here: starting with just three words.

“Liberté,” he said, looking Andrew in the eye. “ Égalité. Fraternité.”

The French, Elmore Waggoner firmly believed, stood by those words. And in taking that stand, in casting down their aristocracy in their revolutions, they’d made a society where men might enjoy opportunities not much different from one another, regardless of the station of their birth, the colour of their skin. A place where a smart Negro had as good a chance of becoming a physician as any other man.

“It may not be a perfect society they made,” said Elmore, “but it’s nearer than anywhere this side of the ocean.”

Andrew chuckled to himself as he picked his way down a rock-fall, and held his splinted arm ahead of him to keep the branches of a stand of young tamaracks from his eyes. Not long after he said that, Elmore Waggoner had given Andrew a hug, and helped him haul the trunks he carried up the gangplank, and into the crowded steerage berth, that was the best accommodation an American Negro could expect on his way to the welcoming harbours of the enlightened Third Republic—and in that airless, low-ceilinged barrack, he’d seen nothing but opportunity—égalité, like the French would say.

Andrew stepped out onto a shelf of rock. It was getting light enough now that he could see his goal, not far now, over the tops of the low, neat orchards. Eliada spread before him, its rooftops spreading like a span of dark stones, smoke rising like river-reeds from their chimneys. At the river’s edge, Harper’s steamboat was pulling away.

Andrew bit down on the sour herbs and made himself swallow. He shut his eyes a moment, and squeezed the hand of his injured arm into a fist until tears rimmed his lids. Then he set out again.

He was nearly there—and much as he wanted to, Andrew couldn’t let himself rest. He had to deliver his warning; and meet Sam Green, and settle some other things that had occurred to him, as he walked in the near dark.

The fence marked the western boundary of Harper’s orchard.

It wasn’t high, but it was high enough. Andrew had set his bag on the other side of it and was halfway over himself, when he heard the hoof-beats, muffled as they were by the soft dirt of the orchard. He winced, pulled his other leg over the fence, and waited, as the man in the slicker with a rifle under his arm rode between the trees, bowing his head now and again, but never taking his eye off Andrew. As he got closer, Andrew thought he recognized the fellow by face, but not name. As he got closer, he shifted his hand to the trigger guard. The horse stopped, and the man sat high in the saddle, and he raised the rifle and aimed along its barrel at Andrew. Then he glanced down at Andrew’s feet, and the rifle went down.

“Dr. Waggoner?”

Andrew looked at the doctor’s bag at his feet.

“I am.”

“What’re you doin’ here?” The fellow threw his leg over and climbed down from the saddle. “There’s Klan on the move in town. You should be long gone, sir. Ain’t safe.”

“No,” said Andrew. “It’s not safe.”

And in spite of himself, he started to laugh.

“You all right, Doc?”

“I’m fine,” said Andrew, then added: “Not entirely, obviously. But—you’re right—it’s not safe.”

“Where can I take you, Doc? To the hospital, by the looks of you.”

“No,” he said. “Not the hospital. I need to see Sam Green,” he said. “Then Mr. Harper.”

“I can do that. Here, let me help you up on the horse.” He bent down and lifted Waggoner’s doctor’s bag. “I’ll carry this, and lead.”

Sam Green looked tired as he came down the path to the cider press—and Andrew thought he must have made the same impression on the Pinkerton here in the dawn.

Green waved his rifle over his head, and told his man: “Go on now. Leave me and the doctor be.”

When he was gone, Sam Green came over and set on one of the chairs. He took off his bowler hat and set it on the table, and laid the rifle across his lap.

“Thank you,” said Andrew finally.

“Thank me?”

“It does sound odd, doesn’t it?”

Sam shrugged. “Figured you’d be long gone. This place is no good for a Negro—particularly not you now. Why’d you come back?”

“I think you might have an idea about that, Sam.”

“Might I?”

“I’ll save you the bother,” said Andrew. “There’s worse trouble than men playing at the Klan in these parts. I spent some time up the hill, and I’ll tell you: Loo’s dead.”

Sam kept quiet, but a shift in his shoulders, a slump really, told Andrew what he needed to know.

“I tried to save her,” he said, “but she needed more help than I could give her. She had one of those monsters in her—one of Mister Juke’s children. And it tore her to pieces, on account of what you helped Dr. Bergstrom do out there a year back. I don’t think I have to go through every tiny detail of that, now do I, Sam?”

Sam looked away, and now Andrew nodded.

He’d put this together through the long night march he’d made down the mountainside—parsing the odd coincidences together. The family had stumbled upon him, as if by pure happenstance, as he rested on a rock that he’d stumbled upon, after marching straight in the direction that Jason Thistledown had sent him. And Jason had sent him that way, thanks to Sam Green—who sent him the warning at just the right moment. He put all that together with a guess, but he thought a pretty good guess: that perhaps one of those fellows with guns that had accompanied Dr. Bergstrom on his mission of sterilization, might have fit the description of Sam Green. Who, if he were accompanying Bergstrom on his hellish mission, might have concluded that the Tavishes and the others deserved kindlier medical attention than Bergstrom would ever give them.

“I put you to use, Dr. Waggoner,” said Sam.

“You did. But I wouldn’t have made it through the night, if you hadn’t sent the boy to drag me out of there. So don’t waste breath apologizing. Just don’t waste breath lying, either.”

“I won’t, then,” said Sam. “Answer me, though, what are you doing back?”

“The Tavish clan—they’re dead.”

Sam sat quiet at that. Finally, the Pinkerton ran his hand across his broad forehead, smoothed down a tuft of hair, and looked up. Andrew felt a heavy drop of rain on his forehead as he said: “Better get to shelter. Can you walk, or should I fetch a horse?”

Andrew pushed himself up. “I look worse than I am,” he said. Sam picked up his bowler, took Andrew’s arm, and they headed up the slope.

“Bergstrom stopped sterilizin’ a few months before you came,” said Sam finally. “And not because he finished the job, neither. There’re mayhap a dozen families living on the slopes of these hills up and down the Kootenai—kin of settlers whose wagons fell too far off the trail. Got to no more than half before he gave up on it.”

“You always in his company?”

“Often enough.” They crested the hill, and looked on the house. It squatted huge on the land, blocking out the river and the sawmill both. Andrew could still see the roof of the hospital, though, over the tree-tops. “The Tavishes were good folk. It’s true—I sent word you were on the road, and that you could perhaps help. What killed them?”

Andrew shook his head. “Didn’t see who did it. But it happened—it happened after we killed the Juke. I was away. So I didn’t see it.”

“Away, were you?” Sam Green stepped a little faster as they headed down the slope. Andrew watched his back as they headed to the main entrance of the house. All was, then, as Andrew had begun to suspect; Sam Green had spent more time, considerably more time, with the hill people around Eliada than Dr. Bergstrom had. He had seen a great deal of this. And he knew enough about Mister Juke, and the way the creature reproduced, not to look too surprised when Andrew had told him what he’d found in Loo Tavish’s belly.

One of his men met them at the front door, which he was guarding like a castle gate. He stepped aside, and Sam opened the door himself. They stepped into the entry hall of Harper’s house silently, and then he shut the door.

“What killed them, Dr. Waggoner?” he said.

“It wasn’t an animal,” said Andrew. “It was men, but not men with guns. The Tavishes were butchered. That’s why I’m back here—I think the attackers might be on their way.”

Sam might have been about to say something else, but he stopped himself at the sound of two pairs of footfalls overhead. They both waited as the footsteps started down the stairs, and at no great length Garrison Harper appeared unaccompanied on the landing. Even at this early hour, Harper was dressed in a dark wool jacket and trousers; his hair combed impeccably.

“My God!” exclaimed Harper, hurrying down the remaining steps. “Dr. Waggoner! You have returned to us! Pray you’ve returned unharmed!”

“I am a little worse in some ways,” said Andrew. “Better, thank you, in others.” He pushed himself to his feet. Harper strode close and took his good hand in a typically resolute handshake.

“Yes, yes, I suppose that you are,” said Harper. “First, however, we must get you cleaned and fed.” He pulled back and looked Andrew up and down. “Food and water first, I think. Yes, sir? I apologize, but given your state I think the kitchen—”

“—will be fine, sir,” said Andrew. “I would appreciate some fresh water.”

Harper made a harrumphing sound and turned on his heel. “Harris!” he called, and the butler emerged. “Let’s repair to the kitchen. You can arrange for Dr. Waggoner to have an acceptable breakfast, I presume?”

Harper’s man led the three of them through an archway beneath the stairs barely acknowledging Andrew’s presence, hurrying through the dining room and nearly letting the door to the kitchen hit Andrew’s arm as they made their way into the vast, stove-hot space. Harper settled on one of several wooden stools next to a wooden table. Andrew took another.

“We’ll take our breakfast here,” said Harper.

“As you wish, sir.” The fellow gave Andrew a disapproving look and hurried off.

“I have to apologize again, Dr. Waggoner. Eliada, despite my best efforts, seems to resist your kind at every turn.”

“Eliada’s not unique that way.” Andrew shrugged and Harper nodded, and in the silence Andrew wondered how was he going to broach this discussion?

Do you remember that strange patient we discussed? The one with the remarkable neck? I believe, sir, that he is of an entirely different species… A monster, Mr. Harper, it is very true! His young burrow their way into the wombs of expectant mothers—they issue forth—and they seize the very souls of men! Andrew Waggoner thought he would never be clean enough, or well-enough dressed, to broach the subject to a fellow like Garrison Harper with anything approaching credibility.

As it developed, he did not have to. Harper smiled sadly at Andrew.

“Eliada is not unique now,” he said. “But with the help of that patient we discussed before you left—the fellow they tried to hang before harming you—I hope that one day it will be.”

“The patient—Mister Juke,” said Andrew.

Harper nodded. “Mister Juke,” he said. “Ah, Dr. Waggoner, how over this past week I wished I had been more forthcoming with you, that evening we met. You asked me about him then, didn’t you? And I evaded.”

“I’ve seen more of them,” said Andrew.

“Have you?”

“I’ve developed a theory about their nature.”

They were interrupted as one of Harper’s kitchen servants, a stout young blonde-haired girl brought over a chrome platter of china and silverware, and another who might have been her older brother, bearing a steaming pot of coffee which he poured into two delicate china cups. Andrew took his with sugar and thick cream; Mr. Harper drank his black.

“They are,” said Andrew, after swallowing a long pull of the hot sweet mixture, “fundamentally parasitic.”

Harper raised an eyebrow. “Parasitic. Like a tapeworm, you mean? The tapeworm lives inside us. Yet this patient—he exists outside the body.”

“No, it does not,” said Andrew. “It’s born from eggs that are laid in the wombs of women. Once hatched, the young compete for food inside the womb—either from the nourishment travelling along the umbilical cord to the foetus, or, if there is no foetus there, from the mother herself.” Andrew felt a palpable release as he spoke—drawing together as he was the culmination of a day and a night’s thought and correlation, as he crawled down the mountain slope toward Eliada. “As they do so, they develop an affinity for the mother’s blood and that of her family. And using that affinity, the ones who survive and emerge are able to… manipulate the family.”

“Using the affinity,” said Harper. “I see. How does this manipulation manifest?”

“Like a narcotic. It causes hallucinations—visions that are indistinguishable from what spiritualists might call the transcendent experience. Those visions cause men and women to believe that the creature is something other. A spirit. A god.”

Harper looked away.

“You don’t believe me,” said Andrew.

“Oh, quite the contrary. You’ve said nothing that I haven’t heard in as many words already. Our friend Dr. Bergstrom has followed your line of reasoning quite as far along as you have—and beyond.”

Andrew set his coffee cup down. “Beyond,” he said. “So you know what threat the Juke poses to this community?”

Harper smiled. “The threat,” he said. “There is no threat to this community, young man, that its constituents do not manifest upon themselves. The Juke is nothing more than an opportunity for this community. For this one, and all others.”

“An opportunity? Sir,” he said, “the Juke is a… it’s a rapist. And a leech.”

The kitchen went quiet at that—just the low burbling of a boiling pot of water carried forward. The half-dozen others in the room—including Sam Green, who, Andrew noted, had made his way closer so as to better hear the talk—were all staring at him.

“All right!” said Harper over his shoulder. “Back to your duties, please!”

The staff turned away, although Sam Green just leaned against a wall. Harper shook his head.

“It may be that the creature in the quarantine could inspire religion. But although I’ve allowed churches here—and in spite of its name—Eliada is not a town raised to God.”

“If not God,” said Andrew, “then—”

“Man,” Harper finished for him. “The perfectibility of Man. That was our goal when we built this place. Do you know what was here before we came?”

“I do not.”

“Savagery,” said Harper. “There was nothing here—naught but hill folk barely possessed of language, never mind wit, surrounded by the Kootenai Indians—who although savage themselves at least had the wherewithal to make good use of this land’s bounty, in fish and land and stone.”

“And you have carved a fine place from it,” said Andrew.

“It is not I,” said Harper. “It is the fine men, and their wives and their sons, who have done the work. Many of them we selected for the task based on their strength and intellect—but it is not just strong men who make a community. They must be motivated—to a common purpose.”

“Yes,” said Andrew. He recalled discussion along those lines when he first arrived. “What has this to do with Mister Juke?”

Harper drained his cup and set it in its saucer. “Why everything,” he said. “This—discovery, of Dr. Bergstrom’s… it is…”

“An answer to your prayers?” interjected Sam Green. Harper scowled at him, then turned his attention back to Waggoner.

“You must share your observations about these creatures with Dr. Bergstrom,” he said. “He has not spoken to me about the creature’s reproductive habits—but we have spoken extensively, about the positive influence the creature has had on the hospital staff and those who work with him.”

“The positive influence?”

“I suppose one might mistake it for religious feeling. But really, it is much more efficacious than simple superstition.”

“How do you mean?” asked Andrew.

“What does this creature do, but infuse a sense of community, of belonging, in those it infects? Assuredly, combining this—well, shall we call it patriotism?—let us do so—this patriotism with firm, wise and benevolent leadership—a strong sense of societal ethics—and what have we? Nothing less, Doctor, than Heaven on earth. True Utopia.”

Andrew finished his coffee, which had grown cool in the bottom of his cup. Heaven on earth. He thought about the vision that the Juke had given him—of his own Heaven on earth, in a way, that crazed and idealized vision of a Parisian cityscape. With a mad Dauphin at its centre, demanding supplication and sacrifice, offering forgiveness for sins that in the glimmer of hindsight seemed entirely manufactured. What, he wondered, had Mr. Harper seen when he met the Juke? Some well-run factory—some town of dutiful workers who sang their employer’s praises rather than plotted strikes and sabotage? Strong, smart and loyal all at once?

“You are building a religion,” said Andrew.

For an instant, this seemed to take Harper by surprise. But only an instant. “It is not a religion. It is simply a community—a place, where the creature might rest comfortably and according to its needs. Because as we both know—” he leaned forward “—the creature does have needs.”

“Yes,” said Andrew, “it does. As I believe we discussed. It rapes young women, destroys them from the interior or starves their babies—then in adulthood demands and receives utter loyalty.”

Harper pretended not to have heard. “It needs to be fed, of course,” he said. “But are we not well-suited to do so, a community of several hundred strong men, and the machinery of industry to create surplus in all regards? You must agree that it is one thing for these subsistent folk to offer up livestock and grain and whatever else the creature desires, when they can barely scratch together enough to feed themselves. Yet something entirely different, for us to do so.”

“Here in Utopia,” said Andrew, shifting on his stool. Harper was playing with fire.

“Indeed,” said Harper. “Now see here, Doctor. I understand that you’ve been through a horrifying ordeal, at the hands of those who would see this experiment fail. But I brought you on because I thought you’d make a contribution. You are no naysayer. You’ve had your share of them, I’ll wager, pulling yourself up into the medical profession as you have. But you’re saying nay now, aren’t you? You think this is a lot of bunk.”

Andrew started to rise. “Sir, if you had seen what I’ve—”

Harper put up his hand. “Enough. There is no harm in that. In fact, a day from now, the riverboat Eliada will be casting off for Bonner’s Ferry. I am already sending back two others who unwittingly stand in the way of this enterprise. Would you like to join them?”

“Two—”

“Jason Thistledown,” said Sam Green, “and that aunt of his.”

Harper turned to look directly up at the Pinkerton. “Yes,” he said. “Mrs. Frost’s nephew. Mr. Green, why don’t you make yourself useful around here, and go rouse them?”

Sam nodded slowly and gave Andrew a wink. “Take care of yourself while I’m gone, Doctor,” he said and turned to leave.

When he was gone, Harper noted that their cups were empty. “Would you care for more coffee?” he asked.

Andrew shook his head. “If it’s all right,” he said, “I’d like some tea. I’ve got the fixings for it in my bag, if you’d care to join me.”

Andrew pulled the cloth from his bag, and pulled free a handful of the mixture he’d rescued from the Tavish clan.

He found a clay teapot that was empty on a sideboard, and he wasted no time filling it with the mixture, and hot water from the stove.

The tea was steeped and ready to drink just as the servants brought their breakfasts—fried eggs with bread and a generous helping of bacon. Andrew downed his quickly, as he’d learned from Norma, and advised Mr. Harper to do the same.

Harper sniffed at it, and made a face. “Perhaps later,” he said.

“As your physician,” said Waggoner, “I’d advise it sooner than later. You see, there is something else—something, I believe, that is on its way here.”

Harper sighed, and brought the cup to his lips. Andrew was considering how he’d explain the next part—the massacre he’d escaped; the sure sense he had, that the dying baby Juke had called that massacre down—when Sam Green, ashen-faced, hurried back into the kitchen.

Harper set the tea down and glared at the man.

Sam spoke very quietly as he relayed what he’d learned. Jason Thistledown, he said, was missing from his room.

Also absent, said Sam, was Mr. Harper’s daughter Ruth and her friend Louise Butler.

“And it appears,” said Sam, his moustache tucked close over tense lips, “that Mrs. Frost is also abroad this morning.”

“Abroad?” demanded Harper, half-standing. “Where?”

“No one will admit to knowing,” said Sam Green. “I’m sorry sir, but that’s the full of it.”

23 - The Incident with the Shotgun

The old man sitting back in the chair across the room did not affect to notice Jason. The wooden chair legs creaked as he pushed back on two of them, leaning the back of the chair against the wall beside the window. He smoked as he sat there, his eyes focused on the glowing bowl of the pipe. The stem of it disappeared behind a thick moustache, over a whitening beard that drooped down onto his shirt. Hanging from a peg on the wall was a long white sheet that reached the floor.

Jason lay very still on the cot. The only move he’d made, he figured, was his eyes opening up and there was nothing to be done about that. He kept them narrow, so maybe this fellow wouldn’t see, and think him still unconscious.

Jason had in fact been awake off and on for some time. He first came to slung over the shoulder of a sheet-backed man, as his own shoulder banged against a door jamb that he thought might have been part of the rear door of the hospital. He’d gasped and passed out again, and then thought his eyes might have opened in a brighter room, looking up at a couple of ghosts in sheets talking about something. He might have seen Dr. Bergstrom at one point, or he might not have. Because here in this little hospital room, with a window just starting to lighten with the pre-dawn sky and the light just so and the quiet man who had no obvious gun on him, Jason thought that he was finally coming properly back to his own mind. Those things outside—the first one and maybe the others—they’d done something to him, whether with the whistling or the stuff the first one had coughed at him.

Whatever had happened to him, he’d had a chance to shake it off. Now he just had to figure out how to take this fellow. That sheet on the wall made it clear that he was no friend.

The man took the pipe out of his mouth and examined it.

“You’re a smart boy,” he said, still not looking up, and Jason’s heart fell. There was no fooling this fellow.

Not with any simple ruse, anyhow.

“Don’t know how smart I am,” said Jason, swinging his feet around and sitting up. “I’m here, ain’t I?”

The fellow looked up. His eyes were deep-set under thick, silvered brows. He took a puff on that pipe of his as he looked Jason up and down. “Smart mouth on you too,” he said in a flat voice. The two front chair legs made a sound like a coffin lid closing when they hit the floor and he leaned forward.

“That’s all right, young Mr. Thistledown,” he said. “You can be just as smart as you like. Ain’t nobody going to hurt you.”

“Late for that.” Jason looked down at his trouser leg, which was torn and stained in blood and dirt, and at his arm, which was also cut from the attack out-of-doors.

The man shrugged and said, “You had worse, I expect.”

Jason looked at the fellow. He had a long face, with cheekbones sticking out far as those brows, like ledges on a cliff. Jason got to his feet and the fellow stood up as well. He was a tall man, six foot or more Jason guessed. He moved in an easy way that Jason knew should make him afraid.

“I don’t know you,” he said. “You sure seem to know me.”

The skin on those cheekbones wrinkled and the moustache rose up in a smile. “James Bury,” he said.

“James Bury.” Jason took a step to him, and Bury held his ground. It was ludicrous, the two of them facing off in this little room. Jason knew it and he could tell that Bury knew it too. But Jason wasn’t going to let this man stare him down… .

