by David Nickle
Yet, she breathed—as Jason whispered to her, as Annie checked her for fever and blotted her forehead with damp washcloth, as Andrew examined her again as the sunlight crept away from the window and the afternoon waned . . . she breathed.
What remained of the Juke twenty years later was tinier still, withered in formaldehyde in the same jar—usually kept safe in the cellar room in the Waggoner household, on a shelf where the previous owners had kept their wine.
This night, September 21, 1931, the Juke was with Waggoner—in the middle of a table on the quieter upper rooms of the Liberty American Bar and Restaurant, bearing a prodigious collection of wine bottles, drawn (as was customary for the Autumn gathering) from its owner Bobby Grady’s much better-stocked cellar below.
Around the table sat all the members of the Société who had been able to attend: only three of them. William Lewis was from Philadelphia, where he practised medicine and continued groundbreaking work on human mutation. He was a slender man, blessed with a certain agelessness, belied only by his receding hairline and white-flecked moustache. Manfred Kurtzweiller, the third member in attendance, had been the one to suggest Lewis for membership. His practice was in Vienna, where he specialized in gynecological medicine, but took a greater interest in the young biological field of parasitology. These days, most of his research went unpublished.
And of course, there was Andrew Waggoner: the chair and chief physician of the Vire Sanatorium, and also founding Chairman of the Société. He, who brought the Juke—who had come nearer than any of them to the organism’s insidious nature.
They were getting older, the men of the Société, and so many of their seats were empty: Dr. Hebert, Dr. Johannsen . . . and the chair usually held by old Giorgio Molinare, who had stopped getting older rather definitively a month past.
Although Molinare was not entirely gone. He had left them his legacy: young Dominic Villart. He had been Molinare’s student, and also assistant, taking care of the more strenuous tasks in the professor’s inquiries on behalf of the Société. This night, he would become a member.
For the moment, Dominic perched where he always sat at these meetings, on the sill of one of the tall windows that overlooked rue Delambre. Sometimes there would be music coming up from the street, and Molinare had always complained that Dominic preferred that to the substance of their inquiries. But in a letter conveyed from his deathbed, Molinare had made clear he wished Dominic and none other to continue his work with the Société.
“Before we go further,” said Andrew, “we should formalize the matter of M. Villart.”
“Agreed,” said Kurtzweiller, fingering his empty goblet impatiently.
“Do we even need to?” asked William Lewis.
“It’s true,” said Kurtzweiller. “We have the letter. And barely a quorum.”
Lewis laughed. “A constitutional crisis, Dr. Waggoner?”
“Not at all,” said Andrew. He lifted the jar from the table and held it aloft, like a glass in a toast. “There. A founding member. We are four now.”
Kurtzweiller clapped and Lewis laughed again. From the windowsill, Dominic smiled uncertainly. Andrew beckoned. Dominic climbed down, Kurtzweiller motioned to the chair, and Dominic met Andrew’s eyes, and Andrew nodded. And that was all it took for Dominic Villart to fill his old master’s empty seat.
“Thank you, gentlemen. I will try to make myself worthy of the honour.”
“A good start,” said Lewis, “would be to open that wine for us.”
Andrew shook his head. “Wine later. Business first. I think we’re all very anxious to hear about Iceland.”
“Yes!” said Kurtzweiller. “Iceland!”
Andrew set the Juke down and slid it along the table to Kurtzweiller, who passed it along to Lewis, who in turn placed it before Dominic.
“Iceland,” said Dominic, and lifted the jar so it dangled between two fingers and he could peer at it. “Where to begin about Iceland?”
Dominic had been en route to Iceland when Molinare’s illness became grave, his ship likely passing Gibraltar but possibly having gotten as far as the Orkneys. He did not learn of his master’s death until much later, after he had returned to Reykjavik from the interior of Iceland, where the letter informing him of the sad news had waited for nearly a fortnight.
“I had all his other letters with me,” said Dominic, “so until that one, that last one . . . it was as though Doctor Molinare was alive, and nearly alongside me.”
