by David Nickle
§
Andrew had encountered this circumstance four times in his career as a physician. Three of the women who had bled out in the afterbirth had died. The last of those was Maryanne Leonard.
The fourth survived—because the French hospital where she was being seen employed a surgeon who had studied blood typing with Landsteiner and knew enough to pick the correct plasma for transfusion.
If he could find the source of the haemorrhaging and stem some of it, Andrew thought he might be able to save his patient with the blood of a close family member—if he could transfuse enough of it, with the single brass syringe in the doctor’s kit.
But he needed to work swiftly. He shouted to Norma to keep Loo’s vagina open, and he quickly inserted the speculum into the opening, then cleared the tube. Unmindful now of what happened to his specimen, Andrew poured the fluid from the mirror onto the sheet. “Out of the light!” he shouted, and when the families obeyed, he positioned the mirror so the sun lit the opening. He demanded a narrow set of forceps and a swab of cotton dipped in alcohol, and he took it in his injured arm, ignoring as best he could the shooting pain. And he peered up Lou-Ellen’s canal, and transferred the forceps to his good hand. He meant to staunch the bleeding with it, if he could spy the source.
And if he could manage it at all, with his hand-and-a-half. It was one thing to take a temperature and listen to a heartbeat; to tell these hill folk how to wash a table and boil water; even to stitch up a farm boy’s cut hand. It was something else again to save the life of a girl bleeding inside.
It’s even harder, Andrew scolded himself, if you keep thinking about all those troubles and not your patient.
Blood began to flow out through the speculum now, like a drain pipe. Andrew twisted the mirror, so he could see the red-flushed wall of the canal in an inch, but the rest was dark. So he set down the mirror, propped himself painfully on his damaged elbow, and inserted the forefinger of his good hand. He felt for the telltale pulsing of an open wound.
He was not in there long at all, before the thing inside Lou-Ellen Tavish bit down.
Andrew shouted, and pulled his finger out, and transferred his weight to his bad arm so that he cried out again. The finger was covered in Lou-Ellen’s murky blood. At the pad, a dark blood-blister grew.
Now Andrew did stagger back, taking the alcohol-soaked cotton from the forceps and pressing it against his finger. He swore under his breath. If that bite had broken skin . . .
A shudder ran up Loo’s body. And the speculum pushed from her vagina, and fell into the mess below, and Andrew thought to himself as the labia spread, this time pushed out from within: I am watching the Devil’s birthing.
And then he thought, as the twig-thin appendages emerged, pushing it wider for the bloody, snot-covered head to emerge, and Loo shuddered and rattled, one last time:
I’ve lost her.
§
The thing pulled itself from Loo’s middle, spewing a fresh stench and emitting a high, furious whistle. Andrew cast about the crowd. The adults were no good—they covered their faces and whimpered, held one another or just onto themselves. One by one, they fell to their knees and prostrated themselves.
But the children were back with the pickle jars. Andrew grabbed one from a slack hand, and pulled off the top. When he turned back, the creature was crouched on hind legs that articulated in two places, like a horse’s, while clawed hands scraped mucous and blood from a wide mouth that was lined with sharp teeth (and somehow, despite its orifices being blocked, it kept screaming). Its eyes were small and black, its skin bedsheet white, the only colour being the tiny rivulets of Lou-Ellen’s lifeblood shearing off its forehead. From buttocks to skull was a span of no more than eight or nine inches.
The jar was big—it would hold four or five quarts of liquid and the mouth was wide. It was only a little smaller than the ones that had held Maryanne Leonard, in her parts.
Andrew held it in the crook of his bad arm, and as he stared the little creature in the eye, and inched towards it, it dawned on him that a point had come and gone in which he had not only given poor retarded Lou-Ellen Tavish up for dead, but that he had ceased to care; because what he was truly after was this . . . this thing that had killed her; this thing, whose cousin had jumped onto his chest, the afternoon he was nearly hanged outside Eliada, and maybe driven him a step nearer to madness.