Bury lifted his pipe and sucked on it, and his smile vanished in smoke. “You won’t leave here right now,” he said, pipe-stem clenched in his teeth. “Looks like you’re fixing to, but you won’t.”

That was as much warning as James Bury gave, before he drove his fist into Jason’s gut.

Jason bent over, felt the air whooping out of him and then he was back on the cot, and on his side, curled around his stomach, and Bury was standing over him, fanning the fingers of the fist of his left hand open while in his right he held the pipe. His eyes were bright now, watching to see if Jason might cry or beg or whimper, or perhaps shit in his trousers or lose his lunch.

When Jason did none of those things, Bury bent over and sat back down in his chair. He leaned it back again, so the rear legs creaked and he resumed smoking. But he kept his eye on Jason, as the pain faded and Jason was able to get his legs straightened out again.

“Best stay abed, young man,” he said.

“You—” Jason didn’t like the whimper he heard in his voice, so he pushed it down. “You’re the one tried to murder Dr. Waggoner.”

The chair creaked like a question, and Bury followed it with one: “You say that… why, now? ’Cause I hit you, and you’re all fired up about it?”

Jason nodded to the sheet on the peg. Bury looked up at it, made a face like he was impressed with Jason’s keen mind, and nodded back at him.

“But you’re no Klansman,” said Jason.

“Oh, ain’t I?” He squinted at Jason. “If I ain’t a Klansman, then what am I?”

“I don’t know what you call yourself. But I saw you… or maybe someone like you… in the quarantine that night.”

“That night.” He snorted. “Must’ve missed each other, boy.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Had he and this James Bury fellow met up in the quarantine? The voice might’ve been the same—he might’ve been as tall. Or he mightn’t have been, of course.

But something in Bury’s stare said he wasn’t far from the mark. So Jason kept up.

“You were beggin’ forgiveness. Not for trying to kill a Negro doctor, I’m guessing.”

Bury looked at him hard, and Jason thought: I’m not the only one bluffing. He went on. “Because you tried to again, didn’t you? You were one of the ones who tried to kill Dr. Waggoner.”

Bury’s face hung still in the morning light. “In a minute,” he said, “I am going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it truthful.”

“I ain’t tellin’ you who—”

“Not that.” James Bury set the chair straight and stood up and came over and sat down beside Jason, who could not help but flinch. Bury pretended as not to notice. “Before I ask you a question, I’ll tell you some things. That’ll help you give a better answer than this shit you’re speaking now.”

Jason didn’t say anything—just kept himself steady.

“I came to these parts before there was an Eliada. Why I came’s not your business in the particulars. There was some trouble up in Canada, put it that way. This was a good place to be; a quiet place. I learned my way around the hills, and the folk who lived here. And when Eliada came, with its hospital and its sawmill and its moneyed fucking fools… I learned to make myself useful. Know what’s most useful in Eliada?”

“Not woodcutting,” said Jason, and Bury laughed humourlessly.

“It’s tracking the folk that live here,” he said. “And I mean tracking. They live like animals, these folk, and they ain’t the kind of animals come running when you whistle.”

“You kill them too?”

“Be easier if we did,” said Bury, then corrected himself: “If the doctor did. No. He’s a scientist. Doesn’t kill folks if he can help it. So I and a couple other fellows’d climb up the mountain with him, and show ’em where the folks lived, and watch his back whilst he finished his business.”

Jason listened, and he watched too, and he saw that as the old man went on, it seemed more the old man was just that—a bent-over coot, telling stories over pipe smoke. Less a danger. Jason wondered if maybe he could take James Bury yet. And then did his best to hide that wondering.

“A year back, we climbed one of the mountains. There’s a clan living at the top of it. Folk call them Feeger. They don’t come down much, ever. And there were stories about them. The doctor—he got excited. There’s a book he’s got—The Jukes, it’s called. He started wondering if this family weren’t another of those…”

He went quiet at that, tucked his chin into his chest, and looked away. Jason might have been able to jump him then, but instead, he asked: “So is that Mister Juke out there… one of their children?”

Bury looked at him now. His eyes were wide and wet (almost, Jason thought, pleading).

“It was a child,” said Bury. “A beautiful child, full of light. I found it—me, James Bury… not the doctor—and I tell you, son. I could see the sky in its eyes. It went on forever.” And then, he made a fist, and Jason was sure he was going to strike… but he closed his eyes instead, and shook the fist in the air, and coughed.

“I got lost that night,” said Bury. “I been lost for most of the year. You said I tried to hang your nigger doctor, and you’re right. Because every so often—once every couple weeks, maybe—I could come up for air. And I figured, as things went on and got worse—that Mister Juke that Bergstrom was keeping, it wasn’t a beautiful child at all. So when it got out that night—when it went ranging… when that girl got sick with its seed…”

“Why’d you try to hang Waggoner?”

“Because, boy, no one in this town will hang Mister Juke. Hanging a nigger… I don’t care how many sermons Garrison Harper gives out about compassion and community and good fucking manners… .”

“You got them riled enough to forget their manners,” said Jason. “Long enough to string up Mister Juke at the same time.”

“Almost long enough.”

Jason made his move before he even thought about it—rolling back and kicking with both legs. He connected, but not as well as he needed to. One heel hit Bury in the jaw, just inches higher than his throat; the other, hard in the shoulder. It knocked Bury to his side; but he was able to roll, and twist—and like that, he had two hands at the base of Jason’s throat.

“Yeah,” said Bury, his fingers digging in under Jason’s collar bone, “we’re comin’ to my question now.” He pulled him close, and looked him in the eye as he hissed: “How do you get him out of your head?”

Jason cried out something that wasn’t a word and Bury held him tighter, if that were possible. “Don’t try to slip out of this one, boy. You see what I am capable of. Now you came here with something special. You got a gunfighter’s blood in you, and you are pretty clever but this thing—this thing talks like God in your head and you have seen it, and you have turned away from it. And stayed away. Somehow.

“Now, how?”

Jason felt hot flecks of spit on his face. Bury’s eyes, no longer hidden beneath his craggy brows, were wide and blood-rimmed. He looked old all right—older than God-damned Zeus. His hands were closing around his neck. This old man was going to strangle him. Jason twisted, tried to get free but Bury held tight.

“Damn it, boy!” Bury lifted his hands higher, and clamped them tight around Jason’s throat. And at once, Jason felt his wind cut off.

“I do not have much God-damned time, boy,” he growled. “I’ll snap that neck if you don’t—”

“You will do no such thing,” came a voice from behind him.

Jason looked over his shoulder at the open door. Aunt Germaine stood there. She was holding the revolver she’d carried onto his homestead at Cracked Wheel. It was levelled at both of them.

“Now unhand my nephew,” she said. “And raise your hands, Mr. Bury. I will not hesitate.”

“You wouldn’t—”

Germaine drew the hammer back.

“Mad cunt,” he said. But he let go of Jason.

“Now,” she said, “James Bury: you are relieved.”

The old man, Bury, took the white cloak from the peg, and slung it over his back. He and Jason met eyes once more before he hurried out the door. This time, there was no challenge, no fight to it. The mad look was gone—he was looking at a place far away. He blinked, and hurried off like a man with an appointment; an appointment he had no choice but to keep.

Jason wondered if that were not truly the case. Bury wanted to know one thing from Jason: how to stop Mister Juke from talking to him. Jason would have told him if he knew; he thought the shock of being cut turned it off. Maybe if he’d let Aunt Germaine shoot him in the belly, that would be enough of a jolt to quiet the voice telling him what to do.

Aunt Germaine shut the door as Bury’s footfalls turned hollow on the stairs and began to diminish. The revolver fell to her side, although she did not let go of it.

“Aunty, you ought put the pistol down,” said Jason. “Your hand is shaking, and I fear…”

Germaine smiled wanly in the thin light and nodded. But she did not let go of the firearm.

“Did he hurt you, Nephew?”

“No, but he was fixing to. These cuts—” he motioned to his leg “—I got them outside.”

“Did you?” said Germaine. She was wearing her travelling skirts—long, deep blue swaths of wool that held stains of grass and muck gathered from countless miles of Montana track and they had a smell to them, of must and mildew that would not launder free. Unpacking here, she’d vowed to burn them, but had obviously not gotten ’round to it. With her empty hand she picked at them now, as though pulling off invisible burrs. She seemed to catch herself, smoothed the cloth and looked up at Jason.

“Who was that?”

Germaine shook her head. “A common thug,” she said.

“In a Klansman’s sheet,” said Jason. “And you knew his name. He work for the Eugenics Records Office too?”

Her eyeglasses caught a flash of sky-slate in reflection and lost it again as she tilted her head.

“What do you take me for?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were outside with the Harper girl,” she said. “In spite of everything that transpired at that picnic—in spite of all the things that Mr. Harper said—you were outside. Skulking about in the night. Weren’t you now? And you met with some things. Didn’t you, now?”

Germaine was waving the revolver around as she spoke, so strenuously Jason was sure it would go off sooner or later. His expression must have communicated that, because she stopped, looked at the gun in her hand as though she had only just realized it was there, nodded to herself and set it on the windowsill.

Then she turned back to Jason.

“Do you take me for a fool, Jason Thistledown?”

Jason stared at his Aunt Germaine Frost. He thought about the way her chin twisted as her thin and pale lips pursed, and he thought about his mama. He thought about how Aunt Germaine knew to call that fellow Mr. Bury—and how she worked so close with Nils Bergstrom. He thought about some of the very smart points that Ruth and Louise had raised, after listening respectfully to his tale of the tragedy and woe in Cracked Wheel.

And then, because he didn’t want to be a fool himself he thought some more before he decided what to say.

“No more a fool,” he said, “than Mama did, when your pa shot his own foot outside Boston back when she was a girl and I guess you were too.” And then he made himself smile a little.

She softened at that—smiled back, like she was remembering how it’d been, Jason’s grandpa cleaning his shotgun on the road outside Boston, only it’d gone off, and filled his boot full of shot that penetrated through some leather and gave him a funny limp until he was older.

“You remember that?” he asked. Aunt Germaine nodded and came over and sat down on the bed beside him. She squeezed his knee and Jason let her.

“Oh, Nephew, I am sorry for that. I know that you’re not being disrespect-ful.”

“I’m not,” he said. He stood up and walked over to the windowsill. “Just like Mama was nothing but respectful when Grandpa hurt himself like that.”

“I remember it well,” said Aunt Germaine.

He lifted the gun, turned to Aunt Germaine, and as surprise widened her eyes, he said: “No, you don’t.”

“What—?” she began, but Jason could see by her expression that she understood.

“Far as I know, my ma’s pa never shot himself in the foot. You were really her sister, I think you’d know that.”

Germaine Frost was without words. Her mouth worked in little oh’s, like a river trout on the rocks.

“You lied to me,” said Jason. “From our house to Cracked Wheel to here. You ain’t my aunt, but you went to a lot of trouble to make me think it were so.”

“Jason,” she finally managed, in a high, frightened voice, “I only wished to help you.”

Jason held the gun steady. A moment ago, he’d been ready to shoot her—put a bullet in this woman, who he ought to have figured sooner for an imposter. Hell, she didn’t look like his Mama or him or anybody in his family. She’d shown up in the middle of the winter just right after a terrible plague—like some sneaky old vulture, a hawk, swooping in and carrying him off to this place. And there was the thing she’d let Dr. Bergstrom do… And then there were those letters they’d left with Louise… .

“The Cave Germ,” he said.

And with those words, all the fear melted from Aunt Germaine—Mrs. Frost. In its place rose an expression that Jason could only describe as glee.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “It is up, isn’t it? You’ve divined my purpose, my hero.”

If Germaine Frost were afraid of getting shot this morning, she showed no sign of it.

“Stop calling me your hero,” said Jason.

“All right,” said Germaine. “Though it’s true.”

“Truer than me being your nephew maybe.” Jason braced his arm against the weight of the gun. “Why don’t you tell me how you came to tell me you were my aunt. How you know my mama to pretend at bein’ her sister.”

“Oh, from the Cracked Wheel Town Hall,” said Germaine. “I knew her, and your father, and many others.”

“What you mean by that?”

She leaned forward. “Records, Jason. I had ample time to peruse them all—in the long days that the Cave Germ took to finish its work.”

She smiled at that—or maybe at Jason trying to work it out. Whichever it was, Jason didn’t care for it, having this lying old woman, who’d abducted him (that was the only word for it) smirking at his ignorance.

“The Cave Germ from the Belgian part of Africa. That Mr… . Dew Lake sent you all those letters about?”

“Dulac,” corrected Germaine. “From the Belgian Congo. You’re a clever boy, Jason. But you are not quite clever enough to translate my private letters—not unaided, hmm? Why don’t you give me that gun. You’re shaking, Nephew—”

“Don’t call me that!” The gun had been lowering, and Jason held it up and drew the hammer back. That got Germaine’s attention. She held up her hands in clear surrender.

“All right.” Her voice had a bit of a shake to it. “May I call you Jason?”

“You may,” said Jason. “You can tell me about those letters now. That Dulac fellow—you fixin’ to marry him?”

Germaine’s hands lowered slightly. “Marry?” In spite of her predicament, she chortled. “Oh, no. Maurice is not the marrying sort. No, Neph—Jason, my correspondence with M’sieur Dulac is strictly professional. He is an operative at a plantation in Africa—not too far up the Congo River. We have never met face to face.”

“How do you know him then?”

“Correspondence,” said Germaine. She shrugged. “We had, I suppose, become intimate sufficient to trick the eye of one with schoolgirl French. But we are professional colleagues, Jason.”

“You mentioned that.”

“I prefer to make myself clear,” said Germaine. “M’sieur Dulac would not relish any confusion on the matter either. He has already risked so much, so much… .”

“How’d he do that?” Jason had spent long enough with Germaine to know that she told her stories in her own time—and he could tell by the way she perched, her thick shoulders arched like a child’s by fireside, that she was building towards an important one now—but he was getting impatient.

“M’sieur Dulac had been working on this sugar plantation for some time. He was on the one hand managing the vast crew of jungle niggers that his company employed—but he also made a study of them. For these were not like the niggers you find in America—weak and foolish and prone to crime—but proud savages. Still you could not trust them, for crime and deceit is congenital to that race. But Dulac conspired—conferred with the physician there to make good records of their health. And as he told me, there was one nigger—particularly tall, with teeth strong and thick and endowment prodigious even for his species—he who walked alone. No wife, nor mother, nor sibling, did he have—and he rarely spoke to others. This nigger came from a village some miles back in the jungle—a village that, the stories told, had been ravaged by a fever that came from the earth—” she chuckled “—from a dank cave inhabited by Devils! Only this nigger—only he—had walked away from it. The superstitious darkies—they all thought it was Devils at work, but Dulac—he, like myself, was a man of science. Devils do not bring up sores, or stop hearts with congestion or drive fevers high. No. It was a germ at work.”

“A germ.” Jason shifted the gun’s weight from one hand to the other. “That’s the Cave Germ,” he said.

Germaine nodded, her smile broadening. “It took not nearly so much doing as you might think to take that lucky, strong nigger back through the jungle roads to the ruin of his village. Oh, Maurice described it in such detail, I recall it though the letter’s not before me. Burnt circles lay where grass-made huts had been prior, only discernible from the fire pits by the presence of so many bones… . The nigger didn’t weep, though Maurice could tell it weighed upon him mightily. But they knew the nigger had nothing to fear; not there—not even, although they had to whip him to it, on moving aside the branches and stones at the entrance to the cave from whence the sickness came—nor when they forced him into it, one final time. For he was immune! He, of the scores of people in that village, was immune to the terrible, killing illness.”

“M’sieur Dulac,” said Jason, his voice quavering, “sent that nigger into the cave to collect some Cave Germ,” he said. “In clay pots. Ain’t that right?”

Germaine nodded. “He was a good nigger, as much as the species is capable. He plucked it from bat guano in that cavern. He was even so kind as to seal the pots with wax, and douse them with alcohol. Maurice,” she added, “was kind enough to let the nigger finish the bottle of brandy, before he shot him and collected the jars.”

Jason felt like he was going to upchuck. He leaned against the windowsill. “And he sent you a jar.”

“Or two,” said Germaine. She stood up from the bed, her hands wringing in front of her, her smile wider now.

“And you—you opened one of them in Cracked Wheel,” said Jason. “You—” killed my mama, he was going to say, but of course she had done more than that. She had murdered an entire community—every man, woman and child with the misfortune to set foot in Cracked Wheel that winter’s day, and then every man, woman and child who’d met them before the disease showed symptoms. Killed his mama she might have—though Jason felt the pain as acute now as he did that night she died—he knew that his mama’s death paled against this woman’s larger crime.

Germaine Frost had killed a town.

“Yes,” said Germaine. “I opened one in Cracked Wheel—and by its grace, Jason Thistledown—” she stood so that the gun’s barrel nearly touched her shoulder “—I found you.”

Jason squeezed the trigger. But Germaine had already pushed it to the side and before Jason could squeeze off a second shot she had the gun from his sweat-slicked hand, and driven her fist into his groin so hard he slammed against the window hard enough to crack glass. Jason didn’t fall out, though—just slid down to the floor, the pain in his gut and middle renewed and amplified. When he opened his eyes, Germaine was standing over him, the gun trained on him.

“I can’t see any reason for me to apologize,” she said coldly, “but I shall in any event. Nephew.”

“You killed—” Jason choked and pressed himself higher “—you killed all those folks.”

“Culled,” said Germaine. “That’s what I did—what the germ did. By my own hand, I only killed one person—a sickly old man, who tried to gain entrance to the town office. And I may not have killed him. Do you recall that window pane? The one that you remarked upon, with the bullet-sized hole in it?” She smiled, and let out an incongruously girlish giggle. “Oh, it was all I could do to keep from laughing aloud, when you pointed that out. Laughing aloud. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“The fellow may not, of course, have died from my bullet,” she said. “He disappeared from the window, and when I checked later on, there was no body. Oh stop looking at me like that.” Germaine motioned with the gun. “Get up,” she said. “Get into bed. You’re hurt.”

Jason did. He hobbled over to the bed, as Germaine motioned with the gun. “Now, take off your shirt.” When Jason hesitated, she added: “I need to examine you! Please, Jason—I am a nurse!”

Jason did nothing to comply. He had thought about what she said. “You were culling them, you said… . You were culling them to find the folks that might survive this sickness, figuring there would be just one or two. That right?”

Germaine’s eyes widened, filling the glasses, and her lips parted. “You are bright, as is to be expected.”

“As I think of it, I do recollect that bullet hole, said Jason. “I also recall you telling about Charles Davenport and what an impression he made on you. You said something about him wantin’ to get rid of the bottom ten percent of people. What’s he think of you tryin’ to get rid of the bottom ninety-five? ’Cause that’s what you were doing, wasn’t it?”

“Dr. Davenport is the bright face on our movement. There has never been a need for him to know the whole of what we are doing. And in any case—we do not aim to get rid of, as you say, the bottom ninety-five percent of humanity. If I’d wanted to do that, I would have unscrewed the jar in the middle of New York City.”

“Then—”

“For us it was simply a matter of finding that top five percent. Finding—” Germaine smiled, looking Jason right in the eye “—the hero. And look… here he is.”

“Here,” said Jason, “in Eliada.”

He felt dizzy at the revelation: how Germaine Frost had with evil foresight come to Cracked Wheel, unleashed a plague and taken the one boy left standing as her own. Taken him… here. To Eliada, this place where the creature they called a Juke lived. “Tell me something,” said Jason. “About Dr. Bergstrom—is he one of your eugenicists? Like M’sieur Dulac?”

Germaine nodded and said, “For that I will apologize. Dr. Bergstrom had been engaged in promising research here, I’ll warrant that. When he contacted me last, it seemed as though he had found something beyond a hero. Something like a god: a creature that seemed resilient to dismemberment and illness—a hermaphrodite, inter-fertile with humanity. I was supposed…” She looked down. “I was supposed to find a girl.”

Jason looked up, aghast. “So you could breed her with the Juke?”

“When it was you, you who survived, I should have taken you straight back to New York.” She sighed. “Dr. Bergstrom has fallen into madness. Sheer madness.”

She lowered the pistol and leaned back against the wall, eyes still downcast. Jason briefly thought he might be able to overpower her; launch himself across the room, knock the gun from her hand as she had knocked it from his. Either shoot her or, more likely—for Jason was not so good at shooting folks as that—just get out.

But the moment passed. Her eyes looked up at him, over the tops of the glasses. They were small, curiously pig-like without the magnifying effect of her spectacles.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll find a strong sow for you, my prize hero. Before the day is out, we will have you bred.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Ruth Harper,” she said. “I am not so old, Nephew—” she said the word like an epitaph “—not so old, that I can’t smell the rutting urge.”

Jason barely listened.

Ruth! He hadn’t forgotten about her, but in the cascade of revelation, her predicament had fallen far from the top of his mind. And her predicament might have been dire indeed—for hadn’t he lost track of her, going into the quarantine, where Mister Juke—

“Where is she?” he demanded. “You know where she is—”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “Ruth is tucked away safe. We found her after we located Louise Butler, by the light of her lamp, reading my letters while the two of you played at footpad. The two of them are very… safe.”

