by David Nickle
“How do you know?” asked Jason.
“Because,” said Ruth, “it is a well-known fact that the Belgians don’t let Frenchmen into Africa any more. Particularly not their precious Congo, wherever that is.”
“You were correct, however, about Mrs. Frost’s intimacy with this fellow—or at least his intimacy with her. See?” Louise pointed to a paragraph. “Tu! Not vous. Tu! He is addressing her as an intimate. And could this be chère?”
“Love letters.” Ruth gave a low laugh. “Well that is one secret that we’ve uncovered. Are you shattered, Jason?”
“No,” said Jason.
“And what’s this?” said Louise. “Germe de grotte?”
“Perhaps an affectionate nickname?” offered Ruth.
“It can’t be that affectionate,” said Louise, frowning. “It translates as Germ of the Cave. Or Cave Germ.”
“Well, you know the French,” said Ruth.
“I do not,” said Louise. “And in any event, this fellow is Belgian.”
“Does your French Grammar learning let you read more than a couple words? What’s the letter about? Aside from being intimate I mean,” said Jason.
Louise fixed him with a glare. “I am more than capable of translation,” she said, “but it is not a simple matter.”
“No, it surely is not,” said Ruth. “Why, I can recall you spending entire nights translating filthy French poetry from that Rimbaud fellow.”
“Ruth! I did no such—”
Ruth interrupted. “We do not, however, have time to wait for a translation. It’s only a few hours ’til sunrise. So I propose this: you remain here and complete a translation of those letters. We, meanwhile, shall investigate the mysterious quarantine—then rendezvous back here an hour before the sun comes up, and share our discoveries.”
Jason could see that Louise was thinking about objecting to this; Ruth was, in her plan, brushing Louise aside. But from the way that Louise kept glancing down at that letter and the other ones still in their stack, Jason could tell that she was maybe more curious about what was going on with M. Dulac and Germaine Frost than she was about what was going on in the quarantine. So when she finally sighed and acquiesced, Jason was not surprised.
“Splendid!” said Ruth, standing abruptly. “Then we shall be off.”
She disappeared into the dark for a moment, and before Jason could follow far, returned with a lantern and a hatchet, the second of which she handed to Jason. “It’s not a six-gun,” she said, “but it’s better than nought.”
Louise shook her head absently, as she leaned over the first of the letters from M. Dulac, and Jason and Ruth slipped out into the night.
§
They could not have been more than ten paces from the door when Ruth stopped, put a hand on Jason’s neck and touched his lips with hers. This kiss lasted longer than the other two, and when they parted, she sighed. “I think that I’m no longer afraid,” she said. “Of kissing, that is. Are you still frightened of the quarantine?”
Jason was, but he didn’t say so. Ruth laid her palm on his chest and looked up at him. The moon was past full, and low in the sky, and it filtered into a silvered filigree through the branches and leaves of the apple trees. She was smiling, mouth open. He couldn’t see her teeth.
“Your heart is thundering,” she said. “You are still afraid.”
Jason lifted her hand from his chest and stepped back. He was afraid. But it was not the quarantine that made him so.
It was that vision of Ruth Harper, small as a doll, mouth filled with sharp teeth and eyes black and mischievous. It was a mad fear; he knew that, but it was a true one—like she was some terrible Gorgon. He could not keep looking at her, but he couldn’t look away.
“May I help, Jason?” She closed the distance and took his hand. “Think of the first time we met. Do you remember? On the train?”
“Sure,” he said. “Although we didn’t meet on the train. It was after.”
“That is when we spoke. We saw each other some time before. I’ve been thinking on that, all this long evening. It was remarkable, don’t you think? That the two of us should, amid all those other passengers, lock our gazes across a rail platform?”
“I didn’t know our gazes locked,” said Jason, and Ruth laughed.