“He was not,” said Kurtzweiller. “Dismiss such ideas. Tell us what you found. Start with that. Was there a Juke?”
Dominic looked at the jar where he’d set it on the table in front of him. “No,” he said and shook his head. He tapped the jar’s lid with his fingertip. “Not like this.”
Lewis sighed heavily and Kurtzweiller turned his attention to his empty wine glass. Andrew regarded the young man. Not so young as he had been, when he began working with Molinare and attending the Société meetings. He was lank and narrow then, effeminate in his youth. He had shed some of that in filling out, but not all. A thin moustache couldn’t hide his full lips, the long lashes over his wide brown eyes. Early on, Andrew had speculated that beautiful young Dominic was more than an assistant to old Molinare and over the years he’d seen nothing to say he’d guessed wrong. But now, looking at Dominic handling the remains of the old Juke, Andrew reminded himself that affection between an older man and his young protégé didn’t necessarily arise from scandal.
“There was very little conclusive to be found when we arrived,” said Dominic. “The church was still standing, but there had been a fire.”
“Yes. That much we read in the letter,” said Kurtzweiller. Dominic had written a brief report on the investigation of the community that had fit the profile so well; the old church in the southeast, on a hot-spring lake near the foot of a towering glacier, had burned the previous summer. Prior to that, the stories of the Sigurdsson parish had occupied Molinare’s curiosity considerably. This was one of the earliest Christian churches in Iceland, on a site believed consecrated in the 7th century by Irish monks and established permanently by King Olaf of Norway and landholder Ulfrid Sigurdsson three hundred years later.
Molinare had selected it for certain particulars.
The church had been very long without a priest. How long was indeterminate. Local stories went that the priests had been driven out by the little people—by faeries—who had claimed the church and as their own, although it may also have been Ulric Sigurdsson’s change of heart. But the lack of priests did not mean the church was abandoned. It was on the lands owned by the old family and inhabited by a clan of shepherds, who sold their wool in Reykjavik—and kept the mutton closer to home at the instruction of their matriarch, whose name was Hekla and who did not meet strangers.
Molinare thought he had never found a cleaner analogue to the study of Eliada, and the hill people known as the Feegers at their mountain lake in north Idaho. He wished to go himself, but with his health failing as it was, he sent Dominic—first by boat, then on a truck hired in Reykjavik, and finally guided by a local man named Elmar on foot along shepherds’ paths, to the foot of the glacier.
There, he found ruins. The church had been made of black volcanic rock, twice as tall as it was wide but for that no higher than two floors. The roof was gone but for a few charred timbers. The fire had not been that long ago; no word of it had reached Reykjavik, and Dominic’s guide was visibly shocked at the sight of it—and the stench.
When they approached and pushed the charred doors off their hinges, they found its source. Among the pews were the carcasses of what they counted to be a dozen sheep, burnt to a crisp in the conflagration.
The church was not the only structure. There was a farmhouse, and a barn, and a bunkhouse. Dominic and Elmar searched them all, and all of them were empty, abandoned. Of the Sigurdsson’s human inhabitants, the witch Hekla, all the rest, there was no sign. And so with the daylight waning, they bivouacked for the
night in the bunkhouse—the only building that had anything resembling furnishings—and in the morning returned to the truck and Reykjavik, to summon help. And that was the end of Dominic’s direct investigation: Icelandic Police occupied the site and, after interviewing Dominic and Elmar, forbade either of them from returning there.
That was the substance of Dominic’s report, sent in a package accompanied by three rolls of undeveloped film containing the sum of the photographic account of their search. The photographs and the contents of the report were now contained in a slim folder in front of Lewis, who was the last to examine it before the meeting began.
“It was a fulsome enough account,” said Lewis. “But it’s not all of it, is it?”
“I didn’t see a Juke,” said Dominic. “I searched. We searched. . . .”
“Over the course of, what shall we say, eight hours?” said Kurtzweiller.
