Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

1 - Mister Juke

APRIL, 1911

Not ghosts.

Although their owners might have pretended otherwise, Dr. Andrew Waggoner knew it. The sheets that loitered and whistled and kicked at the mud on this dark hillside in northern Idaho tonight were not ghosts; nor were they devils, nor duppies, nor spectral things of any kind.

When Andrew was a good deal younger, his Uncle Elmer had told him: ghosts were what the Ku Klux Klan originally intended with those sheets they wore. They wanted to make the poor Negroes think they were beset by the implacable spirits of the dead, Devils straight up from Hell—and not merely small-souled white men with lynching on their minds.

Maybe on some other Negro, the evil light of the kerosene flame in the twilight would make a mix with all those flapping sheets, that eerie un-musical whistling noise they were making, and that would be enough. But Andrew Waggoner was not that kind of Negro and he knew.

These were not ghosts.

They’d got Andrew just outside the hospital—done the deed as the last of the sun fell toward the pine-toothed edge of the Selkirk Mountains, west of Eliada. If he’d been paying better heed, not been smoking and brooding and keeping to himself, Andrew might have seen who they were. He didn’t think anyone would be caught wearing their mama’s bedsheets that close to town.

It didn’t really matter much, of course. The truth of his predicament was awful in its simplicity: five men in sheets. One Negro, tied and on his knees. How does something like that end well?

Andrew did not think of himself as a religious man, but as one of those sheets bent down in front of him, he thought about praying.

As matters resolved, however, he didn’t have to pray or even make up his mind on the matter. If God was paying any attention at all, He spared Andrew the indignity of supplication by tossing down a bone.

“You are going to watch this, Dr. Nigger.”

The man in the sheet spoke in a voice Andrew thought he might recognize.

“It is Waggoner,” said Andrew. “Dr. Waggoner.”

He said “doctor” slowly, because he wanted to make that part of his name especially clear right now. Andrew Waggoner was a doctor, trained by some of the finest surgeons at Paris Medical School, graduated with honours, Class of 1908; he had been a resident here at Eliada’s hospital for nearly a year. He was not some hog-tied vagabond nigger that these men could feel right about killing.

“This isn’t right, Robert,” he said. “You got to know that.”

The sheet rustled like it was in the wind. The two eyes peering out through holes in it narrowed. “You don’t know names,” said the sheet. “You don’t know nothing.”

Andrew let himself smile. He was right. Robert Vernon was the man behind that sheet and that gave him something to grasp.

“Robert,” Andrew said, “you sweep floors at the hospital. You got a sister in Lewiston with a wedding coming up—it’s Harriet, am I right? Harriet Ver—”

Andrew didn’t get the last name of “Vernon” out, because at that moment the sheet drove its fist into his gut. He wished he could have stood up to it, but it was a vicious punch and it sent the air whooping out of his lungs and made him bend and fall hard on his behind.

For an instant, looking up at the sheet, he hated himself as much as the rest of them hated him. Getting on a first-name basis with white men in whiter sheets wasn’t going to get him anything. He was going to die, die twitching at the end of a rope, and there was nothing he could do about it—and he had it coming, stupid weak nigger that he was.

It was only for an instant. As soon as he heard the whimpering, wheedling sounds coming from behind that sheet, he remembered how Vernon slouched and limped behind his broom and wouldn’t meet a man’s eye in the light of day. Andrew had a fine idea who the weak idiot was in this conversation. And it sure as hell was not the one with the medical degree from Paris.

“You don’t know nothing! You don’t know my family name you dirty God-damn nigger!” Vernon hollered.

A foot came out from beneath the sheet and caught him in the side. That hurt worse than the gut punch—it might have cracked a rib—but Andrew held on. He still had a chance. A slim one, but things were not as bad—not yet—as they were for poor little Maryanne Leonard.

It had been an awful day for the poor thing, started bad enough and ended up as bad as it could get. She was pregnant, with a child that no man in Eliada owned up to.

There was talk that she’d been raped by one of the bachelors who worked the mill, or maybe by one of the hill folk passing through. Maybe someone nearer.

Her brothers said they’d found her that morning in the privy, bent over herself as she squatted on the hole, just weeping and crying and cursing Jesus who she said had come one night and done this to her. There was blood coming out of her middle parts and they reported an awful smell coming up from the pit. So they brought her to the hospital on Sunday morning, hoping to find Dr. Bergstrom maybe. But when they got there, Dr. Andrew Waggoner was the only doctor in the house.

He should have been more wary of the sick girl. Even in New York, a Negro doctor touching a white woman’s privates would cause a problem. But in New York, it would never get that far because the doctors wouldn’t be so scarce that there was any need for a Negro doctor in the hospital. That was what sent ambitious young Dr. Andrew Waggoner here to this little Idaho mill town of Eliada, improbably blessed with a decently equipped hospital where he might learn and develop his craft.

He should have stopped. But listening to the story they told him, and looking at the girl, he couldn’t turn her away.

Doing so would mean leaving Maryanne Leonard in the care of her brothers, one of whom likely as not was complicit in giving the poor girl what Andrew was pretty sure was an outhouse abortion.

So Andrew smiled deferentially, told them: Bring her in. And he got ready to do what he could, which as it turned out was nothing much.

“Leave him,” said another sheet. “He’s got to be awake to see how he’s going to die.”

This sheet was taller, and wider too. Andrew did not know who this one was by his voice, and as he looked up at it he realized: he had been gone a spell. The boot had come again and again, in the ribs and in the back and the chest, and there had been a forest of pain, and it had hit in his head, and he must have fallen unconscious. Now he was back.

Through swollen lips, Andrew asked the new sheet: “Who are you? You the Grand Dragon or something?”

“Quiet,” said the new sheet. He leaned in very close—so close that Andrew could smell his breath (not liquored, but ugly, soured as it was with coffee and seasoned with tobacco) and see the flesh around his eye (it was lined, used to squinting at sun, and tufted with a thick black eyebrow whose hairs poked out through the torn-out eye hole in the sheet) and feel the heat off him.

The stranger in the sheet stood up.

“You are one unlucky nigger,” he said, aloud. “Yesterday, we might have just put the scare in you—run you from town. But after what you done to pretty little Maryanne…”

Andrew started to protest:

He hadn’t done that thing to her abdomen. He hadn’t done anything but try and give her some comfort with a shot of morphine; try and find the source of the bleeding and make it stop; look at that opening like a caesarean cut (if the blade that had made it were blunt, and handed to her baby who used it to cut itself out from the inside) and tried to clean it, cover it, stitch it. “Jesus done it to me!” she’d screamed, thrashing on the table in the hospital’s operating theatre. “Jeee-Susss!” She said that again and again, even as the morphine took hold, even as the life went out of her.

Andrew had wanted to go out to the brothers after that, and ask: Any of you boys named Jesus?

“It wasn’t me. She was gone,” Andrew said. “She’d lost too much blood. Her womb was ripped. Somebody did it… but nobody could have—”

He stopped before the sheet’s raised hand could come down in his face.

“You know,” said the sheet, his voice low now, “that’s the first true thing that came out of your nigger mouth since we brought you here. It wasn’t you that did this to her. We do know that. We ain’t fools.”

“Then why—?”

The sheet looked over his shoulder, wagged his head. “Get him up. And bring out the freak.”

Andrew almost screamed in pain as two of them hoisted him up to his knees. Two others walked around behind him, to the wagon. He tried to look but his head wouldn’t quite turn the way it should, so he had to listen to the rustling of the tarpaulin, some grunting, and a sliding sound.

As he listened, he realized:

They’re not taking out a picture book here. They’ve got someone else in there.

The person had been quiet when they’d hauled Andrew along, thrown him in the back—but Andrew didn’t have a sense about how he’d have missed him even so.

Andrew turned his head just a little, and watched as he came into his view.

The sheets were hauling a tall man, thin as sticks. White or Negro, Andrew couldn’t tell because he was not only tied like Andrew, but had a sack pulled down over his head. His legs moved strangely, like they’d been broken at the calf and had a joint added there. The high whistling noise that Andrew had thought was coming from the Klansmen got louder, and Andrew worked it out—it was not, had never been, coming from one of them. It was coming from under the sack.

“So what,” said the sheet, “can you tell us about this fellow here?”

“Will it make a difference?”

“May it might.”

The two others pushed the second captive to the ground in front of Andrew, while another brought the kerosene lamp closer. One of the men pulled the hood from him, while another held the lamp up.

Andrew squinted. There was something wrong with the light, or maybe his vision had been fouled by the blow to his head, or maybe he was just losing his sanity in the course of staring down his own death. The man’s face didn’t seem right. It had an odd bend to it at the forehead, and the mouth seemed too wide, and the eyes…

The eyes couldn’t have been that black. They seemed like they were all pupil, no iris. Eyes didn’t work that way.

That wasn’t the end of the strangeness, though. The hair sprang like winter-dead branches from his scalp and he was true, boneyard white. If the Klansmen were looking for their ghost to frighten even an educated Negro, they’d hit near the mark with this one. Andrew had seen queer things in Paris—pictures of hunchbacks and feeble men and women; dwarfs and giants—even photographs of old John Merrick, the Elephant Man of London.

But there had been nothing quite like this face.

Andrew blinked, and looked again, and swallowed hard and painful as he looked.

It must have been the scrambling of his brains, because when he looked again, the face seemed to have changed.

It was suddenly very beautiful, fine-featured; the face of a pale-skinned girl, black hair floating above her head like she was underwater. Her lips were not wide, but puckered into a rosebud aperture, from which the lovely whistling music came. And he blinked again, and when his eyes opened, they pulled the captive away.

“Recognize him?” said Robert Vernon, who by now had pulled his own sheet aside. “You recognize him, nigger. You do. You brung him here. And he did that thing to Maryanne. Fuckin’ rapist, and you brung him.”

“I—I’m not seeing right,” said Andrew. He felt as though he was spilling out of himself; he heard his voice hitch, in that weak, begging way. “You hit me on the head and I can’t see right.” And he added, hating himself: “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” said Robert. “That’s right, you’re sorry.”

“Tell us,” said the tall man. “No point playing stupid. We know you been keeping this freak under guard. Robert found him a week ago.”

Robert nodded. “In the quarantine,” he said. “Livin’ like a king. The cause of all our woes an’ livin’ like a king.”

“In quarantine,” said Andrew.

The quarantine was a barn-board outbuilding almost as big as the hospital itself, that he had only visited once—the day he’d arrived and Dr. Bergstrom was showing him around the whole compound. He’d never been inside, because there’d never been any need.

“Nobody,” Andrew said, “is in quarantine.”

“Callin’ me a liar, nigger?” said Robert.

Andrew swallowed and took a breath. If he kept himself just so, the pain wasn’t too bad. He kept his breathing right, the fear could be pushed away. So he did and he did.

“Look,” he said. “I’m telling you what I know. That quarantine’s been empty since autumn.”

“Before you were here,” said Robert.

“Before I was here.” Andrew said. “I’m sorry. I’ve never seen anybody in there. And I’ve surely never seen—that. You think he raped Maryanne? Or—cut her?”

The tall sheet made a throat-cutting motion to one of the others. “That’s enough,” he said. “He doesn’t recognize him either. Let’s get on.”

With that, the hood fell back over the head of the poor fellow and they hauled him back to the tree.

It was a maple, and over one thick branch that extended out and swooped down to nearly touch the ground, someone had slung two lengths of noose-tied rope.

The sheets went to work. Robert wrapped his arms around the man’s legs and with a cracking sound from his own bad knees, lifted as another took the poor victim by his shoulders, and a third helped guide his neck to the noose while the last two held the other end of the rope where it crossed the tree branch. Andrew thought there would be more of a fight, but the fellow had an odd calm to him as the rope went over his head, and pushed down over the sack and around his neck. There was a stillness, a terrible quiet, as the men stood there, holding their captive aloft, delicate, like they might be thinking about the right and wrong of what they were doing.

It didn’t last long, that moment.

Robert Vernon let go of the legs and the others let go of the arms, and the maple branch bent somewhat as the rope went tight. The two on the rope’s other end hauled the rope over the branch, and the lynched man rose in the night.

Andrew didn’t know when he’d started work on the rope around his wrists. But he knew as the poor man’s legs twitched and shook and bent, and the keening whistling started up again—far louder this time, almost like a tiny scream—he’d managed to loosen a knot. Nothing dramatic—it was just looser, not untied, and there were other knots after this one before he’d be free. But although his fingers were numb and fat with his own blood, they were still a surgeon’s, and they knew what to do. They would get those knots, because if they didn’t—well, their doctor would end up on that rope. That was not how Dr. Andrew Waggoner was meant to leave this world. Even if he was slow to realize it, his fingers knew.

Luckily, the sheets seemed to have no idea.

Their victim raised high enough—maybe three feet off the ground—they tied off the rope, and came back to watch him die. Behind him, the cart-horse whinnied.

Andrew slipped the knot free. The second was not so tight, and he got that one going much more quickly. What was he going to do when he got them free? None of the men seemed to have guns, at least none outside their sheets. So he might just be able to run for it. Except he was cramped and sore and his rib felt like it could be broken. He could probably still outrun Robert Vernon with his bad knee. But the rest?

Andrew set his teeth. It was hard to think, with that whistling getting as loud as it was, so he just kept at work. How could that whistling be getting louder? The hanged man’s airway should be about shut. The noises he could make should have changed, become more strangled and quieter.

The sheets were thinking the same thing. One of them had his hands over his ears, while their leader was shouting something else, something like an instruction. Two of them moved to obey—if, that is, they’d been told to grab the dying man’s belt-loops and pull him down to break his neck. They grabbed tight, threw their own knees from under themselves and dangled.

The final knot slid undone and Andrew slid out of the ropes. He closed his eyes tight and gritted his teeth, blinked and pushed himself up. On hands and knees, he turned around, and with the fire in his rib making him want to weep, made for the wagon.

He didn’t get far.

Andrew gasped, and his arms slipped from under him, and he thought: I’ve been shot. Then he found himself rolled over. He was looking into the face of Robert Vernon. The sheet was off him now, and he held a stick—no, a handle for an axe. Instinctively Andrew raised his hand to ward him off. The axe-handle hit him in the elbow with a sickening crack!, and he clutched it, as Robert Vernon raised his club again.

There was another crack!, and Robert stood there for what seemed like a long time, weapon raised. Then Robert fell backwards into the dirt. The axe-handle fell against Andrew’s hip. The sky was empty but for early evening stars and a fat yellow moon rising on the horizon.

The high whistling continued, but Andrew thought it might have been joined by another sound: the barking of dogs, and the crack! crack! of gunfire.

That would be good, he thought, if it were true. Then his eyelids slid shut and he let himself rest a moment.

Andrew’s eyelids flickered as someone bent close. Not a sheet. Not a ghost. It had dark little eyes, though, a face bent the wrong way. It puckered its wide mouth, and leaned forward. It breathed out an awful smell, like formaldehyde, and looked up, started, and moved fast off to the right. Andrew felt the scant weight of it on his chest only then, by its sudden absence.

Someone screamed not far off, and Andrew blinked twice before he just gave up and closed his eyes.

“Dr. Waggoner.”

Andrew felt a sharp slap on his cheek, and another.

He coughed and blinked and opened his eyes.

This time the light of a kerosene lamp was nearer him, and there was someone else leaning in. Someone he recognized.

“Doctor,” said Sam Green. “You hear me?”

“I hear you,” said Andrew.

“Good. You know who I am?”

“Sure.”

Sam Green was the boss of the Pinkerton crew. He and Andrew went back—to October, when they’d met at the train station in Bonner’s Ferry some forty miles to the south of here.

Sam was wearing his bowler hat and what looked like his Sunday best. His normally ruddy face was crimson over the starched collar and tight-wound tie. Normally when he was on duty, Sam would wear something a bit more comfortable. But today was Sunday and unlike Andrew, he was a church-going man.

“That is good,” said Sam. “You haven’t been entirely addled by those bastards.”

“Those—” Andrew tried to sit up but the pain in his back and ribs was too

much. “Those bastards,” he said slowly, “are Klansmen. They hanged a man.”

Sam might have smiled under his thick moustache, or he might have grimaced. “They are piss-poor Klansmen if that is what they even are. Anyone can pull a sheet over their head.”

Andrew coughed again, and winced. God, it hurt.

Green stood up. In his right hand, Andrew saw, he was casually dangling his still-smoking Smith and Wesson Russian revolver by the trigger guard.

“They hanged a man, Sam. They were going to do the same to me.”

“And we shot and killed three of them,” said Sam. “You stay put here a moment. Rest a spell.”

As he turned and stepped away, Andrew chanced to lift his head to see what he could see.

Andrew counted three lanterns casting beams here and there among maybe a dozen men and who knew how many dogs working the base of the hanging tree.

Nearer by, Andrew saw the bodies. The nearest belonged to Robert Vernon. There were another two further upslope toward the hanging tree, collapsed on one another, their sheets flowered bloody. Sam stepped over them like they were fallen branches and joined the others.

“He ready to move?” Sam called.

Someone in the crowd answered, “He’ll move. None too pleased about it though.”

“Would you be?” asked Sam.

And with that, the crowd broke and two men hauled a stretcher out. On the stretcher was a figure bundled in dark cloth, and (Andrew thought) tied down. The stretcher tipped and twisted as the two men carrying it tried to manhandle it away. Andrew leaned his head back and shut his eyes.

They’d hanged a sick man and tried to hang a doctor, and earlier on they’d murdered a young girl and her baby.

Christ in Heaven, there was going to be hell to pay.

“Couple of things,” said Andrew when Sam came back to him.

“You have gathered your thoughts?”

“Yes,” said Andrew. “First. There’s been a murder. Not that poor fellow just now hung, either. Another. Maryanne Leonard.”

Sam Green raised his eyebrows. “The girl with child? I had been given to understand she died of… womanly troubles.”

“She did,” said Andrew. “But I examined her. I believe her troubles were brought on by an abortionist. An inexpert one.”

Sam looked away at that, and Andrew let him be a moment. This was nothing for a good Catholic fellow to hear on a Sunday evening.

“You think,” said Sam finally, “that these fellows were hanging you in part to keep you quiet on the subject?”

“The thought had crossed my mind. Yes.”

Sam snorted, lowered his head to look at his feet, and said in a low voice: “Fucking animals.” Then he looked up, met Andrew’s eye. “Pardon my French.”

“It is important that they not be allowed to take the body away. It will need to be examined for proof,” said Andrew.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Sam. “Dr. Bergstrom is back at the hospital now. He has not released anything to anyone.”

“Bergstrom’s back? When—”

“After supper,” said Green. “We saw him at the hospital. These bastards left the place in a mess.”

“So he sent you after us?”

Sam’s moustache twitched. “So we found you,” he said. “That’s what’s important. And now you’ve told me about the murder you suspect. Anything else?”

“I think,” said Andrew, “I’m going to need some help out of here.”

“That so? Can’t imagine why. You feel all your fingers and toes, Doc?”

“Yes, I feel them just fine. But I think my back is hurt and I can’t get up right now. I think you’d better bring over that stretcher you used to carry off the body.”

“Body?”

“Yes,” said Andrew. “The hanged man. That other murder. I’ve got respect for the dead—but I’m going to need that stretcher more than him right now.”

Now Sam was grinning. He knelt down and patted Andrew on his shoulder. “Nobody died here tonight,” he said, “but some cowardly bastards. Old Mister Juke is fine as ever he was.”

“Mister—Juke?”

So the hanged man had a name.

“You, now…” Sam sat down on the ground, propping his gun on his knee and looking off over Andrew’s head. “You do look like you could use some help. But we got to get Mister Juke back to our own wagon. They’ll come back with the stretcher when that’s done.”

“Sam,” said Andrew, “don’t go changing the subject. He was hanged. He can’t be fine. He—”

“Hush,” Sam said. “You are a smart Negro, Dr. Waggoner. I don’t believe I have said so before, but I have a great respect for you in that regard. You managed to get yourself into doctoring school in Paris, France, and back out again with a medical degree. And now, you can set a bone and you can cut out a swelled-up appendix with your eyes closed I expect. But even you can’t expect to know everything on Heaven and earth.”

Andrew frowned and thought about that.

“Tell me something,” he finally said. “Did you come up here looking for me, or were you here to get that Mister Juke back?”

“Oh, we’re bringing you back,” said Sam. “But like I said, boy: ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ See now?” he said, winking again. “You ain’t the only one read a book.”

“How long,” said Andrew, “has Mister Juke been in the quarantine? Why did nobody tell me? And just precisely what—who—is he?”

“No, no,” said Sam. “You won’t get that from me, old friend. Not more from me. You can ask Dr. Bergstrom when you get back. Not,” he added, “that I am recommending it.”

Sam Green leaned back. To show the conversation was done for now, he started to whistle.

2 - A Damn Germ

FEBRUARY, 1911

Jason Thistledown’s mama was tall and beautiful and strong; stronger of arm than many a man and more powerful of spirit than any two. Yet in the end it was not a man nor two nor even a gang of them, but a damn germ that killed her.

The night it happened it was just the two of them alone in the cabin as a terrible howl of a blizzard ran outside. The blizzard was bad for the pigs, and as it turned out one of them died because Jason would not go outside and see to them. He knew the risk in leaving the pigs out like that, but sometimes a man’s got to decide, and if there’s no man about, the decision falls to a boy. To Jason’s way of thinking, when the choice is between standing by your mama and a seeing to a sty of swine, there’s no choice at all.

He sat there and gave her water until she stopped taking it. He tried singing to her like she used to sing to him, but that felt foolish, so he said he was sorry but he was going to have to stop. He thought she might like to hear a story so he told her the one about Odysseus and Polyphemus, until he realized it became too terrifying in the middle part where Odysseus’ men were one by one devoured by the terrible Cyclops. His mama (lying on her bed, unable to move or speak, with blood welling at the base of her fingernails; brown, putrid fever-sweat accumulating in her bedclothes) didn’t need more terrifying. So he said he was sorry and tried to think of a less frightening tale. At length, Jason had to admit he didn’t know many stories that weren’t upsetting in some way or another, so he said he was sorry.

“I guess sayin’ sorry’s one thing I can do fine,” he said and tried to laugh at his little joke but wound up crying.

He cried a long time, but managed to get his wits about him before the germ delivered its coup de grâce.

Later on, Jason was glad for that. He was sure his mama wouldn’t have liked to have had the last sight of her son being him blubbering like a baby.

At that hour, however, Jason had not yet seriously entertained the notion that his mama was going to be having a last anything of anything. She was just poorly. She was quite poorly, sure, but she hadn’t been that way for so very long. The coughing started up on the way back from the store at Cracked Wheel, and that was just a day ago. It was probably a flu germ, she’d said, but she’d had flu before and always just walked it off. She was more worried about Jason coming down with it, and so ordered him to the far end of the cabin for all the good that would do.

Jason hadn’t come down with a thing—not so much as a sniffle. That, to his way of thinking, meant that whatever it was, it wasn’t much of a flu at all.

Still believing this, Jason dried his nose and got up from his chair and went to see to the wood stove, which was starting to cool. He dug around in the wood box and came up with a stick of birch that looked about right, and opened the stove’s front and shoved it in. It raised a little flurry of sparks in the bed of coals inside. Jason blew on it a bit, and fanned it with his hand, poked it with his fingertips until it was just right. Then he closed the door and wiggled the flue to make sure it was properly open so the fire would take.

When he got up, that was it.

Later, Jason would think that it was better his mama saw him tending the fire as she died. His mama valued that sort of thing, that self-sufficiency as she called it. Self-sufficiency had seen her raise Jason alone here in the wilds of northwest Montana—laugh at all the folks who’d said she, born and raised in the east and come out here only late in life, wouldn’t last a year now that her husband was gone.

Yes, he would think, she probably took a deal of comfort in watching him see to his needs; more comfort than having him right there beside her as the life fled her flesh.

Yet there at the deathbed, Jason didn’t even cry. He just stood, hands hanging dead weight at his side. He shuffled over to her bed, and fell to his knees, and died himself or so it seemed to him.

His mama was gone; taken from him by a God-damned germ.

It was on February 12, 1911 that she died.

Jason did not look at the clock when it happened, but sometime afterward he remarked to himself that it struck eleven in the night; so he surmised she’d died prior to eleven but past what might normally be the supper hour, although they had not had a proper supper, and he finally hazarded a guess and wrote this down in the front of their Bible:

He wrote those words the morning of February 13, before he ventured outside to check on the pigs and found that one of them had died too—a young boar that Jason’s mama was fattening for slaughter. The freeze had taken care of the slaughter, and by the time Jason had come out, the remaining four pigs were taking care of the carcass.

The whole homestead was snowbound—one side of the cabin was covered in a drift of white that went from the roof shingles to the ground in a smooth curve, like the snow that ran down the distant western mountain peaks, and the blizzard had left no path between cabin and pigsty. Jason started through the white anyway but it was tough going.

He was finally reduced to hollering, “Stop! You’re eatin’ your own! Damn cannibal hogs!” The swine paid him no heed.

Jason swore a storm, and waved his arms, and finally, in frozen exhaustion, turned back to the cabin.

With that picture in his head, he knew there was no question.

No matter how he loved her, Jason Thistledown could no longer live under the same roof as his mama—reduced as she was to nothing but soured meat.

When he composed himself, he found a shovel and began digging a path from the cabin. The sun was as high as it would get, casting a shortening shadow to the north by the time he’d made it to the side where the woodshed stood. There was a good half-cord of wood stacked within. But Jason looked to the braces. They were six feet from the ground, and spaced adequately for the task.

Against the wall in the shed was a stack of pine planks, bought by him and his mama that autumn past in hopes of setting down a proper floor in the cabin. He lifted two of those planks into the rafters, making a high platform that he reckoned would keep her safe from predation and wolves until the thaw.

“I am sorry, Mama,” he said as he hefted her sheet-wrapped body over his shoulder and put a foot on the ladder. She was wearing the same sheet she’d died in, and he had not washed her, and even in the sharp February cold she gave a stink like a shallow privy.

“I guess,” he said as he rolled her onto the makeshift platform and settled her on her back, “sayin’ sorry’s one thing I can do fine.”

The winter finished hard, one storm after another hitting the Thistledown homestead in a succession of punishing smacks that blanketed the snow in thick layers. Jason fought back dully—each day clearing a path between the door of the house and the woodshed, and halfway along cutting off another path to the sty. He waited a few days but finally succumbed and became diligent in throwing feed to the cannibal swine, creatures he was coming to hate but could not bring himself to kill.

He told himself that when the thaw came, he would trade the sty of them for the finest of coffins, and the churchyard plot nearest to Jesus, a tombstone carved with his mama’s saintly visage and words from the most eloquent preacher in Montana to send her Heaven-ward.

Toward such an end, the pigs would have to be fed daily, lest they ate one another to extinction before winter’s finish.

Aside from the daily feedings, however, Jason did not spend much time tending the pigs.

Most times, he sat bundled in the woodshed, the Winchester in his lap. As the days grew longer, Jason grew more certain that his mama’s frozen resting place was not so secure. Three years ago, during a winter not so harsh as this one, his mama had bent down and showed him tracks in the snow.

Dogs? Jason guessed, and his mama had corrected him: Not dogs, Jason. Wolves. A pack of them. That’s what the gun’s for.

Jason had not seen wolf tracks around the homestead this winter, but he was on the lookout for them all the same—particularly as the snow climbed higher, nearer the height of the braces, and his mama’s frozen body.

He only felt truly safe for his mama when another blizzard blew, and the cold came so strong that nothing—he hoped—could live outside shelter.

Otherwise, he guarded and he patrolled, to make sure no strange tracks came near. He thought of how he would kill a wolf if it came. He counted his ammunition and thought how he would kill five of them. He began to think how he might kill a man if it came to that.

He grew thinner. He felt a hardness come over his face, and when he looked at it in the glass, he thought he looked like someone else. It was worse when he tried to smile, so he didn’t.

Instead, he guarded. And he waited—for the weather to break, so he could get moving, begin the business of trading the lives of his swine for a funeral for his mama.

The sun grew brighter and the smell of old leaves and pine needles came up from the ground. The crackling sound of icicles breaking could be heard, and when in the early morning he stepped onto the stoop, Jason felt a near thing to joy.

Soon, he could be off to town. Soon, he could finish things right: trade the cannibal pigs for the best coffin, an eloquent preacher and the plot nearest Jesus.

He pulled up his coat and set off for the woodshed through the now-slushy path he’d dug for himself. He felt like he should tell his mama something—that everything would be fine, her soul would be soon on the way to Heaven. But having spent the days watching over her, he was fairly certain she was not there to hear it.

All the same. Jason wanted to see her. Maybe whisper it.

But he stopped before he got far, and cursed himself. This was, of course, the first time in weeks he had headed there without the rifle. And this morning was also the first that he had seen tracks, other than his own.

Jason stepped back into the cabin, took hold of the Winchester, and with considerably greater care, crept around the cabin’s side to the woodshed.

How do I shoot a man?

The question suddenly became relevant, because the tracks he saw were not wolf tracks. They were boots, and by the look of them they were heading up from the direction of Cracked Wheel before they stepped down onto the path and disappeared.

