by David Nickle
“What d’ you mean to do to the rest of ’em?” asked Norma.
The doctor shrugged. “You are all family,” he said. “You all carry the germ. You all need to be cleaned.”
The doctor and his men left not long after. For as the talk went along, guns and knives and axes started to appear among the families, and the two men with rifles took the measure of their hosts and whispered to the doctor that a fast leave-taking might be the best.
And so the doctor made sure that Loo’s cuts were properly dressed, set her out and set his men to rolling up the tent. On leaving, he told the families that he thought they would thank him for the work he did on Loo. In the end, he said, they might wish that they took him up on his offer.
“In the end,” he said, “it might save you all a lot of grief.”
§
“So if I understand, the doctor—Dr. Bergstrom—sterilized Loo two years ago.”
“That’s the word he used,” said Norma. “Sterilized.”
“Did he ever come back?” asked Andrew.
“Not him. Couple time, his friends with the guns came up. Them and some others.” Norma looked at her hands. “They come up with their guns and rope and horses . . . They take a few folk back. To the hospital.”
Andrew was horrified. “They kidnapped people?”
Norma said she didn’t know that word. “But they took ’em. They always brung ’em back.”
“Have you—”
Norma smiled thinly. “I haven’t,” she said. “Too old to worry about, I expect. But it’s been a long time since a baby’s been born to the families.”
“Until now,” said Andrew.
“Huh.”
“And this one was . . . fathered by the . . .”
“Faerie King. That’s what we call it.”
“You believe—” in faeries, Andrew was about to say. But he stopped himself. The fact was that he’d seen them too. It would be insulting and worse, unreasonable, to feign scepticism.
So he took a breath and started again.
“Tell me everything you know about the Faerie King,” he said. “Then tell me what happened.”
§
The families had never held much to religion. There were some around who did—but they lived further up the hill and grew stranger by the season, and although they seemed happy it was not the kind of happiness you wanted to share in. Families here on the slope had nothing but bad to say about the clergy they’d left behind and had not much to care for a God you couldn’t see or hear. But they knew the old stories of the creatures that lived in the forest. The stories all pointed to a simple warning—don’t expect help from them without paying a price worse than the help was good.
And though they may speak fair and smell sweet, don’t walk off with one if it beckons, and don’t ever lie with one.
It was this last thing that the family thought had happened to Loo, from the simple story she told over the days.
Loo said she had been digging for leeks with her knife in the early spring soil, when she met the fellow. He was fast and no bigger than a baby, but she thought he was fine. In the early days, she would listen to birdsong as though it were speaking to her, and nod or shake her head or say, “Ho!” or “Yep!” or just laugh, and no one thought anything of it.
But as the days got longer she took to bed more and more. And then the elder members of the family, folk like Norma, started to pay more heed—both to her and to the birdsong.
“You listen to it in the right frame of mind, it’s like words,” said Norma.
“Can you hear it now?”
Norma looked at her hands. “Always,” she said.
“What does it say?”
Norma snorted. “Preacher talk,” she said.
“Preacher talk,” said Andrew. “You know, I’ve seen some things that’ve had whistling attached to them. I don’t hear the words.”
“That’s because you ain’t kin,” said Norma. “And you’re a nigger. Ain’t even the same race.”
“I’m the same race.”
“Oh,” she said, seeing his expression. “M’ apologies. It’s just . . . the whistling seems to come clearer the closer kin you are.”
“And it talks like a preacher,” said Andrew. “To kin of the woman that was pregnant with it.” Andrew leaned back. “Not pregnant,” he said. “I should have said the woman carrying its eggs. Does it normally attack pregnant women?”
“It does, but not always,” said Norma. “Doesn’t happen often enough to really say.” Now she sat back and thought about it. “But it’s queer—you hear stories, how after the Faerie King picks a virgin bride, she goes off and lies with her sweetheart.”
“Ah.”
