by David Nickle
“Could you—could you cover yourself up please?”
Markus beckoned again. “Give me a cigarette.”
“Then you’ll . . .”
“Cover myself, yes.”
Jason obliged and, once Markus had retrieved his blanket, lit the cigarette for him and one for Catherine too.
“These are great luxuries,” said Markus. “I have not enjoyed tobacco for . . . years now. It is not considered healthful by some.”
“That is a lie,” said Catherine as she exhaled a plume of smoke.
Markus glanced at her and back at Jason. His smile was not entirely kind.
“I was not attempting to molest you,” he said to Jason. “You feared that I was, didn’t you? No need to answer. You feared so.” He looked at the cigarette held between the bones of his fingers.
“You are nothing to fear,” Catherine said to Markus, and then she spoke to Jason, in English: “No worry for you. Markus belongs to Orlok.”
“Does he now?”
“As do I.”
“I see.”
“So you see there is nothing to fear from either of us.”
Jason took his cigarette from between his lips and regarded the flaming tip of it, and looked from there into Catherine’s glittering eyes, and then Markus’s, who had never looked away from him, and to the high, bright windows behind them.
“Because you belong to Orlok too,” continued Catherine. “He marked you also. Now we are three.”
Jason turned the cigarette around, and jammed its tip into his throat until the sunlight separated and spread into wings, feathered with beams of fire. Where they intersected, stood the man from the high ground—who’d called Jason little brother. . . .
The wings seemed to fold as he stepped forward, into the shadow of the room.
It was as though Jason were the only one of the three who registered his presence. Orlok had, since their encounter on the mountain, pulled on a coat, but it barely fit over his huge shoulders. He moved quietly for one so large, stepped lightly between Catherine and Markus, his hands brushing each of their shoulders in a way such as might be expected to gain their attention. Jason kept the cigarette at his throat. The big man, Orlok, held his gaze as he approached closer, then broke it as he climbed past him on the stairs.
Jason watched him climb a few steps higher, and then turn, and with one enormous hand beckon Jason to follow him, into the dark upper storeys of the chateau. Jason shook his head no.
“What do you mean?” asked Markus, in what sounded like genuine confusion, but Catherine seemed to understand. She looked up at Orlok, and at Jason. Was that terror in her eyes?
“Ah,” said Markus, and on the stairs, Orlok smiled.
“All of you then,” he said. “Come.”
The three of them climbed the stairs, past the defiled coat of arms. Orlok led them through a room with windows covered in gauzy, reddish curtains, into another one furnished with dark wooden chairs and a long table in front of a huge stone hearth. Then to another staircase and finally to a bright room with tall windows that opened onto a balcony that judging from the light that filtered through the thick green tangle of branches faced the southwest.
The room was nearly empty of furniture but for one piece, against the northeastern wall: a Victrola, in a tall wooden cabinet. Orlok looked at it and then at Markus, and he hurried there and lifted the lid.
Orlok gestured with a nod, a thrust of his chin, and Markus reported: “The song is called ‘In a Small Beach Basket.’”
“Well what are you waiting for?”
Markus turned the phonograph crank, and delicately lowered the needle. It was a summertime song, a foxtrot, very gay. Orlok smiled and his eyes narrowed, and he let one great hand sway in front of him as a conductor. Markus adjusted the volume, as Orlok drifted toward the balcony, his hips swaying in a little dance. He beckoned them to follow him, and Jason did.
Jason thought that stepping outside would quiet the music, that it would diffuse in the open air, but the opposite seemed to happen; the forest seemed to deepen it, enrich it. Was it a trick of the acoustics in that room? The sound bouncing around in that big space and coming out here magnified? More real?
Markus and Catherine joined them on the balcony. They too were swaying in time to the rhythm of “In a Small Beach Basket.” Catherine stepped back, took Jason’s arm and drew him forward.
You belong to Orlok too.
Little brother.
“No, no,” said Jason. He took her hand from his arm and stepped back.
