Eutopia - A novel of terrible optimism

by David Nickle

  “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 c
hin 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.