The creature spat a gob of bloody phlegm in front of it, and reared back on its haunches. Andrew tried to reach for it but he could not. The God-damned arm hindered him. The thing was too quick, too quick . . .
Norma was quicker. She let go of poor Loo’s shoulders, and lunged across the table. The creature made ready to leap, but Norma grabbed it, two hands around its narrow chest. As she did, it seemed as though a dozen mouths opened up along its side, and a terrible whistling rose up. But Norma did not let go, even as she slid down along the blood-slick edge of the table and grasped the twitching thing to her.
Lines of blood beading like a necklace rose up along her face where the creature had slashed. But she did not let go—just yanked her head back so the tendons stood out on her neck, keeping her eyes clear. Yet as Andrew watched, it seemed that she became both Norma and Loo at once, his perception crossing time and memory and making a single thing.
Andrew shook his head as if that might dispel the madness. This was some narcotic that the creature spewed from its orifices and it made him and the others hallucinate. Was that what caused the families to fall into prayer as they had?
He stumbled around the table to where Norma struggled with the creature. It was face-down on the sandy ground with her half-pinning it. She looked up at him, her eyes wild, and as he got closer he saw that her knuckles were nearly as white as the creature as she struggled to crush it.
Andrew intervened. Setting the jar down on his side, himself on his knees, he grabbed hold of the thing and pushed its head through the mouth of the jar. It squealed, painting the glass with a shifting fog. Norma squeezed harder, and Andrew heard a clicking sound that he felt sure was a tiny rib cracking, and Andrew then realized that if he meant to collect a live specimen—and he did—that Norma would be as much hindrance as a help.
She was trying to kill the thing.
Andrew took his good hand and twisted Norma’s wrist. She cried out and let go, and Andrew was thus able to stuff the Juke into the jar. It scrabbled furiously as he found the lid and jammed it on top. The creature lurched back and forth, claws clicking against the glass.
Shaking, Andrew stood up and faced the families. They were still prostrate, most of them, but they looked up at Andrew in a strange way. Andrew could not tell if they meant to tear him apart, or worship at his feet.
He drew a breath.
“You,” said Andrew, motioning to one of the children. “Fetch me a nail. We will have to make holes in the lid, if this thing is to live.”
§
The creature did live, for a time. They watched it through the day, keeping it safe in its jar while Andrew tended the cut on his own good hand with alcohol and gauze, then looked to Norma’s injury. Andrew could not say for sure that he wanted it to live—Norma certainly did not. But he insisted they keep it near them—probably away from the others—and watch what it did.
“I need to know what it is,” he said when she complained about keeping it.
Norma said she was pretty sure she did know what it was, and it was better dying there.
“It’s gonna take over the soul of my folk, you don’t deal with it.” She winced as the gauze settled over her cheek. “Look at them outside.”
Andrew was more interested in looking at the thing that slumped and squirmed behind the fogged glass. But he got up and cracked the door open.
The families had built a bonfire in the middle of the village. When he and Norma had stolen off back to the house, they were already gathering sticks for it. Andrew objected—he wanted to examine Loo’s body before they cremated it. But Hank had insisted the fi
re was not to burn poor Loo.
“We ain’t to burn the Mother,” he said, as though that explained everything.
And before Andrew could say anything else, Norma whispered to him: “Don’t fight him. You got wounds to tend, Doctor.”
Now the fire was roaring, billowing smoke into the pines, over the roofs of the other shacks up here. The forest was filled with the sound of it crackling, of it whistling.
“They’re fightin’ it best they can,” said Norma. “Smoke distracts them. But . . . it’s goin’ to be a hard fight. They could be headin’ to the hill, before too long. Worshipping.” She said the word the way other old women might say “fornicating.”
Andrew shook his head. “I thought you folk didn’t care for God and priests.”
“Faerie King’s changing ’em. Working ’em.”
“Why are they like that and you all are free?”
