by David Nickle
In some, death brings a final serenity. That was how it had seemed for Maryanne Leonard, whose face had been so pure and clear in death, above her mangled torso. One could have imagined that her fleeing soul had paused an instant to show a hint of the transcendence it sought. One could take comfort in such a thought.
There was no such comfort looking on Loo. Death had etched a final, leaden idiocy to her: no joy, no redemption signalled in her face. There was not even the pathos of surrender. In the end, she was just insensate meat.
Bergstrom meant to spare you from this, he thought.
Andrew knew, of course, that Bergstrom meant to do no such thing when he travelled here with his armed surgery. He meant to spare the race, his race, more abominations like Loo. But as for Loo?
The doctor was not caring for his patient; he was not caring for the unborn children she might make. He was caring for a larger body of patients than this girl and her young.
Which was something Nils Bergstrom had over Andrew Waggoner. When Andrew had made his cut, he hadn’t even been sure he could help her; he was in fact fairly certain that he could not. Andrew was looking after his own curiosity and nothing else.
And now, crouched in the darkness of the cabin, he was tending it some more. How hateful, he thought.
Norma came in to get him at lunchtime.
“Come on,” she said, laying a cool hand on his shoulder. “You’re in no shape for this.”
He looked up at her as she guided him to his feet.
“No,” he agreed, “that is true.”
He went back to Norma’s house, and drank down a tea of rose and mint and something else he couldn’t identify. He lay down in the bed while she changed the dressing on his older injuries and packed them with a compound of mud and twigs.
“What is all that?” he asked.
“Remedies,” she said.
“What kind of remedies?”
“Wild onion and ginger. Fireweed. Some yarrow. Rose and mint in the tea. Other things.” She squinted at him. “Good for body and for soul. Don’t argue. You’ll do better with them and a bit of rest. Now I got to go see to my kin.”
Andrew didn’t argue, and he did rest, and Norma was right: he did better by it all when he woke, in the pre-dawn of the second day.
He lowered his feet to the earthen floor and stood, flexing his hands in amazement. There was pain, but it felt as though it had aged, as though bones were knitting, wounds were closing. Norma was nowhere to be seen. That was fine—Andrew didn’t need to talk.
He thought that he might try another look at Loo.
Quietly, he pulled on his coat and found the physician’s bag, and made his way to the death house.
Standing outside in the crisp mountain air, Andrew thought a storm might have passed in the night—a storm that stirred up the scents of the forest floor—that somehow refreshed things, washing away the old. He shivered and gave his head a quick shake, and felt himself smile.
It didn’t take him long, however, to see that he might have a hard time conducting his examination. Lamplight flickered first between tree branches, and then as he drew nearer, from the windows of the house. Andrew could hear something like singing coming from inside, faint but certain. He slowed his step and crept closer.
In spite of his good feeling, he was not anxious to intrude, so he moved near one of the windows and tried to peer inside.
The space was almost as crowded as when he’d first arrived. But this time, things were busier. A couple of the women were going at the sheet with needle and thread, sewing it shut. Some others were sipping from mugs.
And it seemed like everybody was humming—some tune that Andrew couldn’t make out. He raised up on his toes to get a better look around, and that was when he felt the hand on his arm.
“Hem.”
Andrew turned. He was looking at Hank.
“I—I’m sorry,” said Andrew.
“You already paid your respects,” said Hank. “Time for us.”
“Of course.”
“Then go on.”
He let go of Andrew. Andrew nodded, and stepped away.
It was fine. He would not dissect the body at its funeral. He would not bother the families. He took a walk.
As Andrew walked, he found himself humming. Cheerfully. There was a tune to it, but Andrew did not think to try to place it. It was more like he followed it, as though he were listening a song some minstrel might have been playing in the woods downslope. A minstrel, or a choir.
