“Where can I take you, Doc? To the hospital, by the looks of you.”
“No,” he said. “Not the hospital. I need to see Sam Green,” he said. “Then Mr. Harper.”
“I can do that. Here, let me help you up on the horse.” He bent down and lifted Waggoner’s doctor’s bag. “I’ll carry this, and lead.”
Sam Green looked tired as he came down the path to the cider press—and Andrew thought he must have made the same impression on the Pinkerton here in the dawn.
Green waved his rifle over his head, and told his man: “Go on now. Leave me and the doctor be.”
When he was gone, Sam Green came over and set on one of the chairs. He took off his bowler hat and set it on the table, and laid the rifle across his lap.
“Thank you,” said Andrew finally.
“Thank me?”
“It does sound odd, doesn’t it?”
Sam shrugged. “Figured you’d be long gone. This place is no good for a Negro—particularly not you now. Why’d you come back?”
“I think you might have an idea about that, Sam.”
“Might I?”
“I’ll save you the bother,” said Andrew. “There’s worse trouble than men playing at the Klan in these parts. I spent some time up the hill, and I’ll tell you: Loo’s dead.”
Sam kept quiet, but a shift in his shoulders, a slump really, told Andrew what he needed to know.
“I tried to save her,” he said, “but she needed more help than I could give her. She had one of those monsters in her—one of Mister Juke’s children. And it tore her to pieces, on account of what you helped Dr. Bergstrom do out there a year back. I don’t think I have to go through every tiny detail of that, now do I, Sam?”
Sam looked away, and now Andrew nodded.
He’d put this together through the long night march he’d made down the mountainside—parsing the odd coincidences together. The family had stumbled upon him, as if by pure happenstance, as he rested on a rock that he’d stumbled upon, after marching straight in the direction that Jason Thistledown had sent him. And Jason had sent him that way, thanks to Sam Green—who sent him the warning at just the right moment. He put all that together with a guess, but he thought a pretty good guess: that perhaps one of those fellows with guns that had accompanied Dr. Bergstrom on his mission of sterilization, might have fit the description of Sam Green. Who, if he were accompanying Bergstrom on his hellish mission, might have concluded that the Tavishes and the others deserved kindlier medical attention than Bergstrom would ever give them.
“I put you to use, Dr. Waggoner,” said Sam.
“You did. But I wouldn’t have made it through the night, if you hadn’t sent the boy to drag me out of there. So don’t waste breath apologizing. Just don’t waste breath lying, either.”
“I won’t, then,” said Sam. “Answer me, though, what are you doing back?”
“The Tavish clan—they’re dead.”
Sam sat quiet at that. Finally, the Pinkerton ran his hand across his broad forehead, smoothed down a tuft of hair, and looked up. Andrew felt a heavy drop of rain on his forehead as he said: “Better get to shelter. Can you walk, or should I fetch a horse?”
Andrew pushed himself up. “I look worse than I am,” he said. Sam picked up his bowler, took Andrew’s arm, and they headed up the slope.
“Bergstrom stopped sterilizin’ a few months before you came,” said Sam finally. “And not because he finished the job, neither. There’re mayhap a dozen families living on the slopes of these hills up and down the Kootenai—kin of settlers whose wagons fell too far off the trail. Got to no more than half before he gave up on it.”
“You always in his company?”
“Often enough.” They crested the hill, and looked on the house. It squatted huge on the land, blocking out the river and the sawmill both. Andrew could still see the roof of the hospital, though, over the tree-tops. “The Tavishes were good folk. It’s true—I sent word you were on the road, and that you could perhaps help. What killed them?”
Andrew shook his head. “Didn’t see who did it. But it happened—it happened after we killed the Juke. I was away. So I didn’t see it.”
“Away, were you?” Sam Green stepped a little faster as they headed down the slope. Andrew watched his back as they headed to the main entrance of the house. All was, then, as Andrew had begun to suspect; Sam Green had spent more time, considerably more time, with the hill people around Eliada than Dr. Bergstrom had. He had seen a great deal of this. And he knew enough about Mister Juke, and the way the creature reproduced, not to look too surprised when Andrew had told him what he’d found in Loo Tavish’s belly.