Jason stood against the wall of the cabin, rifle held to his chest, heart hammering, and peered around. He blinked, and thought:

How do I shoot a woman?

She wore a black overcoat with a fur collar and a fur-lined hat; she was stout but not overly so, and carried in one hand a carpet bag. In her other hand—her right hand—she held a revolver. She was looking up into the rafters, faced away from Jason.

Well, he thought, stepping out and lowering the rifle, one thing’s sure. I do not shoot her in the back.

“Drop the gun, please ma’am.” He was surprised at how calm his voice sounded, even as the thought occurred to him: should she turn too fast, or jump away, or do anything dangerous, he would have to shoot her. Somehow, he would have to shoot her. “I have you covered.”

“Oh!” The gun fell from her hand, as did the carpet bag. She raised two small gloved hands. “Please don’t shoot. May I turn?”

Her voice made Jason think of easterners. Which made him think of his mama.

“You may,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

The woman turned, her feet making a sucking sound in the dirt. Jason judged her to be older than his mama had been, but not much. She wore eyeglasses, and he thought them to be very thick, because her eyes seemed very large.

“Is that Ellen?” she asked, motioning to the rafters.

Jason took a breath and lowered the rifle. He didn’t expect this strange woman would be trading gunfire with him. But that wasn’t to say he was ready to trust her yet.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said. “What’re you doin’ here, if you please?”

“I’m—” she looked back up “—oh my. That is Ellen, isn’t it? Oh, poor dear Ellen. Did she succumb too?”

“She’s dead, if that’s what you mean,” said Jason. He stepped toward the woman—keeping an eye on the revolver all the while. He felt a piece of him break off in his chest as he said the words. “My mama’s been dead—some time now.”

The woman looked down, and brought a gloved hand to her eye. “Oh. Your mama.”

“Ma’am,” said Jason, collecting himself, “who are you, please?”

She looked at him again, with those great big eyes. They seemed less sure of themselves this time.

“I am Germaine Frost,” she said. “I am, well… I suppose I am your aunt. Ellen Thornton was my baby sister.”

It was hard to credit it at first. Jason’s mama had been tall and blonde-haired, with a firm jawline and a lean, strong figure. Germaine Frost was in many respects the opposite. She was not as tall as Jason, and the line of her jaw was obscured by thick jowls, and her hair was black as an Injun’s.

And leaving aside the glasses, there was the fact that Jason could recall no point at which his mother had talked of any aunts or uncles.

Jason wished she might have. But he supposed this was as good a time as any to meet one of them—he was in need of relations now as never before.

He gathered Germaine Frost’s revolver, her bag, and carried both to the cabin. Germaine—Aunt Germaine—followed at a respectful distance. As they came to the stoop, she asked him to stop a moment.

“Have you washed inside?” she asked.

“Washed—”

“Inside,” she said. “The house. It is a plague house, after all. It may still be infected.”

“Infected?”

“With the disease that took my dear sister. Although not you, young master—Jason, is it?”

“Yes ma’am. Jason Thistledown’s my name. And no ma’am. I did not wash. Not especially, inside I mean.” He shuffled his feet. “It’s pretty ripe in there I guess.”

“Well, Jason,” she said, and put out her hand, “let’s have a look. Please hand me my bag.”

Aunt Germaine set the bag down in a drift. She took a little handful of snow, and scrubbed the handles of the bag where Jason had held it. Then she took more snow and rubbed it in her gloved hands before opening the bag. She rooted through some neatly folded cloth until she pulled out a small handkerchief, with strings coming out of each corner. Jason watched as she placed the cloth over her mouth, then reached up and tied it behind her head like she was doing her hair. In the end, the little handkerchief covered her mouth and her nose. Finally, she pulled off her hat and took off her coat, and set them down atop the carpet bag.

“Very good,” she said, her voice muffled by the cloth. “Now let us see how you have been getting by, Jason.”

Jason stepped aside to let Aunt Germaine through. She did not get far inside.

“Oh my,” she said. “Where does one start?”

Jason looked past her to see what she meant. The cabin was a simple enough place to his eye. One long pine table with a couple of chairs, the wood stove in the middle of it, a tiny windowsill and the beds at one end of it. All in one room.

“This,” she said, “is a breeding place for germs. The ground itself is your floor! Had you been staying outside all the time, Jason?”

“No ma’am.”

“Did you isolate your dear mother as she was ill?”

“No ma’am.”

She turned to him. Her eyes seemed very large behind the glasses. “And after she passed. You’ve remained here for how long after that?”

“Don’t know.”

“Weeks?”

“Months.”

“Oh my.”

She stepped back outside, and leaned close to him. “It is all right, my dear,” she said. “I am well-trained. Open your mouth. And turn to the sun, please, so I can better see.”

Two hours later, Jason Thistledown was naked as the day he was born, up to his breast-bone in a tub of scalding hot water that Aunt Germaine had made him boil up on the wood stove and haul to a level spot in the lee of the house, and rubbing himself down with a black, stinging bar of soap from the carpet bag.

Jason tried to argue. “I’m not sick,” he said. “If I was carrying this germ, wouldn’t it make sense for me to be sick? It’s got to be gone now!”

“No,” said Germaine, “it does not. You clearly have an immunity.”

“How can you know that?” he demanded. “And how would it be on my clothes?”

She pointed back at the house. “Fetch the water, Jason. And get in it. This is not a discussion.” She clapped her hands. “Hop to it.”

Now, sitting in the water, Jason wondered how in the course of less than an hour he could have moved from contemplating shooting a woman to hopping to it when she hollered.

Part of it, he suspected, was that she did seem to know what she was doing. She examined him like she was a doctor, and when he asked about that she said that back in Philadelphia she had worked as a nurse. She seemed to know a lot about germs, and when he asked about that she made a joke about them being her namesake. “The girls used to call me Germy behind my back,” she said and laughed.

It wasn’t all that funny, but Jason laughed too. He hadn’t done that in some time, laughing aloud, and it felt good to finally clear the pipes.

“What girls?” he asked.

Aunt Germaine’s smile faded a bit. “Oh you know,” she said. “The other nurses.”

Jason hadn’t a chance to ask many more questions the next couple of hours, as he followed Aunt Germaine’s very precise instructions about how to heat the water, where to do the bath and most importantly how to wash his clothes and himself.

Finally, as he finished the last spot at the very back of his head, he started up again.

“Aunt Germaine,” he said, “how is it that I never heard of you? You and mama have a fallin’ out?”

“Not precisely that,” said Germaine. “Let us say that we married into different circles.”

“That’s how come you’re called Frost, and not Thornton?”

“Yes. That is how come.”

Jason set down the soap in the snow. It bled little spider legs through the white. “How come you’re here now?” he asked.

Germaine turned around, glancing at Jason then away. “I was—nearby, when I learned what had happened here.”

Jason gave her a look. “How nearby? Nobody’s been here all winter to see what happened.”

His aunt pulled off her gloves, and wrung them together. “Nobody has,” she said. “And you have not left the homestead, and no one has come.”

“Too much snow,” said Jason.

His aunt didn’t say anything to that. She kept her eyes down, while Jason worked it out: news had come from here that was not about his mama, but still bad enough to draw relations nonetheless.

His hand fell back into the tub, and although the water was still quite warm, he shivered.

“What happened in Cracked Wheel? More people get sick?”

Aunt Germaine looked up. Her eyes might have been big and wet again, but the sun reflected off the glass so Jason could only surmise it by the tone in her voice.

“The whole town,” she said quietly. “It is gone.”

Jason would never set foot in the cabin again, of that he was sure.

As the sun set below the mountains, the flames were already reaching higher than treetops. He felt himself hitching to cry all over again as he watched the flames take it, and the woodshed, and his mama—who was going onward with no coffin, no tombstone, no sweet-voiced eulogy from the best preacher in Montana: a quiet recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm by Aunt Germaine, a lick of flame to kerosene, and then…

Fire.

Aunt Germaine stood beside him, her arm around his shoulder as the flames went higher. “Jason, this is something no young man should have to do, but so many do. You are very brave.”

Jason coughed, to hide that he was crying. “Not my idea,” he said, quiet enough that he’d figure his aunt couldn’t hear. But her ears were better than her eyes and she answered him:

“You wouldn’t know,” she said. “You haven’t seen the town yet. You haven’t seen what this germ does.”

“I know well enough,” he said. “Mama should be buried.”

“Why’s that?” Germaine raised her voice as the flames hit the woodpile. “She Catholic? A Jewess?”

“You know she ain’t,” said Jason.

“Then cremation is still good enough for my sister. It was good enough for Mr. Frost, it’s good enough for Ellen.”

Jason swallowed hard. They had had a falling out, Aunt Germaine and his mama—that was a sure thing.

“If we do not do this,” said his aunt, “then what happens when some trapper comes by in the melt, starts rooting through the house and picks up that germ? What happens, I will tell you, is this: it is an epidemic. Like the cholera.”

“Is that what this is?”

Aunt Germaine put up her hand. “The flames are taking,” she said. “Let us pray for your mother’s immortal soul.”

“All right,” he said. “I will.”

And Jason bowed his head, and after a moment of sad quiet, he imagined a great celestial light descending over this infernal pyre. And imagining that, he thought up a prayer.

Oh Lord, he prayed, please see my mama to Heaven where she belongs. And Lord, see to it, please, that should my pa ever wish to speak with her from where he writhes and burns in that Other Place—

Jason opened his eyes and stared into the flames that consumed the cabin old John Thistledown had built the year Jason was born.

—please, Lord: see to it he stays where he is and keeps his damn peace.

A month ago, shooting the pigs might have brought Jason some measure of satisfaction. Now—somehow, the act seemed capricious; low-down cruel. But Aunt Germaine insisted.

“They are probably fine,” she said. “But who knows if whatever it was that took poor Ellen is not also somehow attached to the swine?”

“It don’t seem likely,” said Jason. “And anyhow—those pigs have value at market.”

Aunt Germaine shook her head. “There is no market,” she said. “Not close by. Go on, young man. Take your shot.”

“Well,” he said doubtfully, “they are cannibals.”

In the end, Jason was down six bullets from the Winchester, having missed with one and but wounded with another.

He made sure to gather up the casings for reuse before he and his new aunt started off, in the dawn light, toward the snow-choked pass to Cracked Wheel. Jason wondered how they were going to do it. But as they crossed a rise that had been beaten down by Aunt Germaine’s footsteps, and rounded a tree, he saw it. There, sticking out of the snow, were two pair of snowshoes.

“Have you ever walked in snowshoes?” she asked.

“‘Course,” he said. “There was a couple pair that burned up on the back of the woodshed. Didn’t think of them until now.”

“Well, it is a good thing I thought ahead,” said Aunt Germaine. “See? I brought an extra pair.”

“In case of survivors,” he said.

“That is right.”

“That was good thinking, Aunt Germaine.”

Aunt Germaine reached out, tossed one pair of shoes onto the snow, and stepped onto them. She motioned for Jason to do the same, and then looked at him very intently.

“I will look after you, Jason—from now on. I’ll see to you. We are, after all, family.”

“Family,” said Jason as he stomped his feet into place on the snowshoes. He hadn’t thought he’d be using that word again, but it felt good coming off his tongue.

“Let me carry your bag, Aunt,” he said as they headed off south.

3 - The Horror at Cracked Wheel

Cracked Wheel, Montana, was the biggest place that Jason Thistledown had ever visited, but he was wise enough to know that didn’t mean much. From talking to others when they came to town from time to time, he understood that Cracked Wheel was but a flyspeck next to the great towns of Helena, of Butte, of Billings. He knew that all combined, they weren’t any of them a thing to compare to Philadelphia where Aunt Germaine came from, or New York, where the scale of things dwarfed whole mountain ranges.

Still… there were more than a hundred people who made their homes here around a main street of log-and-board buildings. There was the Dempsey store, which handled dry goods and hardware and coffee and spices and the mail. When the season was right, they’d even get apples and such in, and when it was wrong, it would be applesauce, or anything else you might imagine sealed inside a tin can. There was a saloon, which Jason had not entered since he was very small, where you could get a room as well as a meal and a whiskey. Across the road was Johnston Brothers, a little storefront that offered doctoring and barbering and undertaking depending on your needs. And next to it was the town office, a low clapboard building where the records were kept of births, deaths and land titles.

That was where Aunt Germaine led him. “It is the one building that I dared enter before I came to you. I am not dead. So I believe it is safe.”

“Safe.”

Jason kicked off his snowshoes at the edge of the sidewalk and looked around uneasily. Huge drifts licked up the sides of buildings and swelled over the eaves of rooftops, from which icicles the size of men dangled and dribbled into icy pits in the snow. The wide street was nearly trackless—but for the oval scratches of their own snowshoes, and some older ones that maybe Aunt Germaine had made when she’d headed out.

“This ain’t safe,” he said. He pointed at a hole in the glass of the front window, big as a thumbprint. The panel had been covered with a little wooden board, but no one had cleared the glass. “Look. Someone’s been shooting.”

Germaine didn’t hear him. She pushed open the front door to the town office. “Come inside,” she said. “Help me start a fire in the stove.”

Jason had to wait a moment for his eyes to adjust to the scant light. He had been inside very few times. He knew there was a long, dark wood counter in the front and a few desks behind it, with some wooden cabinets and a big wall of tiny little shelves for notes. It was all shadows now, musty smells of paper and dust, an uneasy chill left from colder days.

“Come on in,” said Aunt Germaine. “I’ve told you, it is safe. There are no dead in here.”

Germaine struck a match and set it to lamp wick. It illuminated her face for an instant before she moved away, scraped a chair across the floor and set down.

“Start a fire in the stove,” she said, “and I shall make some tea.”

Jason stepped around the counter. “Are we staying here?”

“Until there is more of a melt on the road,” said Germaine, “yes, I believe so. It’s all right. The clerk here went to his own bed before he passed. And there’s a fine store of tinned food I found last time I tarried. Come. Bring my bag. I will busy myself with my own work.”

Jason hefted her bag onto a clear space on the desk, which was otherwise covered in a stack of leather-bound ledgers.

“Thank you, Jason,” she said, and dug into the bag until she found a long wooden box. She set it in front of her, turned a latch and pulled from it a neat drawer, with white paper cards lined up. Then she opened a ledger, and, noticing that Jason was still watching her, repeated: “Thank you. Now start the fire. When it is going, we shall find some tea—and perhaps something to eat.”

A meal of tinned ham and pears in his belly, teacup only half-drunk beside him, Jason slept for he didn’t know how long next to the roaring fire he’d stoked in the wood stove. When he woke, it was darker than before—the lamp was doused and somewhere in the Cracked Wheel Town Office, he could hear Aunt Germaine’s rhythmic snores.

God, he must have been tired. Thinking through how the last day had gone, Jason could see how he’d get that way. It was amazing that he hadn’t burned the whole town down, starting the stove fire, like he’d burned down his mama’s homestead.

He got up and stretched. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, and he could see Germaine stretched out on a wooden bench on the customer side of the counter. It was hard to tell for sure, but he thought she had the Winchester cradled in her arms.

Jason looked over to the last place she’d been—the desk, next to the ledger. That had been something else he’d wanted to ask her about—exactly what it was she was doing there.

But every time he tried, she’d tell him to go do something else for her until he got so tired he fell asleep. Aunt Germaine was no fool, that was true.

Well, he thought, now the tables are turned, Aunty. Can’t fib when you’re asleep. Let’s see what you been up to.

He didn’t want to wake her, so Jason took some care. He lifted the ledgers off the table, and set them on the floor behind the counter. Then he did the same thing with her box of cards—which was still unlatched and open. And finally, when all that was in place, he took the lamp, and a box of matches, and with them crouched down behind the counter, next to the book and the box, and started checking through it.

He looked at the ledgers first. They were pretty easy. Stamped on the front were the words “Births & Deaths,” and inside were lists of names, set down by the year and the month and finally the day. They listed parents in some cases. Further along the page, there was sometimes another date—sometimes not. It wasn’t hard to figure it out: the first date was a birthday; the second, the date of dying. The earliest date for either, Jason saw, was 1844, which was, he suspected, the year that some fool settler had broken his wagon wheel and given the town its name. Subsequent years took up more pages, and as it moved on through boom and back to bust, far fewer. 1892 through ’95 all fit onto one page, with two or three lines to spare.

Jason couldn’t resist what came next: he flipped through to 1897, and the month of January. Sure enough, there was his name: Jason John Thistledown. Next to it: John & Ellen Thistledown. He thought seeing that would make him smile, but it turned out looking at his mama’s name written like that in some stranger’s hand had the opposite effect, so he closed the book.

He turned to Aunt Germaine’s box and those cards. On the front of it there was a simple gilded engraving:

And underneath that:

Jason pulled out a card and squinted at the tiny handwritten notes on it.

The card was harder to figure than the ledger.

It had a name on it too—FLANNIGAN, Anne—and there was a number (1892) that might have been a birth date. There was a place name too: Indianapolis, Indiana. But the top of it was a line of nothing but numbers. Then there was a space, and a percentage:

Underneath that, there was a word that Jason had never seen before. He sounded it out in a whisper:

“E-pie-lep-see.”

Jason shrugged, and slipped the card back into the box.

A bundle of them after that came from Indianapolis. More names, more numbers. He saw that Epilepsy word after only a few of them. On other cards, new words replaced it: Consanguineous; Degenerate; Feebleminded. Then he was past the Indianapolis cards, and onto a new locale:

Ossining, New York—Sing Sing.

The numbers were the same length, but the names seemed to be all of men. And the words that came after were more recognizable:

Thief. Rapist. And Habitual Criminal.

“Murderer.”

Jason nearly knocked over the lamp, catching it and steadying it as he turned.

Aunt Germaine leaned on the counter, rifle laid across it. She was not wearing her glasses, and the lamplight made her eyes tiny pits of fury; her mouth worked like an air-drowned trout as she stammered, and finally, shouted:

“Murderer! You would kill me! Me!”

Jason swallowed and stood, and Aunt Germaine recoiled from him, as though he were some bandit. “Away!” she cried. “Away!” She pushed herself back against the bench where she’d been sleeping, and cowered like a child just woke from a nightmare.

And why shouldn’t she have nightmares? Jason’s mama would wake from them often enough, and she hadn’t seen half the horror that her sister had, here in this town… .

Jason stepped up to his side of the counter.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Germaine,” he said softly. “Calm yourself. I was lookin’ in your bag. Just started—having a look at those cards you got. I’m not aimin’ to kill you. Hush.”

Germaine drew a breath at that, and squinted at Jason. “You were looking at… the cards. From the top of the bag?”

“That’s right,” said Jason. “I’m sure sorry. I should have asked—”

“Yes, you should have.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Germaine,” he said. “I guess—”

“You were curious,” finished Germaine. She reached down and found her eyeglasses, and set them on her nose. She drew a deep breath. “That is only natural for a boy awake in the night in a place such as this. Curiosity. Better, I suppose, that you satisfy it going through my private things than rooting through the charnel house over in the saloon. Well, Jason, tell me: is everything clear to you now?”

Jason had to admit that nothing was any clearer now that he’d snooped through Aunt Germaine’s things, and said he was sorry once more.

“Perhaps,” she continued, “you have a question then? Something that you might have asked me earlier, as we ate the dinner I prepared for you? Drank the tea I brewed for you?” Jason felt his face flush with shame. Any questions he had, and there were more than a few, got buried in that shame. Aunt Germaine’s lips pursed, and she nodded as though he had confirmed something.

“Let me hazard a question for myself then. ‘What, oh dear Aunt Germaine, ever are you doing for the Eugenics Records Office?’”

Aunt Germaine didn’t say any more that night. She was clearly upset at her nephew for invading her things like that, so ordered Jason back to sleep while she carefully replaced the box into her bag, and moved it next to her.

But they were there for days after, and she soon forgot her anger—her strange night terror—and set about answering her own question.

When Aunt Germaine was quite a bit younger and Mr. Frost was still of this world, she took a hungry interest in the foundling science of biology—“Like medicine,” she said, “but with an interest in all living things.”

“I thought you were a doctor, or a nurse or some such thing, all you know about germs,” said Jason. “Didn’t you say you were a nurse?”

“We are getting ahead of ourselves,” said Germaine.

Mr. Frost was a doting husband and so indulged his wife’s passion as much as his pocketbook would permit. He purchased her a microscope and kit for making slides—allowing her to view the most minute specks of life—and a small library of volumes which included: Herbert Spencer’s Social Statistics; Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species; and of course, Charles Galton’s seminal tome Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development.

“What about Bulfinch’s Mythology?”

“That is not a biology book,” said Aunt Germaine.

In addition to her reading and her microscopy, Mr. Frost’s fortune enabled Aunt Germaine to attend summer lectures at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York. That was where she first heard Dr. Charles Davenport speak.

“Looking at him, one could see the divinely inspired brilliance,” said Aunt Germaine. A native New Yorker who had completed his studies at Harvard University, Charles Davenport was engaged with the Institute at their biological research station at Cold Spring Harbor in Long Island. He was a tall man, stooped, in his early middle years then but with a goatee going to white on a chin and an expression of sheer intellectual vigour in his eye.

“Sheer intellectual vigour,” repeated Jason. “Now what’s that look like?”

“Studious. Serious,” said Aunt Germaine.

Charles Davenport was a zoologist—which is to say that he studied the ins and outs of the animal kingdom. The first lectures that Aunt Germaine encountered were discussions of studies he had made of lower life forms such as he might dredge from the harbour: pill bugs and molluscs and primitive fish.

It was clear to Aunt Germaine, however, that he was most interested in the study and improvement of the kingdom’s greatest achievement.

“What was that?” asked Jason.

“Man,” said Aunt Germaine.

Dr. Davenport even then had very clear ideas about the way that man might be bettered. In the course of his lecture, Aunt Germaine recalled, he stopped and asked the room:

“Why do we study these lowly, wet creatures? These things that cling to the bottom of rocks and suck up algae? Is it because we have a direct application for them in our lives? Surely not. Then why?”

Aunt Germaine’s hand shot up, and when he called upon her, she answered:

“Toward the betterment of all mankind?”

“Excellent, Madame,” said the doctor. “Precisely. For we are all made from the same protoplasm. And in understanding these creatures—how they live and eat and, forgive me Madame, how they breed—we can better understand how we might live, might eat, might breed. To our race’s betterment, of course.”

This occasioned, said Aunt Germaine, some controversy in the lecture hall, as some wondered whether the doctor was comparing humanity to common garden slugs by some blasphemous design. But Dr. Davenport was not deterred.

“Our ignorance,” he said, “is appalling, when it comes to the understanding of the effect of interbreeding on the races and the children they beget. And the consequences might be severe, should we not move swiftly to eradicate that ignorance.”

Jason wasn’t sure that he would have been any less put off than the others who were there. “I know I ain’t a garden slug,” he said. “Or descended from one either.”

“Do not be so certain, Jason.”

“And what did he mean about interbreeding?” asked Jason. “What consequences are those?”

Aunt Germaine sat back.

“You and your mother raised swine,” she said. “Perhaps I can explain it that way. How is it that you get a prize pig? Do you pray for one? Do you purchase two inferior pigs and mate them? No. You feed and keep a good sow. And from time to time you bring in a prize boar.”

“If there’s one around,” said Jason.

“All right,” said Aunt Germaine. “If there’s one around. If there is not—and you mate your beautiful sow with some—oh, some stringy, undersized, sickly little pig… what sort of offspring would you expect?”

“Not so fine,” he said. “I expect.”

“There is a saying that Dr. Davenport coined some time after that. Breed a white woman with a Negro—the baby’s a Negro. A German with an Italian: Italian. A white fellow with an Indian squaw?”

Jason guessed: “A baby squaw?”

Aunt Germaine clapped.

“You mean to tell me Dr. Davenport was talking about breeding people the way farmers breed pigs.”

Aunt Germaine beamed. “It is a science,” she said. “A new science.”

“A new science.” Jason shook his head. “That’s something.”

“Do you know what it’s called?”

He shrugged. “Breeding, I guess.”

“It is called that. But there is a better word.”

Aunt Germaine leaned forward, her hand on Jason’s arm.

“Eugenics,” she said. Her eyebrows sprang up over the top of her glasses for an instant, and she smiled. “Eugenics, Nephew.”

“And now there’s a Eugenics Records Office,” said Jason. “I guess it caught on.”

The ERO as Aunt Germaine called it had started up officially in the last year. But it had been a dream of Dr. Davenport’s for more than ten years.

“Dr. Davenport contacted me personally,” said Aunt Germaine, “to join his crusade.”

“Crusade?”

“A figure of speech. Call it a mission. The mission, then, of the ERO was to compile an immense list—of every man, woman and child in America. Divided, of course, into segments.”

“Segments.”

“Of the population. Am I speaking too scientifically for you to follow, Jason?”

“I’m following.” Jason took a sip of coffee. “Dr. Davenport contacted you to help him make this list with segments and all.”

“Very good. Last year, he engaged a number of very proficient researchers—nurses, biologists, breeders, and so on—to travel out to the far corners of this nation, and compile this list. We all gathered at Cold Spring Harbor. We learned how to gather the information so as to be most useful to the enterprise. And then, one by one, we set out.”

“To Sing Sing?”

“Among other places, but yes. Sing Sing and prisons and hospitals are places that we have visited. It is particularly important to understand the scope of the criminal and the infirm, after all. For those—illness and stupidity and criminality—are among the things we hope to one day eradicate.”

“I thought you were eradicating ignorance.”

“Do not be disrespectful, Nephew.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt.”

That box of cards contained Aunt Germaine’s contribution to Dr. Davenport’s bold enterprise. The numbers—fully eleven digits long—were each one of them different from the next, and matched up with particular folks. The descriptions underneath (Habitual Criminal, Rapist and so on) were indications of what was wrong with them.

The percentage numbers said how good that person was overall. One of the things that the ERO was on the lookout for, said Germaine, was all the people that fell into the very lowest percentage. Jason couldn’t figure that.

“Why not look for the highest percentage?” he asked, and Aunt Germaine nodded and smiled at that.

“Why not indeed?” she said, and went back to work, entering the names and ages of the poor people of Cracked Wheel. They weren’t exactly murderers or habitual criminals or sufferers of epilepsy, but they weren’t the top of the percent either. They couldn’t have been that special. The germ had killed them all.

Jason only ever saw one of them before he and Aunt Germaine finally left Cracked Wheel. Several times he had nearly summoned the will to enter the saloon, and see what Aunt Germaine meant when she called it a charnel house. But each time he turned away—hands stuffed in his pockets or in fists at his hips—fear inhabiting his gut like a ball of raw dough—and stomped, defeated, through the ever-muddier street back to the town office.

It was finally in the Dempsey store that he confronted the dead of Cracked Wheel. It was only one of them, but one was enough.

Jason went into the store as prepared as he could be. He wore one of Aunt Germaine’s handkerchiefs over his face, and he’d dipped it in the juice from a jar of pickled onion (which she had said would help kill the smell). To make sure he didn’t stumble over anything in the dark, he carried the kerosene lamp in one hand. And so he wouldn’t have to make more trips than one, he carried a big sack in the other. He was on an errand for a few items that, as Aunt Germaine put it, they could not do without.

First, they needed more food and ammunition. It was going to be a week’s journey anyhow to Helena and the rail station and they couldn’t make it on what supplies they’d found in the town office.

And second, Jason needed a decent suit of clothes. If he were going to get on a train with Aunt Germaine, he could not be wearing his mama’s home-sewn duds. Jason, having proved his own immunity to the germ, was the one who would have to go inside.

“It is possible that the store is as safe as the town office. I simply cannot say for certain because I have not been inside,” his aunt said.

So under a crisp blue sky, hands full and shaking, Jason made his way across the muddy road and to the store. The shades were open, but the awning cast a shadow to make it entirely black within. So Jason stopped to light the lamp and then pulled open the door. He wondered as he entered if this would be enough to put “Thief” next to his name on the card that Aunt Germaine wrote for him. The sign on the door said “Open”—and that, he thought, should count for something.

Jason glanced back to where Germaine stood at the stoop of the town office, wringing her gloves nervously. “Courage,” she mouthed at him. Then Jason stepped into the dark.

The pickle juice helped mask it, but the minute he crossed the threshold Jason could tell he was not alone in the store. The smell reminded him of his mama at the end, only sweeter, if sweet could make a fellow upchuck his breakfast.

Jason’s inclination was to stop breathing it, so he stood there still for a moment, breath caught in his throat. He held the lantern high and surveyed the room.

The Dempsey store was pretty big, with a ceiling maybe a dozen feet up and shelves running all the way up every wall. Free-standing shelves held blankets and clothing and made a dark little alcove in the back. And there was a long counter with a box for money and a little balance scale on it for folks that still liked to pay with metals. Jason could see everywhere but behind the counter and in that little cubbyhole in the back—and there were no bodies he could see. He worried about those other spots, though: behind the counter, behind the shelves. Anything could be in there, and he didn’t think it would be anything he wanted to see.

His lungs were burning, so he took a big gulping breath and that set him coughing—the air from the pickle juice stung fierce, and the smell was only worse for gulping it in. All right, Jason thought, no point dawdling. He set to work.