“Safe?”

“Well—relatively so. They are safe as pickles in jars. We’ll see how safe soon, hmm?”

Jason lowered his feet to the floor. He was thinking not of the letters now, but of that jar that was hidden at the bottom of Germaine’s bag—the earthenware jar sealed in wax, that now Jason was certain contained another piece of bat guano from Africa… another piece of the cave germ, that killed nearly all it touched.

“Think of it, my Nephew,” said Germaine. “By day’s end, we’ll know for certain. Either Ruth, or Louise. One of the two will be a fit sow for a hero such as yourself.” She giggled. “Bergstrom can play with his monsters if he so wishes—but we…”

Jason thought for a bit, then stood up. Germaine glared at him, and waved the handgun. “Nephew!” she scolded. “Sit down! Take off your shirt! And your trousers!”

Jason shook his head. He took a step toward Germaine. He fought to keep his voice steady. “I ain’t playing your game no more, Mrs. Frost,” he said.

Germaine held the gun high, so the barrel pointed between Jason’s eyes. Jason took another step forward.

“You ain’t going to shoot me,” he said. “You killed too many folk to find me.”

“I warn you—”

Jason shook his head, said: “You won’t,” and reached out slowly to take hold of the gun’s barrel.

Germaine’s thick finger caressed the trigger, and watching her, for a moment he thought that this strange woman—this monstrous witch—might do it. But Jason kept moving, and the hammer did not fall, even though Jason took his time pulling the gun from her hand.

When he had it, her arm fell limp to her side. It was as though all the fight went out of her.

Jason opened the chamber of the revolver and shook the bullets, of which there were four, out into his hand. He looked at Germaine, who was now sobbing quietly.

“Oh, Nephew,” she said, her voice weak and tremulous. She shuffled toward him, and he shuffled back. “It’s true—I could never harm you, my darling—”

He didn’t let her finish the word hero, before bringing the butt of the gun up against the side of her head.

Its impact sent her stumbling against the wall. He hit her twice more, to make sure of it. She finally fell to the floor, and to his shame, he kicked her, hard in the middle. She was not moving—but she was not dead either. Jason watched her as he reloaded the pistol. When he was done, he raised it up and pointed at her. He stood that way for maybe a dozen heartbeats, then finally sighed; let it drop to his waist and let himself out of the room. Maybe he should become a killer; but he wasn’t one yet, and that was all there was to it.

And he had a more immediate worry.

Ruth was in here somewhere—Louise too—locked up, in a place where the Cave Germ would work only on them, and no one else. A place where the air would not move—where the smell of things could choke you because of that.

Pickles in a jar.

Jason had a good idea where such a place would be.

24 - The Test of Faith

The song rose over the Kootenai where it wended close to the hospital. A small dock extended into the river; on the bank above it, a wooden canoe turned over. The men in their sheets stepped gingerly around it as they moved to the bank of the river. There were several dozen of them. Some had known each other, once. They all listened as the song rose up.

Lothar Feeger watched them from the water. He had swum ahead of his brethren; he alone, promising to scout out things and give a signal if there was likely to be trouble the Feegers ought know about. When Feegers had met strangers in the past—well, there had been good meetings and there had been bad ones.

And on balance, more had gone badly. The Feegers had once had rifles and pistols, but they were only a few and that was long ago; and now, it seemed that the rest of the wide world rattled with iron.

The Oracle had proclaimed that they ought just go ahead, march into the place where the Son had been entrenched, and preach the word to the people there; bring them in line with what the Old Man wished, and set them to work.

“Folk who worship need be learned,” said the Oracle. “Else they praise ignorant, and their God might go astray with ’em.”

And her sisters had nodded, and Missy said: “Can’t suffer one go astray,” and Lily went on: “That’s heresy, ain’t it?” and the Oracle nodded, and bowed her head, and held up the swaddled Infant before her.

No one debated much—one didn’t argue in the presence of the Oracle and her sisters. But Lothar worried; although the scent of her had long washed off, Lothar still could never be far again from her, from the memory of the time with her, when her soft, lake-wrinkled fingers had took hold of him, and drawn him inside. The Old Man spoke through her now, but she was still just a girl—a Feeger—and Lothar would not let her walk into peril blindly.

So it was that when she ordered them to climb the hill, and take the heretics’ homestead for the thing they had done, Lothar had been in the forefront of the raiding party, scouting the town to make sure that no one guarded with rifle, and quietly killing that one who had. He would have wished it had been he who had found the Infant, martyred in a glass jar. But Lothar hung back and made certain that not one of the folk of the ’stead lived, to return one day and take revenge on the Oracle and her brood.

And so it was, that when she ordered them forward to spread the gospel, Lothar nodded—then later, when they crouched in the cold dark by river’s edge, he stole up to a cousin, and told him that he would scout ahead an hour before the rest came, and if there was danger of gunmen, he would whistle a signal so they might all approach more carefully. The cousin grinned at him, and hit him on the back, and told him to go on ahead.

Lothar moved his fingers to his lips now as he watched the men in white mill about the dock. There were a number of them, maybe half as many as all of the Feegers. But they did not carry guns, or even blades and axes like the cousins.

He squinted around the tree-covered bank, and seeing nothing else, lowered his fingers.

They were strangers—but at least they posed no threat.

And so Lothar waited quietly, for his family to catch up.

The song grew over the water as the sheeted men watched and listened. They’d all of them come this morning, even the ones who weren’t watching over their Lord, Mister Juke—even Nowak, who had been resting in a lower ward in the hospital, his shoulder tightly bandaged from the surgery a day before. The call had been building through the early morning, carrying on the scented breeze. A girl’s voice, high and lilting, singing words that though unclear, beckoned—the same way that Mister Juke had beckoned, but with a greater insistence somehow—a sound as insistent as it was insensible.

It grew as the rafts appeared around the river-bend. There were three of them, crowded with folk—tall and beautiful, bearing blades that gleamed in the morning light. The men in sheets raised up their arms in welcome as the rafts drifted closer, and spread out in front of them.

In the middle raft, a girl stepped forward. She wore sheets of her own, her long dark hair tumbling down them. In her arms, she held an Infant. The men gasped at her beauty, and fell to their knees as she opened her mouth and sang to them.

She sang and sang, until she was hoarse—as the music washed over them, some of the men thought: She is singing the same song again and again. It is growing more shrill—it is as though we haven’t heard it properly.

But the thoughts were passing, and not a one spoke of them. The music was too great a thing, and its majesty confounded them; whether they felt joy or rage, it mattered not. They knelt in dumb rapture, uncomprehending, before the greatness of God.

Beside her sister the Oracle, Missy grumbled: “They’re heretics. Kill ’em.”

The Oracle drew a breath. They were heretical, these strange men in sheets—but they were worshipful too; they had been touched by the Son, and they’d felt the touch, and they listened. But the song… they only bathed in it, like water. When the Oracle sang for Feeger, how better it was. Feeger knew the song—they knew who they were—and in the end—they would obey their Oracle.

These folk—they were obstinate. They were…

Lily found the words that the Oracle could not. “They were let be too long,” she said. “They hear your song—some other Oracle’s words.”

“And it’ll send ’em mad,” said Missy—and the Oracle nodded, and hefted her bundle nearer her breast—and she sang again, this time, not to the Heathen in sheets. But to Lothar—and his brothers.

The axes and blades came down in a flurry. They caught the men at the shoulder, the neck; an arm was sheared off, and one of the heretics shrieked, and fell into another blade. The white sheets stained red, and the screaming stopped, as the Feegers stepped away from the steaming circle of the dead.

And that, the Oracle feared, was how things would need go from here. They’d had a false Oracle—they wouldn’t hear her; they thought her foolish, because that other one had poisoned their minds.

“Lothar,” she said, and Lothar came to her. She smiled. He never missed instruction; never asked questions; never disrespected her.

“Find me that false prophet,” she said, “and cut him up the middle.”

25 - The Gospel According to Nils

“Bergstrom is coming,” said Sam Green to the Harpers. “Ben says he’s carrying a lamp.”

They were all of them in the kitchen by now—Mr. and Mrs. Harper and of course Andrew Waggoner, as well as some of Sam’s men.

“A lamp?” said Andrew. “It’s broad daylight outside.”

Ben, a young man with a short-cropped beard and the beginnings of baldness, looked sheepish as Sam explained: “I’m guessing a lamp.”

“A bright light, Mr. Green,” said Jake. “Can’t say it was a lamp.”

Mr. Harper sighed. “I don’t care if he’s got the God-damned sun in a sack. What’s he doing here at this hour?” Then he straightened, as a thought occurred to him: “D’you suppose he’s an idea where Ruth has got to?”

“Did anyone send word to him?” asked Mrs. Harper.

Garrison Harper looked to Sam, who shook his head: “Not us, sir.”

Ben looked over his shoulder. “Doctor’s here,” he said needlessly, before stepping out the servant’s entrance.

Andrew took another gulp of his tea and sat up straighter on his stool. It was absurd, given everything that Bergstrom had done to him—but he didn’t want to appear dishevelled in front of his peer.

“We are in the kitchen!” shouted Garrison, then turned to Andrew. “I’m sure Dr. Bergstrom will be delighted to know that you’re well, in any case.”

“If he’s sobered up,” said Mrs. Harper, under her breath.

“Hush,” said Garrison again, as the door from the front of the house swung open. It was an instruction that none of them disobeyed.

Andrew gaped.

The doctor had undergone a complete metamorphosis since last they’d met. This morning, he had managed the difficult trick of looking at once cadaverous and bloated. His lips were flushed red as a whore’s painted mouth, and his eyes were shadowed with deep rings. He wore a long coat, into the pockets of which he’d jammed his hands.

“Good morning, Mr. Harper,” said Bergstrom. “I trust you are well this morning?”

Harper didn’t say anything for a moment; he simply stared, as they all did. “Sir, you look ghastly,” he finally said. “How can you even be about?”

“A man can find reserves, sir. Vast reserves, when the times call for it.”

He stepped nimbly around a low butcher’s block, and drew nearer the table; and as he did, Andrew’s nostrils flared around a familiar, and awful stink.

“Mr. Harper, Mrs. Harper, I come with joyful news,” he said. “Just from in the docks, I can report that the final juncture’s reached.”

“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” said Harper.

“The men—the men have met the host—as I have instructed.”

“Host? What are you babbling about?”

“The—yes. I’m here to tell you, Garrison—something is coming. And it will change—it will change, if I may say—everything.”

A quiet fell on the kitchen then: it was as though Bergstrom had mesmerized the room of them. Andrew sniffed the air, and blinked, and shifted.

And for the first time since his arrival, Bergstrom seemed to see Andrew. His mouth twitched into something that might presage a smile. “Why look. Good morning, Andrew.”

“Nils.”

“You are well.”

“Better than I’d have been if I’d stayed.”

Bergstrom seemed taken aback at that. But it was only for an instant. He smiled, and reached into his coat, and scratched at his stomach as he turned to Harper, and said, as though Andrew was still missing in the hills and not there beside him: “Garrison—forget all this a moment. We are at the dawn of a marvellous day. The Gods are tumescent. They are joining!”

“Are you drunk now, Dr. Bergstrom?” Harper asked coolly.

Bergstrom shook his head. “Only the opposite.”

Andrew, meanwhile, was watching that coat. It was not just moving—it seemed to be roiling, as though something lived under there, clinging to Bergstrom’s middle and irritated by the commotion. Andrew caught Green’s eye, indicated the coat. Sam Green nodded.

“I apologize for my state yesterday,” said Bergstrom. He thrust his fists deeper into his coat pocket, like he was holding himself in. “I was not myself—I understood things only part-the-way. So I had something to drink after… after worship, when I should have been still in contemplation. It is the weakness of flesh, Gar’, when faced with the fact of divinity.”

“Ah,” said Andrew, as matters came together. The smell—it was near enough the stink that Loo had given off, in the last stages of her illness, of her infection with the Jukes.

Bergstrom looked at him and blinked. His gut rolled and churned.

“You’re very ill, Nils,” said Andrew. “You know that, don’t you? I’ve seen something like the thing that’s infected you—in the hills. You’ve seen her too—remember? Loo Tavish?”

Bergstrom nodded slowly; that seemed to be reaching him.

“You have been to see the imbecile. Is she doing well?”

“She’s dead,” said Andrew.

Bergstrom adopted a thoughtful expression. “She was past her time when we met,” he said. “God has taken her.”

“No. Just dead.”

Bergstrom smirked. “You really have no capacity for it, do you, Dr. Waggoner? You are just a low nigger, after all.”

“Dr. Bergstrom,” said Mrs. Harper in a sharp tone. “There are other matters at hand. Perhaps you could assist us in determining the whereabouts of my daughter.”

Bergstrom withdrew one hand from his pocket, and fanned his fingers out on the tabletop. The nails on three of his fingers had been torn, and the quick under them glistened darkly. “Your daughter. Ruth. She is with God.” Mrs. Harper gasped and clutched at her husband’s shoulders. Bergstrom’s coat flapped open.

“Oh, not like that. No. Sorry.” He smirked. “She still breathes, still breathes. All is well. And that is why I came here.” He withdrew his other hand, and leaned on it too. “To prepare us all—for as I said…”

Andrew stared at Bergstrom’s exposed mid-section. Nestled inside the coat were the things that Andrew had seen once before. On the hillside, crawling out of Loo Tavish. These were smaller than that creature, barely the size of a child’s hand—but they were unmistakable, crawling like thin, long-limbed rats across Bergstrom’s scarred, infected gut.

“The Father rejoins the Son today!” said Bergstrom.

Mrs. Harper shrieked—and Andrew counted five small creatures before they dropped like ripe fruit and scurried across the floor, before the whistling took up. Bergstrom straightened and cast off his coat, and tore away at his shirt. His flesh was bruised and swollen in places. It seemed to move with inhuman musculature. It only confirmed what Andrew had been thinking—it was the answer to the question he had asked Norma Tavish on the mountainside: Do these things ever lay their eggs in men?

Andrew was now sure that they did. The writhing flesh on Bergstrom was testimony to that. These things had laid eggs beneath that skin. But there was no umbilical—no uterine wall from which to feed. So they had immediately begun to feed off—what?

Andrew shuddered. Bergstrom had been a fat man in the fall. And that—his fat—is what they’d fed on. He had been their regimen…

… those tiny cherubs…

Andrew took a breath. It was hard to hold his eye on one of them as they drifted up onto the table, laughing in high voices that might have been whistles. He felt what seemed like a great, hot wind upon him, and when he looked up, it seemed as though the ceiling, the very roof of this house had been torn away—and above, the sky opened into a great vortex. If he looked at it long, Andrew was sure he would overbalance and fall up. But he looked up again, and the ceiling was as it was, bare pine boards, with great hooks for pots and other implements sticking out of the wide beams that criss-crossed it. The cherub that seemed to have been prancing on the table turned small, and squat—a greyish-pink thing, with no fur but a thin baby-fuzz, and long curved claws that clicked on the table. Andrew lifted his plate and swatted it. The creature howled and scurried off.

Then Andrew coughed, and bent, and looked around again.

Nils Bergstrom stood before him, arms spread and belly reshaping itself while Mister Juke’s demonic offspring scurried and danced around him. He glared across the table at Andrew, with what he must have imagined was divine wrath in his eye.

Andrew could understand that. Of everyone whom Bergstrom had caught meeting in this kitchen, only Andrew Waggoner had dared not bow down before his delusion. The rest—even Sam Green—had all bent low to the ground, trembling. They thought—believed—knew that what they were seeing was God manifest in man. Only Norma’s drug, and the things he had seen already, let Andrew see Bergstrom for what he was.

“You’re sick,” said Andrew. “You’re going to die from this.”

“I am reconciled,” said Bergstrom, his arms extended to either side and trembling, “to my God. Unlike yourself, Dr. Nigger. You cannot even look upon Him.”

“I don’t see God here,” said Andrew. “I see a trick—I see…” he motioned to one of the juveniles, perched like a Notre Dame gargoyle on a pine shelf behind where Mrs. Harper bent and wept. “I don’t see God.”

“Then you are blind.” He smiled. “Outcast.”

“Nils, you’re in grave danger right now, said Andrew. “Those things in you—they’ll kill you. Just like they did Maryanne Leonard. Only I think it’ll be worse for you. You’re going to need surgery—”

“Shut your mouth.”

Bergstrom held his hands out and shut his eyes, as though he were listening to some unheard voice. Then he opened them again and looked straight at Andrew. “Why are you alive, Dr. Waggoner?”

“I’m alive,” said Andrew carefully, “because I’m clever enough to know when I’ve overstayed my welcome. Nils, pull yourself out from this insanity. Drink some damn tea—” he offered his cup “—and sit down, and think about what you’ve done to yourself. Then we’ll go and cut those things out of you—as many as we can.”

His hand was shaking awfully as he extended the cup. Bergstrom, encumbered but still nimble, reached across and with a flick of his wrist, knocked it from his hand. The cup shattered on the floor.

“Keep your poison!” he snapped. “You cannot cut me out—that was among the first things that Nils learned when he began to study my effects.”

“Ah,” said Andrew. “So you—so Dr. Bergstrom, has been making a proper study of this.”

“Bergstrom has always sought truth in nature. That is why I came to him.”

Andrew chose his next words carefully. Bergstrom had tried to kill him—he’d thought, from pure wickedness. But he was vulnerable now, trapped in a delusion, speaking of himself in a disassociative way… as though it were someone else speaking through him.

But delusion or no, Bergstrom certainly came here with a message. Andrew thought he might have a better time drawing that message, and more, from the thing that Bergstrom believed possessed him.

“All right,” said Andrew. “Why don’t you tell me, how it is you came to Dr. Bergstrom. Why don’t you deliver me your gospel.”

Around them, the whistling grew. In a distant wing of the house, something that sounded like a gunshot rang out. But he didn’t let himself become distracted by any of it.

“Sit,” said Bergstrom. “I command you.”

Andrew pulled up a stool amid the grovelling others, and got ready to listen.

“My father,” said Nils Bergstrom, “is the mountains. He is the trees and the sky and the forest. All this.” He spread his arms above him to indicate the whole kitchen, and by implication, Andrew thought, pretty well everything else. “So has He been for as long as men have walked this land, He has been their protector.”

The Harpers had managed to climb as far as their knees, draw their hands together in prayer, and they looked up at Nils Bergstrom. Andrew didn’t have to guess; it was clear they were looking not at but through Bergstrom, at nothing but pure eternity. Sam Green was still bent over; his shoulders shaking, forehead pressed against the flagstone floor. The Jukes had withdrawn to shadow; they only revealed their presence by their soft whistling, the clicking of their talons on the tops of hanging pots and the beams of the ceiling. Andrew fought to keep his eyes off them all—all but Nils Bergstrom.

“Praise your Father,” said Andrew.

“And so men do. Those who praise. The Feegers.”

“Feegers,” said Andrew. “What do they have to do with—”

Bergstrom didn’t let him finish. “Yet lo, do they wither. Sickness and weakness and their own animal natures—lo, do they wither. Such a withering came upon the Father’s men, and their women and young also, not a winter’s past. They grew hot and cold and their chests filled with water and many died. The Father wept for them. And he cried out—and his angels, for there were many, cried with him. And in the depths of his despair—came a wandering man—this one.” Bergstrom jammed a thumb into his chest, while Jukes chittered from the rafters. “Come did he, with balms and knives and blankets, up the mountain-slope, and see to those folk as best he might.

“The Father’s folk were fools—they tried drive him away, and nearly they did, swinging sticks and axes and knives of their own. They chased him ’round the great lake atop the mountain, nearer the Father. And there—the Father picked up his scent, he did. And he knew, though the people were fool enough then—he knew that the wandering man had a place for him. So—so he sent me.”

Andrew could no longer keep silent. “You,” he said.

“Mister Juke.”

“I thought you didn’t care for that name.”

“Nils does not, but I—” he stood straighter, glared down at Andrew “—I take the name my worshippers give me.”

“Your worshippers. You don’t mean the folk in the hospital.”

“Those who would have destroyed me came to love me,” he said.

Norma and her clan knew about that; knew how to defend against it. Nils Bergstrom would have had no opportunity to share that wisdom. So when he went to the place where the Juke came from, and stole it away… he would have been defenceless.

And now he was gone, his mind twisted into what he believed was a personification of the Juke.

“I came,” said Bergstrom, “to this place but a babe—swaddled in a crib, carried by this one. He wanted to know me, but was not yet faithful. And so he kept me away in a place cold and bright—and he did feed me and question me and watch me as I grew. I was his secret.”

“I had thought you came here on your own,” said Andrew.

“That is a false gospel.”

“And why would you allow a false gospel to be spread?”

“The folk had to meet their God quiet.”

Andrew considered that phrase: meet their God quiet.

The thing was a secret, because it had secret work that early on the folk of Eliada would not agree to: it would have to sneak out in the night, meet up with girls, and plant its seed.

For what was it that Norma had said before she’d been killed? The thing did not preach to someone until it had a taste of their kin; until it maybe had such a taste as only could come from the inside of them.