Jason swallowed. Ruth took his hand, opened the fingers and placed it against her cheek. Jason found her birthmark with his thumb, ran his finger along it. She lifted her chin and moved it so she nuzzled his hand, and that was all it took: the panic that had run up and down his back gave way to something finer.
“And here we are,” she said, “mere days later, off on a grand adventure—at one another’s side.”
“That’s something,” agreed Jason.
“Something,” she murmured. “Hmmph. I will tell you what it is, Jason Thistledown. It is fate.”
She peeled Jason’s fingers from her cheek. “Fate,” she said, “has seen us this far. It helped me overcome my terror at your touch. It helped us, through the good fortune of that mystery in your aunt’s bag, it distracted Louise from our adventure so we might have a few hours alone before you must leave. Now, let it help you.” She intertwined her fingers with his, and twisted so they were alongside each other.
“Come,” she said, leading the way along a path. “I know a way past father’s guard. Let’s be on our way.”
They headed into the orchard, along a row and then they turned and went along another, and it wasn’t long before he was entirely turned around and lost. He hoped that Ruth was not trusting entirely to fate to see them through the orchard and had some idea where they were going. Jason had read enough of the Bulfinch’s to know that not all fate was the helpful kind.
Before he could worry too much about that, they stepped out from the trees and back into moonlight. There was a rail fence in front of them, and past that, a gentle slope leading down to some back gardens, and then to a row of what Jason pegged for worker houses.
Ruth set the lantern on the ground and hoisted herself up on the fence so that she straddled it. Jason followed her over.
They headed down a footpath between beds of vegetables. Jason moved low to the ground and Ruth copied him, and kept up with him when he sprinted for the road. It was only there that Jason took a good look down the slope to the town, and noticed the lights.
Ruth stopped short beside him, huffing and clutching her lantern. “Oh my,” she said. “That is queer.”
They had a good view of the main streets of the town, and those streets were easy to tell, because they were lit up with lamps, bright like star-points, swinging and twinkling up and down the avenues. More light came from windows, shining squares of light that flickered with flame and intersecting shadows. That was strange—all those lights and activity past three in the morning—but that wasn’t what made him worry so.
It was the whistling.
The whistling was everywhere—and it was the same kind of sound as he had heard that first night, that filled the whole of the quarantine and got into the back of his head. The same as came up at the picnic, when Bergstrom made such a scene.
As he listened now, Jason wondered if maybe he’d been hearing it all through the night, since he snuck out from the house and made his way down here—got to wondering if maybe it had granted Louise the fascination with the love letters from Africa and Ruth her sense that fate decided everything. It was the sound, after all, that had nearly robbed him of his will, when he saw the thing—the Juke, whatever it was—in the quarantine.
And then, as fast as it had come, the whistling faded. And there were just the lights. Hundreds of lights.
Another light appeared beside him, as Ruth struck a match and held it to the wick of the lantern she carried. “I don’t know what they’re doing. But we won’t be able to sneak past them. We may as well hide in plain sight.”
Jason sighed. He slid the hatchet into his belt, and lifted his shirt so it covered the blade. He wished that fate, if it were watching
over them, would have at least seen fit to provide him with a decent gun.
§
The street was empty, but it was lit by the flickering lamps in the windows and on the porches of the worker houses. Jason started, as he saw one of those lights blacked out for a moment—blacked out by something that was moving in the dark outside. Ruth didn’t notice that; she was too busy trying to hide in plain sight, as she’d said. She held the lantern in front of her like a banner in some parade.
“Jason,” she said, as they approached St. Cyprian’s, “I should thank you for your kind reply to my letter.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“And you answered many of my questions. But not everything.”
She stopped at the path to the church. “I can remember very specifically in fact, a particular question I put to you that you did not answer.”
“That so?”
“That’s so, yes. I asked you: why did you think that this fellow was sent to murder Dr. Waggoner? And you wrote me back a fine letter about many things besides that.” She lifted the lantern to shine it on Jason’s face, and peered into his eyes seriously. “Don’t think you can avoid all my questions, Mr. Thistledown, now that we have become intimates.”