He got to the clothes and food cans first. Both were in the open, although he had to use the stepladder to get at a shirt and an overcoat that would fit him properly, they were so high up. He found himself a pair of new boots too—they were rawhide, but stained dark and etched with a swirling design, and were marked to cost three dollars. He also took a couple of blankets, because who knew what they’d need on the trail, and a folded sheet of canvas that he figured he could make into a tent if they needed it. He spent some time checking out the different cans of food and ended up taking a lot more than they needed.

Finally, there was nothing for it. He had to get ammunition: a box of cartridges for the Winchester, another box of bullets for Aunt Germaine’s revolver. And all of that was behind the counter.

Before he went, he took the sack and set it by the front doors. Then he got hold of the kerosene lamp, and made his way around the counter.

It was a bad enough sight there that Jason pulled down his mask and let go some breakfast.

When he was done, he didn’t bother putting the mask back up. He didn’t think the pickle juice would help him a bit, faced as he was with the befouled remains of a fellow Jason was pretty sure used to be Lionel Dempsey.

He guessed that more because of the clothes than anything else. The body still had its apron on, and the white shirt with the arm-bands on it. The little shopkeeper’s visor still dangled over the slick forehead. The body was sprawled along the floor. One hand held the leg of a wooden stool in a very determined grip, and Jason could imagine what had happened: Lionel had been sitting on his stool, waiting for a customer an afternoon back in February when none were coming. A spell came over him. He got dizzy enough that he fell off, and knocked the stool too. And thinking that it was just a little dizzy spell, he got the idea he could grab the stool, right it and use it to pull himself back up. And he got as far as grabbing it before he got too sick to move.

Because he didn’t have a boy or girl to watch over him, he would have died there of thirst and fever. And then because there was no one to do anything else, he stayed there on the floor of his general store, smelling up a bit until the fire in his stove went out, then freezing, and then, in the last couple days as the thaw came, thawing out himself.

Which point, the creatures got at him.

His face was a dark colour, and bits of the flesh were gone, revealing stuff of a blacker hue still underneath. One eyeball was mostly gone too, and the other stared up lidless and dried. To account for all that, Jason suspected mice or something like them had got at him, gnawing little holes in the half-froze flesh and feasting on the eyeball that was gone. And lately, judging from the things that moved where his lips drew from his teeth, and in that one empty eye socket, the maggots had hatched.

Jason wiped his mouth with the vinegary face mask and bent closer to look.

It was a funny thing: now that he’d seen what happened to Mr. Dempsey, the fear that’d possessed him evaporated, and he was just sad. Looking at Mr. Dempsey like this made him compare with the memories he’d had of him alive. And because all those memories included his mama, it made Jason think of her again. He wondered how it could be, that folks like his mama and Mr. Dempsey could be taken down by something so little like a germ. Aunt Germaine seemed to think she had the answers to that in her little file box—those eleven numbers and the percentage of how fit they were.

Jason could see how a fellow like Lionel Dempsey might fall based upon those numbers. He was always skinny and pale, and his chin didn’t come out more than halfway as far as his top teeth. And he was getting on past forty and hadn’t lifted much beyond his stock of cans and foodstuff and hardware in many years, and probably he drank too much over at the saloon which made him weaker still. But Jason Thistledown’s mama was strong and fit and beautiful. And she did beget Jason, who was strong enough to not be bothered a bit by the germ that came across the land. That had to count for something in Aunt Germaine’s eugenical numbers. It should have meant Jason’s mama could stand up to anything, at least as much as Jason could.

And yet, the only difference between her and slow old Mr. Dempsey now was a lick of flame.

Jason shook his head. Before he could upchuck again, he went to the ammunition shelf and got what he came for: plenty of bullets and a good knife besides.

Outside, Germaine was nowhere to be seen. The only sign she’d been there was a couple of steaming tubs of water, set out next to one another on the wooden sidewalk.

She reappeared when Jason was in the bigger one, dutifully scrubbing the germy dirt off his winter-white skin.

“Take your time,” she said. “We won’t leave for Helena ’til morning.”

“Where we goin’ then, Aunt? Somewhere by train?”

She looked to the west, shading her eyes with her hands and peering hard, as though looking at some distant oceanic horizon.

“Idaho,” she said. “The mill town of Eliada, at the very north end of the State of Idaho. We… I’ve an appointment there, one of which I am well overdue in the keeping.”

“We going to set a fire on the way out?”

Aunt Germaine looked at him. The sun reflected from her glasses and made it hard for him to look back.

“To clean the place up,” said Jason when she didn’t answer him. “Get rid of all the germs. Like we did the homestead.”

“Nephew,” she said, “they hang arsonists.”

Jason opened his mouth to argue. He wanted to ask her why she hadn’t thought of that when they cremated his mama and everything she’d made, just to start. But he recalled his aunt’s madness that first night; something in the set of her mouth this day told him not to bother.

“Eliada it is, then,” was all he said.

4 - Utopia’s Daughter

The first time that Jason Thistledown encountered Ruth Harper, he did not learn her name and had no reason to believe he ever would.

He spied her as he and Aunt Germaine boarded the train at Helena, and she, a passenger from further east accompanied by an only slightly older chaperone, was taking a stroll along the vast station platform before the train debarked. Jason could not help but stare, and later, as the train crossed a deep gorge but an hour to the west of Helena, Aunt Germaine told him that he would have to learn to be more circumspect when be-spying young ladies in public places. “One does not gawk,” she said. “It is a sign of bad breeding. And it offends.”

“Then how come she smiled like that?” Jason had been gawking hard he figured, because although he was now looking out the window at a true spectacle of God’s handiwork—down what seemed like a mile to a fast silver river wending serpentine through tree and rock—the view was eclipsed by his memory of the girl: the light brown curls of hair that peeked out from beneath her wide hat the colour of fresh cream, her greenish-blue eyes that glanced between her soft hands and Jason’s own hungry eye, and the smooth red lips that touched up to a smile at one corner only, near a place where a tiny dark birthmark marred her otherwise unblemished cheek.

“She was being well-mannered,” said Aunt Germaine. “That was all. There is a tolerant streak in these modern young girls that sometimes expresses itself in what may seem like licentiousness. Do not take too much from it.”

Jason leaned back on his seat. He supposed he shouldn’t be thinking about young ladies now anyway. Never mind Aunt Germaine’s views; Jason’s mama always advised nothing good came of licentiousness, and she was still not dead more than two months. Any of her advice he could still remember, Jason figured he’d better heed.

He thought he might pay particular attention to what little of that advice still applied as he drew far from the homestead and Cracked Wheel. Sure, his mama knew how to strike a camp and had some wisdom that Jason could apply to that. She knew how to talk to strange fellows who might or might not want something that you didn’t want to give up.

But if she ever knew how to do up a man’s cravat, she’d never let on; if she ever said how to negotiate price for a room in a hotel for a boy and his aunt coming late and on foot, she said so too quiet for Jason to hear; and as for counting up money bigger than dimes—well, she didn’t have much to say on that ever. It was a good thing for Aunt Germaine, who was wiser in the ways of the roads and towns on the way to civilization. Yes, it was a good thing for Aunt Germaine.

“I’m going to stretch my legs,” Jason said and when Aunt Germaine asked why, he fibbed: “I’m not used to sitting so long. My feet are falling asleep.”

As he made his way down the aisle, Jason considered the odd mix of guilt and triumph now welling in his middle. His mama was right saying it: no good ever came of licentiousness.

Jason searched the train in a way that he hoped was at once thorough and nonchalant. But it was all in vain; Jason did not find Ruth Harper anywhere.

Much later, he would learn that she had spent most of the journey in her berth in the sleeper car, re-reading her favourite chapters in The Virginian, while her ostensible chaperone, Miss Louise Butler of Evanston, Illinois, napped and knitted and gazed longingly out the glass at the passing mountains.

They were in a part of the train where a boy like Jason had no reason to linger. Both times he passed through, he was hurried on his way by the glares, silences, and noisily cleared throats of his betters. He and Aunt Germaine were billeted in another car, further to the front where the beds were stacked like shelves on either side and sectioned off by thick, stale-smelling curtains. As far as Jason knew, the lovely girl with the birthmark and the little smile that stopped just beneath it had jumped off the train some time ago, and fled on foot into the Montana wilderness, never to be seen again.

It disappointed him, but not bitterly. In the course of his search Jason was able to observe a great many things about the train, the railway and the people who travelled by it.

Jason figured this would be something his mama would have approved of more than hunting a pretty smile on a locomotive. It would, after all, lead him to self-sufficiency.

Coming upon civilization as he had, all at once through the haze of grief, after spending his short life on a Montana pig farm, and with no one but a new-found aunt to guide him, Jason Thistledown was a boy in need of bearings. Nothing made that clearer to him than the fascinating, loud and stinking machinery of the Pacific Northwest steam engine and the cars it hauled. The thing’s engine made a noise like thunder that didn’t ever stop, and threw out fat clouds of black coal-soot as evil as anything Jason had ever smelled. The locomotive, as Aunt Germaine called it, scared hell out of Jason and he knew he’d have to conquer that fear (along with the fear brought on by all those strangers in their suits and skirts and high leather boots, and their peculiar expressions) if he were ever going to have a life beyond Cracked Wheel.

When he got back to Aunt Germaine, she looked right at him.

“Are your legs well-stretched?” she asked, and Jason looked away for only an instant before he told her they were, which was at least true.

The train pulled in to Sand Point two days later. They debarked, but not because that was the end of their trip. As Aunt Germaine explained it, they would next take a short line ride to a place called Bonner’s Ferry, where they would be met by a man from Eliada who would take them the rest of the way by barge and horseback, down the Kootenai River to the town.

As they debarked and waited for the short line train, Jason happened to spot Ruth Harper for the second time.

This time, he tried to be mindful of Aunt Germaine’s advice and his mama’s wisdom, and made an effort not to gawk.

It was quite an effort. Jason felt his heart thundering in his chest, and a profound quaking in his stomach, and those parts along with every other part of him seemed to be hollering: There she is! Look over there, you damn fool! Perhaps she’s smiling!

Once or twice—for an instant each time—he obeyed, glancing down the platform, under the overhang where all the passengers gathered against the cold spring rain, to be-spy her sitting on the bench next to her chaperone, reading from a book in her lap. She would stir, he imagined, feeling the heat of his look even though she didn’t look up to meet it—just smiling a little more each time.

Later, Jason would learn that he was off the mark but not entirely. For while it was true that his gaze drew notice, it was not from Ruth Harper, but Miss Louise Butler, who sat near to her friend but beyond the scope of Jason’s attention. At only his second glance, she whispered to Ruth:

“We have an admirer.”

“Do we?”

Miss Butler’s hands remained folded in her lap, but she nonetheless motioned in Jason’s direction, with progressively indelicate thrusts of her right forefinger. In spite of this, Ruth did not look up from her book. She did, however, smile a little.

“Is it one of those filthy loggers?”

“He might be. How does one tell a filthy logger from a smooth-faced young man who obviously does not know how to dress himself?”

Ruth sighed. “Is he looking now?” she asked, and when Miss Butler said he wasn’t, Ruth spared her a sidelong stare of withering significance. “Well?”

“There.” Miss Butler pointed.

“Oh,” she said, glancing quickly and then returning her eyes to her book. Her smile was noticeably wider this time than the last.

“Him.”

The train to Bonner’s Ferry was not so luxurious as the one from Helena. It was mostly hauling freight, and the single passenger car was old and cheap, with hard wooden benches instead of cushioned seats, and boot-worn slats on the floor in place of the deep red carpeting of the Pullman cars of the Pacific Northwest.

The passengers seemed generally suited to the humbler appointments. They were almost all men—unshaven, uncouth and probably unbathed fellows of the sort that Jason would watch close if he encountered them with his mama at his side. More than one of them sent leering glances in the direction of Misses Harper and Butler, who this time did not have the luxury of their own car. The men’s obvious intentions vexed Jason.

Let them try something, he said to himself. As the train wound through the hills, he found his thoughts drifting back to those nights he spent guarding his mama, wondering about wolves and ammunition and such things as followed from those.

“You figure these fellows have numbers?” he asked an hour or so in.

“Numbers?” Aunt Germaine blinked. “Oh. ERO numbers. It is possible, but unlikely. We have not been at this long enough yet. If any of them had been in prison, or hospitalized…”

“I bet a few of them have been in prison,” said Jason, and Aunt Germaine chuckled into her handkerchief.

“No doubt,” she said. “But please keep your voice down, Nephew. If you are correct, we don’t wish to provoke an incident.”

Jason sat quiet and tried as best he might to look beyond the window. The land here was not dissimilar to that around his mama’s old homestead: low foothills covered thick in pine trees, little tongues of lakes with rocky beaches, but mostly—trees.

For parts of the trip, those trees would draw in on the train, so all you could see going past was greenery and the shadows beyond. Then they would open up, and the green would spread out forever, crawling up the sides of far mountains strange to Jason’s eye. Jason understood Bonner’s Ferry to be a mill town like Eliada, only one that had been there longer. He figured towns like that would do well up here for a long time, all those trees they had to chew on.

“Is there a prison up in Eliada?” he asked.

“No,” said Aunt Germaine. “They don’t have a great many prisons up this way, I shouldn’t think. What’s in Eliada is perhaps even less common.”

“Well, Aunt?” said Jason, after a long moment watching her stare out the window, not telling him what was less common. “Are you going to tell me what?”

She smiled. “Here comes the town,” she said, as the train whistle hooted. The view out the window went dark then as the wind blew the smoke from the engine down and they started a slow turn. “Get ready for a boat ride, Nephew.”

Jason found that he liked Bonner’s Ferry, and he was disappointed it was only a way station. It smelled like sap and sawdust and wood smoke, and was dominated by a towering sawmill on a river that was all but covered in floating tree trunks. It was raining quite hard under a rolling dark sky as they got off the train, but that didn’t stop the men in this town from going about the hard business of logging and lumber-milling. There was an air of industry here, unlike any he’d seen in Helena or Sand Point—or especially, in those days when its inhabitants still drew breath, Cracked Wheel. Perhaps, he thought, Eliada will be the same as Bonner’s Ferry.

“Where do we go?”

Germaine pointed. “With that fellow.”

Jason looked. There was a moustachioed man in a black coat and a bowler hat standing very straight at the far end of the platform. He held an umbrella in one hand and a sign in the other, which had painted on it neatly “Eliada.”

“Oh,” said Jason as Aunt Germaine waved.

As the fellow drew closer, Jason saw that he had more umbrellas rolled up under his arm: four of them altogether. He juggled the sign into the crook of his arm, pulled out two umbrellas and handed one to Aunt Germaine and one to Jason. Then he tipped his hat. “Sam Green,” he said.

Aunt Germaine introduced herself and Jason, at the same time as she expertly popped open the umbrella and swung it over her head. Jason watched to see how she’d done it, but she was too fast for him to see exactly, so he had to fiddle with his. He did not get far, though. Sam Green reached down and found the catch, and a second later Jason was dry under his own black dome, still not sure of the trick to it.

“How soon may we be off?” asked Aunt Germaine.

“Presently,” said Sam Green. “Mr. Harper’s new boat is waiting at dock. But I must first gather the rest of our party.”

“The rest of our party?”

Sam Green tipped his hat once more. “Please stay here, Ma’am. I shall return.” And he strode off toward the train.

“So there’s a boat waiting for us? A new one?” said Jason. He set Aunt Germaine’s carpet bag down. “I thought it would be a barge. Maybe that is what it is and Mr. Green simply misstated.”

Aunt Germaine smiled. “Mr. Harper is a wealthy man—becoming wealthier by the day. If he has a new boat, it will be a fine one. It was not so long ago that a trip to Eliada meant a long and hazardous march or a horseback ride through wilderness. Not now, though. It seems that Mr. Harper’s investments are paying off, and civilization draws northward.”

“Who is Mr. Harper, anyhow? Aside from a rich man getting richer.”

“Garrison Harper?” Aunt Germaine began. “Why—”

“Why, he is my father.”

Jason turned. He found himself staring into a smile that was all too familiar. The girl it belonged to curtsied, her own black umbrella tilting to one side and a wash of rainwater splashing off it.

And that was when Jason Thistledown learned the thing he thought he never would.

“I am Ruth Harper,” said the girl. “May I introduce my companion, Miss Louise Butler of Evanston, Illinois.” The other lady—a little taller, with darker hair, a longer forehead and thin, half-smiling lips—likewise curtsied. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.

Ruth Harper glanced behind her, where Sam Green was supervising two porters who were each hauling a large steamer trunk. “Mr. Green informs me that we will all be travelling together—” and she turned back to Jason, her smile fading and her eye catching his directly “—for a short while longer.”

Jason nodded and blinked. Aunt Germaine smiled.

“He is cross with us,” she continued. “Mr. Green is, I should say—because we dismissed his associate in Chicago. Vulgar man. He smelled so. I believe—” she leaned forward and whispered to Aunt Germaine: “—he drank.”

“Ruth!” said Miss Butler.

“Mr. Green will overcome it,” said Ruth. “We are after all here in one piece. Two pieces.” Then she turned and looked at Jason in a direct and discomforting way.

“Well?” she said at length. “I believe, sir, that you have the advantage.”

“Thank you, Miss Harper,” Jason managed at last. “But I don’t see it that way at all.”

Ruth Harper’s laughter was the prettiest sound that Jason had ever heard. He did not know how he felt about having it directed his way, but he sure did like how it fell on his ears. So he grinned and joined in.

“I am Germaine Frost,” said Aunt Germaine when they had quieted down. “This is my nephew.”

“Jason Thistledown,” said Jason.

“Really,” said Ruth. “Thistledown.”

Her smile faded, and was replaced by a look that Jason had not seen on her before: an eyebrow arched a hair higher than its twin, and her mouth half open, a fold of her lower lip pinched gently in her teeth.

Days ahead, when he had composed himself and knew her a little better, he would learn what that look signified.

Miss Harper’s considerable store of curiosity was mightily piqued.

Jason found the Harper steamboat not so very impressive. Not more than fifty feet long, it had a shape that reminded Jason of a shoe. The boat was a side-wheeler, with a tall, fluted smokestack coming out the middle, a wheel on either side to propel it, and an interior that was mostly filled with barrels and crates and sacks. It was called The Eliada, which, while not imaginative, at least hit the point. Its skipper could take a wrong turn or even two, and it would not stay lost for long before someone read the bow and sent it on its right way home.

Sam Green collected the umbrellas as they stepped on board, then cleared off a bench for them that allowed them to look out the side of the boat without getting rained on.

“It’ll be a few hours,” he said. “The river gets rough in spots as a matter of course, and the weather today is not ideal for it.”

Aunt Germaine smiled in a kindly way. “It is preferable to the alternative—riding horseback through Indian country.”

“Oh,” said Ruth, “I don’t know about that. I always enjoyed the trek. Particularly the horses. And the Indians—the Kootenays—oh, they were never any trouble. Mr. Green and his people were always most helpful in that regard.”

“I am just as happy,” said Miss Butler. “Indians terrify me.”

“There is no reason they should,” said Ruth. “Not these days.”

“Most of ’em are over in Montana now anyhow,” said Jason. The two women looked at him, and he shrugged. “Government set up a big reserve for Kootenays last year. I expect they’re all of them headed over there by now. ’Twas all the talk of Cracked Wheel.”

Miss Butler giggled. “Cracked Wheel? What sort of name is that?”

“Name of my home town, miss,” said Jason. “It is not very large, I guess. Or it was not,” he added.

“Was?” Ruth looked at him. “Mr.—Thistledown. You speak of your town with the weight of the world on you. Is there something the matter?”

Aunt Germaine caught his eye and gave him a warning glare, but that wasn’t what shut Jason up on the subject. He didn’t want to stray back to Cracked Wheel, didn’t want to pick at the scab forming over his grief. He’d misspoke, he saw, naming it at all.

So all he said was: “Sorry I brought it up. No. Nothing’s the matter.”

Had Ruth Harper known Jason a little better, she might have known to leave it lie, let him to himself for a few minutes. As it stood, her curiosity got the better of her, and she persisted.

“You,” she said, turning a third toward him on the bench, “have a secret, Mr. Thistledown. Is it, I wonder, a secret connected to your infamous surname?”

“My infamous surname?”

“I am sure,” said Aunt Germaine, intervening, “that he is unrelated to that scoundrel.”

“Well, Madame,” said Ruth, “as his aunt, you ought to know. Still—” she turned to Jason “—those are, as they say, ‘mighty big shoes to fill.’”

“Ruth!” said Miss Butler, but Ruth rolled her eyes. She looked at Jason, and pointed with her index finger. “Bang!” she said, and giggled.

Jason felt his hands squeezing into fists. He pushed them between his knees, and took a breath.

“Miss Harper,” he said. “I must apologize but I cannot make head nor tail of what you are saying.”

Miss Butler was trying not to laugh herself by now. “You are not alone, Mr. Thistledown. She has, I daresay, read altogether too many dime novels for her own good. And your name—”

“What about my name?” said Jason.

“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Ruth, having composed herself. “Never mind having not heard of the man—it beggars the imagination to conceive that no one would have suggested to you the similarity of your own name to that of Jack Thistledown’s.”

Jason thought that he might have enjoyed studying Miss Ruth Harper from afar a little longer. He did not like this sort of conversation.

“Oh come,” said Ruth. “Jack Thistledown—hero of the Incorporation Wars. Killed a dozen men fighting against Granville Stewart and his vigilantes, over the cattle ranges of south Montana. One of three men to walk away from the shootout at Snake River. Does that not jog your memory?”

“My pa’s name was John,” said Jason.

“Jack is another name for John.”

Jason sighed. This would come up from time to time in Cracked Wheel, when fellows were passing through town and overheard someone calling his name in the store. Jason said now the same thing he’d said then.

“I didn’t know him too well. But he was no good.”

“The same might be said of Jack Thistledown,” said Ruth. “Well—this is exciting. The son of a famous gunfighter—right here on this boat! I feel I ought to be swooning.”

“Ruth!” said Miss Butler, and this time Sam Green intervened too.

“Leave the boy be, Miss Harper,” he said. “It’s his own business who his pa is.”

This seemed to make an impression on Ruth where her old friend Louise Butler could not. Her face took a more sympathetic cast.

“Of course it is,” she said. “And look—my questions have made you positively crimson! Oh, I must apologize, Mr. Thistledown. As my dear Louise attests, I am quite mad for the dime novels. And here on my way to a summer at Utopian Eliada… Well. I am too hungry for intrigue and so invent it where there is none to be found. Can you forgive me?”

Jason had not been aware that he was crimson. He was not sure he liked having it pointed out. “I can,” he said.

They sat quiet for awhile, watching the shore of the Kootenai River transform from docks to tilled field to wilderness. After a moment, Aunt Germaine excused herself to freshen up. As she did so, Jason caught Ruth looking to him again. This time she looked away quickly, and Jason was fine with that. Let her turn all crimson for a change.

“What’d your pa buy this boat for?” asked Jason as they drew around a bend and the river stretched wide before them. “If I am not prying in asking.”

Ruth didn’t look over when she answered, and she spoke in a cool tone. “I suppose that he told the investors it was to haul his brailles of logs and lumber back to Bonner’s Ferry more efficiently. When he invested in the town, Father had hoped that the markets downriver in Canada might take an interest in Eliada wood; and he has always hoped that the Great Northern Railway might finally complete a line south through the town. Given that they have not…” She spread her hands to indicate the whole of The Eliada “… voila!”

“Voila. That’s what he told his investors,” said Jason. “You suppose.”

Now she did smile. “Yes. But you didn’t ask the proper question.”

“And what is that?”

“Why, given everything, did not my Father acquire his steamboat much sooner?” She did not wait for him to ask it. “That would be because it is only now that Father feels his grand project is enough of a success to let the world in.”

Louise Butler pursed her lips and shook her head. “Really,” she said.

“No,” said Ruth. “It is true. The fact of the matter is that until now, dear Father could not be certain that regular traffic through his community might not pollute it. Why—if the land were not so well-prepared, venal men might arrive and bring with them their terrible vices! Things such as cards—hard liquor—low women—”

“Ruth!”

She waved away her friend’s objections without even looking at her.

“—and worst of all: dancing!”

Jason laughed and shook his head. He didn’t have much experience with young women, and at first Ruth had sure thrown him. But it was like learning a fancy a dance step, talking with her. And he thought he was beginning to get the rhythm of her humour.

“Sounds like your pa has some definite ideas,” he said.

“Oh, only good ideas. Resolutely, unwaveringly good ones. For the betterment of all mankind.”

“That so,” said Jason. “Then he and my aunt have something in common. Hello, Aunt Germaine.”

Germaine took her seat beside Jason and straightened her skirts as Ruth Harper went on.

“For instance: do you know that Eliada, which has just a few hundred men and their families living and working there, boasts its own hospital?”

“That,” said Jason, “I did know as a matter of fact.”

“Well. Here is something that you do not know. Any man or woman needing a doctor’s attention may receive it free of payment. At first, the hospital was only for those men who worked directly for my father, cutting trees or milling them. But in the past year, why—anyone in need is seen to. There are doctors and a surgery and many clean white rooms. And it is not even affiliated with a church! But financed from Father’s own purse!”

“Fancy that,” said Jason.

“My father is very enlightened. You need only ask him. Or failing that, his investors back in the east. They will tell you he is enlightened to a fault.”

“Providing free doctoring for folks that need it? There’s not much fault in that.”

“Except,” said Ruth, “when commerce is involved. Father says that by doing this, he is forestalling any of the ugly labour conflicts that beset so many of his competitors. The others are not so convinced.”

Sam Green shook his head, which caught Ruth’s attention.

“Why, just ask Mr. Green,” she said. “He supervises the Pinkerton men who keep the peace in Eliada. Not that they have much to do. Father does frown on violence so, and the men who work for him are not at all prone to it. Tell him, Mr. Green: all is well in fair Eliada, now and forever, and never must you so much as raise a fist to keep it so.”

Sam Green made a fist and cleared his throat into it. “Miss Harper,” he said, looking at them from under his bowler hat, “talk like that is a good way to make the Devil laugh.”

Ruth stifled a laugh herself.

“What are you saying, Mr. Green?”

“Only that things are not so peaceful as you might think.”

Ruth frowned. “Pray tell—?”

Sam Green gave a long sigh. “I am in dutch with your father, I fear.”

“Oh no! Why is that? Tell us your tale.”

“Well. I suppose that you will like the story better than him,” said Sam Green. “Just two days ago I shot three men, me and my fellows did—men dressed in sheets, in the manner of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“They were not merely impersonating spectres? To cause you and your men to take a fright?”

“Ruth, this sounds to be serious,” scolded Miss Butler.

Green shook his head. “They were readying to string up a nigg—a Negro.”

“A Negro.” Ruth’s eyebrows raised. “Do we have any of those?”

“Yeah,” said Sam Green. “One, anyhow. He’s a doctor, too. Saved him. That’s why your father hasn’t run me and the Pinkertons out of town yet. The saving balanced the killing. But I’m not sure that is going to do the town much good. Dr. Waggoner’s going to make trouble in Eliada. Once he gets to his feet, he’s going to make trouble.”

Ruth smiled radiantly. “Splendid!” she said. “Trouble in Paradise! Made by a Negro doctor hired by Father! And Mr. Thistledown, who is not a famous gunfighter’s son, here to witness it all with us! See, Louise? This will not be a wasted summer after all.”

Louise blushed and looked to her lap. Jason felt the crimson coming on as well. He looked to the riverbank, which was devoid of any sign of human touch. They were in wilderness altogether.

And the further they got, the more came Ruth Harper into her element. Jason wished he could say the same for himself. He found himself wishing again that they’d stayed put in Bonner’s Ferry. Klansmen and Negroes and gunplay: Eliada sounded like more of Cracked Wheel again, in its own particular way, and Jason was not sure he was ready for that.

Eliada came upon them late in the day. The rains had stopped, and the cloud was beginning to clear as they rounded the bend in the river that hid Mr. Harper’s grand town.

It was not a peaceful arrival. The river ran fast at the bend, and The Eliada rode it hard. They had been through a few of the Kootenai’s rapids by then so Jason was more used to it, but he still hung on tight as the boat pitched side to side, veering through white foam and close past shallow rocks.

He was not alone; even Ruth Harper, who was so clever and brave, so up for trouble at the start of a dull summer, sat clutching the edge of her seat as the water sprayed up high alongside and the beams of the boat complained.

“Huzzah,” she exclaimed weakly when the river deepened and the boat became more steady. “Are we home now? We are!”

Sure enough, there it was—contained as it was in a tantalizingly brief glimpse: a collection of rooftops and chimneys that peeked between a now much-thinner growth of trees lining the bank. The boat turned then and Eliada’s rooftops swung from view, so Jason made his way to the bow, and up a steep stair he’d found earlier. That stair took him to the top deck where the pilot worked his craft and he could get a look.

The early evening sun showed the town to good effect. It was built on a flat stretch of river valley so behind it, the hill and forest rose to a chain of peaks that were not quite high enough for snow and bare rock. Crawling up those slopes, Jason could make out plots that had been cleared for agriculture—even what looked like some young orchards, their little trees all planted in tidy rows. Closer, the gold light caught taller wooden buildings like the ones in Cracked Wheel—general stores and hotels and such. There were more of them, though. There were even a couple of whitewashed church steeples, climbing a bit higher than the roofs of the businesses.