So the Faerie King would lie with a woman, and put his seed in her—his seed in this case, not spermatozoa—but something like an egg. He would choose pregnant women preferentially, and they survived better. That made sense. Women who were with child went through many changes that allowed them to carry a foetus—really, another animal—not only without casting it out, but providing nourishment through the umbilical cord. Andrew wondered: did the tiny creatures latch onto the cord and steal food from the withering foetus?
Ingenious, so far as it went. But what if the mother was not pregnant? What if—
Then Andrew recalled Mister Juke, and the one thing that Dr. Bergstrom had let slip.
Mister Juke was a hermaphrodite.
And that drew his consideration to Jason Thistledown, and the night he had in the quarantine.
“You ever hear,” he finally asked, “of the Faerie King lying with a man that way?”
She did not answer that question but looked at Andrew, her fingers drawing into a loose fist on the table, and asked: “So can you help Loo or not, Dr. Andrew?”
Andrew said he could—although he was less sure of that than he was of his own desire for a serious look under the blanket—a look at one of those things alive. And for the second time since he’d fled Eliada, Andrew felt himself fill up with a terrible shame.
He made himself smile around it—pushed that shame down, and to make sure it stayed there said again:
“I can help her. Perhaps.”
15 - A Wicked Cut
Andrew rose early in the morning, and took stock of both his equipment and his circumstance. He had not, since departing Eliada, done a close inventory of the physician’s bag, so he did so now and was pleased to find the bag well-equipped if not precisely modern.
There was morphine and alcohol in a row of phials, packed alongside several thick rolls of gauze. There were other things as one might expect: a flexible stethoscope and a hammer; a small concave mirror and scissors; a roll of suture thread and steel needles. At the bottom of the case was a mahogany box containing a surgical kit that Andrew thought might have dated back to the Civil War, given the rust-specked bone-saw and the ebony-handled trepan tucked among the scalpels and clamps. Andrew would have liked more gynaecological equipment—all he could find was an antique speculum tube that’d been carved from ivory and might be adaptable for vaginal examination. But given that he was not precisely aborting or giving birth to a child—given that he was not entirely sure what he was going to find inside poor Loo—he thought he might make do.
The circumstance was more troubling. His bad hand was only a part of it. In the relative darkness of the dawn, the cabin where Loo rested was nearly pitch black. And it was filthy. The risk of sepsis was enormous in the confines of this place. He asked the woman who was staying with Loo to throw open all the windows, but it was not enough to resolve either difficulty.
There was nothing to do about his hand, either—other than enlist Norma, who had some experience with midwifery, to assist where she could.
As to the cabin?
“We will have to perform this procedure outdoors,” Andrew finally declared, and Norma agreed.
“I’ll find a table,” she said.
“And clean bedclothes.”
“Clean
bedclothes. Anythin’ else?”
By mid-morning, Andrew counted a dozen people helping set up the outdoor surgery. He supervised for part of it, but it soon became apparent that Norma was a quick study, and he wasn’t needed. So at her urging, he took his bag and went back inside to look in on his patient.
She was awake and more alert than the night before. The two of them were alone in the cabin, and it seemed to Andrew that she was smiling at him.
“Hello, Loo,” he said. “Do you remember me?”
She mumbled at him, in a slow, damp drawl. She was definitely smiling. He could see her teeth—short, plaque-covered stumps that peeked out under glistening lips. She mumbled again, and grunted.
“I’m Dr. Waggoner,” he said, and pulled up a stool beside her. “Going to try and make you better. Do you understand?”
Loo made that grunting sound again, and her eyes squinted as though she were trying to pass stool, and Andrew shocked himself by flinching, a sliver of disgust and horror pricking his middle. The girl was enfeebled through no fault of her own; and she had been raped by—by some inhuman thing—and here he was, trained to heal all infirmity, turning away in what? Disgust?
Horror?
He bent forward. “I am going to check you,” he said. “Can you lie still for me?”