“And so you walked the land here in secret,” said Andrew.

“And so I did.”

“And Maryanne Leonard?”

Bergstrom smiled. “I came to her in the night—while Bergstrom watched from a perch—I came upon her in secret, as she walked through the night, and she met my eye, and knew my love.”

The one part of things that was true, then—Mister Juke was a wandering rapist.

And Bergstrom—he had aided.

Andrew imagined how it might have been: whether Bergstrom had taken the young, small Mister Juke from the quarantine one night, led him over to the Leonard house; or perhaps just followed the creature through the snow, checking his pocket watch to mark its progress, then merely crouching down out back of the place, while the creature mesmerized and ravished the child. He wanted to strike him for that, as much as he did for the thing that he later did to Jason Thistledown; the thing he’d tried to do to Andrew. But he contained himself. Nils Bergstrom was in deep with his fancy; he had been as much a victim of this creature as a fine dog is of rabies. Bergstrom’s head had bent back now, as though he were looking to Heaven and not just the rafters.

“Maryanne,” he whispered, and Andrew followed his eye to the rafters.

From those rafters, Maryanne Leonard stared down, her face a ghastly, necrotic ruin. She grinned at Andrew with a mouth too wide, teeth bent and pointed. Andrew felt his breath freezing in his chest.

“She bore angels,” said Bergstrom, his voice taking a hideous, doting tone as Maryanne drew down, moving like some immense and bloated spider toward Andrew. Over her head, the ceiling opened up to light—pure and celestial—bursting out between floorboards.

Andrew tried to look away. “That’s not right,” he said. “There is no God here. There is not—”

Andrew felt it pressing him down—to the floor, to join those others already deep in their worship. There was another pressure in his heart—an expansive feeling, as though he might grow immense within himself, and be so joyful as to only sing the praise; another thing, that feared the apparition above him like a tornado, like a sandstorm—like nature, made manifest.

He swallowed, and shut his eyes, and drew a sharp breath, and when he opened his eyes again, it was only rafters overhead. And there was Nils Bergstrom, shirtless and bruised and emaciated, like a refugee from a war. His flesh crawled with the maggoty young of Mister Juke.

“Nils,” Andrew said, standing and reaching to him. “Let me get you under a knife. I don’t know—but I think it’s the only hope for you.”

Bergstrom looked back at him, and reached out his own scabrous arm.

Maybe this is the benefit—the good thing that comes from the Jukes, thought Andrew as he reached, and the two touched. Weren’t there good works done by churches around the world? Didn’t religious feeling fundamentally provide for those things of value? Compassion—pity—forgiveness—community? That was Garrison Harper’s theory—and maybe… maybe wasn’t there something to it?

But Heaven wouldn’t leave them alone. As he stood there, the door behind them flung open and light flooded in.

A giant stood at the door.

He was big enough the frame barely contained him. His hair was black and a beard hung down over his home-sewn buckskin coat. He stepped inside, looking around with an almost childlike fascination, as light from the doorway haloed him. He carried a sword, long and dark and curved slightly like a sabre.

Another God-damned hallucination. Andrew shut his eyes to it.

Bergstrom’s fingers touched Andrew’s; and he said, in a high, childlike voice of his own: “You see, Nigger? They come.”

“No,” said Andrew. “This is another lie, Nils—another—”

He didn’t have the opportunity to finish the sentence. Bergstrom’s finger jerked away, and there was a sound like an axe-blade splitting kindling, and when Andrew opened his eyes, he saw—there was Bergstrom, on his knees, bright arterial blood spraying from his shoulder. Andrew couldn’t look away from his eyes—wide and wet, first pleading and then diminishing, as what life was left in him drew back and away into whatever the Juke had tricked him to thinking came after.

Andrew stumbled back, in time to avoid the tip of the giant’s sword-blade as it cut the air at the height of his throat. For an instant, he met the giant’s eyes, and he thought he could read the disappointment in them—

—disappointment, at having failed such an easy swing at the nigger doctor’s throat.

The giant raised the sword for another try, but Andrew was on the move. He half-ran, half-fell to his left, toward the door. He screamed in pain as he did so—the move pulled his bad arm in a way that it did not want to go—but the sudden move was enough to once more bring the blade up short.

This time, the giant didn’t look disappointed: Andrew could swear he heard him giggle.

It’s a game, he thought. And it was an easy one. Andrew had to cross a dozen feet to get to the back door; the giant had to cross half that distance, to cut Andrew’s throat open.

The giant knew it too. He stepped slowly toward Andrew, the sword held in front of him like a torch.

“Feeger,” Andrew said.

And the giant said, in his high, child’s voice, “Feeger.”

Then it was that the room rolled with thunder and the Feeger’s halo returned, in a spray of blood and bone and brain that reached as high as the rafters. He fell to the ground, and behind him was Sam Green, up on one knee now, his Russian revolver smoking.

When Andrew met his eye, he saw nothing there at all.

“Get the fuck away from here, Dr. Waggoner,” said Sam. “Get far.” And he raised the revolver, resting it on his forearm, and fired another shot past Andrew as a shadow briefly filled the door.

Andrew didn’t go out the back door—not after just a glance outside. There were maybe a dozen men like the first—not as large perhaps—crowded behind the house. There were more blades, and axes, and spears standing in the muddy garden behind the estate. He shouted a report of this to Sam Green, and Green motioned him to the other door, leading into the dining room and the rest of the house.

By this time, Garrison Harper and his wife were on their feet. “I’ll cover you,” said Sam. “Get them safe.”

Andrew didn’t wait for them. He slipped through the swinging door into the Harpers’ dining room. The last time he’d spent any time here, it was sipping brandy and listening to Garrison Harper boast about the fine conditions in his fine young town. Now, he pressed against the stained-oak wall, the light filtering through rain-streaked glass, flinching at every report of Sam Green’s revolver. He counted three shots before the door opened again, and Mrs. Harper came through. It was quiet as Garrison Harper finally slipped through. “He’s reloading,” he whispered needlessly.

Andrew touched Garrison Harper’s sleeve. “We have to move fast,” he said. “Are you able?”

Harper nodded. “Mrs. Harper?” he asked.

She indicated she was fine, but Andrew wasn’t sure he believed her or her husband. The Harpers had moved when Sam Green told them to, and here they were. But Andrew remembered how he had been, the first time the Juke had infected him. What were they seeing when they looked at him?

The gunfire resumed: three quick retorts from the kitchen, and other shots outside. Somewhere in the house, glass shattered.

At that, Garrison seemed to find himself. “Dr. Waggoner is correct,” he said. “We have to move.”

“Where?” said Andrew. “Do you have a store of firearms?”

Harper nodded. “The study.”

“Across the hall?”

“Afraid so.”

Two more gunshots came from the kitchen—a volley of gunfire outside—and a hollow, splintering sound.

“Oh God!” said Mrs. Harper. “That’s the front door!”

“We don’t know that,” said Garrison. He beckoned Andrew and started towards the arch that led into the central hallway.

“Sir! That may not be safe!”

“Damn sight safer than here in the dining room,” he said, “unarmed.”

Harper took two steps forward, looked around the corner, and took a hasty step back. “Damnation,” he whispered. “Mrs. Harper was right. The front door’s wide open.” He pushed Andrew back into the dining room. “Are you strong enough to move furniture?” He gave Andrew an appraising look. “No. Never mind. I’m fit enough. We are not going to let these God-forsaken degenerates destroy what we’ve made—this enterprise, this family,” said Harper, as he lowered to his haunches and lifted the long table with one shoulder.

The table crashed onto its side, and the small amount of china and silverware set there shattered on the floor. It made a terrible moaning sound as Garrison pushed it to the door. After that, two more shots rang out from the kitchen, but that was all. Perhaps, thought Andrew, the fellows outside are simply reloading.

“What is that?” whispered Mrs. Harper. Andrew cocked his ear. “Someone’s in the hall,” she continued.

Andrew strained to listen, and then nodded. There was the sound of footfalls moving steadily up the hall. Andrew thought it was only one set. Mrs. Harper clutched Andrew’s good arm as they drew nearer.

They slowed, and stopped outside the door.

“What’re you?”

It was a high voice—a child’s voice. Andrew squinted. He could see the shape of a figure in the dark hallway. It didn’t come up more than a foot higher than the top of the overturned table. A young girl.

“Hello dear,” said Mrs. Harper, trying to sound cheerful and friendly. “Are you lost?”

“You in there—what sort’re you?” The girl stepped forward. Her hair was down to shoulders, and it was matted thick and black. She raised her face, and her lip twitched as she sniffed the air.

“We’re the Harpers,” said Mrs. Harper, cajoling. “Aren’t you a pretty little girl. What’s your name?”

“Lily,” said the girl. And she boosted herself up and flung one leg over the dining room table.

“Hello Lily,” Garrison Harper said.

She gave him a sniff, and then she dropped to the floor. She was wearing a filthy slip of a skirt; her feet were splayed and callused. She approached him and Mrs. Harper, and sniffed again.

Lily looked straight at Andrew Waggoner. “You,” she said, “got some song to tell.”

And then, she started to sing.

There were four tall, rain-streaked windows in the dining room and men outside, flinging rocks. The windows all smashed at once. One of the rocks struck Mrs. Harper in the side of the head; it cast her to the floor amid a lawn of broken glass. Andrew dropped to his knees to see to her, but he didn’t get much chance; strong arms reached down and yanked him to his feet, bending his bad arm hard and sending long spears of pain up his spine.

Men stepped through: big men, in buckskin, armed with blades and sticks.

The fellow who had hold of Andrew lifted him like he was nothing, and hauled him over the sill of the window and Andrew couldn’t see, but he could surmise. The men went straight for Garrison Harper. There was a sound that might have been a scream, and then a smashing sound, and what sounded like more gunfire—

—and then Andrew’s face was in mud, and he was struggling to breathe. He was lifted into the air again, and a thick finger dug into his nostrils and his mouth, clearing an airway for him. Andrew blinked, and looked up into a long face, with patches of beard and some discolour, and wispy black hair that snaked across a broad forehead.

He saw other things too. A man face down in mud, a Remington rifle a few feet off his splayed and grasping fingertips; the sky, roiling with storm; the ground itself, seeming to move with the wet, scrabbling backs of things that whistled and cried as they fled; and at last, flames, licking the sides and crossing the roofs of the Harper mansion, while the girl sang a song whose words blended together into a long and triumphal note.

26 - The Pickle Jar

Jason made his way by candlelight from the room where Germaine Frost lay bleeding, down the dark stairwell to the hospital’s basement. The pickle-juice stink of formaldehyde carried along the corridor there, and grew unbearably thick by the time he reached the autopsy room. Jason didn’t heed the stink, though, as he hurried into the room and saw what he suspected. There was the door to the storeroom—the one place in Eliada that Jason knew was cut off from all the others, even better than the quarantine.

The door was padlocked. And as Jason stepped to it, someone pounded weakly from the other side.

He set the candle down, and put his ear to the wood.

“Help us!” It was unmistakably Ruth’s voice. “We’re trapped!”

“Hold on, Ruth. It’s Jason. Don’t tire yourself out. I’m getting a crowbar.”

Minutes later, Jason had the lock off and the door open. The room was dark, and damp, and he held the candle over his head he saw them: Ruth, crouched as if in prayer, hands held together and eyes wet—and behind her, Louise; lying on the floor, curled around herself.

Ruth stumbled to her feet and ran to him. Jason caught her in one arm, as he stepped inside and pulled the door shut.

Ruth pulled back and looked at the door. “Wh-what are you doing?” she said. “We have to get out of here—warn my father and Mr. Green and the Pinkertons! Your aunt—”

“Just a minute.” Jason squinted around the room. The shelves were still filled with jars containing the grotesqueries of the Eliada surgery. It didn’t take him long to find the other, tiny earthenware jar, sitting on a shelf near the door, its lid removed.

“We can’t leave,” said Jason, letting go of Ruth and stepping up to the jar. He peered into it—there was a tiny twist of something that looked like a root, but streaked with white. He carefully picked up the lid and screwed it back on—and then, although he knew it was pointless, Jason dribbled some candle-wax over it. He looked at Louise, who was beginning to stir from a very deep sleep, and turned back to Ruth.

“We have to stay here,” he said. “It ain’t safe outside.”

Louise sat up and coughed. She regarded Jason, or at least the candle that he held, with narrowed eyes. “You shouldn’t leave that going in here, if we’re to stay, she said sleepily. There’s not much air circulation here.”

Jason blew the candle out. “We’re to stay here,” he said. “So we’ll leave the candle out.” The darkness was suffocating and disorienting. Jason groped in it, until he found Ruth’s arm. He drew her to him.

“You do mean to stay,” said Louise quietly. “That’s kind of you.”

Ruth stood close to Jason. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. You—”

“It’s all right,” said Jason.

“I so pushed you to come out last night; mocked you for being afraid. But I know—there are some things that you should be afraid of.”

“It’s all right.”

Jason led her away from the door, taking care not to knock anything over. “But as dangerous as it is out there—we can’t wait here. They’ll come back!”

“We have to wait here,” said Jason. “No choice.”

“Jason is right,” said Louise weakly, in the dark. “No choice.”

A shiver went through Jason. “Hey Louise,” he said, “you remember what happened to you?”

Louise sniffled. “Yes. I took the material back to my room and was reading it by lamplight. Your—your aunt came in. She was accompanied by—”

“Say it,” said Ruth, acidly. “She was accompanied by Mr. Harris. The very fellow who had brought us her bag in the first place. What a traitor.”

“She didn’t say anything,” said Louise. “I tried to apologize, but she struck me. I woke up here.”

“You all right?” asked Jason.

“No,” said Louise, miserably. “No.”

“She hit Louise on the head,” said Ruth. “It’s a wonder she didn’t kill her.”

Jason didn’t think that Louise was being troubled by a sore skull right now. And he thought she knew that as well as any of them.

“Louise,” he said, “how far did you get in Germaine’s letters?”

“Not far,” she said, a little too quickly. In the dark, Jason nodded.

She knows, he thought. She knows that we’re locked in here with the Cave Germ. She knows what it did to Cracked Wheel; she knows what it is likely to do to both her and Ruth, and she’s probably figured out what it is already doing to her.

And for whatever reason, she’s not told Ruth a thing about it.

“That’s too bad,” he said to Louise. And to Ruth: “Let’s go sit down and rest a spell. You can tell me what happened to you.”

“Ah, of course,” she said as they settled down against the cool stone of a wall. “You must have so many questions.”

“Last I saw you, you were bustin’ into the quarantine,” he said. “Did you—hey!”

Jason rubbed his shoulder where she’d punched it.

“So many questions,” she repeated.

“Sorry,” said Jason, and she hit him again—not as hard this time, but still firmly.

“Stop apologizing. All right, then—let me set an example. This, Jason, is how one answers a question honestly put. I didn’t bust into the quarantine. I fled there. The forest—it seemed to me that it was filled with beasts. That thing that had attached itself to the girl in the woods… there were more of them. Countless…”

“I know.”

“I suppose that you do. My God, how did you escape them?”

I didn’t, he thought.

“Well. I bolted across the green, and as I fell against the wall, I was fortunate enough to see a crack with light coming through. So I tried my luck—and fell inside.”

After a moment, Jason asked her what she saw in there.

“Light,” she said. “Brilliant light.”

“And what else?”

“It—” she paused again. “It’s hard to say, because… sight was not a part of it. What I saw was—well, something larger.”

Jason decided to help her along: “Like a very tall man, with tiny creatures dancing around it in a circle?”

“Now you’re making fun,” she said. “No. No tall men. No tiny pixies. Just—a kind of brilliance. A kind of basking warmth. I felt as though I were—not vanishing, that’s not precisely the word… but—cut loose, perhaps.” She paused. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No ma’am,” said Jason.

“Then what do you mean, some tall fellow, with creatures dancing around it?”

“It’s only—that is what I saw, when I went—when Bergstrom locked me up in that quarantine. Don’t you remember? I thought I told you about them back in the orchard.”

“Did you?”

“I’m pretty sure of it.”

Ruth sat quietly for a moment. “Yes,” she said, “you did. I remember now. Why would I have forgotten that?”

“Maybe all that brightness shook you up.”

“Maybe. Things took a turn then. I felt—I felt as though in the midst of this, someone—something, perhaps—glimpsed me. That I stood naked before… something that was… vast. As big as a mountain. Perhaps that was your tall man?”

“That sounds a lot bigger—” Jason stopped himself. He remembered what Sam Green had told him: the Juke was growing. “No, no. It could well be.”

“And then…”

More quiet. Ruth leaned against him, rested her head on his shoulder. Finally, Jason prompted her to continue, but it wasn’t Ruth who answered.

“That’s all she remembers,” said Louise. Although she sounded weaker before, her tone was firm “If you are going to remain here, you should let her rest.”

“All right,” said Jason. He shifted so that she rested against his chest and not his shoulder. She snuggled close and wept quietly, her tears cooling on his shirt, and Jason struggled to control his own.

“Do you believe in fate, Jason?”

“We talked about this.” Jason was having a hard time keeping his eyes open; the air in here being as stale as it was, and with the sickly fumes from the pickled innards all around them, he wanted to pass right out. “Back at the party.”

“It was outside the cider house actually,” she said. “And I believe I told you I believe in fate. But you never answered me.”

Jason was quiet until Ruth said, sharply: “Jason!” and he sighed.

“There are Fates,” he said, “sure. That’s what the Greeks called them. Ladies who wove the strings of your life together, who knew the lay of things before and after.” Other races, he recalled, had the same idea, so he mentioned that too. “The Norsemen called them Norns. I don’t know if I believe in them.” He yawned. “You like to hear a story about them? I can recall a couple.”

“Hmm. From the Bulfinch’s?” Yawns being contagious, she joined him a moment before continuing: “No, Jason, I don’t think that is the story I want to hear. Not now.”

“What story, then?”

“The important one,” she said. “The story of Jason Thistledown and his mysterious father.”

“Aw, damn you,” he said. “Pardon my French.”

She laughed softly. “If Louise were awake, she’d tell you damn is not a French word. Not damn, nor hell, nor…” she paused, as though drawing a breath: “Fuck!” And she laughed.

“Ruth Harper!” said Jason. “I’d wash your mouth with lye, I had some handy.”

“Well you don’t,” she said. “And you owe me a story. A true story, about your father. The gunfighter.”

He owed her a story, did he? The rough stone of the cellar wall scraped against Jason’s shoulders as he shifted. He had moved away from Ruth, but didn’t realize until she remarked upon it. For Jason felt as though he were in two places: here, in the cellar of the hospital at Eliada—and hundreds of miles away, in the single room of the cabin he and his mama had occupied most of his entire life. He’d owed her a story too, he supposed.

“You want to know about my pa the gunfighter,” he said finally. “All right. My pa was no gunfighter. Not that I saw.”

“He was retired,” said Ruth. “You are not old enough to’ve seen Jack Thistledown when he fought in his prime.”

“You seem to have an awful high opinion of Jack Thistledown,” said Jason. “You sure you want to hear this story?”

“No, I’d rather you recite a tale from the Iliad instead. Or perhaps not. Continue,” Ruth said imperiously.

Jason pulled his knees up to his chest. “You’re not—” he felt his voice starting to tremble, and drew a breath to still it “—not quite right to say he was retired. Just I don’t think he was ever what you would call a gunfighter, ’cause there’s no such things. You don’t fight with guns. You kill folks with them.”

Ruth gasped. “So John Thistledown is Jack Thistledown!”

“Sometimes fellows would come to Cracked Wheel,” said Jason. “I was only small, so I didn’t get to see much of them. My pa would hear word that someone or another had come around looking for him. Sometimes, that fellow would go away no wiser. Sometimes a fellow would make it up to the mouth of the pass, and Pa would be there waiting for him.”

“An ambush!”

“You can see fellows coming a long ways off,” said Jason. “Pa picked this place careful, when he decided to settle with my ma. He made himself what he called his trapper’s cabin, with a good clear view of the slope. If he were lucky enough to get word someone was coming, he’d sit there with his rifle, watchin’ for them—shoot them dead before they’d even seen him. You think that’s gunfighting?”

Ruth paused before answering: “He was defending his family,” she said. “His kingdom.”

“Where he spent most days drunk insensible, while Ma did all the work,” said Jason. “And he wasn’t always that good about defending his kingdom, neither.”

“How is that?”

Jason pressed his chin into his knees. It don’t matter, he said to himself. She can’t tell anyone. Not trapped here.

But “Etherton,” was all he said. Ruth prodded, then scolded him and begged him to continue, but Jason kept quiet until he had it under control enough, to tell Ruth the story of that very bad week, when Bill Etherton came to call on his pa.

“What was this fellow Etherton?” asked Ruth after the longest silence yet. “He sounds a monster.”

Jason could see how Ruth might feel that way. He’d tried thinking of ways to tell the story any number of times over the years, and each time it started with figuring out how to talk about Bill Etherton in a way that did not make him sound like some wild beast. He knew how his mama had told it, not long after it had finished and Jason’s face was healing up:

Bill Etherton was a wicked man from your pa’s past. That’s why he did that to you—hit you like that. No excuse. No blessed excuse.

