Andrew gasped, and shut his eyes a moment against the pain, which was beyond anything he’d felt before—even at the moment of his beating by the Klansmen. When they pulled him from the mud, the men who’d attacked the Harpers’ mansion had spread his weight between two of them—without any consideration for his injuries, particularly not his elbow. The pain from it was brilliant—it drowned out any song he could have heard, and blinded him to anything but its own light.
Just like it had for Jason, when he was locked in this building with Mister Juke and had sliced his hand—agony brought Andrew back to flesh.
They let go of him at the front steps to the quarantine. The door hung off one hinge, and it was clear the two men who had carried him this far wouldn’t go further. Andrew stumbled and nearly fell against the wall, but he managed to stand.
The little girl Lily stepped into the doorway and looked at him. “You got an honour,” she said seriously. She extended her hand. “Walk wi’ me.”
Andrew looked back at the men. The two who were hauling him had stepped back among the rest: about twenty of them, all told. Any one of them looked powerful enough to kill him—but all of them were staying well out of reach of the door. And the little girl.
What would happen, he wondered briefly, if he tried to hurt her?
She took his good hand in her thin, cool fingers. “You kin walk, caintchya?”
“I can walk,” he said.
“Then come,” she said. “Oracle’s waiting.”
The girl tugged at his hand, and Andrew followed obediently. As they passed over the threshold into the quarantine, Lily squinted up at him.
“Don’t be crying,” she said. “It’s only darkness.”
It
was
dark. Once they got through the entry hall, the quarantine swallowed memory of day, of sunlight. It was only Lily’s hand, her sure foot, that gave Andrew any bearing at all.
They travelled down a corridor where the walls seemed to chitter with birdsong. At a point, they wandered into a room that stank like a privy. Andrew gagged and Lily, leading him forward, giggled. They climbed stairs for a step or two or ten, and Andrew felt a cool breeze on his cheek, and caught a smell like the sort of river that might run through a grand city. It was when the texture of the floor became soft, like a mown English lawn, that Andrew made a point of flexing his elbow, and gasping at the pain of it. Lily started to sing then, and stroked his hand in a mothering way, and Andrew heard trumpets behind her voice—and as that happened, the darkness began to dissolve like spots of ink, and he saw that he was in a great chamber lit by ten thousand candles. At the far end, a woman sat demurely, long raven hair combed down as far as her waist.
He had arrived in the presence of the Oracle.
“Might wan’ t’ bow down,” said Lily.
Andrew grimaced, and bent his elbow once more.
“Think I’ll stand,” he said.
Seen through the lens of pain, the Oracle wasn’t all that demure.
She stood tall like her brothers, and her black hair hung near her waist, and she seemed strong, with thick hips and large, full breasts and flushed cheeks and lips. But the Oracle paid a toll, and Andrew could see it in her eyes, at once wide and sunken, ringed dark; and her odd posture, bent and swaying in the dark cloth of her homespun dress. She held a bundle wrapped in cloth and twigs, the way a mother might hold a baby. The room was not lit by ten thousand candles or even a hundred, just four kerosene lamps that cast scant light in the wide room. It looked as though it hadn’t been put to use as much but a storeroom for broken old furniture. She stood by an old roll-top desk, not far from a tall blank wall with two big barn doors. Lily pushed him: “Go see ’er,” she said to Andrew, and across the room to the Oracle: “Smell ’im!”
“No need,” said the Oracle. “I c’n smell him from here. Need a look, though.”
Lily pushed him again, making it plain that there was no option. “Go see ’er,” she whispered. “An’ try bowing. She’s the Oracle.”
Andrew made his way forward, jostling painfully against the furniture as he did so. Lily followed close.
“Yes,” said the Oracle, “come to me, black man. Let me a look at you.”
Andrew kept the desk between them. “I think I’m close enough,” he said, and the Oracle nodded. She sniffed the air, and looked him up and down. Then she bent and sniffed the bundle in her arms.
“What is that you got?” asked Andrew, and Lily smacked his arm. “Hush!” Then, to the Oracle: “He got the smell of Him! Of the Lost Child. So I brung ’im.”
“I know you did. Good girl.” The Oracle squinted at him. “You ain’t like th’ others here, are you? Black man.”
“I guess I’m not,” he said, carefully, studying this girl. She was just a girl—he didn’t expect that she was any older than Jason Thistledown, and might well have been younger. And yet, they called her Oracle. “And you aren’t, either. Can I see your baby?”
The girl took a possessive stance, sheltering the bundle with her body.
“Ain’t my baby,” she said, her voice going high. “Ain’t larder.”
Andrew made a hushing noise. “May I see?”
For a moment they stood still, the only sound being the pattering of rain on the quarantine’s roof. It sounded like it was coming harder. At length, she looked up at Andrew.