Jason did not belong to Orlok, would not belong to Orlok. What he might belong to, if he stayed any longer, was the Juke—he might soon start hearing its song through the trees, not this German music-hall ditty—and follow along like the rest of those who did so. He would not allow that to happen. He would not.
It wasn’t to be a fight, though. Catherine shrugged, and clasped her hands above her head, and swayed. Orlok meantime was paying attention to Markus, who did not resist as Orlok placed a huge hand at the back of his neck, which he seemed to massage as he gently danced.
The music swelled with a final flourish of horns, and from inside, the needle clicked and hissed, signalling the end of the record. But the music didn’t stop.
It rose up from the hills, from the trees—no horns, no clarinets . . . no piano. But a choir of voices, high and sweet that carried through the valley. Jason stepped to the edge of the balcony, but he saw only treetops.
Orlok swept his free hand in front of him, his fingers spread and trembling at the height of it. The song continued.
It was definitely coming from the woods, but Jason couldn’t see anything down there. He turned to Catherine, intending to ask after it. But her eyes were shut. Markus, meanwhile, struggled weakly in Orlok’s grip as he was pulled nearer. And the song grew richer still.
You belong to Orlok too, they’d said. He looked over the balcony straight down, did a quick calculation, and made up his mind.
Orlok might have sensed it. He looked up from Markus, and caught Jason’s eye, and commanded: “Come here, little brother.”
“No,” Jason whispered. And without another thought, he lifted a leg over the low balcony railing, swung his other over, and clung to the railing for only a second before he dropped.
Jason landed well. The ground rose high on the foundations at this part of the chateau, and it was grassy enough, and although the drop might have been enough to break a bone, Jason prepared himself and tucked, rolled down the slope of it a few yards before scrambling to his feet and running. He held close to the wall, so he could stay out of sight of the giant Orlok, but far enough that he could move. He needed to be away, and now: he had been a fool to think that he could spend any time in the presence of a Juke before its song overtook him and he lost himself. The song was everywhere now—that idiotic song, with a thousand voices.
Jason clapped his hands over his ears, made fists and stuffed his forefingers in. He didn’t expect that to have any effect . . . that the music would have moved inside his skull, and he’d hear it for as long as it played . . . louder . . . but it softened, and quieted, just as real music might. This was no fever dream.
He stumbled at the corner of the stonework, and rounded it. Here, the trees were closer to the foundations, pale thin spruce conifers. They nearly rode up the stonework, and Jason felt the soft branches whip at his face and shoulders as he hurried through, finally using his hands to clear them and letting the music in again. This suited Jason: having the foundation between him and the phonograph, there was nothing now but the voices. Alone, they seemed to Jason somehow sweeter—almost guileless.
Some seemed quite near, and as Jason continued he saw that some were very near indeed. Through gaps in the branches, Jason thought he could them. A flash of narrow, pale buttock, there for only an instant then gone. In a patch of sunlight, the long yellow hair of a girl, draping over sun-reddened breasts . . .
Ahead of him, Jason saw two boys—no
t boys, young men—in a clearing. They were well-muscled, light brown hair hanging to their shoulders. One was piggyback the other, who ran and stumbled in a small circle around the edge of the clearing. The rider was the only one singing—his head thrown back, as though he sang to the sky. Both were as naked as Markus and Catherine, and the sight of them brought Jason up short.
Before Jason could make sense of the scene, the horse-boy spotted him. His eyes widened, and he took off into the woods.
When Jason started moving again, he did so at a slower pace. As he stepped into the clearing, he saw the reason for it: there was a doorway cut into the stone, low, with a thick black-boarded iron-bound door blocking it. Leading from that was a well-worn foot path that led along a trail through the trees. Peering down there, Jason could see the buttocks of the young men, retreating toward a ridge of rock and perhaps a wider clearing.
Or something of a clearing: in place of the trees, there grew human forms—no, not forms, but humans—standing at attention, nude, faces turned toward the hot sunlight, sprouting . . . in great enough number that at a point, the substance of the forest seemed made of ruddy, sunburnt flesh.