“I don’t know how long we searched. The rest of the day.”
“Did you enter the lake?”
“Lewis,” said Andrew, “it was May, in Iceland. I don’t think we’d be talking right now if he’d entered the lake.”
“That’s so. But really—just a day examining this place?” Lewis stood. “Not even a day? What would your late master say?”
“I’m sorry.” Dominic pushed the jar away from him.
Andrew reached across and pushed it back.
“You omitted something,” said Andrew, “from your report to Molinare. Didn’t you now?”
Dominic said nothing for a moment, then nodded.
“I did not know he was dead, you see.”
“What difference does that make?” demanded Kurtzweiller, and might have said more but Andrew raised a finger to hush him.
“What did you see?” asked Andrew.
“Molinare.” He said it so softly that he had to repeat it. “Giorgio Molinare.”
The men all bent forward at that. Kurtzweiller smoothed his moustache and fixed Dominic with a hard stare. Lewis let out a breath he had been holding. Andrew’s eyes fell upon the Juke.
“I saw Giorgio,” said Dominic, “moving between the bunks. He was walking very slowly, each footstep . . . making a rustling sound, as though he were moving through leaves.”
“But there were no leaves on the floor,” said Lewis, and Dominic shook his head in agreement.
“Can you describe him?” Andrew asked.
“He was unclothed. And he was not . . . not the same as when I’d left. He seemed more youthful, stronger. Younger even than when I met him.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“No. He did pause, next to Elmar—who somehow remained asleep. And I called his name.”
“And he didn’t speak to you.”
“No. He didn’t even look at me. Just stood up straight and continued along the hall, then opened the door to the outside, and left. I did follow, but not quickly enough. When I stepped outside, there was no trace of him.”
“It was dark. How could you know?”
“The Aurora Borealis—the Northern Lights—were bright in the sky. I suppose not bright enough to see by . . . but it seemed that the fires cast enough that I could understand . . . He was gone. I wondered if I’d dreamed it, and maybe I had.”
“Still,” said Kurtzweiller. “Why did you omit that from your report?”
Dominic sighed. “I didn’t know that Dr. Molinare was dead. But I knew he was ill. I couldn’t bear to tell a sick man that I’d seen his ghost.”
Andrew tapped his finger restlessly on the table and pointed to the Juke.
“Almost certainly you didn’t see his ghost,” he said. “What you saw was a Juke.”
Dominic started at that, and looked at Andrew and then at the Juke in the jar.
“Of course,” said Kurtzweiller. “The Juke, as we know, causes hallucinations such as this . . . to trick its hosts into letting down their guard. That is one of the species’ primary adaptations.”
“I know that,” said Dominic, “but this . . . this was not that.”
“What then?”
“It was Dr. Molinare.” He sighed and shook his head. “It did not do what the Juke does. It didn’t—didn’t try to lay its eggs, not in me, not in my guide. It was—”
Andrew interrupted. “Did you have other sensations?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Juke—pardon me, Molinare—didn’t lay hands upon you, correct?”
“It just told you—”
“It didn’t touch you though?”
“No.”
“Did you notice a smell—was there any sound?”
“No!” Dominic glared at Andrew. “Nothing!”
“Did you have—an experience of transcendence, where the world fell away and a great void came upon you, and you felt that the world fell from beneath you, and you were borne aloft?” Andrew shook his head and made himself clarify: “—a revelation?”
Lewis reached for a wine bottle and cast about for a corkscrew.
“It’s obvious,” he said when Andrew shot him a stern look. “The young man needs a drink.”
“That won’t help,” said Andrew, but Kurtzweiller didn’t agree and handed Lewis the corkscrew nearest him: the crude carving of a little Portuguese boy with a bandana, holding the screw where his privates would be. Lewis dug into the cork, and now Kurtzweiller raised his hand, to shush Andrew.
“That is all you have for us,” he said softly to Dominic. “Isn’t it?”
“I—” Dominic’s skin flushed, and he squeezed his hands together.