Jason looked back at her. He was on the edge of telling her the whole thing: how Sam Green had warned him of the attempt on Waggoner’s life, and how Dr. Nils Bergstrom was tied up in it, and everything else. It would be easier to betray Sam Green to Garrison Harper’s daughter, he thought, than it would have to tell Aunt Germaine the truth about what had happened in the quarantine. Jason wondered about that: this was a betrayal, pure and simple—not just keeping a secret from someone he’d stopped trusting anyhow.
But it was betrayal to Ruth Harper, who was, as she’d put it, an intimate.
“Well, Jason?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry but I can’t.”
She narrowed her eyes and looked at him more closely. Jason was sure then that she would become angry and stalk off, leaving him alone in the road. But she surprised him.
“I see that’s so,” she said. “I’ll not press the point. You can tell me about that when you tell me more about your papa.”
“All right,” said Jason.
“All right,” she said, and pulled the lantern away.
The whistling started up again as they passed the sawmill. Jason by this time had one hand clutched around the handle of the hatchet, his grip all the tighter for the fact that he knew it would be of scant help, if all those folks turned their attention away from the mill and its maze of lumber. He leaned to Ruth and said that he thought it was time to snuff the light and she agreed.
The crowd around the mill was prodigious; there were easily as many people there as had attended the picnic that afternoon. Their attention on the mill was absolute; they stood facing the walls and between the stacks of lumber, as though waiting for someone to emerge from it.
“Why are they whistling?” whispered Ruth.
“I don’t think they are whistling at all,” said Jason, and then looked to his feet when a woman dressed scandalously in a long nightgown, turned to him and made a shushing noise. Ruth shuddered, and hurried toward the hospital.
It wasn’t far—indeed, they came upon it sooner than they might have thought, because unlike most of the other buildings in Eliada, the hospital was dark. Jason pulled the hatchet from his belt.
Perhaps they both could feel it: the darkness was only an indication of what was truly going on there. They hunkered low as their eyes adjusted to the lower light.
There was movement around the hospital’s perimeter. Maybe more of Sam Green’s men, perhaps guarding Nowak. But they moved different. There was a flutter, like a skirt.
Jason touched Ruth’s shoulder and pointed. She whispered: “I see.”
Jason leaned to her ear, so near her hair tickled his cheek. In a few short breaths, he relayed a plan that he thought might work. When he was done, she nodded, brushed his jaw with her fingertips, and got to her feet.
§
Absent sheets and masks, Jason gave up the notion of hiding in plain sight. Better to creep up on the quarantine through the woods surrounding it, emerge from the farthest point from the hospital, and wait until the guards had moved ’round the corner to make the final rush.
Thinking about it made it seem easy. Doing it was something else.
The underbrush was thick with high, curling ferns that came past Ruth’s waist and that combined with the darkness made it difficult to move quickly; nearly impossible to move quietly. So to avoid getting spotted, they decided to go back farther into the woods.
This turned out better or at least easier: under the canopy of the trees, the underbrush thinned, and they were soon walking between pine and fir trees on a floor of needles. Jason’s eyes were well-enough fixed to the dark that he could navigate, stepping around a deadfall here and spotting a little spring-bed there—and still keep an eye on the clearing where the quarantine sat.
Finally, he judged them far enough around to make the plunge back. They stood on a small rise of rock and moss, in a spot near a clear sky that made a lonely patch of ferns behind them.
“All right,” he whispered. “You ready, Ruth?”
There was no answer.
“Ruth?” he said again, and turned.
Ruth stood with her back to him. He thought she was saying something, but it was hard to tell: her head shook and bent side to side, but the words weren’t clear. Jason stepped beside her, and as he did so she bent to her knees, peering down from the rocks. Something was moving down there, in a nest made of crushed ferns. He couldn’t tell what it was. He knelt down too, and put his hand on Ruth’s shoulder. Her back was twitching, like she was sobbing. He looked at her, but she shook her head, and pointed down. Jason looked.