Were some of them stepping nearer? As Jason stared, it seemed they were, slowly trampling saplings at the woods’ edge. Jason stepped back, reaching for the wall, the door, but only grasped a sapling himself, and as he looked around saw that it was not them who’d come closer but he who’d walked farther: the foundations, that doorway, were a dozen yards back, visible through the arching branches over the trampled path. In the clearing, he saw a naked girl and a tall, tall boy step into view. They were covered in pine needles and soil, and grinned at him as they saw him looking. They held hands, and each reached out to take hold of branches at either side of the path. No, they were not branches; these were hands too, belonging to two nude boys—one barrel-chested with dark brown hair and another also tall, his hair shaven. The boys might have been behind trees, or hidden in them, or crouched down. . . .
But wasn’t the opening to the house wider now? The sunlight brighter there as they moved?
Jason felt sweat burn away as that sunlight struck his forehead, and he realized: when the boys appeared, two trees had vanished. Had he mistaken them for trees?
“Mama,” whispered Jason.
The sky overhead had no cloud, and the sun was cussed hot on Jason’s skin as shade vanished by the branch. It was so bright that Jason shut his eyes, as his fingers found his wounds, and pressed them hard. The pain was like a splash of cool water, and Jason applied more of them in succession: jab! and jab! and jab!
And two more, until his finger was slick with sweat and blood, the pain was so awful he could barely stand. The ground seemed weak underneath him, and for a moment, he imagined it were cloud on which he stood—as if he were walking outside his plane, on that bounty of cloud.
He opened his eyes, to see how that was.
There was no cloud, below or above. He stood on a bare slope, looking down into the valley.
He was not in a forest. Not in a cloud . . . He stood in the midst of a vast throng.
There were more than a hundred of them. They were young, and slender, and still muscular. Most were young men. But there were girls too, as young and shapely as the men. The house was farther off than Jason remembered it being—maybe two or three dozen yards away, near the edge of the hillside.
And there was something else.
The teepee . . . that structure, that Jason had seen in photographs but not in fact—it stood, high on the slope.
Hanging from the apex of the structure was a thing that first looked like a collection of ragged sails. But it was bloody in parts, with sticklike limbs emerging from its middle, broken branches or the legs of a great spider. Other parts dangled like lengths of intestine, drooping nearly as far as the ground, ending in things that looked like nothing so much as mouths. Further up, there was a form like the torso of a man emaciated by starvation.
Although Jason had never seen one in person, he remembered what it was from Dr. Waggoner’s explanations, those years ago at the Thorn farm.
“It is mouths. All mouths. And always hungry . . . That, in the end, I think, is all the Juke is—all any of us are. Organic machines for eating, and . . . and copulating . . . and eating some more. That is Man. That is God.”
And this thing was all of that. But unlike the God that Andrew Waggoner saw, before he fled Eliada, borne in the icy currents of the Kootenay, but hours ahead of Jason and Ruth . . .
This one was dead.
PART II
The Decameron Sytem
One
The Juke was a tiny thing.
Dr. Andrew Waggoner slipped it into the only clean Mason jar that Thorn had at hand and it fit with room to spare. Later, he would measure it and record it being just shy of two inches long—three-quarters of an inch wide.
He might have even kept it alive in the jar to let it grow a little larger. It was squirming in the forceps as he dropped it into the jar, and if he were to collect some of the blood and amniotic fluid that he’d spilled during the procedure . . . draped a layer of cheesecloth over the top of that jar and sealed it all in . . . the thing might’ve lived, and grown a little, and he might have had more samples, at least . . . more to finally work with.
But he didn’t. He knew then a little of what those things could do when they got bigger—they had nearly taken him—so he put the whole top on and screwed it tight and let the thing suffocate. He might have crushed it too . . . he certainly wanted to, and Annie had thought it an excellent idea. But he wanted it in the jar. The creature he’d pulled from Ruth was too dangerous. He knew from recent experience that these things had teeth and they bit deep with them. This one, he’d later learn, had teeth comparable to a lamprey, ringing a mouth made mostly of very dense cartilage.