He stepped around a copse of tamarack, onto a little shelf of rock, and when he was through that, the sun came up. There was no missing it, standing as he was on the east slope of the mountain. It gilded the rock-face—brightened the green of the moss and lichen and daubed the tops of the trees below with honey. Andrew blinked and squinted in the light, and fell back, and watched, as the breadth of the Kootenai River Valley below him was obliterated—by Heaven.
He blinked and his breath hitched, as he caught himself using his good arm against the rock.
There were gates in the sky: gates marked by two tall monoliths that bent toward one another at their peak. The gates themselves were covered in hammered gold and pinkish-white stonework and they hovered like storm clouds over the river valley. The sun rose beneath them like a straining bloody red bubble; yet within the gateway, another sun shone—this one of purest white, a light that tickled Andrew’s flesh where it touched. Andrew looked into its naked brilliance. He could not look away.
Things moved in that light—they moved, and they sang.
Andrew hummed along, and he realized that he was humming that tune that he’d half-heard in the forest, and as he did, it occurred to him that this was the same tune that he had heard coming from Loo’s death house.
Of course, a small part of him observed. It is a trick of the mind. The Juke is working on you and pulling things out of memory. The song’s part of the trick.
It was one thing to observe that in small measure, another for Andrew to entirely accept it, particularly faced with the spires and arches, the manicured gardens of the City of Heaven. A great Ferris wheel turned in its midst, carrying laughing cherubs nearer the sun, letting them fly at its crest. Marble bridges arched over canals lined with tall trees, carrying long boats painted a brilliant green.. Atop a great flight of stairs, a beautiful Dauphin sat on a throne of hammered silver in robes of white, surrounded by a dozen maidens wearing thin shifts with fine yellow hair tumbling to their waists. Wings emerged from behind him—great white expanses that Andrew first took to be part of the throne, then as they spread, he understood to be coming from the shoulders of the Dauphin himself.
As Andrew looked at him, so the Dauphin looked back. He must have been miles off—but it was as though they stood face to face, as though Andrew could feel his warm breath on his cheek. He looked into his eyes, the irises of which were at first a brilliant blue—then into the pupils, which were black as night sky.
Free thyself, Andrew Waggoner, of thy Earthly bonds.
And as Andrew listened, the irises narrowed, and the blackness of the Dauphin’s pupils became absolute, and he did as he was told.
§
Higher and higher, Andrew fell.
§
Shadows appeared and shortened on the mountainside and as they shifted, the colour changed too. Pink turned gold turned silver turned to nothing but the colour of tree and rock and blue, clear sky. There was a scream. Andrew Waggoner’s right hand twitched in its splint. A hundred wings pounded the air not far off, and then—another scream.
Heaven had come, Heaven had gone. Andrew had stayed put.
He blinked, and drew a breath, and squinted toward the sun. No gates. No city. No Dauphin.
Andrew let out a long, slow breath. “Redemption,” he said aloud. The Juke had offered him redemption. It had brought him low, and lifted him high, and it had offered him redemption from a Heaven of Andrew’s own devising. And that last trick . . .
His kn
ees trembled as he stood up. He looked at his hands; flexed the fingers on both; his broken arm gave off waves of pain, but it was as though he were listening to the pain rather than feeling it. As though he were a larger thing now, that encompassed the trees and the rocks and the sky, that sun that was too bright to look at.
That last trick . . . that glimpse of forever . . .
“You clever beast.” The Juke—the creature in the jar that killed Maryanne Leonard, that had led him to the killing of Loo—the bastard had figured a way to a man’s soul. Or at least to the parts of a man that got agitated when he started thinking of his soul.
But it wasn’t a soul that a man would be thinking of—any more than it was sleep a man thought of when morphine moved in his veins. It was all chemistry; chemistry in the service of these animals, chemistry that they used to hold a man’s attention and hold it for the kill.
Andrew stood up. Whatever chemical smell this thing had put in him, it had passed. He was here in his body—his arm did hurt, his joints did crack. And as to his soul—he felt only muddle-headed, as he would in a morphine aftermath. He stretched his legs and headed back upslope, looking for the path through the trees to the homestead.