They were all made insignificant by the sawmill. Near the water at the north end of town, the mill dominated all. It was not as high as that in Bonner’s Ferry. But it was high enough; and it sprawled all the way down to the water and its own set of docks—off which floated a wide crescent of logs, crossing all but a narrow channel of the river and chained in against its fast current.

“That will be all our travelling for a time, Nephew.”

Jason turned to see Aunt Germaine climbing out the hatch to join him. He reached down to help her. Her hand was icy cold.

“It sure is a pretty little town,” said Jason, “although I wouldn’t call it Paradise like Miss Harper seems to think.”

Aunt Germaine shook her head. “She is a horrible girl.”

“She is all right.”

“No. There was no need to press you on that ridiculous legend.”

Jason shrugged.

“The legend of your father, I mean,” said Aunt Germaine.

“My father’s no legend,” said Jason. “A name’s a name. But my pa was no good. Simple as that.”

“Well,” said Aunt Germaine, “now that we’re here, you shan’t have to consort with Miss Harper any longer. Our business is with Dr. Bergstrom. Hers—well, girls like that do not have any business with serious folk. She is but a silly…”

She stopped then, perhaps noting that Jason had some time ago stopped paying any attention. He was listening to something else. Something that carried across the water with a strange and compelling urgency.

“Jason? Nephew?”

“What’s that birdsong?” he asked her. “Sounds like a fellow whistling who forgot the tune.”

5 - Baby Wakes

The whistling carried like a scream across the fields—it passed across the land like a wave of wind through long grasses, from the base of fresh-planted crop, through gaps in the roofs of barns, and finally, into the crook of some tree roots at the very base of the Selkirk Mountains—where it paused.

That crook had been home to all sorts of creatures—some squirrels, one time a fox and, as evidenced by the sneers of half-collapsed holes, an entire brood of rabbits. Centipedes too. They had all come and gone, though. All but the centipedes.

Right now, the baby lived there.

If it were in the habit of naming things, the baby would not have picked “baby” for itself. It was, in fact, feeling pretty grown-up, inasmuch as its limited experience would allow. Not long ago, it had separated itself from the parent and its servile brood. In so doing, it finished dealing with a good many of its contemporary siblings, who were all of them nearly as tough and determined as it was. The cuts were healing, and the teeth and nails it had lost in that struggle were coming back in.

Pretty soon, it figured it would be walking upright again, marking its territory—making its own brood. It was getting a coalescing sense of just how grand it could become as it curled there in the crook, munching on bugs and watching the world turn. The last thing the baby wanted to hear right now was that whistling. It wanted no part of the things that whistling told it to do.

It wanted no part of it; but neither could it refuse the call.

So it rolled itself over, gathered its legs underneath it, and crawled outside. The ground was wet. It stank. There was no shelter, there was no clue here as to how one might find the bugs and grubs to which it had grown accustomed. Like all babies, this one was fundamentally selfish, and placed a high value on comfort and a full belly.

But the baby didn’t have much say in the matter. The instruction spoke to something fundamental in it, below and beyond even its own unkind nature. And so: as the whistling scream had told it to do, the baby drew air in through its orifices, opened its tiny mouth, and repeated, as best it could, the message that had carried itself this far.

Help, it whistled.

Come, it screamed.

And finally:

Pass it on.

6 - The Feeger Girls

There was singing on the shore to send the Devil when the call came upon the Feegers of Trout Lake.

It was the three Feeger girls, Missy and Lily and Patricia doing the singing. They stood in a circle, up to their bare ankles in the freezing water of the mountain lake, naked flesh creeping in the cold, heads turned high in the joy of their praising song. One time it had had words, but in the care of the girls those words had melted off and it was all melody and harmony and some splashing when Patricia, the eldest, set to stomping to bring their rhythm back in time.

Day was finished—the sun long disappeared behind the bare peak of the Far Mountain, while before it the water glowed in the light of a splintered moon. All was still but for the ripples that Patricia’s foot sent to Trout Lake’s heart and all was quiet but for the sweet voices of the Feeger girls singing their song, when the call came wafting up the hill. Patricia let the song go on for what her grandmother might’ve called a couple of verses before she lifted her foot and pointed the toe so water drizzled from it, straight as a line of piss.

Her sisters took the cue; Missy gasped and looked from one side to the other; Lily, three seasons older, shut her eyes and listened, sniffed. And Patricia held her stork pose, one foot drying in the night air, and paid heed to the call.

“Help,” she said.

“Come,” whispered Lily beside her.

By the time Missy shouted “Pass it on!” Patricia was already splashing again. She splashed four more times until the water was deep enough that she could bend forward, put her arms out in front of her, and ducking her head into the icy water for just a moment, flutter her feet behind her.

Patricia moved out bravely and purposefully; she would not let her sisters see anything but confidence. Yet inside, Patricia was filled up with a sharp, delicious fear. She had done this swim before, but never by herself—always bringing Offering. She supposed that was what she was doing now, bringing praise that had come across the land, but as their mother had told them many times: the Old Man hungers for our Love. Praise is fine—but it is not the same as Love and if you do not bring it to Him, why, He may just take it and then some.

Was she bringing her Love now? She would say so to anyone who might ask—yet to herself, here in the cold lake? Truly?

But as she swam, she knew one thing: she could not do anything but what she was doing now. She carried with her as much Love as there was. There were not many Feegers here to love the Old Man—not since the sickness had come upon them all a year ago. How many had they covered in stones, when they’d fallen down all poxy and coughing?

How many were gone? Patricia was not much for counting past fingers and toes. It would be easier to count the ones left—for there were not many of those—scarcely enough to portion out their Love to the Old Man, whose hunger for it was swelling like waters behind a beaver dam.

Some nights, it was all they could do to make it up the ridge and sing the Old Man to sleep.

And now—was she prepared to look upon him? With Love?

Hesitation grew in her mind, fear expanded in her middle, the further she went; but when she finally paused, it was not to turn back. It was because she had arrived. The Father was near. She shivered at what felt like a branch brush against her ankle, another thing caress her hip.

Patricia lifted her head from the water, let her feet fall below her, and gulped the lake air. The moonlight was dim, and not much good even to her night-accustomed eyes. She could make out the sky, its canopy of stars—and she could tell the line where the sky met the mountaintops. She could feel the water moving about her, the Old Man’s will working on it.

She drew a shaking breath, and closed her eyes and pursed her lips. She did not so much recite the call as she allowed it to pass through her.

And as she did, the fear slaked away. For in her halting whistles, the simple message she conveyed, was a kind of peace. It felt like forgiveness. She was in the Old Man’s hands, telling Him a message from His own child, the prodigal—a message that He was happy or at least anxious to hear. She looked at the sky, at the dark mountain, and even as the line between the two grew jagged, spires like tree trunks emerging from the lake around her and blocking off the stars, as more branches, more vines seemed to wrap her middle, she thought only of Love.

When the water fell away from her sides and she felt herself lifting over the lake, her naked flesh shivering beneath the ancient gaze in the now-encompassing shadow, she thought: There is no need to take that Love.

I give it. And there is plenty.

7 - The Hippocratic Oath

“Tell me about Mister Juke,” were not the very first words Andrew Waggoner spoke after the morphine haze passed. Those were French, almost certainly profane, and in their particulars a complete mystery to the nurses who tended the doctor as he returned to himself. But if “Tell me about Mister Juke” were not his first words, they were the first ones suitable for polite company; the first ones that got any kind of answer.

Andrew was dozing in the mid-morning when the door opened and Dr. Nils Bergstrom stepped through, alone. Dr. Bergstrom was an exceedingly thin man, and recently so. When Andrew had arrived in the autumn, Bergstrom carried his weight around his belly, and his blond-frosting-to-white mutton-chop sideburns drew attention to thick jowls. He’d undergone some sort of a regime over the winter—although what, Andrew couldn’t say, for he always seemed to be eating—and now the sideburns hung like drapes. He stole close to Andrew’s bedside and bent down toward his face.

Andrew opened his eyes.

“Tell me about Mister Juke,” he said.

Dr. Bergstrom did nothing more than blink, twice, to indicate his surprise. He stood straight, crossed his arms and smiled.

“You don’t want to know how you are doing first?”

Andrew looked down at his legs, lifted each one a few inches and flexed the fingers of both his hands. One of those hands was at the end of an arm splinted to above the elbow, and moving it hurt like a knife-twist.

“Looks like I’m all here,” he said. “It’s pretty sore.”

“I can give you another shot, if you like.”

“Morphine? No thank you.” Andrew knew what morphine did for men, and he knew what it did to them. On balance, he disliked it. “Thank you for offering.” He sighed.

Dr. Bergstrom harrumphed. “You are welcome, Doctor. Now—as to your health: although you did not think to ask, I will tell you.”

“Thank you again.”

“You have injuries of the ligaments in your left hip and knee. Bruising and strain is what it amounts to, but I do not recommend you attempt to walk on it for at least a few days—preferably longer. Doing so will change your mind on morphine.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

Dr. Bergstrom gave him a stern look. “I am concerned about your kidneys and bowel so will be watching your emissions in that regard. You have taken a blow to your skull which is not as bad as it might have been; you have avoided serious concussion. But the coincident cuts necessitated a good deal of stitch-work. As is the case with your lower extremities, it is only a matter of time and you should be as fine as you were before the… attack. The more serious injury is there.” He indicated Andrew’s right arm—the arm with the splint.

“The bone was broken near the elbow. And that,” he said, “will prove a problem. You will not be able to perform surgery for some months. And I cannot say how well you will rehabilitate.”

Andrew let that sink in. He knew enough how easily bones could set wrong, to know that Dr. Bergstrom was if anything understating the troubles he might face.

“That could bar me from the surgery,” he said quietly. “For good. That’s what you’re saying.”

Bergstrom shrugged. “Or it could heal well. Your hands are undamaged, and that is good. As to how your arm progresses: that is up to you. You and God.”

“I guess I’m not going to be much use to you this season,” said Andrew. I guess that’s what you’re saying in your way, he added to himself.

Dr. Bergstrom had never been what Andrew would have called a strong advocate. Andrew came here on the recommendation of Dr. Albert Mercer in New York, who had reviewed his credentials on behalf of Garrison Harper. He and Dr. Bergstrom had met face to face only after Mr. Harper had hired him. Andrew suspected that if left to his own devices, Bergstrom would prefer a white doctor to assist here in Eliada, one taught in Germany like himself.

“You are correct on that count.” Bergstrom looked down at a board on his lap and cleared his throat. “Andrew—I am profoundly sorry for what happened to you out there. I saw with my own eyes what those hooligans did in the hospital. As to your experience… My God, I can only imagine.”

“It was no pleasure,” said Andrew. “But I am alive, sir. And that is more than I dared hope.”

“Quite.”

“Now,” said Andrew. “I repeat my question: what can you tell me about Mister Juke? How are his injuries?”

“Minor,” said Dr. Bergstrom. “He is recovering well.”

Andrew drew a breath.

“I understand that he was a patient in the quarantine. But I knew nothing of his arrival or his treatments there. Was I misled?”

Dr. Bergstrom did not answer him immediately. He stood up and went to the window and drew the curtain aside a few inches. He squinted outside.

“You were misled. But only through omission. The patient is something of… a project of mine. Can you understand that?”

“So far as you have just explained. But there are questions. This Mister Juke—”

“Please. Do not call him that. It’s offensive.”

“That’s not his name?”

“No. That is what some of the others who work here named him. Mister Juke.” Dr. Bergstrom spat the words. “As though he is some degenerate.”

“Degenerate?” Andrew blinked. “Oh,” he said. “He’s named for the Jukes. Those Jukes.”

Dr. Bergstrom smiled. “You are familiar with Richard Dugdale’s book? I’d not think one such as you would find time for that sort of reading.”

“By one such as me I suppose you mean ‘Negro,’ and by ‘that sort of reading’ I am guessing you mean eugenics.” Andrew chuckled. “Dr. Bergstrom, if we all only read what sat easily with us, how would we advance? I read his book—what was it? The Jukes: something-or-other.”

“A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity,” said Dr. Bergstrom.

“I read it on the ship back from France. I was inclined to toss it into the Atlantic. The notion of a family of congenital criminals struck me as—”

“Dangerous?”

“Improbable. Fanciful. Is this poor fellow thought to be a Juke?”

Dr. Bergstrom shook his head. “No. I am certain he is not. What he is, is a poor man beset by idiocy and infirmity. And certain—irregularities in his anatomy.”

“Irregularities?”

Dr. Bergstrom ignored him. “He was brought here in the winter, found wandering in the cold. I—I took him in. But I felt it was best that he remain in the quarantine, until I knew more about him. Others here—well, it became something of a joke. At the poor patient’s expense; eventually, I suppose, at nearly the cost of his life. And yours. He’s no Juke, though. Whatever that is. That I can say for certain.”

“I would not worry about his infirmities,” said Andrew. “He had a queer look about him. But I saw that fellow survive a hanging.”

“Did you?” Dr. Bergstrom tucked his clipboard under his arm, dropped his hands into his coat pockets. He regarded Andrew quietly.

“I saw it.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” said Dr. Bergstrom, “about things that you think you saw at the hanging tree. The patient suffered some injuries about his neck. But obviously, the hooligans did not have the opportunity to tighten the noose much before Mr. Green and his men came upon you.”

“I—”

“You are mistaken, Andrew.”

“I think I am not,” said Andrew, adding pointedly: “Dr. Bergstrom.” White men had too easy a time addressing him by his Christian name; Nils Bergstrom was not the first. But Andrew was not going to let it pass.

Dr. Bergstrom cleared his throat. “Well the important element is that the patient survived. As did you. That is more than we can say for Maryanne Leonard, though. Isn’t it?”

Andrew didn’t answer that one.

“Oh, I am not accusing you of anything,” said Bergstrom. “Do not fear that, Dr. Waggoner. You had jotted a theory in your notes, that someone had attempted—how shall we say it—kitchen table surgery on the girl?”

“A home abortion,” said Andrew. “That was my diagnosis. Someone had taken a knife, or a hook, or something like it, and used it to scrape her uterus. In so doing, they had—torn her. Punctured her abdomen.”

“Did she tell you this? Before she succumbed?”

“No. She wasn’t coherent. But you must have examined the body by now. You can’t dispute—”

“I have seen her,” Dr. Bergstrom blinked rapidly as he spoke. “And before you work yourself to an upset, know that I don’t entirely disagree with your diagnosis.”

Dr. Bergstrom took the clipboard from beneath his arm and flipped through pages until he came upon the one that evidently held his notes.

“If you are correct, however, this was an abortion like none other I have seen. I examined her last evening, before the rigor mortis had entirely set in. And yes, I noted the laceration. Or eruption, as it might better be described.”

“Eruption?”

“Yes. Whatever made that incision did so with great and deliberate force,” said Dr. Bergstrom. “Tell me, Doctor—have you ever performed an abortion?”

“That,” said Andrew carefully, “would violate our Hippocratic Oath.”

Dr. Bergstrom smiled. “That wasn’t what I asked. But inasmuch as you’ve raised it: the oath we all took prohibits a great many things—including, you may recall, the application of the knife. Now I have seen you violate that stricture many times. So tell me, Dr. Waggoner, honestly. Have you ever violated the other one?”

Andrew sighed. “Not often,” he said. “But yes. As the need’s arisen.”

“We are fast in one another’s company then,” said Dr. Bergstrom. “I have practised in this part of the country many more years than you—in logging towns and mining towns and railway camps—and do not be shocked when I tell you that most of the women who arrive at a doctor’s doorstep with child are neither fit nor inclined to bear it. Performing the procedure as the need arose has given me a somewhat wider experience than might be found in, say, New York. Or Paris.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” Colour was rising up the other man’s neck. He snapped his board behind his back and turned abruptly. “If I may observe, Dr. Waggoner, the sheltered arrogance of the east coast is not confined to the white race.”

Andrew let the words sit in the air a moment before he answered. “I’m not to judge,” he said. “Better that you do it than someone like the one who took a hook to Maryanne Leonard.”

“Quite.”

Bergstrom swung his arms in front of him, as though summoning his own energy for a jump. “Well,” he said, stepping toward the door, “I shall, I think, leave you to rest a time. I needn’t say it, I hope, but you need not worry about either paying for the treatment you receive here, or the receipt of your pay over the time you remain.”

“That I remain? Do you mean in this bed? Ah. You don’t.”

Bergstrom stopped, his hand on the doorknob. “No,” he said. “I thought that we had come to an understanding. Once you’re able to travel, you must go. Your not-inconsiderable skills are no longer required, and your injury prevents their application in any event. We will make arrangements for your return to your family in New York, where you can recuperate in relative safety. But you cannot remain here—not with the Ku Klux Klan at large. It is unsafe for everyone, as I am sure you’ll agree.”

And with that, Dr. Nils Bergstrom slid behind the door, pulled it shut behind him and left Andrew alone in his room.

The pain got worse as the day progressed. Several times, a nurse came with a tray offering a shot of morphine for it. But Andrew refused.

“You are only agonizing yourself,” said the nurse. Her name was Annie Rowe. She was a tall, thick-faced woman who, Andrew had discovered, had trained in a hospital in St. Louis where she had for her own reasons not elected to remain. It had to have been her own choice: she was one of the better women who worked beds at Eliada, and she’d have excelled in any city hospital.

Andrew smiled. “Pain,” he said, “is how the body communicates with the mind. Lets it know what it’s up to. What its limits are. Why would I quiet all that good communication?”

Annie smiled. “Communicating’s one thing. I can see by the sweat on your brow that it’s past that and there’s a lot of foolish shouting now. Come on, Doctor. Take a shot. You’ll rest better.”

“No, thank you,” he said. “I had my fill of it last night. Although I don’t recall asking for any.”

“Oh,” said Annie, “I know. I heard your views on it. Ears are burning red in Paris, I’ll bet.”

“Yes. Sorry about that.”

Andrew chuckled and Annie laughed.

“I work in a logging town,” she said. “I’ve heard worse. Here—won’t you let me drug you, just a little? No? At least let me wipe your brow. Care for some water in a glass as well?”

“I surely would,” said Andrew. Annie lifted the water jug and poured from it into his water glass. He took a sip then set it aside as Annie poured more water into a basin and dipped a cloth into it.

“Annie,” he said, “mind if I ask you a question?”

“Not at all, Doctor.”

“You ever see Mister Juke?”

She paused, the water dribbling from the cloth and rattling along the edge of the basin. “No,” she said. “Quarantine is not on my rounds.”

“But you knew about him.”

“Sit back,” said Annie. She brought the cloth to Andrew’s forehead. It felt cool and good there as she dabbed it. “Yes,” she said. “I knew they brought in a fellow. I heard some of the fellows start calling him that name.”

“They brought him straight to the quarantine?”

“As far as I know.”

“Now why do you think they would do that?”

“How do you mean, Doctor?”

“Why would they take a fellow straight to the quarantine? Was he contagious? Exhibiting symptoms?”

“I suppose he must have been.” Annie dabbed the cloth down Andrew’s cheek. “You could do with a shave,” she commented.

“So no one told you what they thought he might have,” said Andrew.

“Kept it pretty quiet,” she said.

“I’ll say they did,” said Andrew. “All winter long, I didn’t see anyone bring him in. Didn’t see it, didn’t hear about it.”

“Well of course not,” she said. “That fellow came in late last summer. He’s been there the whole time.”

“Since the summer?” Andrew shook his head. “And I didn’t hear a word about it.”

“Really.” Annie stepped back, inspecting his face like it was a canvas and she’d finished painting it with water. “He would have been an interesting case for you—for any surgeon from Paris, I’d thought. What with his irregularities.”

“That is the second time I’ve heard that word used when talking of this fellow. What are his irregularities?”

Annie reddened a little at that. “They are not widely—I mean to say—those of us who had a look at him when he came in—”

Andrew nodded encouragingly.

“Well. He is not entirely a… he.”

Annie seemed literally about to entirely collapse into embarrassment, then remembered who she was and what she did—her profession—and cleared her throat, stood straighter.

“The word is hermaphrodite. Do I really need to go on?”

Andrew raised his eyebrows. “A person of both genders?”

Now Annie smiled a little. “I imagine you saw those sorts of folk all the time, studying in Paris.”

“No, not really. I’ve read case studies, but that is as far as it went. Hermaphrodites are as unusual in France as they are in Idaho.”

“Well you should have been able to have a look,” she said. “It would have spared me recounting it. You must be in poorly with the management, for them not to’ve told you about it.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Andrew and threw Annie a grin. She grinned back, and told him to rest some more, then started getting ready to leave him for the night.

He could put as fine a face on it as he wanted to, but Annie Rowe was right. Andrew Waggoner was in poorly with the management; very poorly indeed. He was in so poorly he was fired—fired for upsetting Klansmen in a mill town, having done nothing worse than applying his meagre skills to a girl who needed more. Fired for hurting his elbow in the course of protecting himself from one of those Klansmen—for hurting it badly enough he might seriously not be able to operate again. Fired, at the core of it, because he was a Negro, who so far as the management was concerned did not belong here from the beginning, who was not fit to consult on the charity case in the quarantine.

Gloom fell on him like a wool blanket on a hot summer’s day.

It wasn’t, he brooded, as though no one had foreseen this sort of problem. His uncles had been deeply sceptical when Elmore Waggoner announced that he would be putting a year’s profits in the Connecticut livery company he founded towards sending his oldest boy to France to study at the Paris School of Medicine. Andrew would not be the first or even the second Negro to lift a scalpel in the United States. But he would be consigned, they predicted, to ministering to the ill in Harlem or other similar neighbourhoods in big cities. To try and find a place in a surgery—a surgery where white men’s wives and children might one day lie down under the scalpel—would be throwing good money away, they said. And not helping his boy a whit.

But Elmore was stubborn, and because he had some money he could put behind that stubbornness, he was able to send his boy on a boat to France, and welcome him back with a medical certificate from one of the finest schools of medicine in the world.

Who was right? As the sun climbed past the scope of his one window and the room fell into cool, grey shadow, Andrew thought it might be time to congratulate those sceptical uncles of his. Them, and Nurse Annie Rowe.

Andrew was ready to call for some morphine after all, when a knock came at his door, a face draped in shadow poked around the edge of it, and a familiar voice boomed out.

“Dr. Andrew Waggoner! Bless me, it is grand to find you well!”

When they first met in the autumn of ’10, Garrison Harper had insisted that Andrew dine with him and his wife at the sprawling mansion he’d had built overlooking the town. That meal was sumptuous—roast beef in a thick burgundy sauce with good French wine, a sugar loaf soaked in rum, followed by Napoleon brandy in wide snifters and cigars imported from Cuba at the end of it. The meal he brought with him today was simpler: mashed potatoes, some greens from Mrs. Harper’s garden and a breast of well-cooked chicken already cut into bite-sized chunks. He carried the plate in himself, withdrawing the silver cover with a flourish, then called out to the hallway when it developed that someone had forgotten to provide any silverware.

“We are,” said Mr. Harper, “a hospital in an Idaho logging town, and not a fine restaurant in Boston. I must remind myself of this daily. Is there a chair in here?”

“Beside the bureau,” said Andrew. “Thank you, Mr. Harper. This looks delicious.”

Mr. Harper scooted the chair over beside Andrew’s bed, and settled into it. Garrison Harper was not a fat man, not by any means. But he was tall—well over six feet—and he had complained to Andrew on that first night: “The years add weight to both the soul and the waist.” The combined weight made the chair creak precipitously, and that and the memory made Andrew smile.

Mr. Harper was like that, always joking with the help. Andrew understood that behaviour to be an affectation—a rich man’s hollow conscience at work. But his own father was the same way, walking through the stables and calling out the men who worked for him by name, sharing a joke or asking after their wives, acting like he was one of them. Andrew couldn’t begrudge it.

“Go,” said Mr. Harper, passing the fork from the nurse who brought it, to Andrew. “Eat a bit. You have to get your strength back.”

Andrew ate. He was famished, but he restrained himself. If he took this too fast it would come up just as fast.

“I am ashamed,” said Mr. Harper at length.

Andrew set down his fork.

“Sir, do not trouble yourself,” he said. “I will find other work.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Harper gaped.

“Other work, sir. After I take my leave.”

“Do you imagine I am here to—to dismiss you?”

“There is no need,” said Andrew. “It is done.”

Andrew explained what had transpired between himself and Dr. Bergstrom that morning. Mr. Harper listened quietly, and when it was done, he said simply, “No.”

“Sir,” said Andrew, “I am bound to remind you that with my right arm as it is, I will be of limited use in the surgery.”

Mr. Harper blinked at him, as though this fact had been just presented him and somehow altered everything.

“My God, Dr. Waggoner, have I misread you? Do you wish to depart Eliada? I would not blame you if it were the case.”

Andrew knew there was a part of him for whom that was the case. But it was only a small part—the part of him that had been afraid of leaving his father’s home for continental Europe, the part of him that would have settled for clinic work in Harlem rather than take a train to the wilderness of northern Idaho. And that part had not had much say in how Andrew lived his life for many years.

“I would be a fool not to fear the noose,” he said. “But I have not offered my resignation either.”

“I’m glad,” said Mr. Harper. “It is too easy for civilized men to turn away when faced with depravity. When I said earlier that I was ashamed, it is to that which I referred. When I came here those seven years past, to carve this town out of the hills, I did not intend to make just another haven for depravity. When I made the decision to hire a Negro physician to tend to people, it was not to bring him to slaughter. And although I am well glad to see you here and alive, I did not intend to taint Eliada’s soil with the blood of my workers.”

Mr. Harper looked at Andrew expectantly. He’d delivered the whole speech in the manner of exactly that: a speech, written and well-rehearsed as for a university pageant, or from the stump in an election. This was a thing that Garrison Harper had done more than once since they had met. That first night over cigars and brandy, he had held forth uninterrupted for nearly three-quarters of an hour on his plans to create a paradise for workers and owners alike in Eliada: a community devoid of strife and class warfare where men happily lifted their tools at sunrise and set them down again at sunset, not once tempted by Bolshevism or bad morals—and on and on. It was a rich man’s habit, not, in this instance, shared by Andrew’s father. Of course, Andrew’s father was new to the game of wealth, and so did not have the generations of breeding that had so infected the talk of the Harper men.

“You didn’t tie the rope,” said Andrew.

“No,” said Mr. Harper, “but I might as well have loaded and aimed the guns. Why did I agree to have the Pinkertons of all people come here? This is not how I imagined my legacy.”

“They’re hard men, no doubt of that. And they left three would-be murderers dead, without trial. But if they hadn’t been there, it would have been two innocent men dead.” Andrew took a breath. “I’d like to thank Mr. Green and his men for their aid.”

“For that,” said Mr. Harper, “you’ll have to wait. I sent Mr. Green away.” He looked at Andrew, and noting something in his expression, hastily added, “I didn’t dismiss him. He’s off to Bonner’s Ferry. To collect my daughter and her friend, along with some visitors that Dr. Bergstrom is entertaining. Have you met Ruth?” Andrew reminded him that he had arrived in the autumn, some time after Miss Harper had departed for school. “Well. She’s a wonder. When you’re able, you must join us. Perhaps we’ll have our spring picnic soon, if the weather holds—in the orchards.”

“That would be fine,” said Andrew. It was good, if baffling, to see this rich white man talk so easily about introducing him to his daughter. “I would enjoy that, thank you.”

“Excellent.” Mr. Harper clapped his hands onto his knees and started to rise. “Have you finished your supper? No? I will leave it. Is there anything else you need?”

“One thing,” he said. “Have you looked in on the patient?”

“The patient?”

“The one some fellows here call Mister Juke. Your men rescued him along with myself.”

“Oh,” he said. “No. I haven’t.”

“He has been here some time, I understand,” said Andrew. Harper stood hands in his pockets, no longer meeting Andrew’s eye.

“Yes. Dr. Bergstrom has been most charitable with that one.” Mr. Harper shook his head, and smiled as though recalling a private joke. “One of the doctor’s many admirable qualities. Qualities with which,” he added, stepping toward the door, “you will have ample opportunity to acquaint yourself in the coming months and years. I am so glad you have elected to remain a part of our project. I will go see Dr. Bergstrom now, to make sure we are all of that same understanding.”

“Thank you,” said Andrew.

But Garrison Harper had already fled the room. Pondering the speed of his departure, Andrew wondered, did Harper know about Juke’s irregularities?

He took another bite of chicken and as he chewed, he reflected on that and other matters arising from their visit. He was glad enough to be still employed. But he was confounded by the deepening mystery of this strange creature that could survive a hanging. A hanging that some men in sheets thought due him, on account of the alleged rape of Maryanne Leonard. What, Andrew wondered, was the precise nature of the patient Mister Juke?

Ask Dr. Bergstrom, Sam Green had told him. Never mind, Dr. Bergstrom had told him. And as for Garrison Harper? The man, with whom all responsibility in Eliada ultimately rested, was too spooked to say anything at all. Andrew set his fork down and pushed the dining table aside.

It was a mystery, there in that quarantine. He could not let go of it.