It was a girl. Jason thought she might be a little bit older than he and a bit older than Ruth. She had dark curly hair. Far as he could tell, she was naked. The sweat on her breasts and collarbone caught errant rays of moonlight as her chest worked up and down. Her eyes were only half-opened, looking up at the little space of star canopy, and she had a sleepy smile like she was dreaming up a fine night for herself, there in the ferns.
Except it wasn’t just her in the ferns this night. Looking down her stomach, Jason saw something else curled there. First it reminded him of a raccoon, or some other small animal—but it hunched below her navel, and in between her legs was where it rested—and it seemed to be moving, with the same rhythm that Ruth’s shoulder moved when she sobbed.
Jason let go of her and half-slid down the rock. He raised up his axe.
“I’ve seen this thing before,” he said to Ruth.
Oh yes, Jason had seen it before. Last time, it had been crawling up his own stomach, making a run for his privates. Tonight, it had latched onto this girl’s parts—and it was eating or tearing at them or fooling them.
Whatever it was doing, Jason wasn’t about to let it finish. He made his way up close, reached over and grabbed at the thing’s pulsing back. He grasped smooth flesh that felt like pig, and he tried to yank. But the thing wouldn’t budge—it had itself hitched in there somehow.
Jason had to restrain himself from taking the hatchet to it; he knew if he did he’d hurt this poor girl. No, he had to get hold. He turned back to Ruth, to ask her to give him a hand.
He couldn’t see her.
“Ruth?” he said. He stood up and peered over the rock face. In the distance he could see the squared shapes of the quarantine and the hospital. He thought he might be able to hear the sound of someone scrabbling through underbrush, but it was hard to tell over the whistling.
Jason felt his heart hammering. Ruth had run off. She’d panicked, fled. He looked back down. The girl was writhing, her hands on the rolling back of the thing as it snuffled deeper between her legs. Her back arched and her knees bent.
Jason swore, and turned back to the thing. He buried the hatchet in the gro
und beside him, got down on his knees, and with both hands grasped the creature. The girl screamed as he pulled, tugging back with all her might, and Jason nearly lost his grip before he reached around and threw his weight backwards.
And all at once, the thing came away. The girl screamed again and scrabbled away—and Jason held the creature to his chest and rolled in the opposite direction. It was like wrestling a hairless raccoon, with claws and teeth tearing at his shirt.
He pushed it away, and found himself face to face with the beast. This time, there was no chance of mistaking the thing for a tiny Ruth Harper. The alternative was nothing short of demonic—the thing’s black eyes glittered in the light and its sharp teeth snapped as he held it back.
It slashed out, running a claw down his cheek—and as he held it, something else pricked at his ribs. He pushed the thing away so hard that he convulsed in so doing, and the creature rolled away. As it rolled, he saw briefly something that looked like a dagger, only knobbed and twisted, point into the air. That, he was sure, was the thing that tried to pierce his belly. It may have been the thing that it had used to hang onto the girl.
He reached behind him, found the handle of the hatchet and pulled it from the ground. As he did this, the thing that had previously seemed the size of a raccoon began to unfold itself. It stood on thin legs, a small hunched body and dangling clawed arms, the height of a child. It seemed to convulse then—like it was coughing. Jason’s eyes stung, and he felt like he wanted to sneeze.
He didn’t. Instead, he swung the axe.
It was a wide swing, and it nearly sent him to the forest floor, but the blade hit the thing where its shoulder might have been. It felt as though Jason had cut into a sapling.
Jason twisted the handle and pulled it free, and for a moment he stood straight, wobbling like a drunk, and the thing stood still too. They stared at each other, as though waiting to see which one would fall first. Jason was sure the creature would go down, but it surprised him. It twitched, and bent, and with impossible speed dove into the shade underneath the ferns.