“Nigger.”
Andrew stopped and turned.
The voice was a girl’s. It had sounded close, as though the girl stood next to him and leaned nearer as he spoke.
“Nigger.”
She was not that close. She stood in the midst of a close cropping of young pine trees, maybe a dozen yards off. The needles intersected her nakedness, rustling as she moved in them. Her hands strayed up and down her thick naked middle like spiders.
“You the nigger that killed me,” she said in a voice clear as sky. “Killed the young one.”
“No I am not,” said Andrew. “A girl got killed. You’re just part of a clever trick. You here to show me the way to Hell now?”
Loo was not in an answering mood. The pine needles rustled and shifted, and Loo’s shade shifted and was gone.
“I guess not,” said Andrew, and he smiled grimly. This trickery—it wasn’t so different really than Klansmen, dressing up like ghosts, thinking they could put the fear in foolish Negroes.
Andrew made his way over to the baby pines, looked for the tracks, the trampled path through the underbrush that he knew would not be there. He knew, but he had to check, and check again. He was under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen—one that placed credulity on him. He pushed aside branches and looked down, and sure enough, there was nothing but needles and dirt.
“Doctor.”
Once again, the voice seemed right in his ear and it was the voice of a young girl, though not Loo. Andrew stood, and turned—and as he did, he stumbled and choked.
Thin, cold arms were wrapped around his neck from behind. A wet torso pressed against his back and a mouth blew warm, damp words into his ear with breath that reeked of formaldehyde:
“It’s me, Doctor,” whispered the shade. “Maryanne.
“Tell my brothers it’s good here.”
Andrew reached up with his good hand and locked it around the narrow wrist, tried to pull it away. The more he pulled, the tighter it seemed to grip. Sharp ribs broken by a bone-saw scratched at his back.
The voice giggled. “I won’t tell,” she said. “Don’t worry, Dr. Nigger.
“I won’t tell—how you came to me that night—how you put your filthy piece in me—how you made your little nigger baby in my belly, then ripped it on out with a pair of pliers—I will not tell, Dr. Nigger,” she said. “I will not tell what an awful surgeon you are—one-armed and weak and stupid like a nigger was born. It’s between you and me, Nigger. Oh I won’t tell I won’t tell I won’t—”
And with that, Maryanne Leonard snaked her hand free from Andrew Waggoner’s fist, and her fingers cupped over his mouth and nose—and Andrew fell to a powerful sleep.
§
“Hello, Andrew.”
“Hello. It’s dark here. Norma?”
“It is dark. Yes. Norma.”
“Am I blind?”
“It’s dark.”
“Didn’t answer my question.”
A laugh for an answer.
“What happened?”
“You’re safe.”
“You’re not answering any questions, are you?”
“You haven’t asked a good one yet.”
“All right—here’s a good one. What part of the trick is this?”
Norma didn’t answer right away, but Andrew heard a rustling, as of wings. In the distance, he saw a pale bluish light—like a star.
“Well, I’m not blinded,” said Andrew.
“Follow the light,” said Norma. Her voice sounded farther off—as though she’d set off through the dark toward this light and were still walking. “Only there is your salvation.”
“Only there, hmm?” Andrew pushed himself up from the ground and stood straight in the void. “Will that take me to the Ferris wheel? The Dauphin, with his giant wings?”
“Follow the light.”
“Yes, the light. It’s the sort of thing you’d say if you were dead, Norma—a soul guiding me on. But you aren’t. You’re alive right now, looking after a dead girl’s funeral. You have been working me with such lies, such lies.”
“The Dauphin awaits,” she said.
Her voice was near now—he could smell her breath, which was sweet. And she had lost the rasp of years.
“I think,” said Andrew, “that maybe I’ll stay here. You can tell that to the Juke, Norma.”
He blinked as he spoke. It was later in the day: the sun was higher than it was when he’d seen Heaven in it. And he had moved a distance in that time. He sat next to a low stump on a plateau of stumps and small pine trees. His shirt and trousers were filthy.