Andrew Waggoner winced as he swung his feet over the side of the bed. When he settled his weight on them, he wanted to scream. But he held it in, for nearly a minute, before he flopped back onto the bed, bathed in new sweat and breathing in hitching gasps. Pain was a message from the body to the mind—a message that a fellow failed to heed at his peril. Andrew knew this.

But Andrew also knew that if he was smart about it and had a good enough reason, a fellow could ignore pain all the same. It was just, thought Andrew as he gasped air and felt the tears welling out, a matter of will.

8 - The Lesson of Minos

The hospital at Eliada was busiest Mondays, but as Sam Green pointed out, it stood to be busy any day the mill was running and men were engaged in the dangerous profession of sawing up trees for lumber. Tonight was Tuesday, and the Pinkerton man would not offer any guarantees.

“Mondays are bad because men are coming off their weekend drunks,” said Sam Green. “But it doesn’t matter. Drunk or sober, they cut their hands and break their bones, and sometimes a chain will snap and a log will swing and one or the other or both will catch a man in the skull. There are saws and axes and mallets, swinging and sawing all the time, and not always true—and if one of those does not get him, why, you put enough men in a room doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs and sipping tea, and even here in this perfect world, before too long one of them’s bound to fall down with a bad appendix or a kidney stone or some awful tumour.”

Or, thought Jason Thistledown, the whole room of them could drop dead from a strange disease, like Cracked Wheel did in the winter. Would this place, this hospital, have helped out any? If he’d been able to bring his mama here, would that have made a difference?

“Thank you, Mr. Green,” said Aunt Germaine.

The three of them stood in front of Eliada’s hospital in the deepening twilight. The building was a simple, rectangular box, made of white-painted wood and climbing fully three storeys tall. It was back some distance from the dock area (where a few moments earlier they’d bid fare-thee-well to Ruth Harper and Louise Butler) on what Jason figured was the very south edge of town. The land right around it had been cleared but it backed on thick, shadowy forest.

“What I mean to say, ma’am, is that you may not be able to see Dr. Bergstrom for some time. He may be occupied. If you like, I could send for a boxed meal.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” said Aunt Germaine. “We won’t be filling our faces in a waiting room, while others before us suffer.”

Sam smiled and shrugged. “As you please, ma’am,” he said to Aunt Germaine. He tipped his hat first to her and then Jason. “Will you be all right with that bag, Mr. Thistledown?”

“I expect.”

“Then, I shall take my leave of you. Welcome to Eliada.”

“Good night, Mr. Green,” said Aunt Germaine, and Jason repeated it. Then the two of them headed up the walk to the wide front doors to Eliada’s hospital.

Carved into their frame were the words:

Compassion. Community. Hygiene.

“That’s Eliada’s motto,” said Aunt Germaine, and Jason said, “Sounds like a fine one to me.”

The entry hall to the hospital was not the pandemonium that Sam Green had led Jason to expect. It was a large room, bigger than the town hall at Cracked Wheel by about half, with benches along the walls. The tall windows had their curtains drawn, and the only light came from kerosene lamps set into little brass wall sconces. Aside from Jason and his aunt, there were perhaps a half-dozen other people there: a band of men huddled together on a bench and talking quietly. One, a young man not much older than Jason, looked hard pressed. Jason didn’t have to count on his fingers to put it together: someone had died or was dying—a person who was kin to the poor fellow. He knew how that felt, and from seeing himself in the glass those weeks alone in the cabin, he knew how it looked too.

At the other end of the room, next to another set of doors, was a long dark wood counter. Aunt Germaine went there, and pressed down on a little silver bell. Jason set the carpet bag and his own sack down beside Aunt Germaine, excused himself politely and made his way back to the bench. He wasn’t intending to eavesdrop, but that wasn’t clear to the group of men and the preacher he supposed, the way they shut right up and gave him a look as he went to sit down.

“Pardon me,” he said, and skidded farther down the bench until they judged him enough past earshot to start up talking again.

Jason didn’t hold it against them; after all, he’d damn near shot his Aunt Germaine in the back, just for looking at his mama’s corpse the wrong way. Sadness had a way of changing the rules.

Up at the counter, Aunt Germaine was talking to a woman wearing some kind of uniform. Jason had never seen a bona fide nurse before but he expected that was what this woman was. She wore a white smock and a sort of frilly white cap that held most of her hair in. Jason started to get up as the nurse, nodding, backed through the swinging double doors. Aunt Germaine turned to Jason with a look that was, if he were to be honest about it, more than a little bit smug.

“It is as I said,” she said. “We were expected, and Dr. Bergstrom will see us presently.”

“Well good,” said Jason. “Why don’t we sit a spell. But—” he leaned to Aunt Germaine “—not next to those fellows. Let’s give them their room.”

“It is,” said the doctor, “a boy.”

The sad-looking fellow on the bench stood up and hooted, and the doctor, wearing a white smock, long black rubber gloves and a facecloth dangling by the strings around his neck, strode across the waiting room to clap him on the shoulder.

“Congratulations, Albert,” he said. “Baby and mother are fine and resting.”

“That is Dr. Bergstrom,” said Aunt Germaine.

“And that’s a new father. I sure figured him wrong.”

Germaine shrugged. “I would have made the same guess, had I not known Dr. Bergstrom as I do. Hospitals are places for the dying and the sick, hmm? Not babies.”

Dr. Bergstrom let the other men shake his hand and nodded and smiled at their thanks, before he extricated himself. Dr. Bergstrom looked over to Jason and Aunt Germaine. He was a tall fellow, tall and lean, and he stood to his full height and huffed, as though he’d just finished some heavy lifting.

“Mrs. Frost!” he exclaimed. “Welcome to Eliada—at last!”

Aunt Germaine got to her feet, and Dr. Bergstrom beckoned her over. “Come, we will go to my office where it is a bit more private.” And then he looked to Jason.

“And this is—?”

“Forgive me,” said Aunt Germaine. “He is my nephew, Jason.”

“Your—nephew.” An odd expression fled like cloud-shade across the doctor’s eyes. “I wasn’t aware you had a nephew.”

“Well, I do. This is he. Say hello to the doctor, Jason.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir,” said Jason.

“Hmm. Likewise.” Then, to Germaine: “He’s a strong lad, Mrs. Frost. Surely he did not travel all the way from Philadelphia with you.”

“No. We met along the way. He has experienced a family tragedy.”

“I see. My condolences, young man.” Dr. Bergstrom turned back to Aunt Germaine. “How is our Dr. Davenport keeping?”

As she explained, Dr. Bergstrom led them back through the doors, along a wide hallway and up a flight of stairs. As they moved deeper, Dr. Bergstrom motioned to various rooms off the hallway: Obstetrics, Surgery, Recovery.

There were laboratories on the second floor, along with a library, and that was where Dr. Bergstrom kept his offices and some spare rooms for visiting doctors.

“You can use these rooms for your work,” he said. “There are cots there, and you and young Jason can stay there tonight. Until you find more suitable accommodation in town.”

“That will be excellent,” said Aunt Germaine.

“But first, I am curious,” he said as they stopped outside his own office, and he dug around in his pocket for a little silver key to open it. “What is the manner of the tragedy that befell young Jason’s family?” He looked to Jason and Germaine with eyebrows raised, then opened the office.

Aunt Germaine opened her mouth, blinked, and then did something of which Jason did not think her capable: she stammered.

“He—it was—well, it was an illness, Doctor.”

“Was it? Was it that—”

“It was that grave,” Aunt Germaine interrupted. “Yes.”

“Mrs. Frost, we ought to speak privately,” said Dr. Bergstrom. “Jason, could you wait in the examination room?” He pointed to a set of double doors across the hall.

Jason didn’t say anything, just nodded. There was something passing between the two adults—something that went back a long time, and started, he figured, in a place that was no good. He was not about to step into the midst of it, not without knowing a bit more. Waiting in the hall would be fine.

Dr. Bergstrom beckoned Aunt Germaine into the office and she followed, shoulders slumped a little. The door swung shut, and the latch clicked. Jason stood alone in the hallway.

Mama in Heaven, he thought, what has your sister got herself into?

Jason felt ashamed at even considering it, but he did it anyway—pressed his ear against the door to see if he could make out anything about the conversation that would explain things. It wasn’t a good plan. The doors were thick at the Eliada hospital, and even holding his breath and sitting still, he could only figure so much of their talk.

There was anger on both sides of the conversation. Some words repeated themselves: “female” was one, most often from the doctor’s lips, and once or twice punctuated by a bang that Jason guessed might be an open hand on a tabletop. Another was “fool,” and another “never” and a phrase that Germaine kept repeating: “had you been specific”—it all suggested a conversation going the wrong way for everyone. If it had been his mama in there, Jason might have just gone in. As it was—and as grateful as he was to his Aunt Germaine—Jason let her look after herself. He crossed the hall, and let himself into the examination room.

It was a big space. Everything—walls, floor, ceiling—was painted white, but the twilight admitted by two long skylights and a tall window at the far end made it purple as a fresh bruise. In the middle of the room was a sort of bed that was on iron stilts with wheels on the base; along one wall were glass-covered shelves filled with bottles and bright silver instruments next to a couple of big metal wardrobes, all behind a long wooden bench covered in strange, curving instruments of metal and glass such as Jason had never seen. There was a glass jar, filled with sliced, dried apples.

And along the other wall were shelves filled with books.

He had never seen so many, not in one place, and not all together. His mama had just a couple at the cabin—and that was only if you counted the Bible—and the Cracked Wheel Town Office had a few more. But there was nothing like this.

Jason walked along the rows. The books were about doctoring and medicine; he read titles like General Surgical Pathology and Therapeutics, History of the German Universities, and Account of the Sore Throat Attended with Ulcers.

His mama would have called this a treasure trove. For the first time in weeks, he let himself remember her.

There was that one night when he was very small for instance. It was autumn, he thought, because the wind was up and the fire was on, and the trees that had leaves in the summer were bare and rattling. All in all, things were what you might call foreboding around the Thistledown homestead, but his mama was of good cheer. If Jason remembered right, she had sold some pigs in Cracked Wheel for a better price than she expected, but it could have been another thing too.

But that was the night she’d cracked open Bulfinch’s Mythology. The book came out of a chest that she had at the back of the house. She had kept it hidden there until this cold fall day when her mood was right and Jason was big enough, and she brought it out with a flourish.

It was a fine-looking book. The cover was like cloth, a deep red, and on it was a picture of a very strong man with his arms thrust in the air, a great curling beard pushing forward from his chin. The letters were solid gold, although they were chipping a bit here and there.

“Gold!” said Jason, pointing at the letters.

“It is a treasure, that’s certain.”

“We’re rich!” he said, and his mama laughed.

That night, she read him his first tale. It was the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and it became one of his favourites. He thought part of that may have been because his mama spared him the harder facts of the tale. She stopped reading the moment Theseus emerged from King Minos’ maze, the huge bull head of the Minotaur in one hand and the thread and sword given him by beautiful Ariadne in the other. No mention of how subsequently he abandoned Ariadne sleeping on the Isle of Naxos. Then, just to show he was a complete no-good, Theseus forgot to signal his pa that things had gone fine in the maze, subsequent to which the old man, thinking his son was dead, slew himself in misplaced grief.

Jason, who knew none of this, demanded to hear what came next. “Did Theseus go on and stick old Minos with his sword just to show him? What about Daedalus, who made that maze in the first place? He had it coming. How about sticking him?”

“Well,” said his mama, “there’s only one way to find out.”

“What’s that?”

“Read it yourself.”

Jason smiled to himself as he looked around the library at Eliada. He had flown into such a rage. He told his mama she knew full well he could not read or write, and it was unkind of her to withhold important facts on account of his infirmity. His mama had gotten mad too, or pretended to, and took the book away until he came to his senses.

Jason had stayed mad for only a little while. And now, he knew that the only reason he could read the titles at least in this medical library was because of that night. No way he would have figured out reading and writing near as well if his mama had stuck him in a schoolhouse and made him learn his ABCs with chalk and slate at the foot of some stranger. The temptation of mythology was what did it for him, and she laid it out for him, like the Devil doing good.

Out in the hall, a door slammed, and as fast, the door to the examination room cracked open. Dr. Bergstrom stepped in. He was wearing a face mask like Aunt Germaine’s, and he had his rubber gloves back on.

“Well now, young Jason. I see you are a bibliophile.”

Jason didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded like he did.

“Splendid.” He walked over to the table, and pulled out one of the dried apples. He popped it in his mouth. As he chewed on it, he opened a drawer and took from there a box of matches. “Would you,” he said, approaching a wall-sconce, “be so kind as to strip off your shirt and trousers, Jason?” He struck the match, and lit the lamp with it. “Now, please?”

Jason unbuttoned his shirt. “What for?” he said.

Dr. Bergstrom turned to him, hands crossed before him. “It is the routine in Eliada,” he said. “We must make certain that you are as well as well can be, Jason. And then we must keep you that way.”

The doctor lit five more lamps, including one that had been hung in the middle of a bowl-shaped mirror, before he started in on Jason. The room took on a glow under all that flame; it turned everything the colour of gold.

Dr. Bergstrom demanded that Jason turn over his shirt and trousers, and he sniffed at them before setting them down on a chair by the door. Then he made Jason turn around in the light, with his arms out. He asked Jason how old he was and Jason told him seventeen, and Dr. Bergstrom nodded like that meant something. He took Jason by the arm then, and led him over to a big weight scale, and told Jason to stand on it. He moved weights along metal rods until they balanced, then looked at them and wrote down the number on a sheet of paper.

“Over here now,” he said, and motioned to a spot on the wall that had been marked off in feet and inches. He made Jason stand against it, and took a book from the shelf and measured Jason’s height, which Jason thought was five feet and seven inches but Dr. Bergstrom said was five feet and nine inches.

“Sit on the examination table,” he said, the mask puffing out with the wind of his speech.

Jason did as he was told. Dr. Bergstrom went over to the bench, and took something that looked like a hand-scythe, except that it was hinged like scissors and not sharp. Bergstrom told Jason to hold still, and he opened it like pincers on a bug, and set Jason’s head in the middle. The metal tips felt cold against his temples, and Jason worried it would poke into the soft skull there. It did not. He lifted it away, took it back to the bench, and set it against a ruler, and marked a notation. Then he repeated the procedure with the pincers at the back of Jason’s skull, at his jaw-line, his ears and the back of his neck.

“What are you measuring my head for?” asked Jason, but Dr. Bergstrom didn’t answer.

“Smile,” he said. And then added impatiently: “So I can see your teeth.” He examined those, and asked Jason if he ever had a toothache, and when Jason said no, he nodded. He went back to the bench, wrote more things down, then opened one of the glass-covered cabinets. This time he pulled out a thin metal cylinder, and a brown glass bottle.

“Lie on your stomach,” he ordered, not looking back.

“You goin’ to take my temperature?” asked Jason. When Dr. Bergstrom didn’t answer, Jason went on: “When I was small, the doctor in Cracked Wheel took my temperature with a thermometer up my behind, because he feared I’d bite it and poison myself if I put it in my mouth. Well I ain’t going to bite it, so you can just—”

“I am not taking your temperature, Jason,” said Dr. Bergstrom. He was coming across the floor. Jason could see that he was holding the cylinder between two fingers. On one end was a sharp needle. A bead of fluid gleamed like liquid gold on its tip.

“Now hold still,” he said.

Jason did as he was told.

Jason blinked and coughed. He was lying down, on a hard bed very different from the examination table. His arms hurt. His vision was blurry; as was his understanding of exactly how he’d got there.

Memory became fragmented up to the moment. He recalled a sharp pain in his behind, and then a cool feeling, like his foot had gone to sleep. He may have said something.

He may have gotten up off the table. Stumbled around a bit. He may have fallen to the floor. He may have even got up again, made it a short way down the hall, and then fallen over again before the world vanished.

Best Jason could say was that, next thing he knew, he was here. Lying on a table or a bed or, judging from its hardness, somewhere in between the two. His clothes were gone, replaced by a thin cotton sheet. The things that hurt his arms and legs were leather straps tied on top of that sheet. They were tying him down.

Jason had to fight to control his breathing as he put it together. He didn’t know much about doctoring—what little he’d seen of it happened at the barber shop in Cracked Wheel. But he knew that sometimes the barber would use the straps to hold a fellow still for awful things like amputating a leg or digging out a stone.

What in hell were they doing tying Jason down like this? What was Dr. Bergstrom doing, sticking him with a poisoned needle without asking him first? Jason pushed against the straps. He didn’t expect it to free him and so was not surprised when it didn’t. It still made him mad.

He blinked, and his eyes got some of their focus back. He looked side to side. He was in a long whitewashed room, with a high ceiling and windows only near the top. There were other beds in here—maybe ten of them. But the rest were empty. At the far end, he could see two figures, caught in the dim moonlight that cut down through the windows, silhouetted in the glow of candlelight. They were huddled around it, talking to one another, turned away from Jason.

“Hey!” he hollered. “Hey!”

They both turned to him.

“Jason!” It was Aunt Germaine. The other one didn’t speak, but Jason figured it for Dr. Bergstrom.

The two of them hurried across the room. Jason, to show his displeasure, struggled theatrically against the restraints. When they arrived, he noted that both were wearing white gowns and masks over their mouths. “What is the matter,” said Jason in a low, angry voice, “I got a smell about me?”

Aunt Germaine stepped immediately to his side. She put two rubber-gloved hands on his own. It might have been the effect of night, but she looked paler, older than she had ever seemed before. Her hands seemed to be trembling. “Oh Nephew,” she said, “I am sorry.”

“Do not apologize, Mrs. Frost,” said Dr. Bergstrom. He stood somewhat further off, at the foot of the bed. “This was my decision. I will explain it to young Jason.”

“Of course.” Aunt Germaine squeezed Jason’s hand.

“Jason, you must understand that I would not take these measures lightly. But your aunt told me the story of what happened to your town, of—”

“Cracked Wheel.”

“Yes. She told me that a contagion—a sickness—came upon the people there over the winter. It was a sickness that spread very quickly—far more quickly than anything that we know. And its mortality rate—the rate at which it killed—was extremely high. Nearly everyone.”

“Except me,” said Jason. “Because I am immune.”

Dr. Bergstrom’s lips tightened in something cousin to a smile. “You seem healthy,” he said. “That I do grant you. But Jason—that does not mean you do not carry the disease.”

“My aunt and me figured that out,” said Jason. “We burned things and I kept bathed, even when it was fierce cold.”

Dr. Bergstrom shook his head. “The germ might nestle in your soft tissues. It might thrive in the warm places inside your ear—in your throat. Perhaps waiting for a moment to return.”

“That’s not how germs work.”

“And you are expert in this? No. I am sorry, young man. You must remain here for a time.”

“Where is here?”

Dr. Bergstrom crossed his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet. “Quarantine,” he said. “For at least tonight.”

“Tied down?”

“There is no other way,” said Dr. Bergstrom. “As your, ah, aunt attested: you show a tendency to wander.”

“How am I going to relieve myself then?”

“No… other… way,” repeated Dr. Bergstrom slowly.

Jason turned to Aunt Germaine who still held his arm. “Aunt! Get me out of here!” He twisted again against the straps. Panic was moving through him like an ugly liquor, and he could hear it in his voice, and he hated it.

Aunt Germaine looked down at him with pursed lips and a crinkled brow. “Doctor,” she said, “leave us a moment. The boy is distraught. I will calm him.”

“As you wish, Mrs. Frost.”

When Dr. Bergstrom had withdrawn sufficient distance, Aunt Germaine bent down to Jason’s ear and made shushing noises until Jason stopped twisting and struggling and glared at her.

“I am sorry, Nephew,” she said quietly. “Dr. Bergstrom is wrong. You are fine, and this is wrong. But I cannot stop it. It is beyond my authority.”

“Wh-what am I going to do then? What—”

“Shh. Dr. Bergstrom means for you to be trapped here. But you need not be.” Aunt Germaine leaned even closer, so her lips brushed Jason’s ear, and she whispered: “You are a hero, Jason Thistledown. Your survival… well, it proves that. You are as great a Man as Nature might commit. Dr. Bergstrom does not understand that. But he has not seen what you have lived through. He has… underestimated you. Foolishly, he has underestimated us both.” She pulled back a bit, so her face was now inches from Jason’s own. “Now turn your hand, slow and careful.”

Jason unclenched his fist, and turned it to meet with Aunt Germaine’s gloved hand. There was something metallic nestled in her palm.

“Careful,” she said. “You do not want to cut yourself. This is a scalpel—a tiny knife. It is small, but wickedly sharp. Should anything happen…”

“What?” he whispered.

“Cut yourself free, my darling hero,” said Aunt Germaine, “and run.”

9 - The Quarantine Obscenity

Jason fingered his scalpel and glared into the dark. Anger was all over him like fleas, nestling anywhere it smelled blood.

He was angry at Dr. Bergstrom, who had snuck up on him, stuck poison in him and put him here, tied like a dog for no good reason, without even knowing what sort of fellow he was. Although she had given him this scalpel and said kind things to him, he was angry at Aunt Germaine for what he identified as nothing but cowardly betrayal. She said she had no power to stop this—but in that bag of hers she had two guns (one belonging to Jason’s mama) and a pile of ammunition (ammunition that Jason had, at no small risk to his own skin, stepped into the Dempsey Store in Cracked Wheel and faced the putrid corpse of Lionel Dempsey, to retrieve). Jason thought that she was plenty powerful to stop this if she wanted to.

And then Jason stumbled on another source for his anger—an unholy pit of it that ran so deep it dizzied him to look down:

His ma.

His ma, who, if she had not been so weak and slow, might have lived through the sickness that took the rest of those damn fools in Cracked Wheel; who might then have just invited Aunt Germaine in for a meal that winter’s morning she showed up with her two pair of snowshoes; a meal where the three of them would have caught up on the goings-on in Philadelphia and New York, and Aunt Germaine could have told how she was doing eugenical research for Dr. Charles Davenport whose privy was filled with damn gold nuggets he was so fine a gentleman. And then together they could have figured out something more intelligent to do about pulling up stakes than getting on a train for this God-damned supposed paradise in Idaho.

All that they might have done and more, if only she hadn’t abandoned him.

But that anger was too deep and complicated to hold long without it changing to something else. And as Jason faced it, he felt his chest hitch up and the tears start in the corners of his eyes. He was crying. For the first time, since the time his mama stopped breathing in Cracked Wheel, Jason was crying.

This time, he let it come. He pushed the scalpel away from his hand so he wouldn’t cut himself when his fist clenched, and then he let that fist go ahead and clench as hard as it wanted, and the other one too, screwed his eyes shut, and let the weeping out in big, whooping gasps. He cried for his ma, all right—these were tears of grief, and although he was mad he hadn’t finished grieving her, if he ever even would.

But it wasn’t just for his ma. He had been selfish in his grief and in that he had done many a bad turn. When he’d gone to collect that ammunition in Cracked Wheel, hadn’t he looked into the dead eye of Lionel Dempsey—a fellow who’d always been fine to him whenever they met up? Had he even once thought about some of those times they’d seen each other and it had been good enough? No. Had he once uttered a prayer for Mr. Dempsey’s poor unshriven soul? No. Had he ever prayed for any of them—any but his ma, who was but one in a hundred or more who’d died gasping and choking in Cracked Wheel? No, no, a hundred times no.

If he’d thought about it at all, he supposed he’d figured he was being self-sufficient in not doing so. But how self-sufficient is a boy, a man, being, really, when he takes off with his new aunt at the first opportunity, abandoning what plans he had and what responsibilities were left?

Aunt Germaine had called him a hero. Jason had read about plenty of heroes. Maybe he was like Theseus, made for one good turn before he ruined it all afterward. Maybe…

Jason opened his eyes. And as he did, he blinked. A shadow capered across the moonlit squares on the far wall of the ward room. Jason swallowed a mouthful of his own tears.

The shadow moved slowly against the silver rectangles on the far wall: one after the other, very methodical, slow enough that it could spend awhile working at each pane. It used its whole body—Jason could make out skinny legs, a torso that narrowed at the hip, and skinny arms that pressed against the glass.

Jason glanced up over his head. He could not see much of the windows—his bed was directly beneath them, head against the outside wall. But he figured the windows at the top of the wall weren’t more than two feet tall. That meant that the figure—which in shadow looked like a normal man—would have to be considerably shorter than that.

He looked back at the shadow as one of those windows made a snap! and a creaking sound. The shadow ducked, and then it vanished before Jason could look up and see.

Jason unclenched his fist, fumbled for the scalpel, and narrowly avoiding cutting himself on the blade, as he thought again about what Aunt Germaine had said before she and Dr. Bergstrom had left.

Cut yourself free, my darling hero. And run.

Jason set to work. It was not as easy as he might have thought; he had to hold the scalpel in his fist so that the blade came out next to his baby finger, and then position it underneath the middle of three straps that held him down. Then he had to start flicking and sawing.

The leather bit into him fiercely as he did so but he would not stop. The thing, whatever it was, had fallen to the floor. He could hear it scurrying. But he could not see. He could not tell how near it was.

What was it? It was shaped like a man, but no more than a foot or two tall. Bulfinch’s would say it was a dwarf. A better explanation might be that it was a monkey. That would explain its size, and also its speed.

But as he sawed and picked at the leather, struggling to keep a grip with his sweat-slicked hand, listening as the scrambling sound made its way to and fro across the floor, Jason realized it wasn’t just the appearance of the thing.

There was also the whistling.

It was mournful, like an Irish tune about dead lovers—but absent any melody. Jason could not say when it started. The sound seemed in him—like the ringing in the ears that came during long silences—a ringing that might always have been there. Jason listened. As he did, he was dimly aware of the scalpel, slipping from his grip. He took hold of it again, so it would not fall away, but he could not imagine how he would begin cutting.

The door opposite him swung slowly open. How long had it been that his aunt and Dr. Bergstrom had disappeared through that door? Jason thought it might have been just a few minutes ago. He thought it might have been a day ago. He did not have any clear notion.

Could it be that the small creature—whatever it was—had let itself out? To run through the rest of the quarantine? He stared at the door, and listened for more scrabbling. He could not hear any but that proved nothing—the whistling was growing louder, and more pervasive.

It must have fled. Jason let out a breath, and turned the knife back to the strap.

Working it was easier now that he’d calmed himself down, and found the notch. The leather was thick and somewhat stiffer than a blade like this was used to cutting, but it was making it through all right.

Jason thought he might have been halfway done when he felt the tugging on the sheet.

The tugging pulled the sheet tight over his ankles and his toes and sent a chill up Jason’s back. Something—the thing from the window—was climbing up from the base of his bed. It pulled the sheet tight, first on one side, then the other, as though it was coming up hand over hand. Jason tried to pull his feet back from the edge, but it was no good. The straps were tight—so tight they pushed his legs into the mattress. He stared down, unable to blink or breath, watching as the sheet between his feet rose up in a bulge the size of a man’s head. He felt a sharp tickling at his ankles—as though bare branches drew across his flesh.

“Oh mama,” he said. He started up the slicing again. It might have got easier, as the strap peeled back a bit from over his arms and gave him a bit more play. But staring down at the thing between his legs, swaying back and forth under the sheet like a tiny little ghost undid any mere physical advantage. He twisted his legs and hollered at it: “Git! Git out of there! Git!”

The thing did the opposite. It started to move up toward him—toward his middle. Jason could feel his nuggets start to pull back, the flesh crawling over them, and he tried to hitch himself back away from the thing, even as it crouched down and pushed against the strap that was tied at Jason’s knees.

Jason could feel other parts of the thing between his legs now—a cool flank like leather that pushed against the inside of his left knee—what might have been a forearm, reaching up through the belt and then a claw, touching him halfway up the inside thigh and drawing back slow—the brush of what might have been a foot, pushing against the bed next to his right calf—a tiny damp touch, right at the edge of the strap, that Jason feared was the thing’s tongue. Jason sucked a tremulous breath. Mama, he thought, it is tasting me. And Mama, it is aiming for my privates.

It was aiming for them, but it couldn’t quite reach. The belt at his knees was keeping it back. For the moment anyhow, Jason was saved by his restraints.

He knew that protection wouldn’t last long.

Jason gritted his teeth and pushed the scalpel back into its groove. His wrist was cramping from the unusual angle, but he went at it hard all the same. At his feet, the sheet was writhing. Something stinging drew across his knee, and the thing between his legs reared up.

The belt at his arm snapped then and Jason let go of the scalpel.

He wasted no time, reaching around until he found the buckle for the highest belt, over his shoulders. He yanked, unclasped it, then sat up as the buckle clattered against the side of the bed. Jason drove his fist into the sheet between his legs. He hit something hard like bone, and heard a crunch like thick, crumpling paper. A high squealing followed and Jason caught a whiff of something sweet and foul—a smell like the dead at Cracked Wheel.

The thing was still moving, though. So with his other hand, Jason grabbed down on the sheet, pushing the thing into the bed. Holding it so, he unstrapped the final belt, and pulled his knees back so he was kneeling on the bed, still holding the struggling creature underneath the sheet.

All right, he thought. Let us see what it is that goes after me like that; while aloud he spoke to it softly, little calming wordless coos, like he would a panicked sow on the homestead.