“I’m older,” said Norma. “They’re younger. They’re all more one family then I am.”
Andrew nodded. Norma was older—in terms of her own germ plasm, she was a generation or two removed from most of these others.
“And the Juke does best in a family.”
She shrugged. “If I let it, over time it’ll get to me too.”
“I met one of those things, you know,” he said. “At the hanging tree.”
She didn’t say anything—just squinted at the smoke coming up.
Andrew thought back, to that small face he’d seen for a moment, the thing crouched on his chest. He thought about the creature that had gone after Jason in the quarantine. The quarantine where Dr. Bergstrom had hidden away his own Faerie King, the strange hermaphrodite Mister Juke. Hidden away, like, Andrew thought now, some secret, mystical treasure. A treasure that he would not let an outsider—an infidel—a nigger—like Andrew Waggoner lay eyes upon.
“If they fail . . . They’re going to want the baby Juke,” said Andrew. “Aren’t they?”
“They think you’re carin’ for it,” said Norma. “That’s the only reason they’re leavin’ you alone. Soon, I’ll be able to help them. But soon ain’t now.”
He let the door close slowly and turned to look at her. “You have a pretty good idea about how this goes. Norma, have you seen this happen before?”
She looked back at the jar. From inside, the thing might have been peering out. She nodded slowly.
Andrew took another stab in the dark. “Feeger,” he said. “That doesn’t mean feeble, does it?”
Norma shook her head. “It don’t mean feeble,” she said. “It’s a name—a family, lived here as long as us.”
“And Hank doesn’t want to ‘turn Feeger.’ That means—this family, they fell into the thrall?”
“We should kill that thing,” said Norma, stepping toward it and staring at it. “Cover its air-holes and let it smother.”
§
Andrew kept Norma clear of the jar, but he wasn’t trying save the thing’s life. He was being a scientist, he told himself: staying near, watching it through the glass, wishing again he had something to write on to record his observations. Because damnation, they were inconstant.
Was it elongate, mantis-like? A fat toad, with silvery-grey flesh pressed against the side of the glass like bloated fruit in a preserve?
A baby?
Light?
It might have been all of those things at one time or another. Notes might have helped, later.
It sat still for an hour, staring out with black and unblinking eyes. Then it became agitated, throwing itself against the sides of the jar. Andrew held it still so it wouldn’t shatter; this made the creature angrier. It whistled—that sound that Andrew had heard before, and he surmised was the thing’s speech. He sent Norma to the door, to see if anyone were coming but no one was—they were all in their mystical trance around the bonfire.
“You make them see God,” said Andrew as the thing slid down the side of the jar, like it was falling into despair. “That’s how it works, isn’t it? You make them see God with your narcotic fumes, and so they think they’re special, and that makes them think you are special. They start to worship. That how it works?”
The thing ran a clawed hand down the glass.
“Then what happens? You get bigger, with all the food they give you—and you go lay your eggs in one of their girls? And so it goes?”
“Hey,” said Norma. “Don’t be talkin’ to it. That’s how it starts!”
“Shhh,” said Andrew. He felt an awful black thing welling in him—a deep hatred that he could barely put a name to. He saw Maryanne Leonard, he saw Lou-Ellen Tavish . . . he saw Jason Thistledown, trapped in the quarantine. Dr. Nils Bergstrom, driven mad by it he figured, pulled from his course of sterilization. And he saw this thing in the jar, a dim angry shape, ever-changing, like a djinni in a bottle.
His hands were shaking as he lifted the jar off the shelf. He sat down by the stove, with the jar on his lap. The thing was moving in circles now. Spinning. Let it spin, he thought nastily, wear itself out.
“All because we’re willing to believe,” said Andrew. And with his good hand, he covered the air-holes, but he couldn’t bring himself to keep it there. He half-turned back to Norma.
“You were right to want to kill it,” he said, as the thing flopped and struggled and cursed, its whistles muffled by suffocating glass.
