by David Nickle
Jason, who knew none of this, demanded to hear what came next. “Did Theseus go on and stick old Minos with his sword just to show him? What about Daedalus, who made that maze in the first place? He had it coming. How about sticking him?”
“Well,” said his mama, “there’s only one way to find out.”
“What’s that?”
“Read it yourself.”
Jason smiled to himself as he looked around the library at Eliada. He had flown into such a rage. He told his mama she knew full well he could not read or write, and it was unkind of her to withhold important facts on account of his infirmity. His mama had gotten mad too, or pretended to, and took the book away until he came to his senses.
Jason had stayed mad for only a little while. And now, he knew that the only reason he could read the titles at least in this medical library was because of that night. No way he would have figured out reading and writing near as well if his mama had stuck him in a schoolhouse and made him learn his ABCs with chalk and slate at the foot of some stranger. The temptation of mythology was what did it for him, and she laid it out for him, like the Devil doing good.
Out in the hall, a door slammed, and as fast, the door to the examination room cracked open. Dr. Bergstrom stepped in. He was wearing a face mask like Aunt Germaine’s, and he had his rubber gloves back on.
“Well now, young Jason. I see you are a bibliophile.”
Jason didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded like he did.
“Splendid.” He walked over to the table, and pulled out one of the dried apples. He popped it in his mouth. As he chewed on it, he opened a drawer and took from there a box of matches. “Would you,” he said, approaching a wall-sconce, “be so kind as to strip off your shirt and trousers, Jason?” He struck the match, and lit the lamp with it. “Now, please?”
Jason unbuttoned his shirt. “What for?” he said.
Dr. Bergstrom turned to him, hands crossed before him. “It is the routine in Eliada,” he said. “We must make certain that you are as well as well can be, Jason. And then we must keep you that way.”
The doctor lit five more lamps, including one that had been hung in the middle of a bowl-shaped mirror, before he started in on Jason. The room took on a glow under all that flame; it turned everything the colour of gold.
Dr. Bergstrom demanded that Jason turn over his shirt and trousers, and he sniffed at them before setting them down on a chair by the door. Then he made Jason turn around in the light, with his arms out. He asked Jason how old he was and Jason told him seventeen, and Dr. Bergstrom nodded like that meant something. He took Jason by the arm then, and led him over to a big weight scale, and told Jason to stand on it. He moved weights along metal rods until they balanced, then looked at them and wrote down the number on a sheet of paper.
“Over here now,” he said, and motioned to a spot on the wall that had been marked off in feet and inches. He made Jason stand against it, and took a book from the shelf and measured Jason’s height, which Jason thought was five feet and seven inches but Dr. Bergstrom said was five feet and nine inches.
“Sit on the examination table,” he said, the mask puffing out with the wind of his speech.
Jason did as he was told. Dr. Bergstrom went over to the bench, and took something that looked like a hand-scythe, except that it was hinged like scissors and not sharp. Bergstrom told Jason to hold still, and he opened it like pincers on a bug, and set Jason’s head in the middle. The metal tips felt cold against his temples, and Jason worried it would poke into the soft skull there. It did not. He lifted it away, took it back to the bench, and set it against a ruler, and marked a notation. Then he repeated the procedure with the pincers at the back of Jason’s skull, at his jaw-line, his ears and the back of his neck.
“What are you measuring my head for?” asked Jason, but Dr. Bergstrom didn’t answer.
“Smile,” he said. And then added impatiently: “So I can see your teeth.” He examined those, and asked Jason if he ever had a toothache, and when Jason said no, he nodded. He went back to the bench, wrote more things down, then opened one of the glass-covered cabinets. This time he pulled out a thin metal cylinder, and a brown glass bottle.
“Lie on your stomach,” he ordered, not looking back.