That was comfort to Jason when he heard it, the cut on his little chin starting to itch rather than hurt and his shoulder still aching where it’d been twisted. But it was no good at all to Jason Thistledown thirteen years on, trying to make some sense of the memories for the likes of Ruth Harper.

“One day,” said Jason, “a man came out of the bush and hit me hard. He was tall as a tree and wore a long coat of brown leather. I think I asked him something—I was playing with a couple sticks—and he looked at me and said something and hit me. That fellow was Bill Etherton. He knew my pa one way or another.”

“He came out of the bush,” said Ruth. “Your father—your pa would have been watching the pass, correct?”

Jason shrugged.

“And Mr. Etherton stole up behind the homestead. Which was unprotected.”

“We were unprotected,” agreed Jason. “I must have cried out loud, because my mama came running. I remember some of that but not all of it.”

Jason remembered more than he would tell. He remembered vividly the tree branch that Etherton had used to whack Jason with across the face. He did not remember getting hit, but he remembered the tears and screaming, for he was just small when it happened.

His mother cried out, and then Etherton said Good mornin’, Ellie, like he knew her, and Jason’s ma tried to get back into the house, but Etherton was fast and got in her way, and told her there would be no getting the gun this time. No gettin’ the gun this time, Ellie, nuh-uh-uh-huh… . That was one thing that Jason remembered clearly, because even though he was small and had only lived through four winters then, those words had the ring of history—ancient history between his mama and Mr. Etherton and somehow wrapped up with Jason himself.

Jason drew his knees up to his chin. It was warm here, but he shivered all the same.

“Jason.”

It wasn’t Ruth this time. It came from across the room, and before Jason could stop himself he said: “Ma?”

“Jason, just tell her the story. Tell us the story. Stop fussing.”

Jason sighed. “Sorry, Miss Butler. It’s hard in the tellin’—”

“Yes,” said Louise sharply. “It is hard. For all of us, Mr. Thistledown. Forgive me if I don’t—”

“Louise!” Ruth was just as sharp, and she took hold of Jason’s arm tightly. “Let him tell the story in his own time.”

Louise cleared her throat, and cleared it again. Soon, Jason figured, she would be coughing. He put his hand on Ruth’s, and was relieved to find it cool. For now.

“All right,” said Jason. “Etherton was a bad fellow. But I can’t recall everything that happened.”

“It was long ago.”

“I know my ma got herself hit too. In the stomach. Made her sick up. I remember watching that—never saw my ma sick up before.”

Ruth gasped. “He struck her? Jason… tell me. Was your father murdered by this Etherton? When he came back and found his family terrorized by his old enemy? When he confronted him?” She wrapped an arm over his shoulder and leaned close—like she ought to be comforting him. “Oh my dear Jason.”

Jason shook his head. “No,” he said. “My pa came back, but he didn’t confront anybody. Ma’d cleaned herself up and put a dressing on my cut, and when pa came back, he just gave that Etherton a big hug and the two of them set down to drinking. But…”

“But?”

“My mama said it was Etherton that pushed her to do it. Not him—but watchin’ them, Etherton and my pa. After what he did to both of us.”

“Mr. Thistledown,” said Louise in a low tone.

“She—” began Ruth, but Jason finished the sentence: “Took care of my pa.”

There was a silence, and Jason felt embarrassed by it, so he started talking faster: “It was not only that day that drove her to it. My pa would run off whenever he felt like it—he would get himself drunk and do bad things to my ma—he hit me same as Etherton did, for even less reason sometimes. He had it coming; he was no good and so my mama did what she had to, on account of our safety and her dignity and…” He stopped again, feeling as though the words were running together. Ruth took his head and drew it down to her breast, and held him there, and he could feel hot tears coming to his eyes as the image of that night, outside the house as the November wind blew black leaves up off the ground and the sky turned colours like bruised flesh and he had watched his ma…

“I’m sorry,” he said, and in his ear, Ruth hushed him, and her fingers entwined with the hair on the back of his head, and her other hand brushed down the side of his ribs. He tried to say more—how knowing it or not, he’d brought this fate down on her and Louise, and this whole town, how that sealed-up jar of sickness on the floor was the curse he’d carried here—how in bringing this curse, he’d killed her. He tried to say it, but it was too much for words: even having passed the story, or most of it, of his pa and his mama. Saying he was sorry to Ruth was the same as saying he was sorry to his ma, whom he hadn’t even buried—and saying that right, was more than he could say in words. So all he could do was lift his cheek from her blouse, and try and face her in the pitch black. It was too late after that; her mouth was on his, lips parted, and they were sharing the hot breath of fever.

Hush, darling. No regrets.

Ruth’s fingers danced like the legs of a spider down to the belt of his trousers, and then below, and Jason held back a gasp, as her hand formed a cup, and held him in it. He pulled away from the kiss, swallowing a mouthful of her, and slipped his own hand up to her blouse. He could feel her heartbeat, fluttering like a bird’s through the cloth and the flesh, and he could feel her grow momentarily rigid at the contact. They both knew that the only thing guaranteeing their privacy was the dark; the slightest noise would leave poor Louise with little doubt as to what they were doing.

So they made quiet work of it. Ruth found the buttons of Jason’s fly, and in no time she had undone the top two of them, which was enough: the cool, soft flesh of her wrist touched him first, and then she drew him into her palm. Jason could not breathe a moment—yet somehow he managed to find the buttons at the side of Ruth’s drawers and with only a little help from her, was able to loosen them enough that she could wriggle free. Louise might have heard that, but she must have been coughing at that instant; there was no comment from her. Jason trembled as he traced the smooth curve of Ruth’s hip with his fingertips; he drew a sharp breath as she twisted her wrist somewhat, in drawing him between her thighs. He thought—he was sure—that he heard her declare love for him, as she gasped, and pulled him deep inside her. But Jason could be no surer of that, than he was of Louise. Jason drew a sharp breath, and in doing he felt Ruth do the same thing—and he recalled—

—the moment on the rail platform, a cool spring breeze catching her as he spied her standing next to Louise, the tiny half-smile that touched only part of her face—as he wondered: did she spy me too?—and now knowing, that yes, it was, as Ruth herself had said, a moment of Fate. And so it was, when that smile widened, and—

Hush, my darling.

He clutched both her shoulders with his hands, and in so doing thrust himself deeper inside her. Her pantaloons were tangled around one ankle, and the fabric wrapped the back of one thigh as she pressed her legs around him, and drew him inside—

—widened, and reached—

Jason thrust in deeper. He fell into an easy rhythm—he was surprised at how easy. It was like he’d been doing this all his life. In his ear, Ruth whispered things that he could not understand; and he whispered them back, and they moved together more quickly, and finally, although they both fought against it, they cried out—first Ruth, and then Jason.

They lay quietly for a moment, wet with each other’s sweat and juices, and slowly returned to themselves. Jason pulled away enough that he could sit up, and as he did so, he was overcome by a sudden shame. He was not a complete fool; he knew what they’d done was private, better kept behind the doors of a saloon, or best yet, the vows of a marriage. But his will had fled him in her embrace, and here he had taken Ruth Harper, in the dark, in a sick room, right next to her good friend Louise.

The same thought might have occurred to Ruth, but she responded differently—with a laugh that only slightly betrayed her embarrassment. “Oh my,” she said, running her hand down Jason’s forearm and entwining his fingers with hers. “Oh Louise,” she said, “I can’t imagine what you are thinking.”

Jason could—and he waited in the dark next to Ruth for a few heartbeats, for the rebuke.

“Miss Butler?” he finally said. “I’m sure sorry about that; I sure wasn’t brought up to…”

“Louise?” Ruth let go of his hand then, and scrambled away from him. Jason, slower on the uptake than she, didn’t work it out until he heard Ruth’s gasp, and then a sob.

“Oh,” he said. And he rolled to his knees, and crawled over to where Louise lay. He found Ruth first, and took her shoulders, and brought her to his arm as she let go of the cooling, lifeless hand of her friend and chaperone.

“What have we done, Jason?”

Jason swallowed, and with his other hand reached over to touch the wax-sealed jar that had travelled from Africa, to Cracked Wheel, and now, in secret, to this cellar. “We haven’t done a thing,” he said. “Not a God-damned thing.”

Not you.

“Not us.”

But that’s not to say you’re not going to do anything, is it my boy?

“No mama,” Jason whispered.

Ruth pressed in close to him, and he held her tight. And She, come from the shadow of Montana, tall and beautiful and strong as the sky, held them both in her arms.

27 - Gods and Oracles

They’ve gone Feeger, thought Andrew as the quarantine appeared through the trees. That was what Hank had said, back in the Tavishes’ little village on the mountainside. They were afraid of going Feeger, and so they kept to themselves, and—until the end—the Feegers kept from them. Then one day, Sam Green sent them a doctor to kill a Juke. And the Feegers came down the mountain, and they killed those stubborn Tavishes.

And now… now, the Feegers were upon Eliada. And the folk here were losing themselves… going Feeger. He saw it as they hauled past St. Cyprian’s—and a crowd of folk, who stood faces upturned to the rain, hands reaching for the sky beyond it. He heard it, in the off-key voices that sang along with the whistling dirge that seemed to come from every cranny. Fifty of them, maybe more, shuffled outside the sawmill as they passed it.

Andrew gasped, and shut his eyes a moment against the pain, which was beyond anything he’d felt before—even at the moment of his beating by the Klansmen. When they pulled him from the mud, the men who’d attacked the Harpers’ mansion had spread his weight between two of them—without any consideration for his injuries, particularly not his elbow. The pain from it was brilliant—it drowned out any song he could have heard, and blinded him to anything but its own light.

Just like it had for Jason, when he was locked in this building with Mister Juke and had sliced his hand—agony brought Andrew back to flesh.

They let go of him at the front steps to the quarantine. The door hung off one hinge, and it was clear the two men who had carried him this far wouldn’t go further. Andrew stumbled and nearly fell against the wall, but he managed to stand.

The little girl Lily stepped into the doorway and looked at him. “You got an honour,” she said seriously. She extended her hand. “Walk wi’ me.”

Andrew looked back at the men. The two who were hauling him had stepped back among the rest: about twenty of them, all told. Any one of them looked powerful enough to kill him—but all of them were staying well out of reach of the door. And the little girl.

What would happen, he wondered briefly, if he tried to hurt her?

She took his good hand in her thin, cool fingers. “You kin walk, caintchya?”

“I can walk,” he said.

“Then come,” she said. “Oracle’s waiting.”

The girl tugged at his hand, and Andrew followed obediently. As they passed over the threshold into the quarantine, Lily squinted up at him.

“Don’t be crying,” she said. “It’s only darkness.”

It was dark. Once they got through the entry hall, the quarantine swallowed memory of day, of sunlight. It was only Lily’s hand, her sure foot, that gave Andrew any bearing at all.

They travelled down a corridor where the walls seemed to chitter with birdsong. At a point, they wandered into a room that stank like a privy. Andrew gagged and Lily, leading him forward, giggled. They climbed stairs for a step or two or ten, and Andrew felt a cool breeze on his cheek, and caught a smell like the sort of river that might run through a grand city. It was when the texture of the floor became soft, like a mown English lawn, that Andrew made a point of flexing his elbow, and gasping at the pain of it. Lily started to sing then, and stroked his hand in a mothering way, and Andrew heard trumpets behind her voice—and as that happened, the darkness began to dissolve like spots of ink, and he saw that he was in a great chamber lit by ten thousand candles. At the far end, a woman sat demurely, long raven hair combed down as far as her waist.

He had arrived in the presence of the Oracle.

“Might wan’ t’ bow down,” said Lily.

Andrew grimaced, and bent his elbow once more.

“Think I’ll stand,” he said.

Seen through the lens of pain, the Oracle wasn’t all that demure.

She stood tall like her brothers, and her black hair hung near her waist, and she seemed strong, with thick hips and large, full breasts and flushed cheeks and lips. But the Oracle paid a toll, and Andrew could see it in her eyes, at once wide and sunken, ringed dark; and her odd posture, bent and swaying in the dark cloth of her homespun dress. She held a bundle wrapped in cloth and twigs, the way a mother might hold a baby. The room was not lit by ten thousand candles or even a hundred, just four kerosene lamps that cast scant light in the wide room. It looked as though it hadn’t been put to use as much but a storeroom for broken old furniture. She stood by an old roll-top desk, not far from a tall blank wall with two big barn doors. Lily pushed him: “Go see ’er,” she said to Andrew, and across the room to the Oracle: “Smell ’im!”

“No need,” said the Oracle. “I c’n smell him from here. Need a look, though.”

Lily pushed him again, making it plain that there was no option. “Go see ’er,” she whispered. “An’ try bowing. She’s the Oracle.”

Andrew made his way forward, jostling painfully against the furniture as he did so. Lily followed close.

“Yes,” said the Oracle, “come to me, black man. Let me a look at you.”

Andrew kept the desk between them. “I think I’m close enough,” he said, and the Oracle nodded. She sniffed the air, and looked him up and down. Then she bent and sniffed the bundle in her arms.

“What is that you got?” asked Andrew, and Lily smacked his arm. “Hush!” Then, to the Oracle: “He got the smell of Him! Of the Lost Child. So I brung ’im.”

“I know you did. Good girl.” The Oracle squinted at him. “You ain’t like th’ others here, are you? Black man.”

“I guess I’m not,” he said, carefully, studying this girl. She was just a girl—he didn’t expect that she was any older than Jason Thistledown, and might well have been younger. And yet, they called her Oracle. “And you aren’t, either. Can I see your baby?”

The girl took a possessive stance, sheltering the bundle with her body.

“Ain’t my baby,” she said, her voice going high. “Ain’t larder.”

Andrew made a hushing noise. “May I see?”

For a moment they stood still, the only sound being the pattering of rain on the quarantine’s roof. It sounded like it was coming harder. At length, she looked up at Andrew.

“It’s the Lost Child,” she said in a small voice, and reached over with a hand, and pulled aside some cloth. “Like you.”

A tiny claw revealed itself, talons gleaming in the lamplight.

“We saved him,” said Lily.

And the Oracle said, “Too late, too late. So we brung ’im here.”

Andrew stared as she removed more of the cloth, drawing the bent claw out, caressing the thing’s chest.

“Heathen did this. So this is our reminder—of what we do with Heathen that bring harm to the Old Man. To the Son.” The Oracle pulled the cloth back over the corpse. “And you—you smell of him.”

Andrew bit down on the inside of his cheek. No wonder, he thought. This was the thing that’d ripped itself from Loo Tavish. And these girls had it—they had it, because of course they were Feegers, and the Feegers had torn through the Tavish village with knives, and now…

“What are you going to do with the Heathen here?” asked Andrew.

“Same thing,” said the Oracle, “but we can tell the difference. There’s the ones that hurt him. They got one smell. There’s the ones that don’t know yet. They got another.”

“Kill the one,” said Lily. “Learn the other.”

“Then there’s another kind,” said the Oracle. “Smell different. Not one of either. And then—there’s you.”

“Smell of the Lost Child.”

“Black man. With that smell.”

“A mystery.”

“So Mr. Harper—the people in the mansion—the big house—they were harming him?”

“Took him away,” said the Oracle. “Not this one. An elder. They twisted him around, hurt him. Made him do things. That ain’t the order.”

And so they were murdered—cut down by old swords and axes, and the house burned, by this entire community—this extended family—of criminals, bowing to service this animal—this Mister Juke.

How apt, he thought, that the folk of Eliada had named the creature Juke. Apt, but off the mark. The real Jukes were these Feegers—men and women if not congenitally criminal, then made so by the spoor of this parasite. And so it became with anyone who encountered this beast, and its young.

“You have one inside you,” said Andrew to the Oracle, “don’t you?”

At that, the girl beamed.

“And a baby,” said Andrew. “It’s early, but you have a baby too.”

“No,” she said. “He’s got the baby. Larder. It’s better for Him, with larder. As might you know.”

Andrew opened his mouth to speak, and shut it again. This was as he’d surmised and as Norma Tavish had explained to him—the Jukes did better in a womb with child than on their own, by killing and eating the child, stealing its nourishment and so on. It was one thing to understand the behaviour, another to see these… children, apparently understanding what was before them, well enough to deliberately set it in motion.

To make a child for food. A deliberate sacrifice.

And what did they mean: as might you know?

“Why would you?” he asked.

But it wasn’t only the thought. He felt a deep vibration up his back: a deep, basso rumbling, or a moan, as of great timbers drawing against one another.

The Oracle and Lily heard it too. The two girls bent their heads back, and began to hum and sing, in high, broken voices. They mingled with the deeper noise into a harmony as Andrew had never heard before. He flexed his elbow, and the shooting pain drew him back from reverie.

The sounds mingled and bent, and slowly, the room filled up with a cool light. Andrew looked to its source, and saw: the two tall doors were opening.

Two things dwelt there.

One was luminous: a tall, slender man in robes, flesh of buffed mahogany, his brow unfurrowed and gaze open and loving.

A Dauphin.

He stood in a great glass dome, as high as a cathedral. His head nearly reached the apex; doves flew about him, and settled on his shoulders.

When he spoke, he sang, and the doves joined him in harmony. It was a song of forgiveness and welcoming; its lyric spoke straight at Andrew Waggoner.

Come on to Heaven, said the man, raising his hand to touch the glass over his head, and bringing rays of gold where his fingertips tarried. Looking up through there, Andrew felt certain: the shades of Loo Tavish, Maryanne Leonard, might never reach him from this exalted place.

And then there was the other. That one was harder to see—Andrew had to work at it. He took his bad hand in his good, and twisted—and he saw the Dauphin’s head loll to the left, and that fine brow grew quill-thick hairs, and the colour fled and it was the pale white of a fresh-dug grub. Andrew bit down hard on his tongue—and the dome vanished, replaced with weathered beams and cracked roofing, through which rainwater fell and pooled on the packed-earth floor—and high, filthy windows that let in the damp light, to cast upon a shape that was like a shoulder but bent as a wrist. He jammed his elbow against the corner of an old cabinet, and the gentle gaze of the Dauphin became the idiot stare of the Juke, two great black eyes, sunk in folds of mottled flesh, which shifted and faded, into the dark eyes of the Dauphin… which opened up into an infinity that Andrew had glimpsed once before.

And the Dauphin whispered…

Andrew smashed his arm into the corner of the cabinet. The things that leaped and capered at Mister Juke’s side shifted from dove and angel, into small dark things that scurried through the shadows—and back, to beauty.

Love Me.

“No.” Andrew drew back.

Spread My word.

“No,” he said again, and allowing himself one last glimpse of Heaven, drove his head into the corner of the cabinet.

“Dead?”

“No.”

“Oracular?”

“Don’t know. Maybe.”

“Need to know.”

“There be only one way to.”

“Leave him to it?”

“With the rest.”

And so, higher Andrew Waggoner fell.

Not so high as Heaven, though. Not so high as that.

“The Negro wakes.”

Cool water on the forehead, a damp cloth mopping it up. “Annie?” The sound of water wrung from cloth into pan. A laugh.

“Oh, no. Not her.”

Andrew blinked in the light. He was on his back, on a soft-mattressed bed, staring up at a high plank ceiling.

“Mrs. Frost?” said Andrew. He pushed himself up in the bed. Annie Rowe might’ve stopped him, but Germaine Frost kept her distance. She sat on a metal stool near his bed. On the right side of her forehead, someone had taped a thick pad of gauze. The reddish-brown of dried blood frosted its edges.

She sat with hands folded, and nodded. “You’re not addled, Dr. Waggoner,” she said. “That’s good.”

“I’m addled,” he said, looking around. They were in a ward room that he’d never seen before. He wasn’t alone. The room was filled with beds—and patients. Beside him, a woman stirred underneath her sheet, pulled it to her chin.

“You must be in great pain,” said Germaine.

“I am,” said Andrew, and he wasn’t lying.

“Yet you don’t flinch.” She nodded, slow. “You are really a fine specimen.”

He looked at her levelly. “I’m not a specimen, Mrs. Frost.”

“Of course you’re not. It’s just this—place. And I meant it kindly, in any case. You’re a man of resource, Doctor. I can see why Mr. Harper selected you.”

“Mr. Harper is dead.”

She pursed her lips, stood and dipped the cloth into the pan of water. Wrung it out, and examined it an instant before handing it to Andrew. “Hold it to your forehead,” she said. “You’ve taken a trauma there.” Andrew took the cloth and pressed it there, and Mrs. Frost sat back on her stool. “Dead, you say? Well, given the march of events these past few days, I shouldn’t be surprised. Yet I am. He was a visionary.”

“The march of events.” Andrew snorted humourlessly. “I take it we’re in the quarantine—one of the wards.” She nodded. “Who are those women?” he asked, indicating the other beds.