On the bed beside him, he found the scalpel. It was blunted by the leather but still sharp enough. He held it ready like a dagger in one hand while with the other, still making his calm-down noises, he unwrapped the tiny creature.

He blinked. It was hard to make the thing out in the night. It did seem like a tiny person—perfectly formed, not more than a foot or so tall, and clothed in dirt and leaves. It struggled in the sheet, and started making that high noise. The smell was strong—stronger the closer he drew to the mysterious little beast, trying to make it out in the dark ward room. He was very close indeed when it came into focus.

This time, when he dropped the scalpel it fell to the floor—as did the tiny creature with the impossible face. The beast landed near the foot of the bed, and Jason watched, transfixed, unable to breathe, as it skittered first back under the bed—then, gathering its strength, drawing back to leap maybe, it took off on all fours like some hideous rat—shooting through the half-open door and into the dark of the corridor.

Jason fell back. He drew his knees to his chin and wrapped his arms around them. He rocked back and forth, holding the shaking inside, and he tried to make sense of what he had seen leering back at him:

Miss Ruth Harper, her smooth round face and light brown curls reduced to a size as might fit on a doll; her wickedly charming smile not at all improved by the addition of two rows of sharp, glinting teeth.

The whistling changed. To Jason’s ear it became almost melodic—or perhaps it shifted subtly, to make the harmonies more apparent. Jason thought he might be able to make out three or four different sources, coming from variously the ceiling, somewhere underneath the beds, and somewhere in the dark of the hallway. As he listened, he developed another theory—that whatever it was that Dr. Bergstrom had given him to make him sleep, also brought on waking dreams. Dr. Bergstrom was enough of a no-good bastard to do something like that.

It was a lot more likely than some tiny, saw-toothed cousin of Ruth Harper prying its way into the quarantine.

At length, Jason unwrapped his arms from around his legs, lowered his feet to the floor and lifted the sheet onto his shoulders.

Run, Aunt Germaine had said. Jason was not sure he had a run in him right now—his legs were stiff and slow, and once outside—he’d be barefoot and naked. Jason bent down and scooped up the scalpel. He headed to the door, then, seeing how dark it was past it, turned back to the ward room to see if he could find a candle and something to light it with.

Jason found a melted-down candle in a dish on a table near the door. On another table, near the little iron wood stove, he found a box of wooden matches, and within a moment, he was back to the hallway with the glow of candlelight to guide him.

The hallway was like a narrow gorge, cut by a single axe stroke. The ceiling rested higher than the light would reach, and the space itself was narrow. It carried in each direction an unguessable length. Candles had their limits. Particularly in a quarantine building that seemed bigger than the actual hospital it was supposed to serve.

Because there was no better reason for him to head right, Jason headed left—the candle in one hand, and the scalpel clutched in the other. Only thing missing, he thought, was a ball of thread to help him find his way out of the maze.

At first, Jason thought the quarantine gigantic, it took him so long to move along the hallway, through a wider room and into another corridor narrower than this one. The narrower corridor bent, and presented a short flight of stairs up.

Jason stopped at the top of the stairs and listened. There was a sound that a man might make, faced with unimaginable grief. It had a rhythm to it, a cycle: first, a keening, high sound, wavering only minutely; then, as the throat constricted, a sound like a growl, if something signifying such pitiful surrender could be so named.

Yes, Jason was familiar with that sound.

He stepped into the new room, and said, “Hello?”

This room was filled with furniture more akin to the Cracked Wheel Town Office than it was to a room in a hospital quarantine. Jason stepped around a file cabinet and a wide wooden desk to see other things: what looked like tall wardrobes and bureaus and wide shelves. The crying stopped. And something moved—something in white, maybe a fellow wrapped in his bedsheet like Jason was.

“Hello?” said Jason again. “Were you trapped in here too?”

“Forgive me.”

Jason crept forward, trying to locate the voice. The man was hoarse from crying, and he gasped noisily after he spoke. No telling where he was, except not in sight.

“All right,” said Jason, “I forgive you. Now are you all right? You in here because you’re sick?”

“Forgive!”

The unseen voice snuffled, and there was the sound of something heavy dragging fast across the floor. Then the place went quiet.

“Hello?” Jason continued forward, to where he thought he saw that flash of white. There was another desk, this one with an odd glass bell jar in its middle. He stepped past it, and as he did, his foot came down on something different than the pine board that had made the floor in the rest of this place. It was cloth. A swath of cloth, dropped there on the floor.

Jason bent down to have a look. It looked like it might be a pillowcase, although Jason didn’t think it was quite big enough.

He set down the candle on the table, and played out the fabric. It was a pillowcase, in that it was a white cloth sack—except, as he looked more closely, for the two holes that had been cut in it. They were perfect eye-holes.

Jason set it down and picked up the candle again. He held it out at arm’s length, and turned around. “Hey,” he called, more loudly now. “You forgot your ghost mask, sir. Why don’t you show yourself?”

He made almost a complete circle with the candle looking for the fellow but stopped before he finished. That was when the candlelight fell on the huge wall that climbed high into the dark, with a set of double doors on it that were so high the candle could not see their top.

“Well,” said Jason, setting down the sheet on the table, “I’ll leave it here for you.”

He stepped up to the doors and started looking for a handle. Maybe this was the way outside.

It wasn’t. The doors were huge—the size of barn doors—and about as well-made. Where the rest of the quarantine seemed newer, designed to keep the bad air of one room from leaking into the next, the boards that made these doors were warped and decayed with gaps as big as fingers or wider going through them. And the breeze that came out did not carry the smell that Jason associated with a mountain town at night.

The air had that same thick sweetness, the smell of his mama and Cracked Wheel in their dying time, the smell he’d sniffed earlier. The air that wafted out was warm, too. Jason could not find a handle for these immense doors, but after a time he stopped trying. He pressed his face against the slats, and, one eye closed, used the other to peer inside.

He smiled in disbelief. There was some terrific party going on in there—filled with some of the most beautiful creatures he’d ever seen. There were what looked like hundreds of them, dancing and spinning—laughing as their hair whirled out from their heads, their arms akimbo. Every so often, one or the other of them would leap, into an arc twice the height of the others’ heads, spreading fairy dust behind it. And in their centre…

In their centre a figure sat that Jason had difficulty looking at. He was tall—a giant among the other revellers—with arms skinny like a scarecrow’s, and a head that was long and bent kind of funny in the middle, like it had been smacked with one of those mill logs that Sam Green talked about—and hair, that grew from his skull in tangles like branches off a deadfall. He looked around him, then up at Jason’s single eye staring through the wood—and then Jason stumbled forward as the doors swung inward, and the candle fell from his fingers and went out on the floor—and when he looked again, he stood in darkness.

The whistling enveloped him, and Jason felt an odd queasiness in his belly. Things moved close to him, nipping at his heels like cattle dogs—moving him forward. And he found that although it was dark, he could see—that the giant that stood in front of him was opening itself up, as though preparing for an embrace.

He realized then that his hand was wet. Warm and wet, where he clutched the scalpel at his chest. And it hurt.

He opened his hand, and delicately pulled the scalpel away from the wound it had made in the webbing at his thumb.

The pain must have done it. Jason was loose, from whatever odd spell had held him. Now it was a matter of taking the next step.

Hand bleeding into his sheet, pain thrumming up his body, Jason Thistledown turned on his heel and ran back into the dark depths of the Eliada quarantine.

Crossing the strange room with the desks and the cabinets was like crossing a continent. Several times Jason almost lost his sheet as it caught on corners of desks or warps in the floorboards. Finally striking the far wall, he was able to find the stairs again to return to the hallway, but if he had not thought of that he might have been in the room forever.

When he made it to the hallway, the whistling grew louder and he felt certain that as he made his way along tiny hands were grasping at the edge of the sheet. The pain in his hand grew stronger.

As did the anger. Jason thought he understood how it was that people got mad enough to kill. It was not a matter of defending your dead mama and her homestead from bandits: that was not what made you pull the trigger. It was rage—keening rage that went along a fellow’s nerves and mingled maybe with some physical pain that was there already, to make something truly powerful.

The good thing about that rage was it helped a fellow push down the terror. So as he worked his way down the hall, with tiny creatures perhaps dogging his steps and trying to draw him back to that—that leering thing—he stoked it, let it build, started to make himself some plans.

There were two guns in Aunt Germaine’s possession now—the Winchester, and the revolver. Well, he thought, I’ll only need one to do the trick. And it will be the revolver because it’s easier to stash under a coat.

He stumbled and nearly fell down the stairs when he came upon them, but quickly found his balance and continued. The blood in the sheet was slick against his bare chest, and he felt like he might faint or upchuck or both.

You will not stop me, Aunt Germaine. For I am about to do what you lacked the courage to. And I will not forget your betrayal neither.

She might try to use her authority—those terrible eyes of hers—to dissuade him, but Jason would not heed them.

I mean to kill him, he would say. I mean to kill him before I burn his evil quarantine to the ground. Yes. Just like you did to my mama’s homestead. I am going to burn this place and everything in it and they can damn well hang me for it if they can catch me.

Aunt Germaine would shrivel before the onslaught of his venomous rhetoric, and thus unencumbered, Jason would stride down the hall, to the office where Dr. Bergstrom lived. He would kick in the door rather than open it, and when Dr. Bergstrom opened his mouth to shout, Jason would raise the revolver, sight down its barrel, and before he put the bullet between the doctor’s no-good eyes, he would say…

He would say…

The corridor opened up into a larger room that Jason remembered. But this time, without the candlelight to blind him, he was able to apprehend a rectangle of light, or lighter darkness at any rate. A window? No—as Jason stumbled toward it, he saw that it was more than a window. Cool night air—air unsullied by that strange sweet smell—wafted in through an open door.

“Ha!” Jason left his scheming for a moment and hurried toward it.

He stumbled a moment over some carpeting, but regained his footing and continued, wondering: Who opened that door? Maybe that fellow in white, on his way out?

Maybe—maybe those things?

Even as he wondered that, the lighter dark flickered for a moment, as a shadow drew across it. Jason stopped dead. He pulled the sheet close around him, pressing it against the cut in his hand.

The shadow came back. This one, at least, was not in miniature. It was nearly as tall as the door—definitely a fellow—but hunched peculiarly.

“Mister—Mister Juke?” said the shadow.

Jason said: “Who?”

The shadow stepped to the door frame, and reached out a hand. There was the sound of a match being drawn, and then, a tiny glow of light. Jason squinted and looked at the dark face behind the flame.

“The Negro,” he gasped.

“Who are you?” said the Negro, holding the match forward and looking Jason up and down. “And what happened here?”

And then the match went out and the darkness closed back in on them. That did it.

“You better step out of the way, sir,” said Jason, “because this place is filled with Devils from Hell and I don’t want to stay here a minute longer.”

10 - The Autopsy

Andrew Waggoner stepped out of the way, and let the boy out. He looked like a performer in a Greek play—robed in a blood-spotted sheet, face twisted in agony. Andrew was in his own kind of pain. Two nights after his incident, and he had still managed to keep off the morphine, and here he was, gallivanting in the middle of the night outside the quarantine. But one look at this boy, the blood, the wild expression in his eye, ignited his physician’s instincts and let him set his own troubles aside.

“Come on,” he said, leading the boy over to a little stone bench. “Sit.”

“I want to get as far from here as I can.”

“That’s fine. But not before I get a look at you. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”

The boy squinted at him. “You’re the Negro doctor,” he said. “That right?”

Andrew let himself crack a smile. “Dr. Andrew Waggoner,” he said. “I prefer that to Negro Doctor, if you don’t mind. Particularly coming from a boy wearing a sheet.”

The boy nodded. Andrew was glad to see he seemed to be calming down.

“I’m Jason Thistledown,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Waggoner. Sam Green says you’re going to make trouble here. That’s good, far as I’m concerned.” He put his hand forward. It was covered in blood that welled from a long slice up the palm.

Andrew lit a match on the stone bench and took a closer look at it. The wound was deep, like he’d cut himself with a straight razor. “How’d you get this?”

“Scalpel,” said Jason.

Andrew looked him in the eye. “What are you fooling with a scalpel for?”

“My aunt gave it to me.”

“Well, I’ll have to give your aunt a talking-to. This is going to need stitches.”

“Fine by me on both counts, Dr. Waggoner. Now can we get away from here?”

“Of course we can,” said Andrew. “I think we’re going to have to help each other getting back, though. Neither of us is in very good shape tonight.”

That was an understatement. Andrew had not been in very good shape for two nights now. The first night he’d tried to get outside, have a look at the quarantine in the cover of the moonlight, he had been in such poor shape that he had only gotten as far as the south staircase before the pain forced him to turn back. Tonight, it had taken him half an hour to make it downstairs and out the back of the hospital. The best that he could do for it was stay still, work the bruised and pulled muscles slowly back to health.

But he knew that something was odd in the quarantine. And there were questions to which he’d received no satisfactory answer.

He had been standing outside, staring at the open door in the front of the great building, willing himself the strength to go a little farther, step inside, when the boy appeared in his bloody sheet.

Well, he thought as he tore a strip from the sheet and tied a bandage around Jason’s hand, there’ll be no more exploration tonight.

“You want help walking back?” said Jason. “My hand’s bad, but I can sure walk all right. And you—”

Andrew nodded. There was no point in standing on pride. “I’d appreciate it,” he said.

“The Klansmen do this to you?” asked Jason as they moved away from the quarantine, across the clear lawn between there and the back of the hospital.

“You know a lot,” he said.

“Sam Green told me,” said Jason. “I don’t know much otherwise.”

Andrew pushed open the door and guided Jason to one of the examination rooms, where they lit a pair of lamps. At Andrew’s instruction, Jason sat down on the examination table. Andrew took a chair with wheels on the legs, and that made things better. He could roll back and forth looking for the things he’d need: primarily, a bottle of iodine and a sterile needle and thread. As he pulled that out of a cabinet, he caught Jason looking at it apprehensively.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve done this before.”

Jason motioned with his bloody hand. “With your arm like that?”

Andrew smiled. “Well no,” he said, “not with my arm like this. But I can manage. This is simple work. Unless you want to wait for Dr. Bergstrom in the morning?”

“Hell no!”

“All right then,” said Andrew. “Hold still. I’m going to clean your cut out first and that might sting. Try not to shout.”

Jason didn’t shout as Andrew splashed iodine on his hand, but Andrew could tell that the boy wanted to.

“Very stoic,” Andrew said, dabbing the wound clean. “Now tell me—how’d you happen to cut yourself in the middle of the quarantine this fine spring night?”

“Bergstrom did it to me.”

“Dr. Bergstrom cut your hand?”

“No. Bergstrom locked me up in there—on account I might be infectious, even though I got no symptoms.”

“Infectious?” Andrew put a wad of cotton on the wound and pressed down. “Infectious with what?”

“Fever,” said Jason. “The fever that killed my mama and took about all of my town this winter past, I expect. But that’s bunk.”

“Wait a moment. A fever killed all of your town?” Andrew rolled back on his chair, and started to thread the steel needle. “Over one winter?”

“Over one week, more like,” said Jason.

Andrew frowned at Jason. “Are you making up stories?”

Jason shook his head. “Wish I were,” he said.

“Before I start, you want a little whiskey? It helps dull the pain.”

“No sir.”

“Then why don’t you tell more about this sickness that had you locked up in quarantine tonight? It’ll help distract you—and I’m curious.”

“All right.”

And so, as Andrew took the boy’s hand and started to draw the thread through the wound, Jason Thistledown told him his story. He teared up almost immediately. And Andrew wasn’t sure whether it was the pain of the stitches or the sadness of the memories that made him cry.

“Well. I am sorry for your loss,” said Andrew. “It’s a lucky thing your aunt happened by.”

Jason nodded. “I thank the Lord every day. I just wish she’d stopped Dr. Bergstrom.”

“All right, this is the last one.” And he pierced the skin at the very inner edge of the cut. Jason flinched more this time—as though he’d been holding it in until now.

“Can—can I have that bit of that whiskey now?”

“Sure you can.” Andrew wheeled back to the cabinet and got the little whiskey bottle. He poured a capful and handed it to Jason, who slugged it down and coughed.

“This supposed to help?” he finally managed.

“Get enough whiskey into a man, you can saw his leg off.”

“Don’t get any ideas.”

Andrew chuckled at that. “Don’t worry, Jason.” He wrapped the wound in gauze. “I’m done for tonight.”

Now that he was done stitching and bandaging, Andrew got a good look at the boy, assessing him as something other than a patient. He was most of the way to being a man, tall and lean with none of the awkwardness that came on a lot of boys at that time of life. His eyes were pale in the light, but they had a cast to them that Andrew had not often seen, like they looked right through a fellow. Overall, Jason Thistledown just looked strong, and Andrew thought he must be.

This boy, if he were to be believed, had survived an outbreak of something worse than cholera, worse than yellow fever, maybe as bad as Black Plague… Some sickness that had killed everybody in a town this past winter. Not a third or a half, but everybody. Everybody but one.

What kind of fever did that?

“Jason,” he asked, “can you tell me what the symptoms of the fever were?”

Jason handed back the cap, and Andrew screwed it back onto the whiskey.

“I only know what happened to my mama.”

“Tell me that.”

Jason nodded. He was quiet for a moment, looking down at his re-bandaged hand. Then he drew a breath, and started talking.

“She started getting sick a day after we got back home from Cracked Wheel. It was a clear day, all right for travel we figured. We were laying in some more supplies, was all. First thing she complained about was a headache. Then she had trouble with the runs, you know what I mean? Then she got all hot with fever, and she said ‘Why, Jason I think I shall lie down a moment.’ She had a hard time getting up after that, so I saw to her.”

“You feel anything during this part?”

“Not symptoms if that’s what you mean.”

“That is what I mean.”

“After that, things took a bad turn. She told me her stomach hurt, and she was sweating something terrible, and when I went to clean her off I saw that she was bleeding.”

“Bleeding? Where?”

“From her nose for a bit, and also—also from the skin around her fingernails.”

“And then—”

“Well,” said Jason, “she got worse and worse, until she seized up—and died.”

“Were you able to take her temperature? With a thermometer?”

“No.”

“Was she bleeding from anywhere else?”

“I don’t know. I think there was some around her toenails, and her eyes were awfully red.”

Andrew sat back and thought about what he’d told him. It was nothing he’d ever encountered—not clinically, certainly, and not even in the case studies that he’d read in Paris.

“And you didn’t have any symptoms.”

“Like my aunt says—I’m immune.”

“And you haven’t had symptoms—for how long?”

“About two months.”

“During which time, you got on a train, and on another train, then made your way up here to Eliada. Meeting all sorts of people at every stop.”

“That is right.”

“So why, I wonder, did Dr. Bergstrom order you into quarantine tonight? It seems as though your aunt’s right—you’re immune. You’re not carrying it either or others would have surely come down with it. So why lock you up now?”

“That is what I want to know.”

Andrew was about to ask his next question when he heard a gentle rapping at the door.

“Dr. Bergstrom?”

“Annie?” He turned his chair around to face the door. “Come on in.”

“Dr. Waggoner.” Annie Rowe stepped in. “What are you doing up? Oh,” she said, looking at Jason. She blushed and averted her eyes. “Hello, young sir.”

“Nurse Rowe, meet Jason Thistledown. Jason, cover yourself, would you?”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Jason, pulling the sheet over himself.

Annie Rowe raised her eyes and got a better look at the blood-slick sheet. “What happened here?”

“It is not as bad as it looks,” said Andrew. “The boy cut himself. I saw to it.”

“You should’ve called someone,” she scolded. But it was not heartfelt. She peered at the boy. “He doesn’t look well.”

Andrew cleared his throat. “You know what you might do? Could you find Jason a robe or some clothes—something to cover him up better?”

Annie stood straight. “All right,” she said, “as you please, Doctor.” She spared Andrew a tight smile. “Good to see you back practising so soon.”

When she’d left, Jason finally did it, and asked Andrew the question he’d been dreading.

“What were you doing out there tonight? And who’s Mister Juke?”

“Mister—”

“Yes, sir. You thought I might be him, when I came out of the quarantine. Remember? Well, I’m not. So who is he?”

Now Andrew found himself brought up short. It was a simple question but a difficult one. Who was Mister Juke? He’d seen him, on the hillside waiting for the hangman’s noose—a creature with two faces or so it seemed—one congenitally distorted; one, beautiful. He’d seen Mister Juke hanged, by the neck. And Mister Juke had lived. So who was he?

“That,” said Andrew, “is the question I have been trying to answer. He was with me at… at…”

“The lynching?” Jason pulled the sheet tighter around himself. “Sam Green told what happened.”

“All right. He was with me at the lynching. They hung him first—they seemed to think he was a rapist, although I doubt that. They pulled him out of that quarantine building. And they hung him. They tried to anyway.”

“Because they thought he was a rapist. Who they think he raped?”

“Sweet girl,” said Andrew. “Her name was Maryanne Leonard. She died, this past Sunday. Right here in hospital. Complications from her pregnancy.”

Jason didn’t ask another question right away. He just sat there and looked at Andrew, and as Andrew looked back, he thought: The boy is dancing around this topic. Just like I am. Because the boy has seen something in there—Devils up from Hell, he called them—that he cannot explain any more than I can explain anything I have seen. And neither of us will be able to figure it out, until one of us takes that step—openly, into that place.

Jason finally asked his question.

“How big is Mister Juke? Is he skinny and tall with a strange bend to his face, like he’s been whacked? Or is he just little? Like a baby, or maybe a bit smaller than a baby? But with… teeth?”

They sat quiet again, as Andrew took that in. Andrew’s answer, when it came, had no words. He nodded.

“So both,” said Jason, and Andrew said: “Yes. Both.”

Annie Rowe returned with a hospital gown for Jason, and once he’d changed took the sheet and stuffed it into a sack for washing. As she folded it and stuffed it in the bag, she nagged Andrew a bit about getting back to his room, but Andrew put her off. “Just seeing to my patient,” he said.

“You are the patient,” she huffed. “And a terrible patient at that. Why is that truer with doctors than anyone else?”

“Annie, I promise to return to bed once I’ve seen to a few things.”

“Why don’t you let me see to them? I am on duty tonight.”

“You must have enough to do,” said Andrew.

“Oh,” said Annie, “it’s not so busy. We have a new mother and her baby staying the night, but they’re resting fine. Other than that, there is just a certain doctor who is recovering from an unjust beating, yet prone to wandering… .”

She stuffed the cloth into the laundry bag and hung it on the peg outside the examination room door. The whole time, she did not take her eye off Andrew.

“Now what can I take off your hands, Dr. Waggoner, to get you back to bed any sooner?”

Andrew sighed and looked in her eyes and, reading the expression there, he made up his mind.

“All right,” he said, “you can go into the autopsy. You can light up the lamps in there, and you can pull out Maryanne Leonard’s remains and set her on the table. Then you can go up to my room, and you can set up another cot for Jason, and leave the two of us to our work for a moment,” he said. Annie’s eyes widened and she prepared to say something else, no doubt to point out some other damning aspect of Andrew’s obvious infirmities, but he pre-empted her.

“That is how you’ll get me back to bed the quickest.”

“Why do you want to look at that lady’s body?” asked Jason as they made their way slowly down the corridor to the autopsy. “Why now?”

“The truth is, I want to find out as much as I can before I talk to Dr. Bergstrom next. I have my suspicions about what has been transpiring here all this time—and I want to see, so I can get some good answers from him. You want to wait outside, I understand.”

Jason pondered. “You don’t get on with that Dr. Bergstrom either, do you?” he said finally.

“No. I guess not.”

“Well then, I got stomach for whatever you’ve got to do. It’s not like I ain’t seen a dead body before. And you still look like you could use some help.”

“All right, then.”

As they came upon the door to the autopsy, Annie Rowe emerged. Seeing her gave Andrew pause. She looked older, the lines in her cheeks standing out in sharp relief, and the shadows around her eyes deep. Those eyes were wide, though—not this time with disapproval. She looked at Andrew and gasped, started to say something, then shook her head.

“Annie?” Dr. Waggoner leaned on Jason’s shoulder. “What—”

“I did what you asked, Dr. Waggoner,” she said. “I brought her out. But—”

“But?”

“Just go do what you got to do,” she said. “But leave that boy out of it.”

Then she turned and fled into the shadows at the end of the hall.

Andrew and Jason looked at one another. “I think you’d better wait here,” said Andrew. “I’ll go see what has Nurse Rowe so upset.”

Jason nodded. “Just don’t cut yourself. I’m not so good at stitching as you are.”

“I’ll be mindful.” And with that, Andrew let go of Jason and headed into the autopsy.

Andrew had been impressed with the Eliada autopsy from his first visit. The fact that there was a hospital in a place this remote was enough in itself; but the Eliada autopsy was also set up with tables like a surgery. The tables were on rollers, and exactly the height of drawers in the wall where the bodies of the deceased rested and there was at hand a full surgery of equipment for the purposes of examination. But for the absence of electric light, the autopsy here would not have been out of place in New York or Paris.

Annie had set things up for him as he’d asked. She’d lit the kerosene lamps that hung from the ceiling beneath big conical reflectors, and placed the table underneath them. And on the table, she had placed what Andrew assumed were the remains of Miss Maryanne Leonard.

They were under a sheet—but without even drawing it back, Andrew could see what got Annie so upset. It draped like a covering of attic furniture—tenting high where the body’s face and shoulders lay, and over the up-pointing toes, and the knees. But in the middle, where the hips and belly should have made an impression—there, the fabric held closer to the table. Because there, Andrew realized, there was practically nothing at all. He stepped up closer and drew back the cloth.

Maryanne Leonard had been butchered. The flesh of her chest, her ribcage, everything down to her pelvic bone—it was all removed, nothing but a yawning, blackening space. Looking down at her, he could see her spine, the ribs of her back that shot from it, lying empty. Her viscera had been scooped out; she had been gutted, cleaned like a fish.

Except she was no fish. She was a young lady. As if to give evidence of that, her face floated with the unblemished serenity of the dead above the emptiness of her middle.

Delicately, Andrew drew the sheet back over her face.

Bergstrom must consider the discussion closed, thought Andrew, now that he had so tidily carved away the evidence. Andrew turned around to call Jason in—but saw the boy standing at the door.

“How long have you been there?” asked Andrew.

“Long enough to see,” said Jason. He swallowed and shut his eyes a moment. “Where’s the rest of her?”

“Why don’t you sit down,” said Andrew. “Look away. Let me see to this—”

Jason held up his hand. He opened his eyes and stared hard at Andrew.

“No sir. You think I’m upset like a girl or a baby or someone from a city, because there’s an awful thing here. Well, I ain’t. I’ve seen awful things already and this is another one. You think we should start looking for the rest of her? Can’t be far.”

Andrew drew a breath. This boy had depths to him—he was no baby or girl or city person, that was true. “Yes,” he said. “I think we should. And I’ve got an idea.”

“You need a hand walking?”

“No,” said Andrew. “I better get used to doing that on my own.”

Jason stepped aside. “I’m here if you need it, Doctor.”

Andrew smiled as he started across the room. “Someone raised you well,” he said, and pointed to a door at the far end of the room. “Fetch a lamp, then. We’ll check here.”

The door led to the closest thing one could find to a cellar to this place. The nurses called it the root cellar, because it was cool and tight, and probably could keep a good store of potatoes and carrots until winter if that was what the place was for.

But there wasn’t room in this cellar and anyway, the shelves here were full of things you wouldn’t want next to your supper.

“What’s the smell in here?”

“Formaldehyde,” said Andrew.

“Smells like pickle juice,” said Jason.

“You must be used to some awful pickles to say that,” said Andrew. “But it works the same as pickle juice—preserves things that left to themselves might rot away. Come on down, bring the candle.”

Jason brought the candle down the steps. The space in here had been dug out of the ground and lined with fieldstone and timber. The ceiling was a low, whitewashed arch. Air circulation was bad in here, and the few times Andrew had been down before, he’d always had the uneasy sense that he was about to suffocate.

“Sure are a lot of jars here,” said Jason.

“This is where the hospital keeps its specimens,” said Andrew. “Someone’s foot gets amputated—we pull out some kidney stones—even if we cut out an appendix. It all goes here in a jar.”

“Every time?”

“Not every time.” Andrew squinted at a line of jars filled with stones of various sizes. Thin sheets of effluvia drifted in the yellowish liquid. “But when there’s something remarkable about it. Something worth writing down. Then yes, we keep it.”

Jason looked hard at the jars. “Should be a lot of jars like that around here. They’re labelled and everything. What’re we looking for?”

“Not kidney stones from M. Cunningham,” said Andrew.

“Nor a testicle from L. Wharton,” said Jason. “A testicle! He can’t be too happy with how his life’s carrying on.”

Andrew chuckled. “I remember that one. I think he’s happy enough these days. See how big it is?”

Jason looked closer. “I thought that was just the magnifyin’ effect of the glass.”

“Oh no. In fact, it looks like it has contracted since the surgery.”

Jason whistled. “How’d a fellow walk, dragging something like that between his legs?”

“I wondered that too. And so I removed it.”

Jason was quiet a moment, considering this. He pulled the candle back.

“What’s the matter, son? Too much for one night?”

Jason didn’t answer, and when the candle drew farther away Andrew turned.