“You goin’ to take my temperature?” asked Jason. When Dr. Bergstrom didn’t answer, Jason went on: “When I was small, the doctor in Cracked Wheel took my temperature with a thermometer up my behind, because he feared I’d bite it and poison myself if I put it in my mouth. Well I ain’t going to bite it, so you can just—”
“I am not taking your temperature, Jason,” said Dr. Bergstrom. He was coming across the floor. Jason could see that he was holding the cylinder between two fingers. On one end was a sharp needle. A bead of fluid gleamed like liquid gold on its tip.
“Now hold still,” he said.
Jason did as he was told.
§
Jason blinked and coughed. He was lying down, on a hard bed very different from the examination table. His arms hurt. His vision was blurry; as was his understanding of exactly how he’d got there.
Memory became fragmented up to the moment. He recalled a sharp pain in his behind, and then a cool feeling, like his foot had gone to sleep. He may have said something.
He may have gotten up off the table. Stumbled around a bit. He may have fallen to the floor. He may have even got up again, made it a short way down the hall, and then fallen over again before the world vanished.
Best Jason could say was that, next thing he knew, he was here. Lying on a table or a bed or, judging from its hardness, somewhere in between the two. His clothes were gone, replaced by a thin cotton sheet. The things that hurt his arms and legs were leather straps tied on top of that sheet. They were tying him down.
Jason had to fight to control his breathing as he put it together. He didn’t know much about doctoring—what little he’d seen of it happened at the barber shop in Cracked Wheel. But he knew that sometimes the barber would use the straps to hold a fellow still for awful things like amputating a leg or digging out a stone.
What in hell were they doing tying Jason down like this? What was Dr. Bergstrom doing, sticking him with a poisoned needle without asking him first? Jason pushed against the straps. He didn’t expect it to free him and so was not surprised when it didn’t. It still made him mad.
He blinked, and his eyes got some of their focus back. He looked side to side. He was in a long whitewashed room, with a high ceiling and windows only near the top. There were other beds in here—maybe ten of them. But the rest were empty. At the far end, he could see two figures, caught in the dim moonlight that cut down through the windows, silhouetted in the glow of candlelight. They were huddled around it, talking to one another, turned away from Jason.
“Hey!” he hollered. “Hey!”
They both turned to him.
“Jason!” It was Aunt Germaine. The other one didn’t speak, but Jason figured it for Dr. Bergstrom.
The two of them hurried across the room. Jason, to show his displeasure, struggled theatrically against the restraints. When they arrived, he noted that both were wearing white gowns and masks over their mouths. “What is the matter,” said Jason in a low, angry voice, “I got a smell about me?”
Aunt Germaine stepped immediately to his side. She put two rubber-gloved hands on his own. It might have been the effect of night, but she looked paler, older than she had ever seemed before. Her hands seemed to be trembling. “Oh Nephew,” she said, “I am sorry.”
“Do not apologize, Mrs. Frost,” said Dr. Bergstrom. He stood somewhat further off, at the foot of the bed. “This was my decision. I will explain it to young Jason.”
“Of course.” Aunt Germaine squeezed Jason’s hand.
“Jason, you must understand that I would not take these measures lightly. But your aunt told me the story of what happened to your town, of—”
“Cracked Wheel.”
“Yes. She told me th
at a contagion—a sickness—came upon the people there over the winter. It was a sickness that spread very quickly—far more quickly than anything that we know. And its mortality rate—the rate at which it killed—was extremely high. Nearly everyone.”
“Except me,” said Jason. “Because I am immune.”
Dr. Bergstrom’s lips tightened in something cousin to a smile. “You seem healthy,” he said. “That I do grant you. But Jason—that does not mean you do not carry the disease.”
“My aunt and me figured that out,” said Jason. “We burned things and I kept bathed, even when it was fierce cold.”
Dr. Bergstrom shook his head. “The germ might nestle in your soft tissues. It might thrive in the warm places inside your ear—in your throat. Perhaps waiting for a moment to return.”
“That’s not how germs work.”
“And you are expert in this? No. I am sorry, young man. You must remain here for a time.”
“Where is here?”