“Perhaps another night,” said Kurtzweiller, “or perhaps later this night, it will be different. You will unburden yourself, and tell the story in a manner that makes sense for you. I wonder if you have told anyone this story? Perhaps someone you met on the boat, returning from Reykjavik? No need to answer.”
Lewis offered Dominic a glass of wine, then, as Dominic swallowed nearly all of it, poured three more, and slid one toward Kurtzweiller, another toward Andrew. This time, Andrew didn’t object but lifted the glass, touched it to his lips and sipped, watching as Dominic helped himself to a second glass. Lewis rose to his feet and made ready to toast.
“To our newest member,” he said, when Dominic and the rest stood. “Dominic Villart!”
“Arctic explorer!” said Kurtzweiller, and Lewis cried: “Scientist!” and Andrew barely stopped himself from adding, as their glasses clinked together over the table, the jar in its middle:
Oracle.
The four men hadn’t got far—just the start of the third bottle—before the hammering at the door ended, rather prematurely, both the official and informal portion of the meeting of the Société de la biologie transcendantale for September, 1931.
When Andrew rose from his chair—only a little unsteadily—and opened the door, and he saw her, the gathering became something else entirely.
Two
“Miss Harper! My God!”
Andrew had not seen Ruth in long enough that he could not precisely say how many years it had been. But judging from her appearance, it could not have been as many as that. Her hair was shorter now than last time, but it had kept its lustre—her skin likewise showing only a hint of the passage of time. Had she gained or lost any weight in the span? She wore a tweed jacket and a long dark skirt, not as well-cut as some of her other ensembles, so it wasn’t easy to be sure.
As to how she was? Andrew hadn’t a clue.
“Not your God,” she said, and smirked in her way. “Hello, Dr. Waggoner. I’m glad to see your Société still meeting here at the Liberty, and keeping its dates so assiduously.”
“Of course,” said Andrew. “It’s good to see you. What, if I may ask, brings you here?”
“Discretion,” she said, her voice low, and Andrew nodded that he understood. Only a few people knew that Andrew and the Société met here; fewer still, the nature of their business. Grady saw to that. If one knew the schedule—there would scarcely be a more discreet way to co
ntact Andrew, or the other members, than to show up at an appointed time.
Ruth cocked her head and addressed the rest. “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said and, not waiting for a response, touched Andrew’s shoulder with a leather-gloved hand and stepped round him, into the apartment.
Kurtzweiller stood first, offering a little bow, and Lewis followed suit—“Of course not!” he said. Dominic was slowest to stand. But of course as the newest member, he had never met Ruth Harper, and would have only the vaguest idea of her importance here . . . and he had contributed more than his share to the murder of the first two bottles.
“No, madam,” said Dominic finally.
“Hello.” Ruth’s face relaxed into a half-smile as she regarded the young man. “Who are you?” She turned to Andrew. “Who is he?”
“Dominic Villart,” said Andrew. “He’s one of us.”
Dominic looked away. “Only barely, I am afraid.”
“Recently,” corrected Kurtzweiller. “Only recently. You are one of us.”
Ruth nodded. “Very good,” she said. “M. Villart, would you be so kind as to leave us for a moment?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m afraid it can’t be helped,” said Ruth. “You must leave.”
The three senior members of the Société regarded one another uneasily, and finally Andrew spoke to Dominic: “Mr. Villart, this is Miss Ruth Harper. She is a valuable patron—” he shared a glance with Ruth “—a foundational patron. Why don’t you refill your glass and find a chair in the Liberty for a while?”
“Thank you, M. Villart,” said Ruth as Dominic poured his glass and stepped out the door. “Mr. Lewis,” she said, switching to English as the door closed, “see that he’s not lingering on the stairs, would you?”
“I don’t think there’s any cause—” began Lewis, but Ruth raised a gloved hand, and he stepped to it, opening the door a crack.
He shut the door again and nodded. “It’s good, Miss Harper.”