“I don’t know them,” said Mrs. Frost. “They were present when I woke up here; and they’re not so conversational as you, so I couldn’t learn as much of them as I’m sure I can of you. But to be honest, I don’t care to interrogate you, Dr. Waggoner. I presume you came here much as I did—beaten by some sheet-wearing thug into unconsciousness. Although I daresay you look as though you put up more of a fight.” Her mouth twitched into a tiny and, to Andrew’s eye, thoroughly unpleasant smile. “You would think that the people here would have more gratitude, for the society that we—that Mr. Harper—provided them.”

We. “You work for the Eugenics Records Office,” said Andrew. “Your people had more than a hand in this town, didn’t they?”

“Not in a way that we like to advertise,” said Mrs. Frost, “but yes. The ERO watched this place with interest. We even helped it along. Do you know that Eliada means ‘watched over by God’?”

“Really.”

“It’s a fine statement of the middle of our aim,” said Germaine, “to make a perfect society of strong-backed men and their wives, who would never stray far from the healthful path; of children, who were disposed to be healthful by dint of their inheritance. But we were foolish in its application. I hope you won’t take great offence if I tell you that your hiring here was a matter of some controversy at the office.”

“You had a hand in my hiring?”

“Not I. But if I had known and been placed to intercede, I like to think that I would have been one of those who advocated on your behalf. As matters stood, the ERO was in the main opposed to the hiring of a nigg—a Negro doctor. It was Garrison Harper’s intercession, I gather, that brought you here. He believed that excellence in a man is not dictated by race or creed—but by the strength of the lineage. Great men come from all corners of the Earth. It is a belief a few of us share.”

Andrew tried not to laugh. “I’m flattered you—or at least Mr. Harper—thought so highly of me,” he said.

“You ought to be,” she said, and: “Oh. Hush.”

The door from the ward room swung open as Mrs. Frost lifted the cloth.”Lie back,” she said. Andrew reclined, but he watched as the small figure stepped through. It was a girl—very young, this one—with long dark hair tied into an off-centre braid. She wore a grey frock, and a serious and wide-eyed expression as she went to the bedside of one of the women at the far end of the room. She delicately put her hands on the woman’s belly, rubbed them in circles, and began to sing.

She’s singing to Jukes, Andrew thought. Because all these women are carrying Jukes. Just like Maryanne Leonard, and Loo Tavish.

The woman responded to the child’s song, the circling touch—writhing obscenely beneath the sheet, stretching as though waking from a long and restful sleep. The woman didn’t wake, but she did join in—and the strange, wordless song became a duet.

Mrs. Frost set the cloth on his forehead again. She drew it across his brow, down his cheek. The damp tip of it stopped at the corner of his mouth. She leaned over him.

“You ought to be flattered,” she said softly, her breath sour as the night. “You are a fine, strong, smart Negro. I know they didn’t appreciate that in Paris—in New York, when you tried to find internships there. They look at skin, and they think—inferior, by dint of darkness.” She huffed, and spat: “Prejudice.”

Andrew reached up and took her hand. Her eyes widened, and she snatched the cloth away, and for barely an instant, she looked quite fierce.

“They can scarcely tell,” she said, “when Gods walk among them.”

Gods. Andrew thought about that. Gods were what these people thought they were making: people like Bergstrom, like Harper… like the people who worked with Mrs. Frost. How susceptible they all must have been, to the alluring lie of the Juke, which put worms into the wombs of virgins to make saviours; into the flesh of men, to make prophets of them… .

Did any of them ever mark the day, he wondered, when they fell from reason into madness?

And then he wondered: Did I?

“Mrs. Frost,” Andrew said, “I must find your nephew. Jason Thistledown. Can you tell me where he is?”

“My nephew,” she said thoughtfully. “Jason. You need to find him, you say?”

The little girl had moved on to a second patient, three beds away from them. Germaine Frost glanced over her shoulder, as she bunched the cloth up into a ball in her fist, then back at him.

“To what end?” she asked.

Andrew lowered his voice. “The boy is in as much danger as any of us here,” he said. “I don’t know where he might be—I’ve come back looking for him, but had no luck. But he’s your nephew, Mrs. Frost. If you’re hiding him from these people—these Feegers—you don’t need to hide him from me. He may be with Miss Harper.”

Mrs. Frost looked back over her shoulder. The little girl was making circles on the new woman’s belly, same as before, singing a song with a slightly different cadence. She regarded Andrew with a twitch of a smile.

“I don’t know where he is,” she said, “but I can guess. He’s an intelligent boy—a fine boy—and he will have known where to go. There is not much that gets past a boy of Jason Thistledown’s stock.”

“Where, Mrs. Frost?”

“We would have to go together.”

“All right.” Andrew glanced at the little girl. She had moved around so as to face away from them. “She can’t be the only one here. Are there others waiting outside?”

“Who can say? I saw two men bring you in. And the last time she was here, she didn’t come in by herself. She was with a man who was so tall. Practically a giant. But now—”

“Well, that’s a problem,” said Andrew. “I’m in no shape to deal with someone like that and you—”

He didn’t get the opportunity to finish. Germaine Frost spun a quarter turn on her stool and in three large steps moved past the foot of two beds. The girl stopped singing at the commotion, and lifted her hands off the woman’s belly as Germaine Frost stepped nimbly as a spider between the beds.

She took hold of the girl by the hair and tugged, but the child didn’t cry out: Mrs. Frost had already jammed the wadded-up cloth into her mouth, and with her first and middle finger, pushed the soaking wet cloth into her nostrils. The girl took hold of Germaine’s wrist with both hands and tried to pry the hands away. Mrs. Frost set her mouth and held fast. The girl soon gave up on wrist, and tried to claw at Mrs. Frost’s eyes. She got close enough to knock Mrs. Frost’s glasses from one ear, so they dangled over the bridge of her nose. Mrs. Frost responded by bearing down on the child, and pushing her to the floor between the beds.

Andrew rolled off the bed, and nearly fell as his feet hit the bare wooden floor. He clutched Mrs. Frost’s stool like a walking stick and, bent like an old man, moved from that to the foot of the bed beside him, and the bed beside that.

He managed to stay upright as he looked down on Germaine Frost and the child. All he could see of Germaine were her shoulders, wide and round enough to nearly fill the space between the bed. They worked and shifted as though she were kneading dough.

Her skirts were hiked past the knee, her stockings torn to reveal long ovals of pallid flesh. All he could see of the child were her feet. They were pinned beneath Mrs. Frost’s crossed ankles, so she couldn’t kick or make noise on the wooden floor. She could not make any noise at all by now. She was barely struggling.

Andrew reached down with his good hand and grabbed Mrs. Frost’s shoulder. She shifted her weight, and smashed his fingers between her arm and the bed next to it. Andrew gasped. She spared him a glance over her shoulder, catching his eye.

“Don’t interfere,” she whispered. Andrew tried to lay hold of her again, but it was impossible—the space between the beds allowed him no room to get in and stop it.

Soon—too soon—the feet stopped moving, and Germaine Frost was able to stand, and brush herself off, and turn to Andrew Waggoner and, as though nothing had transpired between them, say: “We have to go now.”

All Andrew could do was go. A small part of him wanted to strike Germaine Frost down, raise an alarm—shout murderer! But if he did so… what would become of Jason? Germaine Frost was his only thread through this maze.

The girl was dead. Lips blue, no heartbeat, wide eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Germaine bent and rolled her beneath the bed, and took hold of Andrew and led him to the door. It wasn’t locked. Beyond was a hallway, and they followed it, and climbed down some steps, and finally came upon a bright room: a small surgery, with a skylight, which was badly cracked. Water rained down in a small torrent onto the bare wooden operating table, in turn dribbling down to the floor. Opposite them was another door, and when they went through this, they stepped outside.

They stood next to a stand of tamarack—not far off was the fallen log where Jason Thistledown had given Andrew Waggoner a pack of meagre supplies and sent him into the wilderness alone.

“What luck!” she exclaimed. “Not a single one! What luck!”

Not a single one. There was one, thought Andrew. “She was a child,” he said. He was shaking. “A silly child who they’d let in on her own. You—”

“She would have raised an alarm,” said Mrs. Frost.

“Perhaps,” said Andrew. “But there might have been another way. There must have been another way. And how did you know she was alone? That her guard wasn’t waiting for her outside?”

Mrs. Frost shrugged. “They are degenerates,” she said. “Inferior. They have not the wit. Now tell me, Doctor—do you want to meet my nephew or do you want to question good fortune until pneumonia sets in?”

Andrew didn’t answer that, but Mrs. Frost evidently took silence as its own response. “Then come along,” she said. “Come along.”

Andrew followed her around the corner of the building, and the hospital was in sight, rendered grey and deathly through the driving rain—a silhouette, almost, among… other shapes.

They both stopped and stared, at one of those shapes. It might have been a tree, but it would not stay still—it bent low and climbed higher than the eaves, as though it were in the clutches of some cyclonic wind. As they watched, it moved past the hospital, and then further along, toward the town. It moaned, a deep, bassoon-like sound, and accompanying it came a song, in clear and high voices. It might be that all of Eliada rose up in song, as the thing—as Mister Juke—roiled and crawled and strode toward the docks, and the town and those many, who had watched and prayed as the Feegers hauled Andrew Waggoner to the quarantine, now awaited their God, as the Feegers led Him to them.

And so it was that unmolested, unnoticed by God or Man, the two of them made their way to the shelter of the hospital’s unguarded back entrance and slipped inside.

28 - The Old Man

“How do you know where he is?” asked Andrew as they skulked down the corridor that ran the spine of the hospital’s basement.

“I cannot be certain,” said Mrs. Frost. “But I do know this: against all my advice, the boy took more than a passing fancy to Mr. Harper’s daughter Ruth.”

Andrew waited for her to continue, then prompted: “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Miss Harper,” said Mrs. Frost, “was engaged in a test when Jason left me. If he is half as clever as we both know him to be, he will have joined her.”

“A test?”

“The test of her life,” she said. They hurried past the dispensary and two of the examination rooms, and rounded a corner. “Hush,” she said. “We are almost there.”

Andrew had a sick feeling, as it became obvious where they were heading: the autopsy. Mrs. Frost stopped short, and looked at Andrew significantly.

“Here we are,” she said, and beckoned him to open the door.

Andrew’s skin prickled at the base of his neck, and he shook his head. It was as though…

… as though something larger were guiding him, warning him.

Andrew shook off the feeling. It was a reasonable instinct.

Germaine Frost had murdered a little girl. She might argue the tactic was an effective one—here they were, after all, out of the quarantine that had been overrun with Feegers. The girl was one of them. But Mrs. Frost had murdered a little girl. And they were standing on the doorway of the autopsy, where a week ago, he and Jason Thistledown had examined the cut-up remains of Maryanne Leonard.

This, the place where another girl was undergoing what—a test? The test of her life?

Andrew Waggoner’s skin prickled, for good, worldly reason.

“I’m not going in there until you tell me about this test.”

“Oh,” she said, grinning, “it’s nothing you should worry about. If I’m half as right about you as I was about young Jason—I’m certain it won’t be even the tiniest problem for you.”

“For me?” Andrew stepped back. “What is this?”

Germaine Frost looked down, and smiling, shook her head. She looked up again. Her eyes sparkled in the dark. With madness, with inspiration.

Her hand pressed against the door to the autopsy. Andrew thought he saw a sliver of Nils Bergstrom in her then—he remembered seeing her, coming out of the quarantine with him that morning.

“It is the only way to see,” she said. “If you’re worthy. If you are a true hero—”

The door swung open then, and pushed her backwards, and a figure in white burst into the hall. Mrs. Frost came up against the far wall, and started to say something, but she couldn’t finish. The white-clad figure drove a fist into her face, and with the other hand grabbed her hair.

Then it turned to Andrew, and he recognized it:

“Jason!” he said.

“Dr. Waggoner.” The figure took a step forward, hauling Mrs. Frost as he peered at Waggoner. “You’re alive. And back. Keep your distance.”

His voice was absolutely flat—a tone that did not admit any argument. Waggoner stepped back.

It had been barely a week, but Jason Thistledown seemed like he’d aged a decade. With one hand, he pushed Germaine Frost to her knees. His face was in shadow, but Andrew saw the flat slit of his mouth, the stillness around his eye. It didn’t so much as twitch as Mrs. Frost tried to twist her hair from his fist.

“Jason,” said Waggoner. “I came to get you out of here—”

“Hush, Doctor,” he said. “You should have stayed away. You need to stay clear now. Remember that disease that slew my kin? Good. Well, it’s here—in that room. And this one is the one that brought it. In a little jar from Africa. She lied about being my aunt. She murdered all my kin. My town. With a germ in a jar. You understand that?”

Andrew nodded.

“I let her live once today. That was wrong. But things are makin’ more sense right now. I was fixing to find her—and that Bergstrom, and do the thing I should have done to both of them. Like Deborah said to her generals: ‘Surely the Lord will deliver them this day unto a woman.’ Well, the Lord delivered this woman unto me. And I know what to do.”

Andrew didn’t say anything. Jason did know what to do. The boy—the man—knew very well to do what Andrew hadn’t been able to countenance: to kill, when killing was due. He looked away, and Jason obviously took note.

“Now I only know you a little. I know you’re a good man. I know you might be thinkin’ of getting Sam Green or somebody to stop this. But anyone does that, they’ll die. This germ’s killed one already, Louise Butler, and I think it’s going to…”

At this, his cheek finally twitched, and he hesitated an instant before starting up again, quieter:

“… I think it’s going to take Ruth Harper soon. It’s all over the autopsy, and that cellar. It gets out of here, it’s going to kill just about everybody. So when you’re thinking of goin’ to get help from Sam Green and those Pinkertons… You think about that. I hope no one will stop me when I go after that Bergstrom, anyhow.”

“There’s no need,” said Andrew. “He was killed this morning. Jason—you’ve got to let me help her. Not her—” he motioned at Germaine “—but Ruth. It may be possible—”

“You help her, you’ll get infected too. Doctor, I’m set on my path. Thank you for tellin’ me about Bergstrom. I’ll keep away from others, then. But in this room—don’t get near.”

And with that, he yanked Germaine Frost up—she screamed, and sobbed, and he threaded an arm under hers, and hauled her, feet dragging, through the door in the autopsy.

“Get away!” he hollered, and the door slammed shut.

Andrew got away, but he didn’t go far.

He made for the dispensary, his mind racing. He felt oddly enervated. Finding Jason Thistledown had been the overriding impetus for Andrew for too long, and it was a thing so large and mysterious, so seductive, that he might lose himself in it, falling off the edge of the world into the madness of the Juke’s false Heaven. Jason’s chilling revelation—that Germaine had brought the sickness, that she was using it as an obscene test of fitness, on Jason, on Ruth… on Andrew himself—that was something else. It was a cord, tying him to earth. He would grasp it.

There was a sick girl, locked in the autopsy—sick with a disease so terrible it had killed a Montana pig town in three days last winter.

She might well die too—would certainly die without treatment.

Andrew Waggoner would simply not let that happen.

He stumbled to the dispensary, a dark room with a thick wooden door with a lock strong enough to deter a lumber-man with an axe. Less trouble for Andrew, who knew, as did the rest of the hospital’s staff, the hiding place for the brass key that opened it, tucked into a space in the door-frame. He was inside in no time, striking a match in the jar next to the wall lamp and setting the wick.

Then he set to work. He brought down a tray, and filled it with what things he might require: a glass thermometer, a bowl and clean washcloths, sterile lancets; after some consideration, a phial of morphine and a clean syringe. He found a cotton mask, and put it there too—although he wasn’t confident at all that that would be enough.

What he would have liked to have, was Norma Tavish and her pack of curative herbs with him now; as modern as this hospital was, there wasn’t anything that would by itself cure an infection that’d set in here, as well as Norma’s miraculous herbs had in the Tavish settlement.

Andrew set against a stool, and shut his eyes, and pushed Norma Tavish out of his mind. Letting regret steal up too close was a bad idea at any time; here, where the machinations of the Juke could make a man believe anything, it could be fatal. It might almost make a fellow think she was coming now, opening and closing the door to the stairwell, and walking down the corridor with efficient purpose.

Of course, Norma Tavish’s footwear wouldn’t clack on the floor, the way these did.

Andrew opened his eyes and took a breath. It wasn’t a Juke imagining. Someone was coming.

It was too late to douse the light or shut the door. Andrew was not in any shape to prepare for a fight, if it were one of the Feegers. He pressed himself against the wall of the dispensary, and prayed the footsteps would continue.

They slowed, and stopped. And then Waggoner heard a familiar voice.

“Hello? Who’s there, please?”

He laughed out loud.

“Nurse Rowe!” he exclaimed, and then added: “It’s Waggoner.”

There was a shuffling in the hall, and then Annie Rowe put her familiar face around the door jamb. Her eyes were wide in the lamplight.

“My Heavens,” she breathed as she beheld him. “Look at you. I’d sew you a shroud, I hadn’t heard you speak just now.”

Waggoner grinned. He was preposterously glad to see her—almost tearfully so. The exhaustion, no doubt, was catching up to him.

“It’s been an adventure,” he managed. Then he cleared his throat, and drew himself together. “Annie—we’ve got a medical emergency. Ruth Harper’s in the autopsy. She’s deathly ill. Whatever it is, it’s contagious.”

Annie frowned, and looked at the material he’d gathered. She nodded. “You’ve put together quite a kit, Dr. Waggoner. You were intending to carry it down the hall yourself? I’ve a better idea.”

“Which is?”

“Come with me.”

Andrew stood up. It occurred to a small part of him that Annie Rowe had not given him a good reason to follow her—and that part of him thought that he had decided to follow the mad Germaine Frost with scarcely more resistance, and obeyed Jason Thistledown to fly off, with scarcely less.

“I know what will heal your injuries,” said Annie, smiling and holding his good arm as they strode down the hall, to the door.

As they stepped outside into the rain, Andrew asked: “What is that?”

And Annie Rowe turned, and pointed to the narrow road that led down to the sawmill, scored now with strange tracks, and said:

“Jesus.”

A small part of him tried to bend his arm—send the visions away on a spike of agony—but this time, Annie was there to help.

“Easy, Doctor,” she said. “There’s no need for any more pain.” With great care, she reset the sling. “Jesus Christ will heal all. He told me so, in a dream last night.”

And together, they stepped around the hospital, and looked down the road—and Andrew gasped, at the great light that glowed there: warm, and welcoming, and so very melodious. Whether from Jesus Christ or the Dauphin, who rested within—he could not resist it this time. Willingly, he entered into His realm.

The autopsy room was not built with windows, but air moved through it all the same, within high vents in one wall that led straight outside. So it wasn’t as bad a place to be as the storeroom, where Ruth still rested. The voice from the shadows approved.

As Jason hauled Germaine Frost into it and slammed the door shut, it was only a little humid. Water was splashed here and there, from two large buckets that were foaming with soap. Not long ago, Jason had spent time with those buckets, washing himself as thoroughly as he could—as thoroughly as Germaine Frost had made him wash outside the homestead at Cracked Wheel. After he’d scrubbed himself clean of the Cave Germ as best he could, he searched some cupboards and found a white smock as might be worn by doctors cutting up the dead. He got to thinking that maybe some power had a good sense of humour; that outfit would do fine to cover him up for the work that lay ahead.

He was even more sure that that power had taken a hand in this latest moment of providence: delivering his quarry, the murderess Germaine Frost, right into his hands.

“This is fine that you came,” he said. “We can seal this whole matter here, and not put anyone else in harm’s way.”

“Oh Jason,” she said, sobbing, but Jason was having have none of it.

A week ago, he’d have thought when this moment came, when Germaine Frost used tears on him again… he would spew anger at her, call her foul names, and laugh when she objected—like a fellow in a book that Ruth Harper might’ve liked to read over and over again. But as he had held Ruth, comforting her over the death of her friend and sitting there in the dark of the cellar room… he got to know his anger a little better. It grew into a purer thing.

So when Germaine sobbed and cried here in the autopsy, he saw it for what it was. She was trying to trick him with tears, the same as when just idly, after she let him be locked up in the quarantine, he suggested he might head down south and pick up some work there. That made him feel badly—and feeling badly thinned that anger, like throwing water in a tub of lye.

You let remorse get in your way, you’ll never do the kind of thing you have to do.

“I know, Mama,” said Jason over his shoulder.

You let an old drunk’s begging turn you around—he’ll just get drunk again, and let friends even worse than that Etherton into the house.

“Oh Jason, please—think of your potential! The Harper girl is sick, true, because she’s not fit. We’ll find you one with whom to breed, and then—”

Shut her up!

Jason swatted Germaine across the ear.

“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “You talk to me, I’ll hit you. That’s how it’s going to go. Now—” Jason hefted her up by an arm. “Sit on that.” He motioned to the drawer.

She won’t cooperate. A shadow shook its head beyond Germaine’s shoulder. Sure enough, Germaine wasn’t having any of it. She might have divined what Jason intended; get her feet up, lie her on the table, and roll it in, and lock it with her inside. That was his ma’s wisdom, delivered from the shadows behind the jars: Show her what she showed me. Take her away.

So she twisted away from him and planted her feet firm on the ground. One of the lenses was nearly obliterated, and the other hung oddly from her nose.

She stared at Jason steadily. When she spoke, her tone was low and deliberate.