One of his men met them at the front door, which he was guarding like a castle gate. He stepped aside, and Sam opened the door himself. They stepped into the entry hall of Harper’s house silently, and then he shut the door.
“What killed them, Dr. Waggoner?” he said.
“It wasn’t an animal,” said Andrew. “It was men, but not men with guns. The Tavishes were butchered. That’s why I’m back here—I think the attackers might be on their way.”
Sam might have been about to say something else, but he stopped himself at the sound of two pairs of footfalls overhead. They both waited as the footsteps started down the stairs, and at no great length Garrison Harper appeared unaccompanied on the landing. Even at this early hour, Harper was dressed in a dark wool jacket and trousers; his hair combed impeccably.
“My God!” exclaimed Harper, hurrying down the remaining steps. “Dr. Waggoner! You have returned to us! Pray you’ve returned unharmed!”
“I am a little worse in some ways,” said Andrew. “Better, thank you, in others.” He pushed himself to his feet. Harper strode close and took his good hand in a typically resolute handshake.
“Yes, yes, I suppose that you are,” said Harper. “First, however, we must get you cleaned and fed.” He pulled back and looked Andrew up and down. “Food and water first, I think. Yes, sir? I apologize, but given your state I think the kitchen—”
“—will be fine, sir,” said Andrew. “I would appreciate some fresh water.”
Harper made a harrumphing sound and turned on his heel. “Harris!” he called, and the butler emerged. “Let’s repair to the kitchen. You can arrange for Dr. Waggoner to have an acceptable breakfast, I presume?”
Harper’s man led the three of them through an archway beneath the stairs barely acknowledging Andrew’s presence, hurrying through the dining room and nearly letting the door to the kitchen hit Andrew’s arm as they made their way into the vast, stove-hot space. Harper settled on one of several wooden stools next to a wooden table. Andrew took another.
“We’ll take our breakfast here,” said Harper.
“As you wish, sir.” The fellow gave Andrew a disapproving look and hurried off.
“I have to apologize again, Dr. Waggoner. Eliada, despite my best efforts, seems to resist your kind at every turn.”
“Eliada’s not unique that way.” Andrew shrugged and Harper nodded, and in the silence Andrew wondered how was he going to broach this discussion?
Do you remember that strange patient we discussed? The one with the remarkable neck? I believe, sir, that he is of an entirely different species . . . A monster, Mr. Harper, it is very true! His young burrow their way into the wombs of expectant mothers—they issue forth—and they seize the very souls of men
! Andrew Waggoner thought he would never be clean enough, or well-enough dressed, to broach the subject to a fellow like Garrison Harper with anything approaching credibility.
As it developed, he did not have to. Harper smiled sadly at Andrew.
“Eliada is not unique now,” he said. “But with the help of that patient we discussed before you left—the fellow they tried to hang before harming you—I hope that one day it will be.”
“The patient—Mister Juke,” said Andrew.
Harper nodded. “Mister Juke,” he said. “Ah, Dr. Waggoner, how over this past week I wished I had been more forthcoming with you, that evening we met. You asked me about him then, didn’t you? And I evaded.”
“I’ve seen more of them,” said Andrew.
“Have you?”
“I’ve developed a theory about their nature.”
They were interrupted as one of Harper’s kitchen servants, a stout young blonde-haired girl brought over a chrome platter of china and silverware, and another who might have been her older brother, bearing a steaming pot of coffee which he poured into two delicate china cups. Andrew took his with sugar and thick cream; Mr. Harper drank his black.
“They are,” said Andrew, after swallowing a long pull of the hot sweet mixture, “fundamentally parasitic.”
Harper raised an eyebrow. “Parasitic. Like a tapeworm, you mean? The tapeworm lives inside us. Yet this patient—he exists outside the body.”
