Eutopia - A novel of terrible optimism

by David Nickle

  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 fi
lled 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.