“All right, Jason,” said Germaine. “You will have to hit me, because I’m not going to go quietly. What do you mean to do? Take the germe de grotte that’s in that room, smear it on me, and watch me die of bleeding from the ears?”

“I’m showing you what you showed my ma,” said Jason. “What you showed all of Cracked Wheel, with that germdeegrot. You murdered Cracked Wheel! The whole damn town!” Behind her, next to the doorway, the shadow nodded its head.

He didn’t cooperate. Not even with all the whiskey in him. My, my—but you’d think he would. He certainly did as he was told when Etherton got him drunk, and made him look off while he did his business.

“Are you paying attention to me, Nephew?”

Jason looked back down at her. Her face was beginning to swell where he’d hit her. Only half an eye managed to magnify in the glass.

“You’re not,” she said. “And you shouldn’t have to, because in the scheme of things, I am what? A childless old woman with index cards. One such as you shouldn’t grant someone like me the hour of the day. In the end, my contribution to greatness is secondhand. You, on the other hand—you should be fixed upon greater things.”

He half-raised his hand, but couldn’t manage it. Behind Germaine, the shadow grew agitated. But Jason couldn’t hear what it said.

“I’m sorry I brought you here, Jason. When I came—when I brought you—it was only because Bergstrom so grossly misrepresented his discovery here. Remember—I explained to you. Had I known…”

Jason found the strength. He hit Germaine again, knocking her glasses clear.

“You use devil words on me, you get this.” Then he grabbed her and pulled her up—her back bent on the shelf, so that it creaked on its rails. The shadows in the corners of the room danced, and murmured. A hinge creaked, so Jason could not hear the words. “I should have done this upstairs. First time you started talking. You think I was strong and a hero, but I should have done this.” He put one hand over her mouth, and the other elbow on her throat. “You can’t live, ’cause you’ll just kill more. Like you’d have killed Dr. Waggoner. Just to see.”

“That may be true, son.”

The shadows finally coalesced. Jason looked up.

He was tall, and he smelled of fire and heat. His face was half-blackened, the other half swollen in a great sore. His eyes, white and round, stared out at Jason as though from bare sockets. Around him, the lamp-lit walls of the autopsy seemed to melt, and growing from the shadows were the square-cut logs of the cabin in Montana.

“You,” breathed Jason.

“Jason,” he rasped, and coughed.

Hell had not been kind to old John Thistledown.

“What did you do with my ma?”

“I did nothing with your ma. Now this one—you said she murdered Cracked Wheel? She murdered your ma too, didn’t she?”

Jason stepped back, as the smells of that cabin—the hint of wood-smoke, the greasy smell of tallow from the candles lighting it, the pervasive scent of his mother—overcame him. His mother’s smell was there, but she wasn’t. Germaine Frost was crouched on her bed, cowering.

John Thistledown stood in the open door, swirls of snow around his burnt cadaver.

“She murdered everyone,” said Jason. He wanted to cower himself, but he put on a brave face. “You back from Hell to see what another murderer looks like?”

The elder Thistledown seemed to think about that, and finally he nodded. “You’re fixin’ to kill her,” he said. “To make her pay for all those other killings?”

“I am.”

“You given any thought to what price you’d pay, doing that? Killing a person?”

Jason looked at his father’s shade, and unbidden, a memory of him, hard and cold, looking down on the pass with his rifle in his lap, came up. “It was a price you were willing to pay.”

“And look what it did to me.”

“He’s right, Jason,” said Germaine. “Killing is not for one such as you—”

She didn’t finish. John Thistledown, as tall as a pine, swooped over her. His filthy, Hell-scorched hands took hold of her head. “Look away, boy,” said John, but Jason didn’t obey, and watched as an instant later, his father’s shade twisted his false aunt’s head hard to the right, and cracked it. Her hands shook, and then went limp.

Jason kept watching, as his father straightened and walked past him. “You’re right, Jason. Sometimes there’s got to be a killing. Sometimes it is right. But you’re better leaving it to a man with blood under his fingernails already. Keep your own clean for supper.”

He stepped around Jason, and through a door that Jason had never recalled in the back of the cabin. That, of course, was because there hadn’t been one. He was going into the storeroom, at the back of the autopsy. Where they had been all along.

Jason looked down at Germaine Frost. She had slid to the floor, her neck at an odd angle—her eyes tiny without their glasses.

“Goodbye son,” said his father as he came back from the storeroom. There was something in his hand… a jar, sealed in wax. “Best you stay put with that girl of yours. She can use the comfort. And what’s next—is something you don’t need to see, neither of you.”

And then John Thistledown stepped out into the hallway, and vanished.

Jason stared at that door for a long time, putting together what he’d seen—where he’d been. There was Germaine Frost, dead on the floor. Had he done that, possessed by the shade of his pa, come up from Hell to guide his hand in killing? What had he done with his ma?

“Jason?”

Jason looked around. Ruth stood trembling, at the door of the storeroom. Her eyes were dark, and she looked thinner in the lamplight. He went to her, deliberately blocking the view of Germaine Frost’s body, and took her in his arms.

She looked up at him.

“What was Sam Green doing here?” she asked.

29 - The Oracle Frets

The cathedral growled and hummed and came alive, as the Heavens dried up.

Inside its belly, acolytes stoked saw-scrap and wood shavings by the shovelful into the boiler; a plume of white smoke drifted from the high stack and across the town, where others crouched—their faces pressed into the mud of the road, or bent down as they clutched their chickens and pigs and bushels of apples—a proper offering to the God who now dwelt inside.

At the cathedral’s gate, the Oracle waited.

She let Lily lead the song; she was uneasy, as she surveyed the crowd of new worshippers as she sniffed at the bundle in her arms and hung back under the shadow of the roof. There were a lot of folk there—more than she’d seen before, and she wasn’t sure she liked all of them in such a great number. Were it up to her, she’d send the men-folk out to do a cull—whittle these families down to manageable sizes, feed the carcasses to the Son, like they already were with the false priests—that stinking old man, who’d climbed up a mountain and thought he’d be an Oracle because of it.

A false oracle.

The Oracle stood under an overhang of roof, at the back of a wide platform overlooking the square. Rainwater dribbled off the roof in front of her, like a waterfall. Lily let that water course over her as she sang, and the multitude sang too. They were supplicant, all right. But the Oracle felt a twang of doubt. It was one thing to sing and holler and tell kin—tell Feegers—that they needed to get off their behinds, take up their axes and bows and clubs, and take their Word on a crusade. Another entirely to tell these folk, who only now felt the touch of the Son on them.

Would they follow her? Would it be enough, to speak some words at them and take them along, down the river to the towns of the heathen folk—would they travel with their sticks and axes and bows and guns? Just because the Feeger Oracle said?

She clutched the infant to her breast, let its drying flesh, its needle teeth tease her.

It would be easier, she thought, if she had another—not a false one, but a real Oracle. He might help—keep these folk alive, and strong behind her. Travelling south, with the young… .

“Where,” she said aloud, “is Missy?”

Lily shrugged, and Lothar—who’d been attending near the gate—got to his feet.

“I go look on her?” he asked, and the Oracle smiled on him. “You go fetch her,” she said, and touched her cousin’s brow. “Fetch me that nigger too, if Missy think he’s right for it.”

He bobbed to and fro, and smiled broad, and climbed down into the crowd.

Lily stopped singing and looked at her.

“You think the black man is one?”

“Mayhap.” If Missy didn’t come with some word—then the Oracle would have to preach it herself. Would it be a fair enough sermon for the Son, who had settled up in the rafters of the cathedral, waiting for His due?

She held the Infant tighter, and watched the crowd—and after a moment, she smiled.

“Mayhap,” she said, as she looked to the crowd, and saw the dark, familiar face among so many pale. “Mayhap.”

30 - Rapture of the Juke

Andrew Waggoner mounted the stone steps of the cathedral. Ahead were great gilded doors, filigreed with sunbeams. Beyond those: the Dauphin waited for him.

Andrew was glad. Dimly, he recalled a time when he’d turned away, and he might have thought the Dauphin would not welcome him… that he had spurned Him. This would be enough to cast Andrew down, among the bones of those he’d failed.

If only Andrew had let the Dauphin guide his shaking physician’s hand—how much suffering might he have prevented? How much less misery might he have caused?

“Don’t cry, Doctor.” Annie Rowe stood on the steps to the Cathedral with him, her face glowing in its light. “Christ’ll save you.”

“I’m already saved, Annie,” said Andrew. He didn’t know whether he’d say Christ was saving him, exactly. But Andrew had been saved some time ago—on the mountainside he’d wandered alone, full of doubt and anger, befuddled by the hill witch’s narcotics. He’d come to him, the Being, the Dauphin—the Juke, he thought—and Andrew had turned away, but it hadn’t mattered.

Once touched by the Divine, Andrew carried the spark.

If Annie saw that as Christ… well, all right. The one thing he’d learned about the Juke—the Dauphin—was that he lit that spark differently in every soul.

Now, he bore that spark home. To this great cathedral, swimming with angels, surrounded by a multitude. As he reached the top, one took his hand.

“I’m Lily,” said the Angel, and Andrew looked at her again, and sure enough, it was Lily.

“How about that,” he said, and walked across the platform—the dais—to the Oracle, who stood waiting for him. She smiled radiantly.

“You,” said the Oracle. “You are one. An Oracle too. Yes?”

“I am.”

“You stopped asking questions.”

“I have.”

“Will you speak?”

“I will.”

She unfolded her arms, and indicated where Andrew had been. “Tell them,” she said, her arm sweeping over the crowd of the wretched, lost souls of Eliada. “Tell them how to worship right.”

The last drops of rainfall steamed off Sam Green’s bent back. Jason could just see it from the front doors of the hospital: Green had made it a good way down the roadway to Eliada. His shirt was badly singed, and the flesh of his right hand, which clutched the jar, was slick, an awful mix of bright red and black.

“You see,” said Ruth, who stood beside him, “it is Sam Green. Not your father. Your father’s dead.”

“I see that now,” said Jason. He held Ruth’s hand, and looked at her. The flesh of her brow was slick too, even though she hadn’t yet stood in the rain. That might be fever, maybe exertion, maybe just all that time kept in that hot, airless room. With Sam Green gone, carrying the Cave Germ, there was less need to keep her there, and when she’d insisted on coming with him to follow, Jason couldn’t make an argument otherwise.

Jason squeezed Ruth’s hand, and let it drop. “Hush,” he whispered, and ran down the steps. It wasn’t a long distance, and until he was just a step away, Jason thought he might have gotten the jump on the Pinkerton.

But in that instant, Sam Green spun around, his free hand clenched in a fist.

“Jason!” cried Ruth.

“It ain’t your business anymore, boy,” said Green.

And then Jason was on his back in the mud. His jaw felt like it might never close properly again.

Green stood over him. In the light of day, it was sure clear that Jason’s father hadn’t come up from Hell; but Green looked like he hadn’t been anywhere too different. Half his face was red and peeling, and bloody meat hung in tatters from his right cheekbone. His hair was patched on his scalp. What flesh was intact was sooty and black. He winced as he reached to his belt and drew his revolver. He aimed it at Jason with a steady hand.

Jason kept steady too—steady as his ma would have, as she had…

“You’re aiming to let the germ out—ain’t you?” asked Jason.

“It’s the only way.”

“You know what it does, and you’re still goin’ to do that?”

Green narrowed his eyes. “I know,” he said, and gestured over his shoulder with his head. “I know what they do. The Jukes. I’ve seen it, Jason. You have too. They take men’s souls away. Take them away.”

“There’s a thousand folk yonder. You open that jar, they’re all going to die.”

“That they are,” he said. “But you saw what those things—that Mister Juke—what it can do. Just one of them, not too old… drives a fellow to think he’s seen God. And then it gets bigger—and what do you think happens then?”

“I expect…”

“Everyone thinks they’ve seen God. Everyone,” said Green. “They’ll do anything for that monster. Their souls—the ones entrusted to the True God. And eventually—they’ll run like a plague themselves over the land, mad with that thing.” He drew a ragged breath. “The Devil will rule the Earth.”

“Mr. Green,” said Ruth. She’d come up while they spoke, slowly, teetering in the mud. “What’s happened to you?”

Sam Green squinted at her. The gun faltered. “Miss Harper,” he said. “There’s been a fire… and a fight. I’m sorry to tell you—your father, your mother… They all died in it.”

“And yet you did not.” Ruth’s voice took a brittle quality. “You survived.”

“I fought them off. Best I could. Miss Harper—men from up the hill. Burned the place down—murdered as many as—”

Jason didn’t let him finish. He pivoted on his hip, and kicked out and Green shouted out as his knee buckled to one side. The gun flew from his hand, and landed quietly in the mud.

Jason dove at Sam Green’s middle. “I’m sorry,” he said as he connected, sending the bigger man sprawling under him. The stink of cooked flesh was overpowering, and Green was slippery underneath his shirt, like he’d been skinned. “I know you’re hurt.”

Jason grabbed for the jar, but Green moved it out of his reach with one hand, grabbed Jason by the hair with the other and yanked him back. Jason cried out, and he felt ashamed: Green hadn’t so much as whimpered.

Jason pulled away hard enough that he left a fistful of his hair with Green, and drove his fist crosswise into the other man’s gut. Green coughed and bent, and Jason got the upper hand for an instant—just enough to get high and come down hard on Green’s shoulders, so he pinned him in the mud. He reached up to where Green’s burned-up fist held the jar. He closed his own hand around it and tugged. But Green wouldn’t let go.

“You can’t kill a thousand folk,” said Jason. “I seen less than that killed and it was awful. You can’t kill a thousand. Not like that.” He yanked again at the jar, but Green’s fist tightened.

“Boy, that jar’s a gift from God. If what your aunt says’s true, it’ll be enough to stop this.”

“You can’t kill a thousand.”

Jason realized he was crying, his eyes soaking up with tears. His voice was weak, a child’s voice. Some damn hero he was being for Ruth Harper and his mama and everyone else.

And Green—that bastard—he saw it too.

“No, Jason. You can’t kill a thousand. You might’ve. If you’d killed your aunt… you might’ve been able to. But you can’t and you shouldn’t. Leave it to one with blood enough on his hands already. You run on and—oh Jesus—look after that girl.”

Green glanced over to where Ruth stood, and perhaps trying to distract Jason, shifted in the muck, and pushed up hard. But Jason had the leverage and pushed back harder.

Green glared up at him. “God damn it, boy. She’s got my gun.”

“It’s all right, Ruth,” said Jason, not taking his eye off Green. “I got him.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ruth move into view. There was the sound of a hammer drawing back.

“She wants to make sure,” she said, in a strange, strangled but supremely confident voice; it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

Green struggled and motioned to her. “God damn it, boy. Look at her!”

Jason spared a glance, then looked again. Ruth stood like a lost child, feet close together, eyes darting here and there… one arm up over her breast—the other holding up Sam Green’s Russian, pointed at them both. Her eyes were wide, and the lids trembled—like there was a scream inside her that couldn’t get around that strange talk.

“She wants to make sure you don’t turn on Me too,” said Ruth, in a voice like a chorus.

“Jason,” whispered Sam, “you got to let me up. She’s gone like old Bergstrom went.”

“Like Bergstrom?”

“Thought the Juke was talkin’ through him. Before he died.”

Ruth’s lips parted—and between them, wasn’t there the hint of teeth, sharp and ready to tear at him?

Jason looked back at Green.

“What’s happened to her?”

“Juke’s in her, I’m guessin’. You two got taken away—didn’t you now? Bergstrom said it, before he died. She was in a safe place. Somethin’s made her like Maryanne Leonard.”

“Raped her, you mean.”

“Raped her.”

Jason let up on Green.

“And it’ll kill her.”

“Might just.”

Ruth spoke, but this time nothing like words came out—rather a trilling, high song that Jason now understood was not entirely or even mostly coming from her. The trees around the hospital were filled with it—the whistling that he’d heard from the creatures, the Jukes, that filled this town… the quarantine.

They were the things that had tried to prick him, and put those eggs inside him, under the skin like a fly lays… they were the things whose call Ruth had heard, as they crept around the quarantine last night… the things that had drawn her in, to lie with Mister Juke.

The gun moved as though at the end of a tree bough, and settled on them. Jason felt transfixed—like he was when he stepped up to Mister Juke himself, in the quarantine, and only a cut hand broke the spell.

Now, Ruth Harper herself held his gaze, as she aimed the gun at the two of them.

“She will hide herself,” said Ruth, “while I make manifest.”

And then, the world became brilliant, as the voices—Ruth’s included—coalesced, and one solo voice rang out across the Kootenai river valley. Jason swallowed, and felt himself swept in it.

“There are not ghosts,” said Andrew Waggoner.

He stood on the highest steps of Heaven, and looked down on the multitudes before him. At his side, the Dauphin’s woman—black-haired Oracle girl—stood, and whispered to him, in the fast and unmistakable tongue of the Dauphin… and she whispered: Worship nothing but him.

“There are not ghosts—there are not Devils from Hell,” said Andrew, and the people before him nodded, agreeing. “There’s no point in trying to impersonate them. You won’t fool anybody—any more than you will live well, coming here and sawing up wood for a rich man.”

The Oracle whispered to him, and he nodded, and went on:

“You won’t live well following those priests—your pastors. Because they talk about God far removed, who promises things later that might not be as fine as you’d heard. Not the one you see, right here in front of you.”

As he spoke, Andrew found he could also see farther, and that made a certain kind of sense. This place was high up—a mountain-top. The Oracle whispered at him, and he craned his neck and looked down the great river—all the way down, where men toiled in darkness and made up ways to hate, to elevate themselves above one another. He thought he might be able to see all the way to New York, where his father and his horses toiled too, hauling barrels of beer from a brewer to a tavern—thinking that well, at least he’d sent his son, his boy, to Paris.

“And you’ll live as poorly,” shouted Andrew to the multitude here, “following your reason. Why, reason misleads us. Same as those false priests, those frightening ghosts. It takes us to places where we can say such is so, and such else is so, and then—without knowing it—this further thing must be so. But it’s an error. A fellow could think himself away from—” from the Juke “—from this here…” the Dauphin “… this Son.”

The Oracle whispered once more: Get them ready.

The world swirled about Andrew then, as the golden sands of Heaven flew into the air in a great cyclone, and Andrew drew higher. And he saw this multitude, turning to the south, and in a great line, making their way down the riverbank—some of them crawling on board the steamboat—and bearing on their shoulders a great Ark, that held in it the substance of the Son. Down the river they crawled and floated—until they came upon another Cathedral like this one, filled with folk, but empty of God. With guns and axes, they overtook it. And Andrew—Andrew preached the truth to the ones that lived; and gathered them into their army.

And from there, they swept the world.

Andrew spoke it—but he didn’t speak it: with the Oracle at his side and Annie Rowe holding his arm, he sang it. The whole world sang too, sang, and whistled—while in His Cathedral, the Son—the Juke—the Dauphin… was pleased.

And if a shadow moved beneath—if it didn’t sing as clearly—well, Andrew thought, what’s a small speck, in the all-seeing eye of God?

She has chosen him.

Lothar Feeger stepped forth from the shadow, his burden thrown over his shoulder. He carried his hatchet in one hand, and looked upon the back of the Oracle. She stood next to the nigger, bent, and held her prize—the prize that he, Lothar, had brought her—she held it between the two of them.

Lothar was not wise—he knew this about himself, and every time he forgot this someone would remind him—but he was wise enough to know that when he lay with Patricia, he had not taken her as a bride and had no claim over her. She was bride to the Old Man if to anyone, now that she had gone Oracular.

Lothar was at peace with that; same as any man, he would stand aside for God. Why, if God chose to murder young Missy, strangle her in the space between beds—leave her there, as the Mothers squirmed and cried out…

If that were His choice—Lothar would not object.

But the nigger… the pretending nigger—taking up the song, standing here at his Oracle’s side…

Lothar wouldn’t allow it.

Lothar stepped out—he resisted the song, with all the agony in his heart.

He would show her, the sweet girl who would not spill more blood than she needed. He would show her, what the crone and the nigger had done to her sister.

Lothar pushed forward, and knocked the pretender aside. And as the Oracle stared at him, he dropped the still corpse of her sister at her feet. And the nigger… he screamed like a pig.

The cyclone stilled, and Heaven sloughed away; what had been gates made from gold, turned back to weathered grey timber. Those multitudes, ready a moment ago to do battle for their God, knelt in mud. Andrew Waggoner crouched not at the top of a great stone staircase, but on the loading platform of the sawmill at Eliada.

At his knees—

—a dead girl. Just a child—the child that Germaine Frost had murdered, while Andrew stood helpless.

That’s three you didn’t save.

Andrew drew a ragged breath. There was no time for remorse; he’d been given a reprieve, the pain that sheared up in his arm gave him a moment away from the sorcery the Juke worked. And that remorse—that guilt—was a fast route back to the lie.