Then he set about her second examination.
Loo was still running a low fever, her heart sounded fine, and there wasn’t much congestion in her breathing.
“Good girl,” said Andrew, and Loo mumbled back. “Now,” he said, “I am going to look at your belly.”
The sheets and blankets were stiff and stank from days of stale sweat. He had to literally peel away the tattered bottom sheet.
Andrew gasped. Even in the dim light, he could see the mottled discolouration across her, dark bruising from beneath her breasts to her pelvic bone. He traced with a finger one of the two thick scars that Nils Bergstrom had left. With his other hand laid flat, he felt for movement—anything, any sign of the thing in her uterus. He felt nothing but the girl’s breathing.
So he took the stethoscope, and after warming it first in his hand, set the chest-piece against the flesh above her navel. And he listened.
§
The two things missing from the physician’s bag that Jason Thistledown had stolen for him were the two things that Andrew dearly wished he had: a pencil and a proper notebook. With those two things, Andrew might have written down a proper clinical description of the thing he heard twisting and gnawing inside the belly of the poor idiot hill girl.
As it was, Andrew Waggoner took the stethoscope away, looped the rubber tubing and put it back in the bag. He returned to Loo’s bedside. He felt her forehead for fever, checked her eye movement with a finger, and even tapped her knee to see if it might jolt, which it did.
Then he sat by her, and waited, until Hank opened up the door and told him they’d finished everything he’d asked and there was no more reason to tarry.
“So ’s time,” said Hank. “Get doctoring.”
§
It was just past noon when Andrew Waggoner cut into Lou-Ellen Tavish. They had laid her out on a clean sheet on the table, pots of steaming boiled water next to her and Andrew’s surgical kit laid out on a stool beside her. He had set his mirror between her legs, which had been strapped apart, one to each table-leg. Her breathing was slow and steady, as a result of the morphine he’d given her. Next to the mirror was the ivory speculum, fresh out of the boiling water. He lifted it, because he did not intend to cut yet, and brought it to her vagina. The speculum had two pieces: a conical wedge, which fit perfectly inside the cylinder. If things were as they should be, the first step of this operation would be to insert that between the patient’s labia, gently forcing it open. Then he would remove the wedge, and have a two-inch diameter tube through which to operate.
But Andrew set the speculum back down as fast as he’d lifted it. He bent forward, positioning the mirror to get a better look.
“What’s a matter?” asked Hank, who was standing with his brothers and sisters and cousins at the agreed-upon distance of ten feet. “Your arm hurtin’?”
Norma, the only one allowed close, leaned in closer to look herself. “What’s it?”
Andrew touched the labia with finger and thumb. “Look,” he said, drawing them apart. Between the pink flesh was a yellowish membrane, stretching the length of Lou-Ellen Tavish’s vagina. “There’s no opening. Or rather—there’s an opening, but something is covering it.” Andrew prodded it. It made a crackling noise, as though it were part calcified. “It’s as though her hymen regenerated somehow.”
“Hymen?”
“Maidenhead.”
Norma nodded. “Ah. The child skin. That don’t come back once you’ve lain with a—”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Andrew. “I’m going to need a scalpel.”
Norma didn’t know what that was, so Andrew took it and showed her: “Scalpel,” he said. “For next time I ask. Now I need you to get around there and spread the—” he was about to say labia, but again, just showed her: “These.”
Norma leaned over and did as she was told. Lou-Ellen made a soft whimpering noise, as Andrew leaned in, positioned the mirror, and set the blade of his scalpel against the tissue.
“Need somethin’ else?” asked Norma finally.
“No,” said Andrew, “I’m fine.”
Which finally was true enough. His hand did not shake at all as he pressed the tip of the blade into the strange yellow tissue.
Although the scalpel was keen, it took surprising force to break through the membrane. It became fibrous once the scalpel breached the brittle surface, and Andrew had to saw at it.
