by David Nickle
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 fro
m 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 surpr
ised 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.