He blinked in the morning light and took stock. The girl was on the deck in front of him; to one side, a black-haired young man dressed in the buckskin uniform of these people, a hatchet in his hand. The Oracle girl knelt now to touch the child’s brow; her sister, Lily, stood with her fists bunched, eyes in tears. And just beyond, stood Annie Rowe, her hands clasped in prayer as she looked with eyes that nearly glowed, to the open doors, the dark cavern of the sawmill itself—like she was looking through the Gates of Heaven, toward salvation. Andrew looked there too. It was all dark, but for a square of light at the corner. It could be salvation; that was the riverside loading bay. Past it was a dock, and then the frigid waters of the Kootenai.

Andrew got to his feet, biting down on another scream. His arm was bad now—and he wondered if he would be able to keep it when this was all done. If he survived.

He staggered to Annie, and grabbed her with his good arm.

“Come on, Annie,” he said, and when she looked confused, he added: “Let’s go see Jesus.”

That was all it took to convince her. The two of them dashed into the belly of the sawmill, stepping into shadow even as the buck-skinned man pointed his hatchet at them and bleated into the silence.

The angels became quiet, and fell to the earth, the trunks of trees, and a silence fell upon the world. Ruth blinked and looked around, and down at her gun. The angels looked around themselves too, their faces wide, innocent—as Ruth Harper’s, only in miniature, in a multitude.

Jason opened his mouth to speak to her, tell her to put the gun down, but no words would come. He looked from one to another—to Ruth Harper, perched in the low crook of a branch, to others on the edge of the road, peering between strands of grass; still more higher in the branches of the tamarack, gazing down at him. Silent.

“They’re foolin’ you, Jason,” said Sam Green.

“I know,” he whispered.

“They’re the Devil.”

Jason looked down at Green. “Ain’t so,” he said. “They’re animals.”

Green looked up at him, his eyes ghastly white in their sockets. “They’re more than animals. They’re liars, Jason. They could… they make you think they’re God. They could be… they could be God.”

“You sayin’ there’s no God?”

“Don’t blaspheme,” he said. “God’s great and true. But these things… They act so much like God… like Jesus… A fellow could be made to wonder, where to place his faith exactly. In God and Jesus, or these things that look just the same? And that’s the Devil’s work.”

“I’m not fooled,” said Jason.

“Yeah,” said Green. “Not now you aren’t. That whistling’s stopped. You have to make up your mind. Before it starts.”

“It starts.”

The voice came from everywhere—all the creatures, in words and whistling. Ruth—the hundred or more of her, that inhabited the trees—they all looked up, and Ruth opened her mouth and the song came up again, and the face of Ruth Harper faded from the world, until it was only Her own, held high.

Jason looked at Sam Green—watched him shift and change again, the features melt, and him grow, until it wasn’t Sam Green anymore—but John Thistledown, burned not from a battle at the Harper mansion, but ten years in Hell. Ruth was singing this—making another lie for him, the way the song had before. Filled with the Juke’s issue, she was spinning its lie where the other had stopped.

Jason stood up, let go of the jar.

“Go on,” he said. “Do the hard thing. Stop the spread.”

“Good boy,” said the apparition.

And then, as the song she sang grew, Jason stepped up to Ruth Harper.

And she sang, and Jason said, “Yes,” and then took hold of the gun in her limp hand. Before she could let go of it, he squeezed her finger on the trigger.

Andrew wished he had a notebook, or better, a camera, and the wit and time to use it. Standing before Mister Juke, stripped of illusion, it occurred to him that he might well have been the first man—the first scientist—to properly see this thing… .

This God.

Mister Juke hung in the rafters of the great building; stretched out, the creature almost extended its full length, like the branches of some tree. Any resemblance to a man was gone now. The construction that Andrew had made in his own mind, of some great Dauphin, the all-seeing giant who ruled over a Parisian Heaven… that was nowhere to be seen in the thing this creature had become. One might be tempted to call it formless, for it was hard to see where a head, arms—even an abdomen—might begin and end.

The only feature Andrew make out clearly was its mouths.

They descended on fleshy stalks, from the rafters over the great saw-blade which now sat still. They were circular too, those mouths, like those of a lamprey eel’s. Andrew wasn’t close enough to tell if the similarity extended to concentric circles of teeth; the way they dangled and twitched, he decided it best not to check. But small wonder that the attempt to hang this thing had so little effect. Who could say what shape the Juke had possessed, even when Bergstrom took it down from the mountain in its infant state? The creature’s seduction of this town, of the fools who would first try to kill it, then attempt worship of it, had drawn its lies from their hearts from the very first. Man or woman or hermaphrodite—the thing was as suggestive as a cloud, and as malleable.

“What—oh Lord,” Annie said, and Andrew squeezed her arm hard.

“We have an instant, Annie. And then we’re gone.” He pointed to the far side of the sawmill, where the bay opened up onto the river itself; he spared a glance over his shoulder, where the north-facing bay filled with shadows of the Feegers.

“Stay!” he shouted at them, and still conditioned to hear his voice as the Juke’s, they obeyed.

“Come on,” he urged Annie.

She went with him, but as they emerged in the light, she hesitated once more.

“Doctor—are we sure we want to—I mean, how do we know we’re not turning our back on God?”

Andrew started down the wooden ramp that led straight into the frigid, fast-moving waters of the Kootanai River, then he looked at Annie.

“All things considered,” he said, “we don’t.”

And then before she could raise another question, he took hold of her, pulled her on down the ramp—and Andrew Waggoner clung to Annie Rowe, and she clung to him, as the freezing waters enfolded them both; and bore them down-river, clear of God and man, and Juke; empty of everything but the clarifying shock of the true world.

31 - The Cruelty of Sam Green

Sam Green walked among the living, and they scarcely made a note of his passing.

They were busy with the completion of their own work—work that had begun in the early hours of this day, when one or another had awoken with the idea to go back of the house, take the milk cow by a rope, or to open up the hen house and gather the fattest, or visit the pigsty and take a suckling—take those animals, and bring them down to the Cathedral. They didn’t know much when they did that, but now, the Nigger prophet had told them as clear as they could understand: God hungered, there in his Cathedral. He hungered, and He expected something to be done about that.

So the living formed into a column, moving up the ramp to the Cathedral’s great doors; past the Oracle, the Madonna weeping over a child, while another sang sweetly, her voice not hitching even as tears streamed down her cheeks. The dead man joined the throng, his filthy, blistering flesh inches from the smooth, near-to-perfect skin of a young blond-haired man with a thin moustache and bright, bright eyes. Sam didn’t know his name, but he’d seen him, working the team of horses that had cleared the southern slopes of the hill last fall. The fellow had a pair of chickens—one in each arm, kicking and pecking. He regarded Sam.

“You don’t look well,” he said.

“I been better.”

“Maybe you will be,” said the young man, nodding toward the great dark gates of their new cathedral. The song was met with the whine of the saw-blade spinning up. “I bet He’s merciful.” The dead man huffed, reached into the jar he carried, and dabbed him on the cheek.

“Bless you, son,” Sam said when the fellow looked at him oddly.

“Well bless you,” he said, touching his cheek and sniffing at his finger.

They drew toward the Oracle—a sickly girl who would have gone by the name of Feeger. Her eyes were hollow and wet, and Sam could see every section of her spine through her soaked-through frock as she bent over the dead girl—another Feeger, surely. Another one—black-maned like all of them, with thick shoulders and an idiot stare—tried to touch the Oracle; but his hand came away, as though burned.

Sam had heard tell of these Feegers often enough, visiting the other folk on the hill who lived in such fear of them. They were certainly terrifying enough, coming into the kitchen of a mansion with big home-made blades and axes, murdering rich men and their wives… setting the beams on fire, as a fellow emptied his iron into their bellies, and more came, stoking the flames and finally leaving that fellow for the dead… .

Here, grieving for their own—they were almost deserving of pity. Weeping, they reminded him of others living on the mountain slopes—poor folk living hard, sickly lives in Heaven’s shadow. The people Bergstrom would so methodically butcher.

He paused a moment, dipped his thumb into the jar, and touched the hem of the singing girl’s sleeve. The big lad looked up at him, and Sam thought this might be the end of his walk. But he turned back to the Oracle, and tried again to rest his hand on her back. The singer looked at him in such a way that caused him to think: She knows.

But she did not spare him by crying out. Sam Green huffed, and continued on through the wide doors of the mill.

“Oh my,” said a beautiful young red-haired wife next to him, carrying a pig under her arm, looking up at the dark rafters. Sam looked there too.

“Our Father,” he said, “who art in Heaven…”

“Hallow’d be Thy name,” continued the wife, not sparing Sam a glance as he dabbed her arm.

“Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done,” said two men a little ways behind him, coaxing their nervous cow into the shadow of the mill, “on Earth, as it is ’n Heaven.”

Sam let them finish.

He would like to have prayed now—talked to God, asked Jesus Christ for forgiveness of his sins, because when a man knows the moment of his passing, that’s what a man does.

But looking up into the trembling maws of this God—he didn’t want to curry favour, be forgiven, granted entry into This One’s Heaven. And no amount of supplication before the true one and His Son would do much good. Not held against the thing he was about to do; the thing he’d already done.

As he stood there, he watched as the blond-haired man handed one of chickens to a black-haired Feeger who stood by the whirling saw. The bird squawked and struggled as the Feeger lowered it to the spinning blade. Blood fountained and sprayed high, and a stalk whipped down from the rafters. The Feeger tossed the bird into the air, and the stalk twisted and snatched, and the bird was gone. The Feeger took the man’s other chicken.

“Where’s your sacrifice?” asked the wife, holding the kicking pig like it was a baby.

Sam smiled as best he could.

“Right here,” he said, and held the jar from Cracked Wheel, Montana over his head. He dabbed two fingers in it.

“You sure that’ll please Him?” she asked.

Sam Green turned in place, both arms outstretched, and looked up into the face of Mister Juke.

“God forgive me,” he said, “if it does.”

She gave him a strange look and shrugged, and took her baby pig to the saw.

And Sam Green, fever rising, turned beneath God, like a stumbling, half-drunk dancer—again and again, until his legs gave out and he tumbled to the floor, and the jar rolled from his fingers, and a dry, pale thing no bigger than a thumb fell from it—and as its germ spread among the flock here at Eliada, in the rafters of the sawmill, Mister Juke took what Sam Green prayed would be His last meal.

32 - Death and Resurrection

Annie Rowe was a woman of hidden depths.

Andrew concluded this as he sipped the broth from the tin cup she gave him. It was a fish broth, made from a sturgeon she’d managed to catch somehow in the first day. Andrew had no idea how she would have managed such a thing—he was barely conscious when they came out of the Kootenai, and she spotted the ruined cabin and together they hauled towards it, soaking with ice-cold river-water. He might have recalled stumbling over the remains of the door, under the broken roof of the cabin; collapsing against the log wall…

But beyond that, all he could tell was that he was alive and dry and warmed by a fire built on bare rock floor under the night sky. Annie was alongside him propped against the wall, her hair drawn back tight and her face smudged with soot.

She’d re-splinted his elbow; bandaged cuts new and old. And there was the broth, which he insisted on holding himself in his good hand, although Annie wasn’t pleased.

“I can feed it to you, Doctor. You’re still weak. Don’t want to spill.”

“You’ve been doing quite a lot,” he said. “Saved my life, the things you did.”

“Just returning the favour,” she said. “Don’t know what would’ve become of me, you hadn’t…” She trailed off, and Andrew let her. The Juke’s call had been strong in her, and she would have been lost to it—were it not for the shock of the river, the distance it carried them. He sipped at the soup, and took a deep swallow. It warmed him fierce, and he made sure Annie saw him appreciate it.

“But you need to get your rest,” she said finally. “You’ve been about the worst patient I’ve ever had.”

He sighed. “How long’ve I been asleep?”

“Two days,” she said. “Nearly.”

“And in that time, you found this place, built up a fire, somehow found these—” he pointed to a bandage on his head, another on his shoulder “—and managed to figure out how to catch a fish without tackle or net.”

Annie smiled. “Guided by an Unseen hand,” she said. Then, catching the expression on his face perhaps, added: “Don’t worry, Doctor. I’m not going back to that.” She crouched down against the log wall.

“How’d all this come about?”

“This place is nothing but an old homestead,” she said. “Barely got a roof on it anymore. But you can see it from the river, so spotting it was easy enough, and we had to stop somewhere. You’d have died, Doctor. Me too, likely. Managed to find an old pot and an axe-blade and that cup you’re drinking from. Just like home.”

“All right,” said Andrew. “And you’re a secret expert fisher, and you pulled that sturgeon from the river with your bare hands. And where’d these bandages come from?”

“Well, I’m no expert fish-catcher,” she said. “The bandages—they came from the same source as the fish.”

Andrew handed her the cup of broth. She took a sip herself. “Stop being mysterious,” he said. “Where—”

“Outside.” She returned the cup to Andrew, and stood. “I shall fetch him.”

“Jason!”

Jason Thistledown was leaning against what was left of the door frame. He was dressed in a pair of trousers and a smock that Andrew recognized from the hospital, and he looked like he’d just come from there—scrubbed clean, fine hair unencumbered by grease or dirt as it fluttered in the updraft from the fire.

“Evening, Doctor,” he said.

Andrew shifted so he sat higher against the wall, and blinked again as a disturbing implication came over him. The Jukes had tried everything on him. They showed him Heaven as Paris. They sent the shades of Maryanne Leonard and Loo Tavish to scold him.

Why not wake him up in this safe place, wounds magically bandaged, warm soup in his belly—set Annie Rowe by his side—and show him the boy, Jason Thistledown, he’d sworn to rescue?

“You can thank Jason Thistledown for the fish,” said Annie. “And the bandages too. He appeared here not a couple hours after we found this place. In a canoe. With—”

“Lucky I found you first,” said Jason. “You could see the smoke from that fire for miles. Probably as far off as Eliada, if they’d been thinking to look.”

“You took a canoe?”

“Found it at a dock not far from the hospital,” said Jason. “So I took another doctor’s bag, some blankets… and we set off down the river. You an’ the nurse made it a good way in that river. Surprised you didn’t drown before you got here.”

Andrew frowned. “You said we. Who are you travelling with? Not your aunt—I mean—”

Jason shook his head, and looked into the fire, quiet.

“She was killed,” said Annie finally. “After we left. Sam Green did it. No need to make the boy relive it.”

Andrew looked at Annie. “Who then?”

“Miss Ruth Harper,” said Annie, and Jason nodded.

“She lives,” he said. “But she’s going to need some help.”

“She—” Andrew began piecing things together. “She was infected—with the same thing that killed your town. Germaine told me she’d done that, just before we met. And it’s been two days… and she lives? So she’s immune?” He thought about that—that the daughter of a fine white family, the wealthiest white family in Eliada, was also marked the strongest here by Germaine Frost’s diabolical test.

“It’s not an immunity,” said Annie. “She’s showing no signs of that… Cave Germ. But we think something else is happening.”

“She spent some time with that Mister Juke,” said Jason. “Alone. Think he—” Jason finally looked up from the fire, and when he met Andrew’s eyes his own were those of a child again, sad and alone. “—think he raped her, like he did Maryanne Leonard.”

Andrew sighed. “You’ve examined her?” he asked Annie, and she nodded.

“She’s healthy.”

“She ain’t,” said Jason, his voice breaking. “Her foot’s bad… . She—”

“Hush,” said Annie, and Jason jammed his fists into his pockets, did as he was told. “She was shot in the foot. Her right foot. I cleaned it up, and it should be fine, although I’m guessing she’ll walk with a limp. But Doctor, there’s something else.” She leaned close and whispered. “I think she’s not just infected. She could well be pregnant. By young Mr. Thistledown.”

Andrew nodded slow, and regarded Jason. He held himself as tall and as strong as ever he had, but that hard piece that had glinted from his eye two days ago, when he’d hauled Germaine Frost by the hair into the autopsy—that was gone now. Andrew would have been glad of that, had it been replaced by something other than the aching hurt he’d brought to Eliada, the fearful certainty that more of that hurt was on its way.

“Son,” Andrew said. “Don’t fear. I owe you a debt, and I came back to repay it. I’ll make things right for Ruth Harper.”

“Can you even? I mean, look at what happened to Maryanne Leonard.”

Maryanne Leonard, and Loo Tavish both. Thanks to your shaking hand.

Andrew felt ashamed; he wanted to look away, nestle himself in his shame and self-pity and doubt. But he didn’t. Those things were the Juke’s weapons—that was how the beast got inside, and started changing everything about a fellow, succoured him with sweet lies of an easy Heaven, and eventually turned him from man to slave. Andrew kept his eye on Jason.

“You were with her, weren’t you? Don’t look all puzzled, you know what I mean.”

Jason nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Andrew. “I’ve learned some things since you got me out of Eliada. A woman wise in the lore of these things told me—” Norma Tavish, who you also let die “—she told me, that when a woman’s with child, and infected by a Juke—she’s stronger. Because the Juke helps her. Until it’s ready to come out. That’s why Ruth fought off the Cave Germ. That’s why she might stand a better chance now.” Andrew drew a breath, forced himself to keep looking at Jason across the fire. “So don’t you say you’re sorry. The two of you may have saved Ruth’s life.”

“Just don’t hurt her.”

“I won’t do anything ’til daybreak when the light’s right. Not at least. In the meantime, bring me that doctor bag you filched. Then go back and sit with your lady, and I’ll see what I’ve got to work with.”

Jason made sure they put their fires out prior to dawn, but no one was doing the same in Eliada. The smoke climbed above the shadow of the mountains and caught the rising sun high over treetops, a black-and-gold plume that might’ve been visible from as far south as Sand Point.

“Do you think they’ll come? Have you seen them?” Ruth asked him, from the lean-to he’d made her the first day. She had been awake most of the night, and from the quaver in her voice, she must still have been in a fair amount of pain. Nurse Rowe had offered her some morphine from the doctor’s bag, but Ruth had declined, and Nurse Rowe had said she understood. When the pain faded, so did they all.

“I don’t think so,” said Jason. He’d been watching the river since first light, and not long past that, he’d seen The Eliada drift past. The wheels of Garrison Harper’s steamboat were still as it turned in the current that drew it downriver; not a wisp of smoke came from its stack. He didn’t try to hail it. The river had borne nothing but the dead for two days now, and the steamboat hadn’t left town any better off. It was just another corpse.

Jason had only seen two of Eliada’s dead up close, as he drew hook and line through the fast-moving river to catch their supper, one coming close after another: a man with a belly either fat or bloated under his white shirt, and what looked a lady, skirts spread like a great dark flower in the churning water. But there were dozens, distant shapes rolling in the fast waters of the Kootenai, bearing north into the wilderness. Jason prayed it was only wilderness… not more folk.

He prayed for that, same as he prayed no more boats would come to Eliada, until the Cave Germ had finished its work—starved out that Juke, wiped its many ghosts and devils from the land, and died off itself.

Ruth sniffed. “It’s a certainty, then. Mr. Green’s mission was a success.”

“It was.”

“I suppose it was a kind of heroism.”

“It was sure a sacrifice,” said Jason. He crouched down beside Ruth and took her hand. It trembled for only a moment before it gripped his hand, hard.

She sniffed again, and whispered on scarcely more than a breath:

“All dead.”

Jason looked down at Ruth Harper. Her face was smeared with dirt and mud, and leaves and twigs tangled in her hair. The tiny smile that’d bewitched him so on the train, before he knew her name, was gone—perhaps forever. He wanted to speak with her about that. He wanted to tell her: My ma died too, all my kin are dead—my whole home—just like yours. And I ain’t found a place for them in me, but I’m going to. Just like you will. But as he looked on her face, he saw that wouldn’t do. His own trials, as great as they were, marked only half of Ruth Harper’s journey. She carried a grief like his own, and another’s… .

Well, that was not a grief, exactly. More a hunger.

“Do you think they’re in Heaven?” asked Ruth.

“’Course they are,” he said. “Well, perhaps not all. But Louise? Sure. Your ma—Hell, even your pa. Now, Nils Bergstrom—I don’t think so. And Sam Green?”

“I hope Sam Green’s in Heaven,” said Ruth. “But you answered my question very quickly, Jason. Without thinking.”

“Should have asked the question different, then,” he said. “Question you wanted to ask is: do I have any reason to think there even is a Heaven for them to go to?”

“I’ll try to be more precise next time.”

Jason let go of her hand and pushed himself to his feet. He had his own pains—the cut on his leg, a bad rib—scrapes and bruises in a dozen places, taken when he’d tangled with Sam Green—and he relished them as he drew higher, and saw the movement at the cabin’s ruin. Annie Rowe came out first, the doctor’s bag in one hand, the other helping steady Dr. Waggoner, a branch cut into a crutch under his good shoulder. He was amazed the doctor could even walk that well, the things he’d been through. The two of them made their way forward low along the riverbank, to avoid the ankle-twister rocks higher up. Jason held his hands together in front of him—fingers intertwined as though in prayer, or just clutched against shaking, the line of stitches Waggoner had made in the one palm itching against the other.

“You got to believe in something,” said Jason, and Ruth laughed weakly, and agreed; and then, of their own volition it seemed, Jason’s fingers spread and his hands came apart, and he hurried off, to help the doctor up the rocky slope.