The day had also marched on since he’d last looked. Andrew thought the sun had moved a good three hours. Andrew was tired—deep, soul-tired—but he was elated.
I defeated it, he thought. I faced that thing down, and I defeated it.
Andrew pushed himself to his feet with a wince. The land here was clear for four, five hundred yards around him. Downslope, he saw wide paths cut in the trees, starting to grow in with underbrush. Harper’s men had been at work here, but they had not been back in some time.
Still, he could follow one of those paths and eventually find himself back at Eliada.
Andrew marched upslope a few dozen yards. His doctor’s bag lay where he’d dropped it as he twitched and stumbled down the hillside. Miraculously, it was intact.
No, Andrew corrected himself. There was no miracle because there had been no battle. He had not been attacked by her, any more than he had encountered Loo in the trees.
The mechanism of this thing had simply preyed upon his own doubts and fears and aspirations. It had somehow aided him in isolating something that for lack of a better word might be called “sin.” And for a physician, sin was failure.
Andrew shut his eyes. Oh yes—the Juke had done its work with the brainless cruelty of a clockwork. It had done everything that it might, to draw him into its web—to ripen him for what amounted to a religious conversion.
All of which gave rise to another question: why hadn’t the strategy worked?
It should have. Andrew thought himself clever enough. He had been a good student and, recent experience notwithstanding, a competent physician. But he was under no illusions that he possessed heroic will or genius insight. What was it that saved him?
Norma said the Juke tended to make its deepest mark upon close families—through the amniotic fluid and germ plasm of the host mother, no doubt. And Andrew was far enough from the stem of that family tree that he was barely affected at all.
He flexed the fingers of his broken arm, and thought then about another possibility.
Perhaps it was something in Norma’s remarkably curative tea.
What was it she had said? Good for the body and the soul. Might she have discovered some root, som
e concoction that lessened the ability of this thing to rob men and women of their wills? It would explain how it was that she and her ilk had lived in this place for so long, without falling into the thrall of these creatures.
I will have to ask her for the recipe—as soon as I find my way back, he thought as he hefted the bag in his good hand and started to climb back up the slope. It wouldn’t be hard—there was a good plume of wood smoke climbing into the sky. Perhaps, thought Andrew as he climbed, they are cremating Loo now.
§
Or perhaps, Andrew thought as he first took sight of what was left of the Tavish’s homestead, the Juke hasn’t finished with me yet.
At the opening of the path was a body of a man, his intestines torn from his middle and stretched through the blood-quickened dirt, mingled with pine needles. More corpses were stacked in the middle of the common, in the same place that just a day ago, Andrew had worked his meagre skills to try to save Loo. The table was gone—perhaps locked in the still-smouldering ruins of the house where Loo had been kept in her last weeks.
Andrew knelt down by the first corpse and took a good look at the cut. Nothing had clawed its way out of this one and no creature had torn it either. The cut was crosswise across the gut, and it was neat enough to be from a blade, not neat enough to suggest a sharp one.
Andrew touched the man’s face. He stared with wide milky eyes up into the pines. Blood flecked his beard, and flies buzzed in Andrew’s ear. He let go of the man’s face, and touched his fingertip to the cooling tube of intestine, and drew a deep breath of the smell of this place—and uncertainly at first, he stood up, shaking with the realization: this was no chemical fakery. This was not something that Norma’s tea would drive off.
Andrew left the single corpse and made his way through a thickening cloud of flies to the others. Eyes stinging, he made a count: there were seven here, among them what was left of Hank, his skull split from the side. One eye hung out, its orb crusted with dirt where it touched the ground.
He wanted to cry out, to call for Norma—but he didn’t. The ones who’d done this weren’t in sight, but they mightn’t be far. So Andrew picked up his doctor’s bag, and propelled by the slimmest hope he struggled his way up the hill as quick as he might, to Norma Tavish’s cabin.