Dr. Bergstrom crossed his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet. “Quarantine,” he said. “For at least tonight.”
“Tied down?”
“There is no other way,” said Dr. Bergstrom. “As your, ah, aunt attested: you show a tendency to wander.”
“How am I going to relieve myself then?”
“No . . . other . . . way,” repeated Dr. Bergstrom slowly.
Jason turned to Aunt Germaine who still held his arm. “Aunt! Get me out of here!” He twisted again against the straps. Panic was moving through him like an ugly liquor, and he could hear it in his voice, and he hated it.
Aunt Germaine looked down at him with pursed lips and a crinkled brow. “Doctor,” she said, “leave us a moment. The boy is distraught. I will calm him.”
“As you wish, Mrs. Frost.”
When Dr. Bergstrom had withdrawn sufficient distance, Aunt Germaine bent down to Jason’s ear and made shushing noises until Jason stopped twisting and struggling and glared at her.
“I am sorry, Nephew,” she said quietly. “Dr. Bergstrom is wrong. You are fine, and this is wrong. But I cannot stop it. It is beyond my authority.”
“Wh-what am I going to do then? What—”
“Shh. Dr. Bergstrom means for you to be trapped here. But you need not be.” Aunt Germaine leaned even closer, so her lips brushed Jason’s ear, and she whispered: “You are a hero, Jason Thistledown. Your survival . . . well, it proves that. You are as great a Man as Nature might commit. Dr. Bergstrom does not understand that. But he has not seen what you have lived through. He has . . . underestimated you. Foolishly, he has underestimated us both.” She pulled back a bit, so her face was now inches from Jason’s own. “Now turn your hand, slow and careful.”
Jason unclenched his fist, and turned it to meet with Aunt Germaine’s gloved hand. There was something metallic nestled in her palm.
“Careful,” she said. “You do not want to cut yourself. This is a scalpel—a tiny knife. It is small, but wickedly sharp. Should anything happen . . .”
“What?” he whispered.
“Cut yourself free, my darling hero,” said Aunt Germaine, “and run.”
9 - The Quarantine Obscenity
Jason fingered his scalpel and glared into the dark. Anger was all over him like fleas, nestling anywhere it smelled blood.
He was angry at Dr. Bergstrom, who had snuck up on him, stuck poison in him and put him here, tied like a dog for no good reason, without even knowing what sort of fellow he was. Although she had given him this scalpel and said kind things to him, he was angry at Aunt Germaine for what he identified as nothing but cowardly betrayal. She said she had no power to stop this—but in that bag of hers she had two guns (one belonging to Jason’s mama) and a pile of ammunition (ammunition that Jason had, at no small risk to his own skin, stepped into the Dempsey Store in Cracked Wheel and faced the putrid corpse of Lionel Dempsey, to retrieve). Jason thought that she was plenty powerful to stop this if she wanted to.
And then Jason stumbled on another source for his anger—an unholy pit of it that ran so deep it dizzied him to look down:
His ma.
His ma, who, if she had not been so weak and slow, might have lived through the sickness that took the rest of those damn fools in Cracked Wheel; who might then have just invited Aunt Germaine in for a meal that winter’s morning she showed up with her two pair of snowshoes; a meal where the three of them would have caught up on the goings-on in Philadelphia and New York, and Aunt Germaine could have told how she was doing eugenical research for Dr. Charles Davenport whose privy was filled with damn gold nuggets he was so fine a gentleman. And then together they could have figured out something more intelligent to do about pulling up stakes than getting on a train for this God-damned supposed paradise in Idaho.
All that they might have done and more, if only she hadn’t abandoned him.
But that anger was too deep and complicated to hold long without it changing to something else. And as Jason faced it, he felt his chest hitch up and the tears start in the corners of his eyes. He was crying. For the first time, since the time his mama stopped breathing in Cracked Wheel, Jason was crying.