“Jason? Are you all right?”

The candle was glowing at the far end of the little cellar, making a silhouette of Jason, and illuminating a high shelf that was filled with big glass jars.

“Doctor,” said Jason, “I think I found Maryanne Leonard. Or the rest of her. You need a hand coming over here?”

Andrew made it over on his own but Jason did most of the work moving the jars out into the autopsy where the light was better. There were eight of them that were labelled M. Leonard, and each one was big—a good half-gallon. Andrew was doing all right walking, but with one good arm and a limp, he was sure he’d drop every one of them. So Jason hauled them out and arranged them for inspection.

The jars were all labelled with the name of the particular organ that was inside. It was a good thing—because whoever had removed them had done an inept job. The intestine and stomach were both badly perforated, one of the kidneys was almost liquefied, and the liver…

Andrew leaned in close to examine the liver. Its surface looked as though someone had drawn a table fork across it—or in some spots, a spoon, scooping parts away like custard. Jason leaned in beside him.

“What happened to that?” he asked. Andrew looked where he was pointing—into the jar that was labelled Uterus.

At first, Andrew took it on faith that this was what he was looking at, because Maryanne Leonard’s uterus was a ruin. Andrew could see where the rip was, but there were also cuts, radiating out from it. Other parts had holes of a variety of sizes, like a slice of Swiss cheese. The fallopian tubes and ovaries were kinked and ragged, as though they’d been gnawed by rats.

And there were… other things.

They looked like tiny pustules, attached to the inner lining of the uterus. They were each perfectly round, whitish, not more than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. There might have been hundreds.

“Look at those.”

“What are they?”

“One way to find out,” said Andrew. “Let’s have a look. Could you unscrew the jar, Jason?”

“This is going to smell worse.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Jason wrinkled his nose, took the jar in the crook of his elbow and twisted the top off.

Andrew found a set of forceps and a steel tray, and when Jason set the jar back down he reached inside and carefully pulled the organ out.

“A uterus. That’s the same as a womb.”

“Very good.” Andrew unfolded it onto the tray as well as he could, using only his left hand. “Jason, could you bring a light near? Thank you.”

Jason took the candle near and set it on the table beside the organ, while Andrew brought a magnifying glass to bear on the problem.

“Tiny people did this,” said Jason.

Andrew was only half-listening, so he nodded. He prodded the pustules with the end of a needle. They were attached all right—and they were hard.

“Tiny people,” repeated Jason. “From the quarantine. That’s what I saw there—never seen anything like it before. But they had sharp teeth and I bet they did this. I know it.”

At that, Andrew sat up and looked at Jason. “Jason,” he said levelly, “we don’t know anything. We’ve both seen things—and we’ve seen the same thing in one case. So it gives it some credence, this idea that some little cousin of Mister Juke did all this. But we don’t know. Not yet.” He sat back. “Unless, there’s some story about what happened in that quarantine you haven’t told me.”

“Those things in there—they looked like folks. Small folks but that weren’t all. The one I saw up close had pretty sharp teeth and a hungry way about it. It went after my—” he hesitated, and reddened “—my privates. Think if it were smaller—younger—it couldn’t cut a hole in a woman’s insides? Chew it? Looking for food?”

“That’s good, Jason. You are asking questions. And they’re good ones too.” Andrew looked back through the magnifying glass, focused it on a cluster of the pustules.

“Thank you,” said Jason. “And what’re you going to do about those questions?”

Andrew frowned. He focused in closer. They looked like nothing so much as a cluster of tiny fish eggs… roe.

And they certainly could be. As he looked, he saw what appeared to be tiny fractures along the surface of the pustule—like veins, perhaps, but infinitely smaller. And there—he wondered—might that even be a shadow of a form inside?

Andrew blinked and sat up, set the magnifying glass down.

“Right now, we’re going to take some of these things…” He shook his head. “We’ll put them in a jar, and keep them to look at through a microscope tomorrow. And then we’re going to put things back, and we’re going to climb the stairs to my room.” Andrew drew a deep breath before continuing:

“You’re going to stay there the night. By my own bedside. And I’ll make sure you don’t ever end up in that quarantine again.”

Jason glared at him. “Are you putting me off?” he asked. Andrew started to answer, but the boy waved him down. “It don’t matter,” he said. “I owe you thanks for fixing my hand up and you’re right. I don’t think I can stay awake much longer and you sure don’t look it. We ought to clean up this place and get rest.”

“Rest is definitely what we both need right now,” said Andrew. He pushed himself up and winced, and looked at Jason. “A tiny person tried to bite your privates?” he asked.

Jason nodded. “Let’s get to work,” he said.

Nurse Annie Rowe met them upstairs, and she was grateful to learn that Andrew and Jason had closed up the autopsy. “I am not squeamish but I have never seen a young lady—her remains—in such a state. What happened? Do you know?”

“Better you ask Bergstrom,” said Jason before Andrew could shush him.

“Better not to ask Dr. Bergstrom,” said Andrew and Annie nodded and said she understood all too well.

“I don’t want to stir the hornet’s nest anymore. There will be enough trouble with this one out of quarantine,” said Annie.

“Oh,” said Andrew, “there will be more than enough trouble, on more than one count there. Kings will fall. We will make sure of that.”

Nurse Rowe smiled gently as she prepared to leave them. “Don’t exaggerate, now, Dr. Waggoner. Dr. Bergstrom will be in a state in the morning. But things will be fine by lunch again.”

11 - Love Among the Feegers

The two Feeger sisters waited through the night for Patricia. By the time she came back, Feeger men had joined them. Feeger men often tried to join them for the singing, or more to the point they tried to interrupt it, by grabbing at one or the other of them, or just staring at their nakedness with hungry enough eyes to put them off harmony. Patricia was the one with the knowhow to shoo them off. Now it fell to Lily, second eldest.

So when El Feeger put his hand on her shoulder, Lily said: Scat! Which was the first thing you said when a Feeger took a liberty. El took his hand away but he didn’t move too far, nor take his dark eyes off her, nor lose that awful grin.

That was fine for the moment but it would not last. Lily hummed a little prayer that the Old Man might release her big sister soon so she would not have to face El and others alone.

The Old Man heard her prayer. Looking out on the lake, which was dimpled with slanted rays, Missy pointed out the little ripple in the waters, spreading like a line from a middle point. As it grew nearer, El’s gaze removed itself from his cousin’s behind and joined the rest of them watching at Patricia came back from her night with the Old Man.

She was changed. Although she’d spent a night in water cold enough to paint a girl blue, her skin was ruddy and cheered. Was she any plumper? She soon would be, and that may have been why Lily thought she was now. But she smiled as she squinted against the sun at the family, and walked out of the lake.

Missy ran up and threw her arms around her sister, who absently stroked her hair. The men, guessing what had come upon her, stepped back and fell to their knees.

“Patricia,” whispered Lily. “You’re an—”

“Oracle,” whispered Patricia, then, loud enough for everyone to hear: “I am all Oracular now, and I have words from Him in the Lake. So heed, and keep your hands off me ’n’ mine ’til I say.”

She did not say anything else then. For the whole town had not gathered. So El went down to fetch some weave for his cousin, and they all wrapped her up in it, took her back down the ridge to the crèche where, Oracle or not, Patricia would be staying until the Old Man’s issue was done with her.

They drew straws that afternoon in the village. Lily was happy to see that it was not El who drew the short straw, but his younger brother Lothar. He was quiet and nice to girls, handsome enough, and Lily figured that he would not much harm her older sister when he laid table for her.

As much as all the Feegers wanted to hear what their Oracle had to say, they knew that this ritual, of laying table, was important. An Oracle would only live short if she carried the issue without sustenance—the issue would turn to her, tear her out from the inside.

So when the Old Man sent an Oracle back, someone had to lay table—fill her up with seed for the issue’s larder. To forestall bloodshed, for it was no chore offering this prize, the Feeger men-folk had long since drawn straws.

Lothar drew the shorter straw only second up. He held it in front of him in wonder.

“Old Man favours you,” said El, all trace of his smirk gone now.

Lothar swallowed and said, “Oh,” and then on shaking legs he headed off to the crèche.

Patricia waited, tucked well beneath the rock overhand. She was trembling, with the memory of the cold and a bit of a fever, but also with a bit of worry. Her memories of the night with the Old Man were not too clear, but happy. She’d given her Love and seemed to get as much back again. She knew how the Feeger men could be with her and her sisters. She thought about bruising and bleeding and being made to feel small again. She worried, like her sister, that it would be awful now.

Then the door opened on the wooden front of the crèche, and in the noon-hour light she saw who it was. She smiled.

“Lothar,” she said.

“Huh,” said Lothar.

“Glad it’s you,” she said. Lothar held his hands at his middle, and stumbled in. His trousers and shirt and boots were gone. “Close the door,” she said.

Lothar nodded. He turned around and closed the door. Outside, there were sounds of disappointment. But the crèche was dark. Patricia shifted. She heard Lothar shuffling in the dark, moving around the crèche.

“I’ll talk,” said Patricia, “so you c’n find me.”

“Hum,” said Lothar.

“It is going to be a good time for us,” said Patricia. “That is what the Old Man said.”

Lothar stumbled, and there was a clattering sound.

“You hit the table, now, didn’t you,” said Patricia. “You’re going the wrong way. You’re not scared, are you?”

“Um,” said Lothar. “Um hum.”

“Well don’t be. This will be—” she paused, looking for the right word “—not mean.”

More stumbling, this time closer. Then Patricia felt the heat from Lothar’s flank, next to her. She pulled the furs aside, and she felt as he scrambled to get underneath with her.

“You’re shaking,” she commented.

“Um,” said Lothar.

“Well I’ll calm you,” she said. She reached down and took hold of him. He was slick and warm down there, and he gasped as she pulled and worked him. “Now,” she said, “get ready. Babies are hungry. And they will need food for the long walk. So you go plant your seed, Lothar. Plant it for harvest.”

“Long—” Lothar made a sound as she lifted her leg and guided him inside “—walk?”

“That,” sang Patricia, “is how it is going to be.” She thrust down on him, and Lothar made a strangling sound at the base of his throat. “That—that’s the message. The Old Man’s sending us on a long walk. Down the mountains to that river place. To see about His son. Show the folk there how to treat him right.”

Lothar took his breath in sharp, and whimpered, and she felt his release in her. She welcomed it, the way she’d welcomed the Old Man. It was more love for Him.

She would need that love and more—because the Old Man had made it clear. There was heavy work ahead of them, if they were to do his bidding: find the Son, and make things right again. To do that, she would have to preach—preach to strangers, and make them see how the Son was their Father—make them raise up a Cathedral to him.

And if she couldn’t convince them… if they turned from their calling?

Either way, it would be heavy work.

12 - Aunty’s Tears

Jason sat up in bed and gingerly touched his sore, bandaged hand. Dr. Waggoner was still sleeping, so he was quiet as he got out of bed and padded to the window, looked out. It was early morning and he had a good view of Eliada. The hospital was on a rise, and looking down he could see the low wooden buildings spreading along two muddy roadways. People were up and getting set for work—a couple of wagons were loading sacks outside a store. Farther along, he could see gangs of men moving around the sawmill, a team of horses in their midst hauling a pile of logs up to a ramp on the mill’s edge. The two smokestacks at the far end of the mill building sent out a long white cloud of wood smoke. Muffled by distance and wooden walls, Jason was sure he could hear the chugging of a steam engine, the whine of saw-blades.

He let the curtain fall, and stepped out the door, into the corridor and to a tall window at its end. This view was better. It gave him a look at the quarantine. In daylight.

It was not as big as it’d seemed, but it was big enough, built a little better than you’d build a barn, but shaped like a horseshoe. It looked new. It was nestled right back against thick woods and its wooden walls were painted a deep green—as though it might blend in better that way. And there was one other thing about it that Jason noted especially.

It looked like it would burn.

Jason swallowed and leaned against the wall. Was that what he was thinking? Putting torch to the quarantine? Deliberately murdering whoever was in there? Or not caring who was in there and who was not, and doing it all the same?

Last night, he might have done it. The same way he’d been thinking about picking up a gun and using it to shoot Dr. Bergstrom, he could easily have thought about putting torch to the quarantine. It was filled up with Devils after all.

This morning, that urge was gone. Maybe Dr. Bergstrom’s poison had run its course—had made him mean for awhile, like too much liquor or Coca-Cola. Maybe…

Jason drew a sharp breath then and forgot his musings, as a pair of figures emerged from the middle of the horseshoe. It was Aunt Germaine—and Dr. Bergstrom. They were talking to each other. But they did not seem angry—not like last night in his office, or at the quarantine. They seemed more like old friends now. As Jason watched, Aunt Germaine actually laughed at something the doctor said. Dr. Bergstrom did not seem as pleased. But he reached up and patted Aunt Germaine on the shoulder, and she did not flinch away from him.

Jason pulled back from the window. The easy part of the morning was over now. The rest of the day, he figured, was going to be a hard fight and nothing better.

Jason got Dr. Waggoner awake soon enough that they could talk about a plan for confronting Dr. Bergstrom. They figured they would not talk about the tiny people that Jason said he’d seen in the quarantine, the strange man in white and the other man behind the door, and concentrate on the question of why Dr. Bergstrom thought it was safe to strap down a healthy boy alone in an empty ward room.

“You going to talk to him about that girl?” asked Jason. “All butchered like a hog as she was?”

Dr. Waggoner shook his head. “We fight one battle at a time,” he said. “If we tidied things right, he won’t be sure we even looked at her. No, I will deal with that next time I can speak with Mr. Harper. Which,” he said, looking significantly at Jason, “I intend to do as soon as I am able.”

That was about all the planning they had time for, before the door swung open and Dr. Bergstrom, followed by Aunt Germaine, stormed in.

“What are you doing treating patients, Andrew?” he demanded.

Dr. Waggoner leaned back on the pillows they’d propped behind his back, as Dr. Bergstrom approached him closer.

“The boy was cut,” he said. “He could have become infected.”

“Do you have any notion,” Bergstrom said, “of the risk that you took in removing this patient from quarantine? He could be carrying an illness that might wipe out the town!”

“My,” said Andrew. “The entire town you say. That is quite some ailment.”

“And you removed him.”

“I did not remove anyone. He was already out when I met him.”

“Not possible.”

“How is that?”

Dr. Bergstrom drew back at that question, because Jason figured he had no good answer. Dr. Waggoner must have figured that too, because he showed the faintest trace of a smile as he nodded.

“You are not supposed to be practising,” said Dr. Bergstrom finally. Your arm, Andrew.”

“It works well enough for stitching a cut.” Dr. Waggoner looked at his hand coming out of that splint, waggled the fingertips. “And however you choose to address me, Nils, I am still a doctor here. At least according to Mr. Harper.”

“Yes. Mr. Harper.” Dr. Bergstrom regarded him with a squint. “Your benefactor.”

“I wonder, should we perhaps speak with him about this breach?”

“Do not be so quick, to run—”

“Yes?”

Dr. Bergstrom glared silently, not answering.

Jason wanted to stay for more but he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see his aunt standing close. She bent to whisper in his ear: “Come, Nephew. This is a matter between these men now. Not us. Not now.”

“But—” Jason did not care for the idea of leaving Dr. Bergstrom alone with his friend. But when he caught Andrew’s eye, he nodded, as if to say, Go on. I will be fine here.

Dr. Bergstrom looked at Jason too—and that, more than Dr. Waggoner’s encouragement, was what made up his mind, because Jason had never seen a man look hungrier than did Dr. Bergstrom looking at him then.

“Good bye, Dr. Waggoner,” he said. “Thank you kindly for the stitching.”

Dr. Waggoner smiled. “Take care of yourself, Jason.”

And out they went, hurrying down the hall and past the window overlooking quarantine.

“Why did you leave me in there?” said Jason as they moved to the stairwell. Aunt Germaine glanced at him with a queer half-smile.

“In the quarantine?” she said. “I am sorry, Nephew: I could do little else. Dr. Bergstrom is the senior medical official in Eliada.”

“Senior medical official. Is that the same as the law?” Jason didn’t let his aunt answer the question. “Because if he is the law, like a sheriff or a judge, then I guess he has a right to inject a fellow with poison, tie him up and leave him to die. Otherwise…”

“Jason,” said Aunt Germaine, patting him on the shoulder, “the important thing is—the truly important thing is, that you fared magnificently. You—”

“I could just leave, you know.”

Germaine’s eyes widened in the dark of the stairwell. The two stood on a landing, she a step below Jason, and he towered over her. Perhaps that is what gave Jason the courage to say that thing. Because after having said it, he could scarcely believe it had come from his mouth. It was a region of thought he had not come near—even when his temper was at its hottest.

But he found it was a region with a clear path through it. So he went on.

“You got me out of Cracked Wheel when things were bad, and I’m grateful for that, and glad to know I have kin yet. But when I was sitting in the cabin with my mama, I figured on carrying on with what I could. A fellow willing to work can find it anywhere I figure. I’m surely big enough.”

Aunt Germaine opened her mouth to speak. But a sound came out that was unfamiliar to Jason. “Why—” she began, and “My nephew—” she went on, and finally, she opened her arms and flung them around Jason’s shoulders, and Jason realized with a hitch that he’d done something that nothing—not the death of her sister, nor the wasting at Cracked Wheel—nothing else had yet done in his presence.

Through his selfish words, he had made his Aunt Germaine cry.

“Why did you do that to the boy?” said Andrew when Jason and his aunt were well gone. “He’s not sick. From what he told me, any exposure to the illness that took lives in his home town happened long ago. And if he were somehow contagious… Well. He spent a long time on train and boat and foot without quarantine. What would be the point of containing him now?”

Dr. Bergstrom pulled up a chair to Andrew’s bedside. “You feel that you are qualified in some manner to question my decisions with regard to this boy? That’s interesting, Andrew,” he said.

“That boy was in danger, and you put him there,” said Andrew. “Deliberately. You tied him down and locked him up with that rapist, Mister Juke.”

Dr. Bergstrom leaned very close to Andrew’s face, and as he did so his expression underwent a change. And that was the first true sense that Andrew got that he might actually be in physical danger from this man.

“Do not,” he hissed, “call him that—you damned meddlesome nigger. Do not dare.”

Andrew drew back against his pillows. All he could think about was Maryanne Leonard, the things that had been done to her corpse. What could this man’s hands do to living flesh?

“Doctor,” he said as levelly as he could. “Control yourself.”

His words seemed to have some effect. For a moment, Dr. Bergstrom looked as if he would strike him, but the moment past. The doctor sat up, ran a hand through his hair, then looked deliberately into his lap for a moment before shutting his eyes tight.

When he opened them again, he drew a deep breath. He stood fast enough the chair rocked at his calves.

“What an error it was,” he said softly, “bringing you to Eliada.”

Andrew did not say anything to that. He could do nothing but stare at the man across from him.

“Well. I have other business to attend to. So if you will excuse me—I will leave you to your rest.”

Dr. Bergstrom lifted his hands from his side—with a flash of silver in one of them. Before Andrew could react, he grabbed Andrew’s good arm, pulled it out straight and pushed it down onto the mattress, then pausing not an instant to find his mark, jabbed the hypodermic needle into it. Andrew moaned, as the drug found its way into his veins.

“Rest,” said Dr. Bergstrom again, wagging the spent hypodermic in front of him and backing away, he slipped out the door and hurried down the hall.

Aunt Germaine was set up in a room on the third floor, not far from Dr. Bergstrom’s own offices. There was a table, a couple of wooden chairs, and five big boxes full of papers.

Aunt Germaine, having dried her eyes and calmed her nerves after Jason contritely explained he was not going anywhere, said, “Those are like larger versions of my file cards. They are all the records that Dr. Bergstrom has kept of the people here in Eliada. From the time that it began.”

“That must be a lot more than those ones.”

“Not so much more,” she said, whisking her skirts aside as she sat down. “Eliada is a young town. It was incorporated in 1887—just a quarter of a century ago. Currently, some eight hundred souls call it home. But its population has grown only in recent years—since Mr. Harper and his foundation arrived and began their work in earnest.”

“That the Utopian paradise business that Ruth was talking about?”

Aunt Germaine smiled wryly. “Near enough the mark,” she said. “Let me see if I can explain it a little better. Mr. Harper comes from a family that has done well for itself in timber and mining. Most of their more profitable holdings are farther west of here—in Seattle and California. Mr. Harper came into—shall we say, possession of this town, inasmuch as he took control of the sawmill, at the turn of the century. So we are properly regarding just a decade of medical records.”

“Because the hospital came with Mr. Harper.”

“Correct.”

“And so what is it that makes this place so Utopian? The hospital?”

“Utopian. Those are that young Ruth’s words.” Aunt Germaine shook her head. “The hospital is not the cause of it. It is, however, a signpost.”

“A signpost.”

“It is an indication that the community cares for the health and hygiene of its members. However remote—this is a safe place. Do you know what Eliada means?”

Jason frowned. “It’s from the Bible. One of King David’s sons? I got that right?”

“Very good. And it means, ‘Watched over by God.’ That is the principle upon which Mr. Harper governs.”

“What was it like here before Mr. Harper came along then?”

Aunt Germaine shrugged. “I really cannot say. But,” she said, patting the top of one of the boxes, “we will be able to say a great deal about the last decade here. Once we have looked through these, and conducted our interviews.”

“I guess you want to get started.”

“In time,” said Aunt Germaine. “To begin with—I think we ought to find a good breakfast. I have your clothes here. We can go into town, eat our fill—and you can tell me all of what happened last night.”

Jason did not tell all of what happened. In fact, he left out important parts and that changed the story utterly. He was not sure when he decided to withhold these things from his aunt, but decide he did. As they left the hospital and made their way along the wide roads to breakfast he told her a story: how, left alone in the ward room, he had panicked when a large raccoon came into the room and had gotten curious about him. So he’d cut himself loose, he told her, as he ate a plate of fried eggs and thick-rinded bacon, and run off into the dark, where he had cut himself on the scalpel something terrible. Dr. Waggoner had found him outside, bleeding and naked, and taken him inside and stitched him up.

“So we went up to his room, where he said he would keep me until morning, on account of neither of us thought it was a good idea going back into that quarantine building.” He pushed his plate away. “On account of the raccoon. And just generally.”

Aunt Germaine patted a napkin on her lips and regarded him. They sat in the dining room of the Eliada Empire Hotel, which had in it five tables, each round and covered with identical red-and-white checked tablecloths, and they had it to themselves. In fact, from the way the old man who ran the place greeted them coming in, Jason got the idea that fixing breakfast at ten in the morning was a real travail. Now, he could feel himself being watched.

“A raccoon,” said Aunt Germaine.

“Or something.”

“It must have been quite something. You do not want to talk about the things that happened in there, do you?”

“We are talking about them.”

“No we are not,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Not truly. But that is fine, Jason. It was an awful night. You will speak of it in time.”

There was a rattling behind them then as a door opened. Sam Green walked in, hatless but well-dressed. Aunt Germaine pursed her lips and looked at her hands. Jason nodded back hello when Sam Green waved.

“Good morning,” he said. “Trust everything went well at the hospital?”

Jason thought about speaking, but before he could, Aunt Germaine spoke up.

“Thank you, yes, Mr. Green,” she said. “Fine.”

“Fine,” he said, and sat down at a table near the door, a respectful distance from the two of them. “Glad to hear it, Mrs. Frost. You able to start your work, determining all our fitness and whatnot?”

“Not yet,” said Aunt Germaine. “Thank you.”

Green’s moustache spread like a fan over his smile.

“And you, Mr. Thistledown? You ready to assist?”

Jason nodded.

“Well today looks like a fine one for it.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Germaine. “Thank you.”

Sam Green nodded, reached into his coat and pulled out a little black book, stuck his nose in it to signal the conversation was done—or he was finished trying to start it. He took out a pencil and began underlining. At length, Aunt Germaine leaned forward.

“You saw something in there other than a raccoon,” she said. “You did. Didn’t you?”

Jason swallowed. “I—guess I did,” he said.

“It is important that you tell,” she said. “Not anyone—” she glanced over to Sam Green, who was now scribbling something on a piece of paper he’d used to mark his place “—but me.”

“You.”

“You should tell me, so I can protect you.”

And as she looked at him in that way, her eyes wide and generous, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder, Jason almost did tell her everything. She was family, after all, and if you could not trust family with your secrets then who could you trust? And had she not given him that scalpel—that little knife that had saved his life as far as he knew, in the quarantine?

But as he tried to put it into a sentence, he found that he couldn’t.

“Just don’t let him put me back in that quarantine,” he finally said.

Aunt Germaine nodded. “I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t we go explore a bit? My work can wait a few more hours. Why not see what we can find in this little town—well away from that dreadful quarantine.”

“All right,” said Jason. “That sounds fine to me.”

They got up to leave, and as they did, Sam Green stood as well.

“Ma’am,” he said as she stepped through the door to the street. As Jason passed, Sam Green was more demonstrative: he clapped him on the shoulder and shook his hand. “Pleasure to see you once more, young Thistledown. Enjoy your tour of the town.”

Jason swallowed as he let go of Sam Green’s hand, did his best to avoid making a face.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, meeting the older man’s eye.

“Hurry along, Nephew,” called Aunt Germaine from the street. He did. It was only at the end of the block, as Germaine rooted in her handbag for a fan, that he opened his hand and looked at the scrap of paper that Sam Green had left him there.

BE AT NORTH DOOR OF SAWMILL AT AFT SHIFT CHANGE, it read.

And underneath, in big letters underlined twice:

13 - The Mercy of Sam Green

The sawmill’s north door was at the edge of a vast and shadowed lumber yard—a whole town made of stacks of square-cut timber, whose avenues and alleyways were choked in sawdust so thick it might have fallen in a storm. Jason Thistledown waded along its main thoroughfare as the hour neared four o’clock. A bell was ringing to signal the shift change, and because of this he was not alone on his march. Men were walking to and from their work. A couple of them made eye contact with Jason but just one of them, a heavy bald man whose beard dangled well past his neck, spoke to him, from across the crude avenue.

“Hey fellow,” he called, and beckoned him. Jason cringed inside. He was sure he was going to be found out, told to scat and then he would never learn what Sam Green wanted with him and not Aunty. But there was nothing for it, so over he went.

The man looked at him. “You new here, heh?”

“Yes sir,” said Jason. “Just came in yesterday, sir.”

“You name?” The man had a strange way of talking; like his tongue was stuck in his mouth sideways.

“Name!” he repeated.

“Jason,” Jason said.

“Nowak.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Is good place in Eliada,” said Nowak. “Godly. You like.”

And then he slapped Jason on the back and laughed deeply, and gave him a push forward hard enough to make Jason stumble.

“Thank you, sir,” Jason said, and waved as he stepped away from Nowak. Jason swore to himself. Telling his name to a strange fellow on his way to a secret meeting was probably a bad mistake. But it too was done.

Soon enough, they came upon the sawmill itself, and met with another group of men who were coming out. In this chaos, Jason stepped to one side, into a little alleyway between two long stacks of lumber. MEET AT THE NORTH DOOR, the note had said. AT, it read. Not INSIDE it.

Jason settled into shadow as the lumber yard cleared out, and waited. He’d positioned himself to have a view of the door without being too conspicuous—or worse, seeming like he was hiding.

He did not wait there long. The Pinkerton man showed up only a moment after the whine of the saw blade started up, and just preceding the first plume of sawdust that flew out a high opening. He was wearing his hat now, but no coat. His suspenders were showing atop a dusty white shirt. The revolver holstered at his hip was in plain sight.

He came out of the same door they were to meet by, and without so much as looking left or right ambled over to the spot where Jason figured he’d hidden himself so well.

“Aunty back there anywhere?” he asked, and when Jason shook his head he nodded. “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing,” said Jason. “I left her a-napping back at the hospital.”

“Good. Anyone else see you come? I should have told you the same about Dr. Bergstrom and other folk too, but by the time I’d thought of it you’d left.”

“I didn’t tell Bergstrom. No one else either.”

“Good.” Sam Green stepped around Jason and set his behind against the lumber. “I thought you might have good instinct. Turns out I was right.”

“I don’t trust Dr. Bergstrom,” said Jason. “He locked me up in the quarantine with some kind of Devil, left me to—”

Sam Green raised his hand. “Hold on,” he said. “You don’t trust Dr. Bergstrom and that’s smart thinking. Why’n hell do you trust me?”

Jason looked at him. “Because—”

“Because I invited you here to meet me by yourself, and not tell anybody?” Sam Green shook his head. “Boy, I wanted to, I could kill you right now and probably get away with it. You just told me nobody knew you came here, then started spilling everything after I buttered you up about your good instincts.”

“But—”

“But nothing.” Sam Green grabbed Jason’s shoulder and leaned close. “You’re in some trouble, Jason Thistledown. You’re right Doc Bergstrom locked you up in the quarantine with something else—maybe a Devil, maybe a freak of nature… but for certain something that has no business being there. He did that last night and he put you at grave risk, son. What do you think he’s going to do tonight?”

“I—”

“I nothing. You listen, and I’ll tell you. What’s going to happen tonight, it’s got nothing to do with you. But it has a lot to do with our friend Andrew Waggoner. He’s not going to wake up tomorrow, if he stays in that room in the hospital through the night.”

