She sang and sang, until she was hoarse—as the music washed over them, some of the men thought:
She is singing the same song again and again. It is growing more shrill—it is as though we haven’t heard it properly.
But the thoughts were passing, and not a one spoke of them. The music was too great a thing, and its majesty confounded them; whether they felt joy or rage, it mattered not. They knelt in dumb rapture, uncomprehending, before the greatness of God.
Beside her sister the Oracle, Missy grumbled: “They’re heretics. Kill ’em.”
The Oracle drew a breath. They
were
heretical, these strange men in sheets—but they were worshipful too; they had been touched by the Son, and they’d felt the touch, and they listened. But the song . . . they only bathed in it, like water. When the Oracle sang for Feeger, how better it was. Feeger knew the song—they knew who they were—and in the end—they would obey their Oracle.
These folk—they were obstinate. They were . . .
Lily found the words that the Oracle could not. “They were let be too long,” she said. “They hear your song—some other Oracle’s words.”
“And it’ll send ’em mad,” said Missy—and the Oracle nodded, and hefted her bundle nearer her breast—and she sang again, this time, not to the Heathen in sheets. But to Lothar—and his brothers.
The axes and blades came down in a flurry. They caught the men at the shoulder, the neck; an arm was sheared off, and one of the heretics shrieked, and fell into another blade. The white sheets stained red, and the screaming stopped, as the Feegers stepped away from the steaming circle of the dead.
And that, the Oracle feared, was how things would need go from here. They’d had a false Oracle—they wouldn’t hear her; they thought her foolish, because that other one had poisoned their minds.
“Lothar,” she said, and Lothar came to her. She smiled. He never missed instruction; never asked questions; never disrespected her.
“Find me that false prophet,” she said, “and cut him up the middle.”
“Bergstrom is coming,” said Sam Green to the Harpers. “Ben says he’s carrying a lamp.”
They were all of them in the kitchen by now—Mr. and Mrs. Harper and of course Andrew Waggoner, as well as some of Sam’s men.
“A lamp?” said Andrew. “It’s broad daylight outside.”
Ben, a young man with a short-cropped beard and the beginnings of baldness, looked sheepish as Sam explained: “I’m guessing a lamp.”
“A bright light, Mr. Green,” said Jake. “Can’t say it was a lamp.”
Mr. Harper sighed. “I don’t care if he’s got the God-damned sun in a sack. What’s he doing here at this hour?” Then he straightened, as a thought occurred to him: “D’you suppose he’s an idea where Ruth has got to?”
“Did anyone send word to him?” asked Mrs. Harper.
Garrison Harper looked to Sam, who shook his head: “Not us, sir.”
Ben looked over his shoulder. “Doctor’s here,” he said needlessly, before stepping out the servant’s entrance.
Andrew took another gulp of his tea and sat up straighter on his stool. It was absurd, given everything that Bergstrom had done to him—but he didn’t want to appear dishevelled in front of his peer.
“We are in the kitchen!” shouted Garrison, then turned to Andrew. “I’m sure Dr. Bergstrom will be delighted to know that you’re well, in any case.”
“If he’s sobered up,” said Mrs. Harper, under her breath.
“Hush,” said Garrison again, as the door from the front of the house swung open. It was an instruction that none of them disobeyed.
Andrew gaped.
The doctor had undergone a complete metamorphosis since last they’d met. This morning, he had managed the difficult trick of looking at once cadaverous and bloated. His lips were flushed red as a whore’s painted mouth, and his eyes were shadowed with deep rings. He wore a long coat, into the pockets of which he’d jammed his hands.
“Good morning, Mr. Harper,” said Bergstrom. “I trust you are well this morning?”
Harper didn’t say anything for a moment; he simply stared, as they all did. “Sir, you look ghastly,” he finally said. “How can you even be about?”
“A man can find reserves, sir. Vast reserves, when the times call for it.”
He stepped nimbly around a low butcher’s block, and drew nearer the table; and as he did, Andrew’s nostrils flared around a familiar, and awful stink.
