by David Nickle
Andrew got to his feet, biting down on another scream. His arm was bad now—and he wondered if he would be able to keep it when this was all done. If he survived.
He staggered to Annie, and grabbed her with his good arm.
“Come on, Annie,” he said, and when she looked confused, he added: “Let’s go see Jesus.”
That was all it took to convince her. The two of them dashed into the belly of the sawmill, stepping into shadow even as the buck-skinned man pointed his hatchet at them and bleated into the silence.
§
The angels became quiet, and fell to the earth, the trunks of trees, and a silence fell upon the world. Ruth blinked and looked around, and down at her gun. The angels looked around themselves too, their faces wide, innocent—as Ruth Harper’s, only in miniature, in a multitude.
Jason opened his mouth to speak to her, tell her to put the gun down, but no words would come. He looked from one to another—to Ruth Harper, perched in the low crook of a branch, to others on the edge of the road, peering between strands of grass; still more higher in the branches of the tamarack, gazing down at him. Silent.
“They’re foolin’ you, Jason,” said Sam Green.
“I know,” he whispered.
“They’re the Devil.”
Jason looked down at Green. “Ain’t so,” he said. “They’re animals.”
Green looked up at him, his eyes ghastly white in their sockets. “They’re more than animals. They’re liars, Jason. They could . . . they make you think they’re God. They could be . . . they could be God.”
“You sayin’ there’s no God?”
“Don’t blaspheme,” he said. “God’s great and true. But these things . . . They act so much like God . . . like Jesus . . . A fellow could be made to wonder, where to place his faith exactly. In God and Jesus, or these things that look just the same? And that’s the Devil’s work.”
“I’m not fooled,” said Jason.
“Yeah,” said Green. “Not now you aren’t. That whistling’s stopped. You have to make up your mind. Before it starts.”
“It starts.”
The voice came from everywhere—all the creatures, in words and whistling. Ruth—the hundred or more of her, that inhabited the trees—they all looked up, and Ruth opened her mouth and the song came up again, and the face of Ruth Harper faded from the world, until it was only Her own, held high.
Jason looked at Sam Green—watched him shift and change again, the features melt, and him grow, until it wasn’t Sam Green anymore—but John Thistledown, burned not from a battle at the Harper mansion, but ten years in Hell. Ruth was singing this—making another lie for him, the way the song had before. Filled with the Juke’s issue, she was spinning its lie where the other had stopped.
Jason stood up, let go of the jar.
“Go on,” he said. “Do the hard thing. Stop the spread.”
“Good boy,” said the apparition.
And then, as the song she sang grew, Jason stepped up to Ruth Harper.
And she sang, and Jason said, “Yes,” and then took hold of the gun in her limp hand. Before she could let go of it, he squeezed her finger on the trigger.
§
Andrew wished he had a notebook, or better, a camera, and the wit and time to use it. Standing before Mister Juke, stripped of illusion, it occurred to him that he might well have been the first man—the first scientist—to properly see this thing. . . .
This God.
Mister Juke hung in the rafters of the great building; stretched out, the creature almost extended its full length, like the branches of some tree. Any resemblance to a man was gone now. The construction that Andrew had made in his own mind, of some great Dauphin, the all-seeing giant who ruled over a Parisian Heaven . . . that was nowhere to be seen in the thing this creature had become. One might be tempted to call it formless, for it was hard to see where a head, arms—even an abdomen—might begin and end.
The only feature Andrew make out clearly was its mouths.
They descended on fleshy stalks, from the rafters over the great saw-blade which now sat still. They were circular too, those mouths, like those of a lamprey eel’s. Andrew wasn’t close enough to tell if the similarity extended to concentric circles of teeth; the way they dangled and twitched, he decided it best not to check. But small wonder that the attempt to hang this thing had so little effect. Who could say what shape the Juke had possessed, even when Bergstrom took it down from the mountain in its infant state? The creature’s seduction of this town, of the fools who would first try to kill it, then attempt worship of it, had drawn its lies from their hearts from the very first. Man or woman or hermaphrodite—the thing was as suggestive as a cloud, and as malleable.
“What—oh Lord,” Annie said, and Andrew squeezed her arm hard.
“We have an instant, Annie. And then we’re gone.” He pointed to the far side of the sawmill, where the bay opened up onto the river itself; he spared a glance over his shoulder, where the north-facing bay filled with shadows of the Feegers.
“Stay!” he shouted at them, and still conditioned to hear his voice as the Juke’s, they obeyed.
“Come on,” he urged Annie.
She went with him, but as they emerged in the light, she hesitated once more.
“Doctor—are we sure we want to—I mean, how do we know we’re not turning our back on God?”
Andrew started down the wooden ramp that led straight into the frigid, fast-moving waters of the Kootanai River, then he looked at Annie.
“All things considered,” he said, “we don’t.”
And then before she could raise another question, he took hold of her, pulled her on down the ramp—and Andrew Waggoner clung to Annie Rowe, and she clung to him, as the freezing waters enfolded them both; and bore them down-river, clear of God and man, and Juke; empty of everything but the clarifying shock of the true world.