Jason twisted his shoulder and Sam Green let go.

“All right,” said Jason, stepping back a bit, “I’m listening. You tell me what’s what.”

“Good.” Sam Green sat back, blew out his cheeks. Sawdust was falling on them now, light golden snowflakes, and the whine of the saw was steady. “First thing. I know that you and Dr. Waggoner met outside the quarantine last night. I saw you, because I was watching the quarantine under orders from Doc Bergstrom.”

“I didn’t see you anywhere—”

“You didn’t see me because I didn’t want you to.”

Jason glared at him.”You tell Bergstrom?”

“About last night? As it happens, no. No I did not. You and I are of a mind on Dr. Bergstrom, and that mind’s made up. I didn’t tell, but I did talk to him. Him and your aunt, early this morning.”

“My aunt?”

“Yes, son, your aunt. He did most of the talking but she was there for all of it. And he—” Sam Green looked at his hands, and huffed. “He asked me to do something. Or not to do something.”

“What?”

“He told me to keep clear of Andrew Waggoner tonight.”

“And that is it?”

“Son, you remember how I told you I was in dutch?”

Jason remembered. “On account of shooting those fellows at the hanging tree?”

He nodded. “That is why I’m in dutch with Mr. Harper. Doc Bergstrom is none too happy with me, either.”

“And why’s that?”

“I’m in dutch with the doctor,” he said, “for showing up at all.”

Jason gaped, and Sam Green nodded. “Or at least when I did.”

“You mean—”

“Bergstrom thinks that the Juke was never in any danger of hanging, or at least of dying from it. He said the important thing was for those fellows to try, and then to fail. Teach ’em a lesson, he said.

“He was more than happy to see the Negro doctor die on the end of a noose. It would have solved some problems for him if he did.

“And so he asked me to keep clear of the top floor of the hospital. He made sure to tell me that everyone would be keeping clear of the top floor of the hospital tonight. He told me that Dr. Waggoner needed his rest—and that if someone came by, to make sure they understood—why, he wanted to make sure no one who knew how to use a gun was there to stop whatever’s going to happen.”

Jason sat back and absorbed that. In the mill, the saw had stopped its work a moment—maybe while the men were positioning more logs. So the lumber yard became quieter, but the sawdust still fell.

“Why do you think he’s doing that?”

“Two reasons. First one: Bergstrom is the kind of man who cannot abide a nigger in a white man’s job, and Harper’s the kind of man who can’t abide denying a smart nigger his due. And second: that smart nigger’s learned more about the Juke than Bergstrom would like.”

“You know about the Juke,” said Jason. “You know what that thing is in there.”

“I know it is a freak of nature,” said Sam. “It doesn’t die from a hanging. It does not speak but makes itself understood better than any man I have met. And it gets…”

There was quiet again.

“Yes?”

“It gets bigger.”

“Bigger.” The air cleared now, as the last of the sawdust plume settled on the brim of Sam Green’s bowler hat.

“Yeah,” he said. “It grows. When Bergstrom found it, just in the summer—the thing was only as high as my elbow. Now…” Eyes down, his voice trailed off. But he put his hand level a good six inches over the top of his bowler.

“Were you there when he found it?”

Sam Green looked up from the hands he was examining so closely. “Boy,” he said, “here is what you’ve got to do. You get up to Andrew Waggoner’s room. You tell him that if he sleeps tonight, he won’t wake up, because Nils Bergstrom aims to see him dead. You tell him he’s got to get far from here. No one will suspect you—because I am the one supposed to be watching you, and I will say you were someplace else. And if you head up there around—oh, let us say seven—you will find you can make a clean escape.”

“Think I should go with him?”

“I think,” said Sam, “that you ought not trust your aunt to protect you. But you shouldn’t leave, either. That will draw things back to me, and that won’t do anyone any good. I’ll do my best to keep you safe if you stay here. But stay you must.”

And at that, Sam Green got up.

“That is all for today,” he said. “You think I have done you a favour but I haven’t. I’m doing my friend Dr. Waggoner a favour. You are not my friend.”

“How can you trust me to carry it out then?”

“I trust you,” he said, “because you owe that doctor a debt, and you are not the sort of man to leave a debt unpaid. And,” he added, “you won’t leave, or tell of this, or anything else, because you owe me now, for giving you a way to repay it.” And then he turned and stomped off. Jason watched him go, across the avenue and into another passage between the lumber. Jason had no reason to stay, but he waited all the same, until the saw started up again, to make his way out of the lumber yard and back to the hospital.

He was gone before the sawdust stormed again, which was a good thing, because Jason knew he would have to clean the residue off before he got back to the hospital, and went to work settling all those debts.

Andrew Waggoner blinked and coughed. The boy—Jason—Jason Thistledown—was in his room again. He had left the room at some point, but Andrew was not clear on exactly when or why, or on the things that had come after. Now he was back and he was talking. Or whispering. His mouth was moving, anyhow.

Andrew worked his lips, which felt numb, and blinked, and as he did, things started falling into place. Jason leaned closer, and Andrew became aware that the boy had his hands on his shoulder and was talking, somehow more clearly now.

“Dr. Waggoner, you have to wake up now. You’re in very bad trouble. You have to walk out of here, because I cannot carry you and the things I’ve got for you.”

Andrew licked his lips. “Wha—”

He tried again. “What are you talking about, Jason? What things?”

Jason looked relieved. “Good. I thought they might have already got you. Why’re you like that?”

“Bergstrom gave me a needle of something,” said Andrew. He looked at the window, the purple-orange sky outside it. “What time is it?”

“Quarter past seven,” said Jason.

Andrew let out a slow whistle, counting hours until he got to ten. What had Bergstrom put in that needle? It wasn’t morphine. Veronal, perhaps? Put enough of Emil Fischer’s hypnotic drug into a hypodermic, and it could knock a man out for a day. Put a drop too much, and it’d kill him.

“You were saying something about the trouble I was in. I may have missed the beginning of it,” said Andrew.

Jason took a breath, and started over again. By the time he was finished, Andrew was fully awake, alert—and convinced. He had to get out of that hospital room. There would be no stopping at his house for things. There would be no dallying here waiting until his wits were all returned to him. He had to get away from Eliada. And he had to do it now.

A few moments prior to eight, they were out the back door of the hospital. Andrew wore a pair of workman’s trousers and boots, and an oversized woollen coat—one big enough to admit his splinted arm and still let him move. Jason carried the doctor’s bag and another satchel containing food and a knife, a canteen for water and what other things a man might need on foot in the wilderness.

There was no gun in the kit, an omission for which Jason apologized several times, but as he explained: “Aunt Germaine keeps a close watch on both our guns and would miss them. Then you’d be done for.”

I may be done for anyhow, thought Andrew as he and Jason made a wide circuit around the quarantine, towards the tree-line. Whatever Dr. Bergstrom had put in him that had knocked him out, seemed to have the effect of numbing the pain enough for him to move right now. But he knew enough about anaesthetic to know that would only purchase him so much time, before all that pain came back at him. He would have to pace himself—and then rely on some good luck to get him through the next couple of nights.

For now, though, he kept on moving. The going got tougher the closer they got to the trees, and finally, maybe a dozen yards into the thin woods—out of direct sight of the hospital but still in good view of the quarantine—they stopped. Andrew sat down on a log. Jason handed him the doctor’s bag, and the other bag that could be thrown over a shoulder.

They sat still and quiet for a bit. Then Jason spoke, his voice soft and quavering.

“Why would they lock me in with that thing?”

“I don’t know.” Andrew squinted at him. “You sure you won’t come with me? I’m not sure this is a safe place for you right now.”

Jason shook his head. “Sam Green said: I go, it points straight back to him.”

“Ah,” said Andrew. “I don’t know about that. There’s a game going on here. Has to do with Mister Juke. Harper. Bergstrom. Sam Green now. And I wonder how your aunt’s involved.”

Jason hunched his shoulders. “I wonder that myself.” He looked right at Andrew Waggoner. “Sometimes, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better I just got left alone back in Montana, my aunt never showed up. Or maybe if that germ had took me—”

Andrew stopped him. “That is not something to wonder about.”

“I know.” Jason sighed. “You better get moving. I’m sure sorry I couldn’t get you a gun.”

“Don’t apologize. I’m not much good with a gun right now anyway.”

“Well—” Jason stood up, and cleared his throat. “Well, it would still be a greater help to you than that knife. I hope this goes a little ways towards repaying you for helping me last night.”

“That is no debt,” he said. “Helping a boy who’s hurt in the night is a doctor’s work. I am sorry that we won’t be able to learn more about Maryanne Leonard, and those things inside her.”

“You can,” said Jason. He put his hand on the bag. “I wrapped the specimen jar with those eggs in it in cloth. You get back to someplace with an eyeglass, you can have a look at them and see what’s what.”

Andrew smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

Then Jason’s expression, something in the tilt of his shoulders, shifted. He finally looked Andrew in the eye.

“No,” he said. “You got no reason to thank me, sending you off alone to die.” He took a look back at the hospital. “Hang Sam Green. I’m going with you.”

Andrew put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “No,” he said. “You made an agreement—a promise. You go too, attention will come back to Sam Green, who’ll suffer for no reason other than doing a fellow a good turn. I’ll be fine.”

“You won’t be,” said Jason.

“You don’t have a say.” Andrew made himself smile, and lied. “I’m feeling much improved, anyhow. That knife and the food will be a help, and I can remember the way back to Bonner’s Ferry fine. You go back to your aunt, and keep your mouth closed, and lie low for awhile. Like Sam Green said to.”

Jason didn’t answer. He turned away and tromped back through the underbrush. Andrew watched him as he headed past the quarantine, paused to look at it for only a second, and returned to the hospital and his aunt. By the time the boy was inside, the smile was not even a memory on Andrew Waggoner’s face.

With a grimace, he pushed himself up off the log, gathered the things that Jason had brought for him, and headed into the dark sanctity of the woods.

Aunt Germaine was waiting for Jason as he came through the door to their rooms at the hospital. A single candle burned in a dish beside her. She held a small envelope between two fingers of her right hand, tapping the edge of the envelope against the palm of her left like the blade of an axe. Those eyeglasses made her expression inscrutable.

“Good evening, Aunt.”

“Nephew,” she said, nodding sternly. “Been busy?”

Jason felt something fall in his gut—something that had stayed put through the whole adventure of stealing medical supplies and clothes and what else he could find, and sneaking Dr. Waggoner out the back. Through it all, he had attributed the ease of it all to improbable luck. Now, all he could think of was how improbable it was that he’d get away with the escape—how vastly improbable. Aunt Germaine knew of his conspiracy, and he felt like a bandit, caught in the act.

He looked away from her. Germaine leaned forward. “Nephew,” she said, her voice low, “I am trying to protect you. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” said Jason. He felt very small then. Were he a couple of months younger, he thought he might’ve started to cry.

“Well,” she said, “then why do you feel the need to go to another?”

“You mean—” Jason felt as though it were all going to spill out. Aunt Germaine—who, if Sam Green were to be believed, was at the very core of this plan to murder Andrew Waggoner… she had Jason in a corner. She had him figured out. Her next words would surely be about Sam Green, he thought.

“I mean that dreadful girl,” she said. “Ruth Harper.”

Jason gawked, and Aunt Germaine took his expression as something else. She held the envelope, and pulled a card from it. “Do not play the innocent, Nephew,” she said. “This came for you whilst you were gallivanting—no doubt signed after you had met.” She tossed the card on the floor in front of Jason. Perplexed, he bent down to pick it up.

It was written in a fine script on paper so thick it almost felt like cloth. It was addressed to Jason Thistledown. It requested the Pleasure of Your Company at a Celebration of Spring in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Garrison Harper this Sunday the Thirtieth of April, following Worship. It was signed, Miss Ruth Harper.

He took a long, even breath, then looked up and met Aunt Germaine’s gaze.

“First I heard of this, Aunt,” he said. But all he could think of was his improbably good fortune.

Just as Sam Green said they might, men came to the hospital in the evening. They wore ghost-white cloaks over their shoulders, and white hoods like pillowcases over their heads. There were five of them and they all strode purposefully to the front of the hospital, up the steps and in through the waiting room like Hussars.

One of them hollered: “Where is the nigger rapist?” which brought the duty nurse as far as the door to the clinic (she fled back into the depths of the hospital when she saw who was there) and set the newborn infant sleeping not far in a room with his mama yowling.

They were not perturbed by the sound of a crying baby, not these men. They did not even look to each other as they pushed through into the corridor beyond, up four floors to the very top of the hospital—to the floor with a few private rooms for the important ones, where nurses and doctors had not been for some hours.

Although there were many rooms upstairs, there was only one occupied now, and the men in white went straight to that one. The one with the rifle pushed open the door. He held up the gun, aimed it at the form in the bed, and stood still. One of the sheets with a club nodded at him, went to the foot of the bed and raised his club over his head. The sheet with crossed arms shifted, looked one to the other, like he was trying to suss some secret communication between the two of them. The rifleman motioned with the barrel of his rifle and the club fell, with murderous force.

“Fuck,” said the rifleman. He raised his rifle and strode over to the bed. “Fuck,” he said again, as he pulled the covers aside and saw naught but a stack of pillows artfully arranged.

“He was warned,” said another sheet. “Nigger got warned, now he’s off.”

“Treachery,” said a third.

And: “Blasphemy,” said the one with his arms hid.

“Don’t overstate matters,” the rifleman said. But his hands shook. He gripped the stock of the rifle harder, until the shaking stopped.

14 - The Faerie King’s Bride

“I’m not going to fight you,” Andrew Waggoner said. He raised his hands palm out to display the splintered arm to full effect. The hill man holding the rifle nodded. He was a tall, black-haired fellow with a patchy beard over a thick chin, gangly but for disproportionately wide shoulders.

“You ain’t gonna fight,” he said. “You ain’t gonna run, neither.”

“I won’t do that either.”

“Well get up.”

Andrew lowered his good hand and propped himself up with it against the bare rock. He drew his feet under himself and stood. He had been resting on the lichen-covered shelf of rock, partway up a steepening slope he’d spent the early part of the morning scaling. It should not have been a difficult climb, and—reflecting back on it with the perfect wisdom that comes to a man staring down the barrel of a rifle—Andrew thought it was not a necessary one either.

But Andrew’s exhausted mind had fixed on the idea that he could find the riverbank he had lost the day before by climbing above the tree-line and looking for it; and his exhausted body had made that walk up the slope of a hill into an ascent of a mountain. He was thinking about opening the doctor’s bag, sticking himself with a syringe full of morphine, letting it work its magic, when the man with the rifle came upon him.

“I am up,” said Andrew. “Now tell me what you want.”

“You the nigger doctor,” said the hill man. He glanced down at the bag, which Andrew had not gotten around to opening when he came. “From the log town. You got your doctoring fixings there. ’M I right?”

“Dr. Andrew Waggoner,” he said. “Yes. I’m the doctor.”

“Pick it up,” said the hill man. “I’ll get the other one. You come now. Got work for you.”

They climbed for a short distance, then came upon a beaten path through the underbrush that followed the contour of the hillside. Andrew was glad: it helped him catch his breath, put his thoughts together.

“What’s your name?” he said then.

The hill man said something that sounded like “Ink.”

“Well, Ink,” said Andrew between gasps, “you said you had work for me. Someone sick?”

“Sick,” he said, nodding, and prodded Andrew’s back with the gun barrel. Andrew took the hint: he didn’t ask any more questions, although he had plenty.

Over his time in Eliada, Andrew had only had a little contact with the folk who lived in the hills to the west. They were old families—some of them here since the 1830s, settler families whose wagons had travelled north—and they did not come to Eliada much. When they did, the hospital would see to them; Andrew himself had stitched up a couple of cuts, splinted a fracture or two.

As they climbed over rocks, he wondered: might not some of those Klansmen who tried to hang him and Mister Juke have come from shacks up the hillside from Eliada? How did Ink know that he was the “nigger doctor?”

“Here w’are,” said Ink, and they climbed a short rise in the path, and stepped into the compound of Andrew’s captors.

It was a homestead, built on a cleared-out plateau and surrounded by tall pine trees. There were four buildings, all cut from logs with low sod roofs, arranged in a semicircle with their front doors facing downslope.

Ink hollered something that Andrew couldn’t understand, and the front doors of two of the other buildings swung open. An enormous man strode out from one, and two younger boys came out the other.

“Set your bag down,” said Ink. Andrew did, and found himself falling to his knees.

The boys took up the bag. One of them opened it and had a look inside. He reached in, pulled out a scalpel, turned it in a filthy hand and set it back. Then he pulled out a bottle of iodine, twisted off the top and gave it to the other to sniff.

“Put it back,” said Ink. “This here’s the doctor.”

The boy did like he was told, and squinted at Andrew.

“Don’t look like the doctor,” he said.

“Different doctor, but he do the job,” said Ink. He sounded irritated to Andrew. “Take his bag inside. To Loo’s bed.”

Andrew looked back over his shoulder. Ink had lifted his rifle so its barrel pointed up to the treetops. Seeing Andrew turn, the hill man nodded.

“You can get up,” he said. “Look like you’re going to wet y’ trouser.”

Andrew got to his feet. He was shaky and his vision greyed a bit, but he was feeling better. He was certainly not going to wet his trousers because this was far from the worst he’d imagined. These weren’t Klansmen.

These were hill people with a sick relation.

Ink motioned with his hand, and walked ahead of Andrew to the doorway. He disappeared into the dark, and Andrew followed.

The house was a single room, with light coming in mainly through the spacing between badly fitted timber. A little kettle-shaped stove warmed things, and next to it was a crude mattress, held in a box made of pine, like a great crib. Or a casket.

One of the boys opened the wood stove and stuck a candle in. He brought the flame near the bed, and Andrew bent down.

“Oh my,” he said softly, peering down into the sweat-covered face, the skin that even in the warm candlelight seemed deathly pale. “How long has she been sick?”

“Two week,” said Ink.

“This is Loo, am I right?”

“Loo,” said Ink.

Andrew looked close. Loo’s dark hair was thin—Andrew could make out patches of bare white scalp. Beneath it, her face was slack—so much that at first he feared that she was in a coma. But her eyes were open, and they followed him as he examined her. Andrew put his fingertips to her cheek, and found it warm to the touch. He asked if a window might be opened, and one was.

“Hello, Loo,” he said, as the girl’s eye squinted in the light. “Can you tell me how you’re feeling?”

Loo licked her lips with a tongue that seemed swollen. She took a breath. Then she closed her mouth and looked away.

“She can’t,” said a woman’s voice. “She’s too simple. She’s feeling awful though. You should be able to tell that by looking.”

She stood beside the open window, wearing long dusty skirts and her hair tied in a dark bun from which individual hairs strayed like thin branches. This woman was lean, and quick, and old. Lines were on her face like rivers.

“You are feeling awful too,” said the woman, looking at him, glancing in particular at his bad hand. “Hank do this to you?”

“I—I’m sorry,” said Andrew. “Hank?”

“Ink,” said Ink, who was standing by the door, rifle tucked away at his elbow now.

“Hank,” said Andrew. He smiled weakly and turned back to the woman. “No. He didn’t.”

“Well you’re in no shape to do us any good now,” she said. “Look at your hands. They shakin’ like a drunk’s, and one’s bound up. No cuttin’ for you, Doctor sir.”

Andrew sighed. “I know. I’m not going to do anything but look right now. Look, and ask questions. If you could tell me, ma’am, what you think’s ailing her, that would help. Then I can get a look, and we can talk about what to do next.”

“Sounds fair,” said the woman.

“Fine then. First things. This is Loo. She’s the patient. My name’s Andrew Waggoner. I’m the doctor. And you, ma’am… ?”

“My name’s Norma. I’m Loo’s cousin, let’s put it that way. And you asked what’s wrong with her?”

“Yes?”

Norma tucked her chin into her blouse.

“Raped,” she said, her face pinched angry.

“Raped,” said Andrew. “By anyone—”

He didn’t know how to put it gracefully, but Norma spared him.

“No one in this room,” she said. “No one here now.”

At that, Hank spoke up.

“She was raped by the Faerie King,” he said, standing on his toes so he could see over Norma’s shoulder. “He planted his seed, and now—now, we got to stop that.”

“That’s enough, Hank,” said Norma.

“Got to stop it,” he said, eyes wider than they should be. “Before it eats her up. ’Fore it turns us all Feeger.”

Andrew Waggoner set to work on Loo Tavish. He checked her fever, and it was a shade over 100. Her heartbeat: regular. She was breathing easily, and although she wasn’t talking, her eyes followed his fingers when he moved them and her foot jumped when he tapped her knee. He started to look under the blankets, to see about this rape, this pregnancy—the talk of the Faerie King and Feegers and everything else—but that was when Norma put a stop to it.

“No more ’til you get some food in you and your hands stop shakin’,” she said.

Andrew’s hands were shaking—and he had to admit, thinking straight about the problem was beyond him now. If he did anything, it would be as likely to harm her as help her.

So he accepted Norma’s invitation to come up to her cabin for a bowl of fiddlehead-and-rabbit stew. Apparently, the hill folk saw nothing wrong with a Negro having a meal alone with their lady cousin, because he and Norma hurried alone through the rain along a path that wound between some woodsheds and up a little slope to a small log building with a bowed roof. Even Hank and his rifle let them be.

As he stepped inside through the low front door, Andrew remarked on that fact. “Suddenly, I’m no longer at gunpoint,” he said. “It’s refreshing.”

Norma shrugged as she opened her own stove, lit a twig and brought the flame to candles mounted along the walls. “Up to me,” she said, “wouldn’t have brought you here at point of a gun. Would’ve asked nice. But Hank’s jumpy, and don’t care much for the folk in the mill town.”

“You know better.”

Norma laughed. “You’re hurt,” she said. “Not much trouble, and not much use either. Why don’t you sit down, Dr. Waggoner.” She motioned to a table with a couple of chairs.

Andrew sat. He liked this little house. It wasn’t exactly civilized—but held against the shack where Loo was staying, this was fine. It seemed cleaner, more orderly—and the rich smell coming from the stove promised a fine meal.

Norma pulled out a couple of metal plates and cutlery, and ladled the stew into them. She put one in front of Andrew, and watched as he set to it. It was delicious, and it warmed him through.

“You manage to get out of town without them killing you,” she said as Andrew spooned another mouthful.

He sat up, swallowed and looked at her. “Now why do you think they were going to kill me?”

“Look at you.” She pulled a small bone from her mouth and set it on the plate. “You di’n’t get that from fallin’ down a hill. Fact is, a nigger in that place shouldn’t have lasted any time at all. A doctor nigger? My.”

“Wasn’t a problem,” he said, “until the end.”

“Never is,” she said. “Not ’til the end.”

Andrew let out a breath, and leaned back. He thought he was coming back to himself, now the food was working its magic. More than anything, he wanted to go to sleep. But as he sat back, the question formed itself and he spoke it before he knew:

“What does ‘Feeger’ mean?” he asked.

Norma set down her spoon.

“Hank said it. Before I started the examination. He said, what was it?… get rid of it, before it eats her up—and turns all of you… Feeger.”

“He said that?” she said. “Maybe he meant feeble. Maybe he thinks it’s catching. Hank tends t’ mumble.”

“Mmm.” Andrew didn’t think that Hank had been mumbling. But he didn’t press her on it. “Faerie King. Was that more mumbling?”

Norma made a humourless smile. “You’ll think we’re crazed,” she said.

“No,” said Andrew, “I don’t think I will.” He waited for Norma’s reply, and when it didn’t come, he smiled and shrugged.

“Let’s finish eating,” he said. “How about that? When we’re done, I’ll help you clean up and then… I’ve something to show you.”

Andrew cleaned his plate and stowed the bones in the garden bin, and good as his word, after helping clean the dishes he went to the doorstep, where he’d stowed his doctor’s bag.

Norma watched with interest as he dug among the ampoules of morphine and jar of iodine, and finally pulled out the small glass jar that Jason had given him before he fled.

He brought it to candlelight. Norma drew close, squinted through the glass.

“Where’d you get these?” she asked.

“A woman,” said Andrew. “After she died. They were on the inside. In her womb.”

Norma took the jar from him and twisted open the top. She made a face as a whiff of formaldehyde came out, and before Andrew could say anything reached in and pulled one of the tiny spheres out on her fingertip. “Ah,” said Andrew, “best leave the rest.”

Norma nodded. “She alive?”

“No,” said Andrew. “I told you. She died.”

“All the way dead, I guess you meant. Well that’s too bad. No baby inside, then.”

“I—beg your pardon?”

“In years past, when the Faerie King took a bride, he left the mother half-dead when he done with her and her babe. That’s only if she’s already with child. Takes most from the baby, only a bit from ma. If she be barren…”

Andrew stepped back and stared. He must have been making a face to frighten children, for this grown woman took a look at him, set the jar down on next to the candle, folded her arms and stepped away.

“You want to sit down?” she said.

“If she’s barren,” said Andrew, putting together this story with what he’d found in the autopsy, “the Juke eats her from the inside, killing her completely.”

“The Juke?”

“The Faerie King,” said Andrew. He followed the notion further. Assembling it together with what he had observed in Loo’s cabin.

“Is that the trouble with Loo?” he asked. “She’s barren?”

Norma nodded. “Not born barren. But thanks to your hospital and that fine doctor there, she be so now.”

Andrew picked up the jar and screwed the top back on. “Norma,” he said, “I think it’s time to talk about Loo’s case in more detail. I’ll sit down now, if you will.”

Norma talked. And through the rest of the afternoon, at Andrew’s gentle prodding, they put together a case history of Loo—who’s proper name was Lou-Ellen Tavish, and who had never done a wrong thing in her life save on her birthday, when she killed her mama.

Her mama’s name was Rose, and she’d had three other children, all by her husband Will. That may have been part of the trouble. Rose was old, near forty, when she lay down with Will in the summer of 1894. It was winter when the child came due, and Rose was that much older, and more things went wrong than the midwife could make right. She bled to death on the earthy floor of their cabin, while Will held his quiet baby girl close at his coat and screamed blue murder to the rafters.

As the days wore on, old Will’s screams quieted, and little Lou-Ellen—she stayed quiet. Lou-Ellen didn’t cry in her blankets, she didn’t laugh or coo when her brothers and sister would wiggle their fingers at her. By the time she was two, everyone had worked out that Lou-Ellen had been born simple and she might never be able to look after herself. It led to some awful talk among the families, about how a girl ought to be able to pull her weight. But it was only talk and it didn’t go on for long. Lou-Ellen was kin, everybody’d liked Rose and only a few didn’t care for Will. So they all cared for Lou-Ellen as she grew. They fed her even when food was scarce, gave her hugs and played with her, and when she got so she could make some words, they rechristened her Loo, which was something she could say back.

She managed to make herself useful, too. By the time the folks from Eliada came, she was tending goats and cleaning kills and minding the garden patch.

There were three men that made the trip up the hill. Two of them carried Winchester rifles on their backs and made it clear that they were not to be trifled with. A third was a fat old doctor (when Andrew asked if the name Nils Bergstrom rang a bell, Norma thought that might’ve been it).

The doctor talked to a couple of them and said he was there to provide free medicine—that some people out east had decided it was a good way to spend their money, to make sure that folks who couldn’t afford it got properly looked after by doctors.

There were some in the families who were suspicious, but they were quiet about it. The two riflemen looked like they had other friends besides this doctor, and no one wanted to have those ones drop by. So the riflemen set up a tent and started inviting folk inside for examinations.

No one was sure what sort of conversation went on when Loo was in the tent, but others from the families reported that the doctor just asked a lot of questions, looked into their eyes and listened to their hearts with a stethoscope.

The doctor heard many complaints, but by the time he packed up his tent and headed back to town, he’d offered little to cure them that the family couldn’t figure for themselves.

He did, however, offer what he called “preventative medicine.” His last day there, he invited a few people back, who’d had no complaints at all. It was mostly the younger folk—Loo, her sisters and brothers, and the two boys. He was, he said, going to give them a special operation that would make it easier on them. Loo, he said, would go into the tent first.

She would also be the last to go in.

Loo never spoke of that operation, but her cousin Jacob got the whole story for them. Jacob was little for his age, but fast and smart. While he was waiting his turn outside the tent, he managed to slip away and get around the back side, and stick his head underneath the cloth to see what was going on.

Loo was strapped down to a bench, and struggling a bit. The doctor held what looked like a shoe over her face, and she stopped moving. Then he took a shiny knife, and started cutting away at her middle—her privates. There was a bit of blood, and although she was quieter, Jacob could tell by the way she moved that it still hurt.

Before the doctor was done with her, Jacob had relayed all this to the rest of the family—and when the doctor came out, he found himself faced with Norma, Hank, and Karl ( the giant that Andrew had seen coming in, Norma explained).

There might have been shooting, but the doctor seemed anxious to avoid it. He begged the families to trust him, that he was doing this work for the good of everyone. When Karl wondered what he meant by that, he explained:

“I am doing you a service,” he said. “Your daughter Lou-Ellen was born feebleminded. If she had children of her own, the chances are that they would be feebleminded too. Now, there is no danger of that.”

“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 anyone 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.

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 fire 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.