“Mr. Harper, Mrs. Harper, I come with joyful news,” he said. “Just from in the docks, I can report that the final juncture’s reached.”
“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” said Harper.
“The men—the men have met the host—as I have instructed.”
“Host? What are you babbling about?”
“The—yes. I’m here to tell you, Garrison—something is coming. And it will change—it will change, if I may say—
everything
.”
A quiet fell on the kitchen then: it was as though Bergstrom had mesmerized the room of them. Andrew sniffed the air, and blinked, and shifted.
And for the first time since his arrival, Bergstrom seemed to see Andrew. His mouth twitched into something that might presage a smile. “Why look. Good morning, Andrew.”
“Nils.”
“You are well.”
“Better than I’d have been if I’d stayed.”
Bergstrom seemed taken aback at that. But it was only for an instant. He smiled, and reached into his coat, and scratched at his stomach as he turned to Harper, and said, as though Andrew was still missing in the hills and not there beside him: “Garrison—forget all this a moment. We are at the dawn of a marvellous day. The Gods are tumescent. They are joining!”
“Are you drunk now, Dr. Bergstrom?” Harper asked coolly.
Bergstrom shook his head. “Only the opposite.”
Andrew, meanwhile, was watching that coat. It was not just moving—it seemed to be roiling, as though something lived under there, clinging to Bergstrom’s middle and irritated by the commotion. Andrew caught Green’s eye, indicated the coat. Sam Green nodded.
“I apologize for my state yesterday,” said Bergstrom. He thrust his fists deeper into his coat pocket, like he was holding himself in. “I was not myself—I understood things only part-the-way. So I had something to drink after . . . after worship, when I should have been still in contemplation. It is the weakness of flesh, Gar’, when faced with the fact of divinity.”
“Ah,” said Andrew, as matters came together. The smell—it was near enough the stink that Loo had given off, in the last stages of her illness, of her infection with the Jukes.
Bergstrom looked at him and blinked. His gut rolled and churned.
“You’re very ill, Nils,” said Andrew. “You know that, don’t you? I’ve seen something like the thing that’s infected you—in the hills. You’ve seen her too—remember? Loo Tavish?”
Bergstrom nodded slowly; that seemed to be reaching him.
“You have been to see the imbecile. Is she doing well?”
“She’s dead,” said Andrew.
Bergstrom adopted a thoughtful expression. “She was past her time when we met,” he said. “God has taken her.”
“No. Just dead.”
Bergstrom smirked. “You really have no capacity for it, do you, Dr. Waggoner? You are just a low nigger, after all.”
“Dr. Bergstrom,” said Mrs. Harper in a sharp tone. “There are other matters at hand. Perhaps you could assist us in determining the whereabouts of my daughter.”
Bergstrom withdrew one hand from his pocket, and fanned his fingers out on the tabletop. The nails on three of his fingers had been torn, and the quick under them glistened darkly. “Your
daughter
. Ruth. She is with God.” Mrs. Harper gasped and clutched at her husband’s shoulders. Bergstrom’s coat flapped open.
“Oh, not like that. No. Sorry.” He smirked. “She still breathes, still breathes. All is well. And that is why I came here.” He withdrew his other hand, and leaned on it too. “To prepare us all—for as I said . . .”
Andrew stared at Bergstrom’s exposed mid-section. Nestled inside the coat were the things that Andrew had seen once before. On the hillside, crawling out of Loo Tavish. These were smaller than that creature, barely the size of a child’s hand—but they were unmistakable, crawling like thin, long-limbed rats across Bergstrom’s scarred, infected gut.
“The Father rejoins the Son today!” said Bergstrom.
Mrs. Harper shrieked—and Andrew counted five small creatures before they dropped like ripe fruit and scurried across the floor, before the whistling took up. Bergstrom straightened and cast off his coat, and tore away at his shirt. His flesh was bruised and swollen in places. It seemed to move with inhuman musculature. It only confirmed what Andrew had been thinking—it was the answer to the question he had asked Norma Tavish on the mountainside:
Do these things ever lay their eggs in men
?