“No, it does not,” said Andrew. “It’s born from eggs that are laid in the wombs of women. Once hatched, the young compete for food inside the womb—either from the nourishment travelling along the umbilical cord to the foetus, or, if there is no foetus there, from the mother herself.” Andrew felt a palpable release as he spoke—drawing together as he was the culmination of a day and a night’s thought and correlation, as he crawled down the mountain slope toward Eliada. “As they do so, they develop an affinity for the mother’s blood and that of her family. And using that affinity, the ones who survive and emerge are able to . . . manipulate the family.”
“Using the affinity,” said Harper. “I see. How does this manipulation manifest?”
“Like a narcotic. It causes hallucinations—visions that are indistinguishable from what spiritualists might call the
transcendent
experience. Those visions cause men and women to believe that the creature is something other. A spirit. A god.”
Harper looked away.
“You don’t believe me,” said Andrew.
“Oh, quite the contrary. You’ve said nothing that I haven’t heard in as many words already. Our friend Dr. Bergstrom has followed your line of reasoning quite as far along as you have—and beyond.”
Andrew set his coffee cup down. “Beyond,” he said. “So you know what threat the Juke poses to this community?”
Harper smiled. “The threat,” he said. “There is no threat to this community, young man, that its constituents do not manifest upon themselves. The Juke is nothing more than an opportunity for this community. For this one, and all others.”
“An opportunity? Sir,” he said, “the Juke is a . . . it’s a rapist. And a
leech
.”
The kitchen went quiet at that—just the low burbling of a boiling pot of water carried forward. The half-dozen others in the room—including Sam Green, who, Andrew noted, had made his way closer so as to better hear the talk—were all staring at him.
“All right!” said Harper over his shoulder. “Back to your duties, please!”
The staff turned away, although Sam Green just leaned against a wall. Harper shook his head.
“It may be that the creature in the quarantine could inspire religion. But although I’ve allowed churches here—and in spite of its name—Eliada is not a town raised to God.”
“If not God,” said Andrew, “then—”
“Man,” Harper finished for him. “The perfectibility of Man. That was our goal when we built this place. Do you know what was here before we came?”
“I do not.”
“Savagery,” said Harper. “There was nothing here—naught but hill folk barely possessed of language, never mind wit, surrounded by the Kootenai Indians—who although savage themselves at least had the wherewithal to make good use of this land’s bounty, in fish and land and stone.”
“And you have carved a fine place from it,” said Andrew.
“It is not I,” said Harper. “It is the fine men, and their wives and their sons, who have done the work. Many of them we selected for the task based on their strength and intellect—but it is not just strong men who make a community. They must be motivated—to a common purpose.”
“Yes,” said Andrew. He recalled discussion along those lines when he first arrived. “What has this to do with Mister Juke?”
Harper drained his cup and set it in its saucer. “Why everything,” he said. “This—discovery, of Dr. Bergstrom’s . . . it is . . .”
“An answer to your prayers?” interjected Sam Green. Harper scowled at him, then turned his attention back to Waggoner.
“You must share your observations about these creatures with Dr. Bergstrom,” he said. “He has not spoken to me about the creature’s reproductive habits—but we have spoken extensively, about the positive influence the creature has had on the hospital staff and those who work with him.”
“The
positive
influence?”
“I suppose one might mistake it for religious feeling. But really, it is much more efficacious than simple superstition.”
“How do you mean?” asked Andrew.
“What does this creature do, but infuse a sense of community, of belonging, in those it infects? Assuredly, combining this—well, shall we call it patriotism?—let us do so—this patriotism with firm, wise and benevolent leadership—a strong sense of societal ethics—and what have we? Nothing less, Doctor, than Heaven on earth. True Utopia.”
Andrew finished his coffee, which had grown cool in the bottom of his cup. Heaven on earth. He thought about the vision that the Juke had given him—of his own Heaven on earth, in a way, that crazed and idealized vision of a Parisian cityscape. With a mad Dauphin at its centre, demanding supplication and sacrifice, offering forgiveness for sins that in the glimmer of hindsight seemed entirely manufactured. What, he wondered, had Mr. Harper seen when he met the Juke? Some well-run factory—some town of dutiful workers who sang their employer’s praises rather than plotted strikes and sabotage? Strong, smart and loyal all at once?