§
Andrew did not kill the thing right then. But it died on its own all the same. If it were older it might have made it—like the Juke that’d hung and lived in Eliada. But this was a baby—a newborn. It sent noise from the jar as it expired—tapping and scratching and whistling. It was hard to see what it was doing, because the glass was so streaked with mucous and blood. But its death was not quiet.
As the creature died, Andrew huddled like a boy in the arms of the old mountain woman, curled around the raw spot in his middle where so far as he could tell, his soul had once resided; while around them, the forest whistled and screamed the baby Juke’s dying lament up and down the mountainside.
PART II
Nature
16 - Saint Lothar
The Oracle woke a-screaming that night.
Before she was done, she was joined by her sisters—Missy, who was waiting up during that part of the night anyway, hunkered in the crook of a fallen tree—and then Lily, who slept on the flat of a creek-side rock.
The three girls screamed until they lost their wind and paused, looking around blinking to see what attention it brought them.
It took time to find out. The rest of the Feegers were camped downstream, most all of them out cold from the labour of the past days, preparing the march and making that first hard climb, down rock-face and scrub slope, carrying all they needed. By the time they got down to the stream, a spot in the crook of two mountains like the bend of a lady’s middle, they curled up and slept like the dead.
And you don’t wake the dead with just a shout. So it took time, and that did not make the Oracle happy. She demanded to know where the Feegers were. Just to show she meant business, she swatted Lily a good one across the ear.
“I have word from Him,” said the Oracle Patricia. “Gather my people.”
And so Lily and Missy took off for the camp, and the Oracle was left alone a moment before they came. She calmed herself, hand on belly, walking into the rushing stream that was made dim silver by the moon. She caressed her belly, which was still small.
She dropped to her knees in the cold mountain water, felt the ice travel up her thighs to her middle, where the Host waited for their larder to fill. If it weren’t filling, they’d start in on her straight away—but they were wise enough to know that there was a proper time of things.
Oh soon, she thought, and smiled a little. You can thank old Lothar when the time comes. He will be a Saint for the part he plays in making you strong. . . .
And her smile fell away, as she recalled the cry that had awakened her—not a cry for help, but one of dying. A dying son; a dying grandson.
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Murdered by the hand of ignorant heathen. Like those others, maybe, who stole the Son. Those ones though—those might be sinners: folk who, with strong application of word and stick, could be made to see to their God. To see to Him right.
Not like these killers. . . .
She stood now, and stared down the stream, where around the bend she saw the light of lamp and torch, as her Feeger kin made their way up the bed, to see what their Oracle wanted now.
When they got there, she made it clear that it was only a little thing, a few drops of blood, scarce an ounce of courage, and doing it would not take them long from their path.
“But there ain’t a choice,” she said. “Wicked heathen folk did a thing. They got to be shown.”
The sleepy-eyed Feegers didn’t know what to do with that at first, and for that instant, the Oracle felt a sliver of doubt.
But that doubt vanished, as a cry rang out. There in their midst, Lothar, eyes shining in the starlight, lifted his blade above his head.
“Wicked heathen!” he shouted, his voice cracking, and shouted again: “Wicked heathen!”
And the Oracle smiled upon him, and Lothar hollered some more. And before long, the rest did too.
He will be a Saint, all right, thought the Oracle. Lothar will do it for us fine.
17 - The Dauphin’s Women
The first morning after Loo’s death, Andrew Waggoner went to see her body intending to perform a post mortem examination.
He might even have done it. Good as their word, the families had neither burned nor buried her, but wrapped the girl up in a blanket and placed her back on that foul bed in the awful shack where he’d found her. He brought his physician’s bag and a candle to see her by as he went into the single room that stank so sweet of death; he shuffled in like an old, sick man, and he fell to his knees, as though in prayer.
He was not in prayer—not precisely—but as he crouched there he realized that he would not be able to cut into this girl’s body and learn anything from it. It was as much as he could do to lift the cloth from her head and look at her face. And even that, he could not do for long.
