Volk

by David Nickle

  “There’s some argument on that, is there?” asked Jason in an exhalation of smoke.

  “Not at all.” Bergstrom smiled. “Born in Cracked Wheel, Montana to Helen and John Thistledown in 1894, in January. The fourth of January.”

  “Not much of a card player,” commented Plaut. “Look how red his face is.”

  “I’m pretty good at German,” said Jason, and looked at Plaut as he switched: “I learned it in the war killing your country’s children from the sky. I learned it very well I think.”

  Jason continued in English. “All right, Herr Bergstrom. I won’t play at cards. Your friend Aguillard tried to fish it out of me, and I held out because I didn’t care for him. I’ll come clean now, but not because I like you any better. I’m Jason Thistledown. That’s my name. I was born in January, and Cracked Wheel . . . that town’s gone now. Your brother, Nils . . . he had something to do with that. That, and some other things all this brings to mind, might account for the redness of my face.”

  Were these men afraid now? Since Jason had told Plaut about speaking German, the little man hadn’t met his eye and had now retreated to one of the tall windows, where he appeared to be enjoying the mountain view. Bergstrom sat in his chair, hands folded in his lap, with a curious, attentive and unambiguously pleasant expression. Jason studied him, and Bergstrom would not look away.

  “Yes,” said Bergstrom. “My elder brother Nils did you a mischief at one time. Would my apology for your treatment at his hands have any meaning?”

  “I didn’t come here seeking one,” said Jason. “I didn’t come here of my own will at all.”

  “And you didn’t really come to Idaho, and Eliada, of your own free will in the spring of 1911 either. You were tricked, yes? By Germaine Frost. She led you to a chamber of horrors—there is no other way to describe it, is there?—in Doctor Nils Bergstrom’s lumber-town hospital. You very nearly perished there.” Bergstrom leaned forward, gestured to the box on the table. Jason, noticing his cigarette was near its end, reached over and took another, lit it from the last one.

  “A lot of folk ‘perished’ in Eliada,” said Jason. “The whole town, by the time the Juke—”

  “Yes?” prompted Bergstrom. “By the time the Juke . . . ?”

  Jason dropped his spent cigarette into an ashtray on the table. “No,” he said, “you tell me what I’m doing here first.”

  “Right now,” said Bergstrom, “we are having a conversation about Eliada. I know it is upsetting to you. Among other things, it came at a time after you lost your mother, to the outbreak in Cracked Wheel. Might I remind you that I lost my brother. You grieve for her. I grieve for him. I also wish to understand about his death. We corresponded quite regularly until the spring—shortly before you arrived there. His last letters . . . they seemed to me to be indicating a growing psychosis—about this thing he called a Juke. Can you tell me anything else?”

  “That’s why I’m here? To tell you about Nils Bergstrom?”

  Bergstrom produced a black leather notebook and a pencil from a satchel that only then Jason noticed, on the floor beside his chair.

  “I know some of what came before,” said Bergstrom. “I know what was found, after all had perished. I want to learn about the space in between.”

  Jason drew another three cigarettes from the box and set them on the arm of the chair. It was clear he wasn’t going anywhere until he got through this.

  “All right. I’ll tell you what I know about your brother. You might not care for it.”

  Bergstrom raised his pencil, and set its tip to the notebook’s first page.

  “Your brother was the chief surgeon in Eliada. His boss, Garrison Harper, gave him quite a hospital. It was part of his idea about how a town should be made, and he spent a fortune making that idea real. It was right there in the town motto: ‘Community. Compassion. Hygiene.’ Your brother had nurses and equipment, and even another doctor to do work for him, and if anyone got too sick, a big quarantine building. But you know he wasn’t just setting bones and sewing up cuts. He was also looking after the hill folk who lived outside that town. Paying special heed to the ones he thought weren’t fit to breed. He had some friends in New York who were real interested in fixing those ones. You know about that part? Of course you do.