31 - The Cruelty of Sam Green
Sam Green walked among the living, and they scarcely made a note of his passing.
They were busy with the completion of their own work—work that had begun in the early hours of this day, when one or another had awoken with the idea to go back of the house, take the milk cow by a rope, or to open up the hen house and gather the fattest, or visit the pigsty and take a suckling—take those animals, and bring them down to the Cathedral. They didn’t know much when they did that, but now, the Nigger prophet had told them as clear as they could understand: God hungered, there in his Cathedral. He hungered, and He expected something to be done about that.
So the living formed into a column, moving up the ramp to the Cathedral’s great doors; past the Oracle, the Madonna weeping over a child, while another sang sweetly, her voice not hitching even as tears streamed down her cheeks. The dead man joined the throng, his filthy, blistering flesh inches from the smooth, near-to-perfect skin of a young blond-haired man with a thin moustache and bright, bright eyes. Sam didn’t know his name, but he’d seen him, working the team of horses that had cleared the southern slopes of the hill last fall. The fellow had a pair of chickens—one in each arm, kicking and pecking. He regarded Sam.
“You don’t look well,” he said.
“I been better.”
“Maybe you will be,” said the young man, nodding toward the great dark gates of their new cathedral. The song was met with the whine of the saw-blade spinning up. “I bet He’s merciful.” The dead man huffed, reached into the jar he carried, and dabbed him on the cheek.
“Bless you, son,” Sam said when the fellow looked at him oddly.
“Well bless you,” he said, touching his cheek and sniffing at his finger.
They drew toward the Oracle—a sickly girl who would have gone by the name of Feeger. Her eyes were hollow and wet, and Sam could see every section of her spine through her soaked-through frock as she bent over the dead girl—another Feeger, surely. Another one—black-maned like all of them, with thick shoulders and an idiot stare—tried to touch the Or
acle; but his hand came away, as though burned.
Sam had heard tell of these Feegers often enough, visiting the other folk on the hill who lived in such fear of them. They were certainly terrifying enough, coming into the kitchen of a mansion with big home-made blades and axes, murdering rich men and their wives . . . setting the beams on fire, as a fellow emptied his iron into their bellies, and more came, stoking the flames and finally leaving that fellow for the dead. . . .
Here, grieving for their own—they were almost deserving of pity. Weeping, they reminded him of others living on the mountain slopes—poor folk living hard, sickly lives in Heaven’s shadow. The people Bergstrom would so methodically butcher.
He paused a moment, dipped his thumb into the jar, and touched the hem of the singing girl’s sleeve. The big lad looked up at him, and Sam thought this might be the end of his walk. But he turned back to the Oracle, and tried again to rest his hand on her back. The singer looked at him in such a way that caused him to think: She knows.
But she did not spare him by crying out. Sam Green huffed, and continued on through the wide doors of the mill.
“Oh my,” said a beautiful young red-haired wife next to him, carrying a pig under her arm, looking up at the dark rafters. Sam looked there too.
“Our Father,” he said, “who art in Heaven . . .”
“Hallow’d be Thy name,” continued the wife, not sparing Sam a glance as he dabbed her arm.
“Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done,” said two men a little ways behind him, coaxing their nervous cow into the shadow of the mill, “on Earth, as it is ’n Heaven.”
Sam let them finish.
He would like to have prayed now—talked to God, asked Jesus Christ for forgiveness of his sins, because when a man knows the moment of his passing, that’s what a man does.
But looking up into the trembling maws of this God—he didn’t want to curry favour, be forgiven, granted entry into This One’s Heaven. And no amount of supplication before the true one and His Son would do much good. Not held against the thing he was about to do; the thing he’d already done.
As he stood there, he watched as the blond-haired man handed one of chickens to a black-haired Feeger who stood by the whirling saw. The bird squawked and struggled as the Feeger lowered it to the spinning blade. Blood fountained and sprayed high, and a stalk whipped down from the rafters. The Feeger tossed the bird into the air, and the stalk twisted and snatched, and the bird was gone. The Feeger took the man’s other chicken.
“Where’s your sacrifice?” asked the wife, holding the kicking pig like it was a baby.
Sam smiled as best he could.
“Right here,” he said, and held the jar from Cracked Wheel, Montana over his head. He dabbed two fingers in it.
“You sure that’ll please Him?” she asked.
Sam Green turned in place, both arms outstretched, and looked up into the face of Mister Juke.
“God forgive me,” he said, “if it does.”
She gave him a strange look and shrugged, and took her baby pig to the saw.
And Sam Green, fever rising, turned beneath God, like a stumbling, half-drunk dancer—again and again, until his legs gave out and he tumbled to the floor, and the jar rolled from his fingers, and a dry, pale thing no bigger than a thumb fell from it—and as its germ spread among the flock here at Eliada, in the rafters of the sawmill, Mister Juke took what Sam Green prayed would be His last meal.
32 - Death and Resurrection
Annie Rowe was a woman of hidden depths.