Andrew was now sure that they did. The writhing flesh on Bergstrom was testimony to that. These things had laid eggs beneath that skin. But there was no umbilical—no uterine wall from which to feed. So they had immediately begun to feed off—what?
Andrew shuddered. Bergstrom had been a fat man in the fall. And that—his fat—is what they’d fed on. He had been their regimen . . .
. . . those tiny cherubs . . .
Andrew took a breath. It was hard to hold his eye on one of them as they drifted up onto the table, laughing in high voices that might have been whistles. He felt what seemed like a great, hot wind upon him, and when he looked up, it seemed as though the ceiling, the very roof of this house had been torn away—and above, the sky opened into a great vortex. If he looked at it long, Andrew was sure he would overbalance and fall up. But he looked up again, and the ceiling was as it was, bare pine boards, with great hooks for pots and other implements sticking out of the wide beams that criss-crossed it. The cherub that seemed to have been prancing on the table turned small, and squat—a greyish-pink thing, with no fur but a thin baby-fuzz, and long curved claws that clicked on the table. Andrew lifted his plate and swatted it. The creature howled and scurried off.
Then Andrew coughed, and bent, and looked around again.
Nils Bergstrom stood before him, arms spread and belly reshaping itself while Mister Juke’s demonic offspring scurried and danced around him. He glared across the table at Andrew, with what he must have imagined was divine wrath in his eye.
Andrew could understand that. Of everyone whom Bergstrom had caught meeting in this kitchen, only Andrew Waggoner had dared not bow down before his delusion. The rest—even Sam Green—had all bent low to the ground, trembling. They thought—believed—
knew
that what they were seeing was God manifest in man. Only Norma’s drug, and the things he had seen already, let Andrew see Bergstrom for what he was.
“You’re sick,” said Andrew. “You’re going to die from this.”
“I am reconciled,” said Bergstrom, his arms extended to either side and trembling, “to my God. Unlike yourself, Dr. Nigger. You cannot even look upon Him.”
“I don’t see God here,” said Andrew. “I see a trick—I see . . .” he motioned to one of the juveniles, perched like a Notre Dame gargoyle on a pine shelf behind where Mrs. Harper bent and wept. “I don’t see God.”
“Then you are blind.” He smiled. “Outcast.”
“Nils, you’re in grave danger right now, said Andrew. “Those things in you—they’ll kill you. Just like they did Maryanne Leonard. Only I think it’ll be worse for you. You’re going to need surgery—”
“Shut your mouth.”
Bergstrom held his hands out and shut his eyes, as though he were listening to some unheard voice. Then he opened them again and looked straight at Andrew. “Why are you alive, Dr. Waggoner?”
“I’m alive,” said Andrew carefully, “because I’m clever enough to know when I’ve overstayed my welcome. Nils, pull yourself out from this insanity. Drink some damn tea—” he offered his cup “—and sit down, and think about what you’ve done to yourself. Then we’ll go and cut those things out of you—as many as we can.”
His hand was shaking awfully as he extended the cup. Bergstrom, encumbered but still nimble, reached across and with a flick of his wrist, knocked it from his hand. The cup shattered on the floor.
“Keep your poison!” he snapped. “You cannot cut me out—that was among the first things that Nils learned when he began to study my effects.”
“Ah,” said Andrew. “So you—so
Dr. Bergstrom
, has been making a proper study of this.”
“Bergstrom has always sought truth in nature. That is why I came to him.”
Andrew chose his next words carefully. Bergstrom had tried to kill him—he’d thought, from pure wickedness. But he was vulnerable now, trapped in a delusion, speaking of himself in a disassociative way . . . as though it were someone else speaking through him.
But delusion or no, Bergstrom certainly came here with a message. Andrew thought he might have a better time drawing that message, and more, from the thing that Bergstrom believed possessed him.
“All right,” said Andrew. “Why don’t you tell me, how it is you came to Dr. Bergstrom. Why don’t you deliver me your
gospel
.”