  “I didn’t know about that when I met him. I’d come up from Cracked Wheel, where nobody was going to breed. I was tricked into coming there, by a woman who called herself Germaine Frost and lied about being kin to me. What she was, was a friend of your brother Nils. She brought that sickness to my old town, and killed everyone there but me with it—even my ma—and thought me surviving meant something. Your brother seemed real interested in that too. You see now how I can say he had something to do with all that killing? That’s how.

  “First night, your brother locked me up in that quarantine. Tied me down like I was some sort of lunatic. There was something else in there with me. A lot of things. He called ’em Jukes. Things might’ve killed me, but I . . . managed to get hold of a scalpel and cut myself free before they did.

  “Your brother was a lunatic himself by then. I could tell it. There were some folk in town who dressed up like the Ku Klux Klan. You know about them? They weren’t truly Klansmen—they worked for him, or with him, or just listened to him. They thought those Juke things were Jesus. Just like your brother did. They weren’t Jesus though. They were . . . parasites, is what they were. They could trick a fellow into believing anything.

  “They were worse than that, though. They liked to lay their eggs inside folk, like a certain kind of fly will under the skin. But the Juke eggs, they liked it best in ladies’ wombs. Your brother knew all about this and he didn’t do anything, except one lady killed by it, he butchered, to see what it looked like inside. How ’bout that.

  “That’s what I knew of your brother, before he died. I . . . heard he had some of those things growing under his skin, and maybe that’s what killed him, as they got bigger. I guess that must’ve hurt. But his mind was half gone by then, or so I’m told. He died an awful death, but he’d done awful things, so I guess that’s about right.”

  Plaut had rejoined Jason and Bergstrom around the low table, and he looked at each of them—first Bergstrom, who squinted at Jason through the smoke that hung in the still air of the sitting room, and then at Jason, who busied himself lighting his fourth cigarette from the remains of the third.

  “That is a nasty little burn at your throat,” Bergstrom observed. “You make it yourself?”

  “Using his neck as an ashtray,” commented Plaut.

  “That’s near all I know about your brother,” said Jason.

  “It must be very painful,” said Bergstrom. “Did you find pain helped you resist the . . . the Juke . . . when you met it?”

  Sure it had. When Jason had been locked in the quarantine with the juvenile Juke, he’d sliced his hand on the scalpel while cutting his way out, and he later on realized that’d saved him. When Ruth Harper’d been in its thrall later . . . with its young in her . . . he’d fired a bullet into her foot, to bring her back to herself. How the hell would Johannes Bergstrom know that? Was he just guessing? Jason did his best not to confirm his supposition.

  “I gather you thought it a great help to calm your nerves in the cockpit,” continued Bergstrom. “Pain, I mean to say. That was why in 1915 your corps physician ordered you grounded, and sent back to England to train, yes? You were an exemplary pilot. But the cuts on your arms . . . must have seemed to some as nothing more than suicide attempts. To others as a kind of madness.”

  “You have my war record,” said Jason.

  “Easy enough to obtain,” said Bergstrom. “You flew aeroplanes for Imperial Airways for three years, and they maintained clean copies of all your records for long after. If you had left under better circumstances, they might have been more diligent in protecting your confidentiality.”

  Jason wouldn’t have expected anything other from Imperial. Hell, even Zimmermann s
eemed to have a good idea how Jason Thorn spent the war. What worried him more was how exactly Bergstrom and Aguillard and the rest of them connected Jason Thistledown to Jason Thorn, so long after he’d fled downriver with Andrew and Ann and Ruth. Had they got to Lawrence? Or Tom—wherever he was now?

  “Do the cigarette burns help in the same way?” asked Bergstrom.

  Cigarettes did help, and had for a while, but Jason knew that soon they wouldn’t; like the incisions, the contusions, the nails . . . each only worked until his flesh learned the language of that particular pain. For now, the cigarette to the throat was still fresh enough to drive the demons away, to let Jason remain himself. As Jason thought this, it occurred to him that he had nodded. Bergstrom scribbled a notation.

  “Your brother,” said Jason. “He was a doctor of medicine. I’m guessing you’re a doctor too.”

  “Astute,” said Bergstrom “I am indeed a doctor.”