Andrew concluded this as he sipped the broth from the tin cup she gave him. It was a fish broth, made from a sturgeon she’d managed to catch somehow in the first day. Andrew had no idea how she would have managed such a thing—he was barely conscious when they came out of the Kootenai, and she spotted the ruined cabin and together they hauled towards it, soaking with ice-cold river-water. He might have recalled stumbling over the remains of the door, under the broken roof of the cabin; collapsing against the log wall . . .
But beyond that, all he could tell was that he was alive and dry and warmed by a fire built on bare rock floor under the night sky. Annie was alongside him propped against the wall, her hair drawn back tight and her face smudged with soot.
She’d re-splinted his elbow; bandaged cuts new and old. And there was the broth, which he insisted on holding himself in his good hand, although Annie wasn’t pleased.
“I can feed it to you, Doctor. You’re still weak. Don’t want to spill.”
“You’ve been doing quite a lot,” he said. “Saved my life, the things you did.”
“Just returning the favour,” she said. “Don’t know what would’ve become of me, you hadn’t . . .” She trailed off, and Andrew let her. The Juke’s call had been strong in her, and she would have been lost to it—were it not for the shock of the river, the distance it carried them. He sipped at the soup, and took a deep swallow. It warmed him fierce, and he made sure Annie saw him appreciate it.
“But you need to get your rest,” she said finally. “You’ve been about the worst patient I’ve ever had.”
He sighed. “How long’ve I been asleep?”
“Two days,” she said. “Nearly.”
“And in that time, you found this place, built up a fire, somehow found these—” he pointed to a bandage on his head, another on his shoulder “—and managed to figure out how to catch a fish without tackle or net.”
Annie smiled. “Guided by an Unseen hand,” she said. Then, catching the expression on his face perhaps, added: “Don’t worry, Doctor. I’m not going back to that.” She crouched down against the log wall.
“How’d all this come about?”
“This place is nothing but an old homestead,” she said. “Barely got a roof on it anymore. But you can see it from the river, so spotting it was easy enough, and we had to stop somewhere. You’d have died, Doctor. Me too, likely. Managed to find an old pot and an axe-blade and that cup you’re drinking from. Just like home.”
“All right,” said Andrew. “And you’re a secret expert fisher, and you pulled that sturgeon from the river with your bare hands. And where’d these bandages come from?”
“Well, I’m no expert fish-catcher,” she said. “The bandages—they came from the same source as the fish.”
Andrew handed her the cup of broth. She took a sip herself. “Stop being mysterious,” he said. “Where—”
“Outside.” She returned the cup to Andrew, and stood. “I shall fetch him.”
§
“Jason!”
Jason Thistledown was leaning against what was left of the door frame. He was dressed in a pair of trousers and a smock that Andrew recognized from the hospital, and he looked like he’d just come from there—scrubbed clean, fine hair unencumbered by grease or dirt as it fluttered in the updraft from the fire.
“Evening, Doctor,” he said.
Andrew shifted so he sat higher against the wall, and blinked again as a disturbing implication came over him. The Jukes had tried everything on him. They showed him Heaven as Paris. They sent the shades of Maryanne Leonard and Loo Tavish to scold him.
Why not wake him up in this safe place, wounds magically bandaged, warm soup in his belly—set Annie Rowe by his side—and show him the boy, Jason Thistledown, he’d sworn to rescue?
“You can thank Jason Thistledown for the fish,” said Annie. “And the bandages too. He appeared here not a couple hours after we found this place. In a canoe. With—”
“Lucky I found you first,” said Jason. “You could see the smoke from that fire for miles. Probably as far off as Eliada, if they’d been thinking to look.”
“You took a canoe?”
“Found it at a dock not far from the hospital,” said Jason. “So I took another doctor’s bag, some blankets . . . and we set off down the river. You an’ the nurse made it a good way in that river. Surprised you didn’t drown before you got here.”
Andrew frowned. “You said we. Wh
o are you travelling with? Not your aunt—I mean—”
Jason shook his head, and looked into the fire, quiet.
“She was killed,” said Annie finally. “After we left. Sam Green did it. No need to make the boy relive it.”
Andrew looked at Annie. “Who then?”
“Miss Ruth Harper,” said Annie, and Jason nodded.
“She lives,” he said. “But she’s going to need some help.”
“She—” Andrew began piecing things together. “She was infected—with the same thing that killed your town. Germaine told me she’d done that, just before we met. And it’s been two days . . . and she lives? So she’s immune?” He thought about that—that the daughter of a fine white family, the wealthiest white family in Eliada, was also marked the strongest here by Germaine Frost’s diabolical test.
“It’s not an immunity,” said Annie. “She’s showing no signs of that . . . Cave Germ. But we think something else is happening.”
“She spent some time with that Mister Juke,” said Jason. “Alone. Think he—” Jason finally looked up from the fire, and when he met Andrew’s eyes his own were those of a child again, sad and alone. “—think he raped her, like he did Maryanne Leonard.”
Andrew sighed. “You’ve examined her?” he asked Annie, and she nodded.
“She’s healthy.”
“She ain’t,” said Jason, his voice breaking. “Her foot’s bad. . . . She—”