This time, he let it come. He pushed the scalpel away from his hand so he wouldn’t cut himself when his fist clenched, and then he let that fist go ahead and clench as hard as it wanted, and the other one too, screwed his eyes shut, and let the weeping out in big, whooping gasps. He cried for his ma, all right—these were tears of grief, and although he was mad he hadn’t finished grieving her, if he ever even would.
But it wasn’t just for his ma. He had been selfish in his grief and in that he had done many a bad turn. When he’d gone to collect that ammunition in Cracked Wheel, hadn’t he looked into the dead eye of Lionel Dempsey—a fellow who’d always been fine to him whenever they met up? Had he even once thought about some of those times they’d seen each other and it had been good enough? No. Had he once uttered a prayer for Mr. Dempsey’s poor unshriven soul? No. Had he ever prayed for any of them—any but his ma, who was but one in a hundred or more who’d died gasping and choking in Cracked Wheel? No, no, a hundred times no.
If he’d thought about it at all, he supposed he’d figured he was being self-sufficient in not doing so. But how self-sufficient is a boy, a man, being, really, when he takes off with his new aunt at the first opportunity, abandoning what plans he had and what responsibilities were left?
Aunt Germaine had called him a hero. Jason had read about plenty of heroes. Maybe he was like Theseus, made for one good turn before he ruined it all afterward. Maybe . . .
Jason opened his eyes. And as he did, he blinked. A shadow capered across the moonlit squares on the far wall of the ward room. Jason swallowed a mouthful of his own tears.
The shadow moved slowly against the silver rectangles on the far wall: one after the other, very methodical, slow enough that it could spend awhile working at each pane. It used its whole body—Jason could make out skinny legs, a torso that narrowed at the hip, and skinny arms that pressed against the glass.
Jason glanced up over his head. He could not see much of the windows—his bed was directly beneath them, head against the outside wall. But he figured the windows at the top of the wall weren’t more than two feet tall. That meant that the figure—which in shadow looked like a normal man—would have to be considerably shorter than that.
He looked back at the shadow as one of those windows made a snap! and a creaking sound. The shadow ducked, and then it vanished before Jason could look up and see.
Jason unclenched his fist, fumbled for the scalpel, and narrowly avoiding cutting himself on the blade, as he thought again about what Aunt Germaine had said before she and Dr. Bergstrom had left.
Cut yourself free, my darling hero. And run.
Jason set to work. It was not as easy as he might have thought; he had to hold the scalpel in his fist so that the blade came out next to his baby finger, and then position it underneath the middle of three stra
ps that held him down. Then he had to start flicking and sawing.
The leather bit into him fiercely as he did so but he would not stop. The thing, whatever it was, had fallen to the floor. He could hear it scurrying. But he could not see. He could not tell how near it was.
What was it? It was shaped like a man, but no more than a foot or two tall. Bulfinch’s would say it was a dwarf. A better explanation might be that it was a monkey. That would explain its size, and also its speed.
But as he sawed and picked at the leather, struggling to keep a grip with his sweat-slicked hand, listening as the scrambling sound made its way to and fro across the floor, Jason realized it wasn’t just the appearance of the thing.
There was also the whistling.
It was mournful, like an Irish tune about dead lovers—but absent any melody. Jason could not say when it started. The sound seemed in him—like the ringing in the ears that came during long silences—a ringing that might always have been there. Jason listened. As he did, he was dimly aware of the scalpel, slipping from his grip. He took hold of it again, so it would not fall away, but he could not imagine how he would begin cutting.
The door opposite him swung slowly open. How long had it been that his aunt and Dr. Bergstrom had disappeared through that door? Jason thought it might have been just a few minutes ago. He thought it might have been a day ago. He did not have any clear notion.
Could it be that the small creature—whatever it was—had let itself out? To run through the rest of the quarantine? He stared at the door, and listened for more scrabbling. He could not hear any but that proved nothing—the whistling was growing louder, and more pervasive.
It must have fled. Jason let out a breath, and turned the knife back to the strap.