  “But not like your brother.”

  “I am what used to be called an alienist.”

  “A psychoanalyst,” said Jason. “A head doctor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you psychoanalyzing me now?”

  “No,” said Bergstrom.

  “Then what?” said Jason. “What are we doing here?”

  “I am guessing, Herr Thistledown. You are a unique fellow. Perhaps you are, as Germaine Frost and my brother guessed, an evolved fellow. What I do know is that you are a member of a very select club. Of people who can turn away when . . . the Juke, as you call it . . . when it calls. I am interested in how you do so.”

  Jason shrugged and Bergstrom nodded. He was very different from his brother, or at least the way that Jason remembered him. Nils Bergstrom was skeletal—he moved like a marionette, which Jason supposed in a way he was. He was also a figure that Jason knew best from his nightmares; he had only known Nils Bergstrom in the flesh for a few weeks if that, when they met in Eliada. Were he to meet him now, as he was in 1911, Jason might not recognize him.

  “But that is for another day,” said Bergstrom. “What is important is that you do turn away. The work that the Juke does on you never lasts long.”

  Jason found himself nodding again—but this time he wasn’t giving anything away. He was working it out.

  Bergstrom must have seen it. He smiled in a way that seemed a little sad, and he nodded too.

  “It is true, Herr Thistledown,” he said softly. “We have one. Nearby. And that, to answer the question you posed earlier, is why we have brought you here.”

  “We are fucked,” muttered Plaut in German. Bergstrom shushed him with a wave of his hand. With the same sweep, half-standing, Bergstrom reached across and plucked the cigarette from Jason’s fingers, before he could jam the tip hard into his throat.

  “Not now,” he said softly, grinding the cigarette into the base of the ashtray.

  “It is beyond that mountain,” said Bergstrom, motioning out the window, across the fields. “There is a valley there. You may have seen it from the aircraft as you flew in, yes?”

  Jason recalled the rings of concentric fencing, the deeply shadowed woods.

  “It is there that we had a . . . a colony, one might call it. There is a great chateau there, and orchards. It is rugged land otherwise. But beautiful. At one time, the property had been in the Aurberg family, for what that is worth to you, but for as long as I have been alive, it has been a house of healing . . . of cleansing.”

  “Like Eliada,” said Jason. “Its hospital, anyhow. Is that what you were trying to do? Make another Eliada?”

  Bergstrom looked at Jason. “Not precisely.”

  Jason shook his head slowly and let out a low whistle. “But near enough,” he said.

  “We have not tried to duplicate Eliada,” said Bergstrom. “That would have been a duplication of failure. My brother, and Mr. Harper and the rest of them had only discovered the creature months before you arrived. They embarked on a reckless experiment on their community without so much as a dissection to understand the thing they were dealing with.”

  “And you’ve done all that? You have it worked out?”

  “To the greatest extent possible,” said Bergstrom. “Much of its biology is beyond my expertise to properly explain. But in the simplest terms, it operates as a kind of parasite, pairing itself with humans. It tricks us, with secretions, into caring for it—into worshipping it, or some entity we imagine that it conducts. If it is allowed to breed freely, to feed its fill . . . it will overrun us. But first, ecstasy.”

  “That much, Eliada taught us,” said Plaut.

  It felt like Jason had swallowed sand. He wetted his lips, and stared between the two of them. When he had seen that thing as a boy, the Juke had done far more than overrun Eliada: it had raped women there, sending them into a nightmare that was like a pregnancy. It devoured infants in the womb to sustain itself. If a woman survived such an ordeal—and many did not . . .

  Ruth.

  He thought of her eyes as the thing grew in her, standing in the woods, glittering with the certainty of utter madness.

  “So,” continued Bergstrom. “We did not emulate Eliada—where my brother allowed juveniles—wild juveniles—free run, to attack and impregnate women . . . and as you say, infect himself. But a mature organism was cultivated for us. And brought here, to a specifically designed enclosure that would, we hoped, contain and channel the organism’s effect.”