One of those only a little larger had bit his hand a few days back, and that hand still wasn’t right. But next to the other things it could do, those filthy little teeth were the least of a man’s worry. It wasn’t just the teeth. It was the damn religion.
“Sure that’s the only one?” said Jason Thistledown when he peered at the thing through the late afternoon sunlight that streamed in through the bunkhouse window.
Andrew shook his head. “The only thing I’m sure of is that Miss Harper is still breathing, and not bleeding.”
“Can you go in again if there’s another? No,” said Jason, taking the answer from the expression on Andrew’s face. “Too much blood.”
There wasn’t too much blood spilled, not by Andrew’s reckoning, but Jason was right. Ruth was in no shape to undergo a second surgery any time very soon.
This was just the second time Andrew had attempted this procedure on a woman. The first was under open sky, in the middle of a filthy village square, when Andrew’s broken wrist was worse than it was . . . and when Andrew had no notion of how the Juke and the unlucky woman who served at its host would respond to the knife. Poor, simple Lou-Ellen Tavish had died so that Andrew Waggoner might have some clue as to what he was up against . . . so that wealthy, bright young Ruth Harper might live.
Andrew was bright enough to know the hard lessons of Lou-Ellen Tavish’s failed abortion were far from the only reason Ruth Harper was breathing now. There were other factors at play.
He had waited to perform the operation until he could find a clean room with good light, and this bunkhouse building, with its well-swept floor boards and high south-facing windows, was that. His hand was better. He had some time to think.
But even at that, the bunkhouse was no operating theatre, his hand was by no means restored, and there was never time to think enough. There would have been no hope at all, then, but for Ruth’s major advantage—her great stroke of luck. This time, Andrew was not alone. Annie Rowe—cool-headed, competent, and nimble—was at his side. And so, Ruth lived.
“I guess we’ll have to pray—hope, then,” said Jason, correcting himself.
Andrew thought
he caught something in the boy’s tone, something low and insinuating that he didn’t care for—but he let it pass, then. They had been through a hard time. The Thorns had fed them, but the hunger still haunted their bellies, their bones. As did the damn little Juke.
“Hope is good,” said Annie. “You sit by her side awhile, Jason. Let her know you’re there.”
Ruth was laid out at the far end of the bunkhouse, half hidden by a reddened sheet that Annie had draped on a clothesline. From where Andrew and Jason stood, only her legs were visible—one of them with fresh bandages, covering the wound left where Annie had dug out a bullet, back at the riverside. Another sheet came down just below her knees like bloody skirts.
“Go on,” Andrew said as he saw Jason hesitating. “She’s asleep now. She can see you when she wakes and that will be good for her. You can tell her how fine she’ll be.”
Jason gave Andrew a rueful look that said he wasn’t sure, but squared his shoulders and nodded. “Don’t know why I’m so squeamish,” he said, “after everything else.”
“Nothing to be squeamish about,” said Annie, and took Jason’s hand to lead him around the curtain. The way he tiptoed, Andrew thought, it was as though he were going to see a corpse, and not his lady-love on the clear side of calamity.
Andrew looked at his own hands. He’d washed them clear of blood but his sleeves, rolled up past the elbow, were still red with it. The fingers of his right hand were swollen from the exertion, and his wrist and elbow ached in their splints. He inspected them again for little cuts or even nicks that might spell infection, but there were none: he’d been careful, and done most of his work with forceps and speculum. He hoped—yes, hope was the word, not pray, not again—that her uterus might heal well from the indignity. The fingers of his left hand—undamaged, unswollen—began to tremble as he worried about this, in a way they hadn’t after Lou-Ellen Tavish perished. That, at least, had been certain: Lou-Ellen was dead, bled out, finished. The uncertainty, with Ruth Harper behind that sheet . . . Ruth, the girl who might yet die from any number of causes . . . it had bedevilled him.