But once that pierced, Andrew did not have to complete the incision. It was like breaking a seal on an overturned jug; once the scalpel pierced all the way through, the pressure from a thick flow of brownish liquid tore it the rest of the way open. It splashed up Andrew’s arm, stained the sheet to the edge of the table, and filled the dish of the mirror with a foul broth.
Loo shrieked, and her back arched, and the table-legs creaked as she tried in vain to draw her knees together. Andrew lurched back, pulling away just in time to avoid slicing her thigh with the scalpel. Norma moved as well, to take hold of Lou-Ellen’s shoulders, hold her down and try to comfort her best she could.
Andrew took a breath. If his patient were genuinely pregnant, this might be explained as amniotic fluid, but Loo was not, and this was not. It was something strange.
And it smelled . . .
The smell was a cousin to the stench Lou-Ellen had left in the cabin. It could be a sign of infection, just that, Andrew thought. But it reminded him of something else, that skirted at the edge of memory. He sniffed at his hand, which was covered in the mucous-thick liquid, trying to recall—and as he did, he chanced to look closely at it. It was not, he saw, entirely pure—suspended in it were tiny dark objects of various shapes. They might have been insects, or pieces of insects.
You have a patient, he reminded himself. See to her.
Lou-Ellen was still screaming but she had slowed her struggling enough that Andrew could get close again. The sheet was soaked now, with glistening puddles here and there. Andrew shook off his hand, and reached in to pick up the mirror, clean it off and begin again, this time sliding the speculum into the open space to see what he could see. Which would be a problem, Andrew realized, because in her struggles she’d knocked the speculum to the ground. It would have to be sterilized. He shook his head as he started to pour the juices out of the mirror’s bowl. Then he looked at it more closely.
At its deepest point, the bowl held about a quarter-inch of the liquid. And it, like the stuff on his hand, was impure. But the particulate that had gathered there was bigger. Andrew held it in the full sunlight and squinted. Was there something like a hand in it? No bigger than a man’s fingernail? Wispy effluvium trailed in the murky liquid, making it impossible to tell.
“Does any
one here have a jar?” he asked. “A clean jar I mean?”
“Sure,” said Norma. “In the root cellar there’s plenty.” She turned to one of the children, and ordered her to fetch a couple.
Andrew set the mirror down carefully. He motioned with his splinted arm to the ground, where the speculum lay. “That will have to be washed,” he said. “Clean it with boiling water and alcohol.”
Norma stayed with Loo, so it was Hank who bent to pick it up. He, and the rest of them, had drawn closer. Any closer, and they’d be blocking out his light. “Wash your own hands first,” said Andrew. “Don’t want Loo to get sick. Not now she’s through the worst of it.”
“Worst of it?” It was Norma. “You mean you’re done?”
Andrew looked back down at the bowl—the grotesque pieces of tissue—the strange shapes they made in the liquid. “Maybe. I don’t think I had much to do. Looks like whatever was in her died on its own. There are pieces of it in this.” He held the mirror out so Norma could see. Her eyebrows raised and her nostrils flared as she sniffed it. “I’d call it a miscarriage if I didn’t know better. As it stands, I’ll still take a look inside. See what troubles this awful sickness has caused her.”
“But you think she’s better,” said Norma. Loo did indeed seem better. The morphine, still in her blood, was back to work now that the panic was over.
Andrew gave a smile he hoped was reassuring. “We’ll see,” he said.
“All done,” said Hank, and handed Andrew the speculum. Andrew took it, and dribbled some of the alcohol on it and through it for good measure. Then he bent back down. “All right, Norma. Same as before.”
Norma reached down and pulled the labia apart, and Andrew leaned closer to insert the speculum. He barely touched it to the girl, however, before the second eruption. This time, Andrew didn’t lurch back, because this time, the fluid coming out was something that his surgeon’s reflexes understood.
This time, it was blood. Lou-Ellen Tavish was haemorrhaging.