  “That being ecstasy,” said Jason hoarsely, and Bergstrom shook his head.

  “That being common purpose. When the organism engages with its human hosts, its only purpose is to have workers . . . helpers, as a queen in a hive. But the organism’s needs are simple at that stage of its life.”

  “Calories,” said Plaut. “It simply needs to eat.”

  Jason nodded. “Jukes have an appetite all right. You opened up something awful over there, didn’t you?”

  Plaut shrugged, and Bergstrom smiled sadly. He stood, and walked over to the windows, beckoned Jason to join him.

  “Are you familiar with the term ‘Volksgemeinschaft’?” asked Bergstrom.

  Jason shook his head no.

  “The closest translation is ‘people’s community.’ It is a way of living that is very much an ideal among the German peoples—and in the years since the war, it has become an ideal seemingly impossible to achieve. There are many reasons that this may be so. Our friends downstairs, in the uniforms . . . many of them say that we have allowed ourselves to be robbed by the Jew, seduced by the homosexual . . . weakened by the moor and the Asiatic . . . that our very bloodline is under attack. Maybe all this is so, although a more fundamental problem is this: we lack Volksgemeinschaft. We have since our terrible defeat in 1918. In the years since then, its absence has been filled with a psychosis.”

  Plaut arrived at the window at that point with two crystal tumblers filled with what smelled of brandy. Bergstrom took one, but Jason made an excuse it was early in the day. Plaut shrugged again, and downed it in a gulp. Bergstrom sniffed his and sipped more delicately.

  “The organism was the last of many things that we attempted at the estate,” said Bergstrom. “We set it, as I said, within an enclosure . . . guarded by rings of concentric fencing, tended by experienced caretakers who wore clothing and breathing apparatus that protected them from its secretions. At the outermost fence, nearly three quarters of a kilometre from the organism, the effect of those secretions had what we presumed was a measured effect on the population—”

  “Population?”

  Bergstrom looked at Jason levelly. “Nearly three hundred,” he said. “A camp of young German men and women—all beautiful and strong and intelligent.”

  “Deutches Jungvolk,” said Plaut.

  Jason nodded. “They that youth club the Nazi Party set up?”

  “Yes,” said Bergstrom. “They are a branch of the Hitler-Jugend. Brave volunteers.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “It is difficult to say specific
ally. We have not been able to successfully visit the site for several months. When we send in an expedition, it does not return.”

  Jason nodded, a trifle impatient. “And so,” he said in German, gesturing at Plaut. “We are fucked.”

  “The experiment was a success for many months,” said Plaut.

  Bergstrom nodded. “For many months, yes. But finally, it has been something of a failure. One beyond our ken, and, more importantly, our means to investigate. And that,” he said, looking directly at Jason, “is why we have been forced to bring you here. We need you to go there, and with all your strength—as you have proven able—resist the call. Help us understand what has happened to our community. Perhaps then we can unmake this failure.”

  Unmake the failure. That made Jason laugh, and he didn’t stop himself.

  “You think I can help you ‘unmake’ a failure like that?” Jason wiped his forehead and looked straight at Bergstrom. “I only know one way to do that—one way in general terms. You got any more of that Cave Germ that Germaine Frost had? No? Well you Germans are good at finding other ways. That’s a valley beyond yonder hills, am I right? Here’s what you do.” He leaned against the windowsill, until he got his laughing under control. “You take some o’ that mustard gas you used on my old comrades back in the trenches in France . . . you dump it down there and you kill everything that draws breath. You have the stomach for that? I sure as hell don’t, but if you want to ‘unmake’ your failure, that’s what you got to do. A man named Sam Green taught me that lesson.”

  Bergstrom smiled sadly. “We could do that, of course. But we are no more mass murderers than you.”

  “I’m not going to help you,” said Jason.

  “You will be very well compensated,” said Plaut, and Bergstrom nodded.

  “Ten thousand pounds sterling. When have you seen that much money?”

  “Go to hell.”

  A smile flickered across Bergstrom’s lips and extinguished.

  “Herr Thistledown, are you afraid?”