“It’s the Lost Child,” she said in a small voice, and reached over with a hand, and pulled aside some cloth. “Like you.”
A tiny claw revealed itself, talons gleaming in the lamplight.
“We saved him,” said Lily.
And the Oracle said, “Too late, too late. So we brung ’im here.”
Andrew stared as she removed more of the cloth, drawing the bent claw out, caressing the thing’s chest.
“Heathen did this. So this is our reminder—of what we do with Heathen that bring harm to the Old Man. To the Son.” The Oracle pulled the cloth back over the corpse. “And you—you smell of him.”
Andrew bit down on the inside of his cheek. No wonder, he thought. This was the thing that’d ripped itself from Loo Tavish. And these girls had it—they had it, because of course they were Feegers, and the Feegers had torn through the Tavish village with knives, and now . . .
“What are you going to do with the Heathen here?” asked Andrew.
“Same thing,” said the Oracle, “but we can tell the difference. There’s the ones that hurt him. They got one smell. There’s the ones that don’t know yet. They got another.”
“Kill the one,” said Lily. “Learn the other.”
“Then there’s another kind,” said the Oracle. “Smell different. Not one of either. And then—there’s you.”
“Smell of the Lost Child.”
“Black man. With that smell.”
“A
mystery
.”
“So Mr. Harper—the people in the mansion—the big house—they were harming him?”
“Took him away,” said the Oracle. “Not this one. An elder. They twisted him around, hurt him. Made him do things. That ain’t the order.”
And so they were murdered—cut down by old swords and axes, and the house burned, by this entire community—this extended family—of criminals, bowing to service this animal—this Mister Juke.
How apt, he thought, that the folk of Eliada had named the creature Juke. Apt, but off the mark. The real Jukes were these Feegers—men and women if not congenitally criminal, then made so by the spoor of this parasite. And so it became with anyone who encountered this beast, and its young.
“You have one inside you,” said Andrew to the Oracle, “don’t you?”
At that, the girl beamed.
“And a baby,” said Andrew. “It’s early, but you have a baby too.”
“No,” she said. “
He’s
got the baby. Larder. It’s better for Him, with larder. As might you know.”
Andrew opened his mouth to speak, and shut it again. This was as he’d surmised and as Norma Tavish had explained to him—the Jukes did better in a womb with child than on their own, by killing and eating the child, stealing its nourishment and so on. It was one thing to understand the behaviour, another to see these . . . children, apparently understanding what was before them, well enough to deliberately set it in motion.
To make a child for food. A deliberate sacrifice.
And what did they mean:
as might you know
?
“Why would you?” he asked.
But it wasn’t only the thought. He felt a deep vibration up his back: a deep, basso rumbling, or a moan, as of great timbers drawing against one another.
The Oracle and Lily heard it too. The two girls bent their heads back, and began to hum and sing, in high, broken voices. They mingled with the deeper noise into a harmony as Andrew had never heard before. He flexed his elbow, and the shooting pain drew him back from reverie.
The sounds mingled and bent, and slowly, the room filled up with a cool light. Andrew looked to its source, and saw: the two tall doors were opening.
Two things dwelt there.
One was luminous: a tall, slender man in robes, flesh of buffed mahogany, his brow unfurrowed and gaze open and loving.
A Dauphin.
He stood in a great glass dome, as high as a cathedral. His head nearly reached the apex; doves flew about him, and settled on his shoulders.
When he spoke, he sang, and the doves joined him in harmony. It was a song of forgiveness and welcoming; its lyric spoke straight at Andrew Waggoner.
Come on to Heaven
, said the man, raising his hand to touch the glass over his head, and bringing rays of gold where his fingertips tarried. Looking up through there, Andrew felt certain: the shades of Loo Tavish, Maryanne Leonard, might never reach him from this exalted place.
And then there was the other. That one was harder to see—Andrew had to work at it. He took his bad hand in his good, and twisted—and he saw the Dauphin’s head loll to the left, and that fine brow grew quill-thick hairs, and the colour fled and it was the pale white of a fresh-dug grub. Andrew bit down hard on his tongue—and the dome vanished, replaced with weathered beams and cracked roofing, through which rainwater fell and pooled on the packed-earth floor—and high, filthy windows that let in the damp light, to cast upon a shape that was like a shoulder but bent as a wrist. He jammed his elbow against the corner of an old cabinet, and the gentle gaze of the Dauphin became the idiot stare of the Juke, two great black eyes, sunk in folds of mottled flesh, which shifted and faded, into the dark eyes of the Dauphin . . . which opened up into an infinity that Andrew had glimpsed once before.
And the Dauphin whispered . . .
Andrew smashed his arm into the corner of the cabinet. The things that leaped and capered at Mister Juke’s side shifted from dove and angel, into small dark things that scurried through the shadows—and back, to beauty.
Love Me.
“No.” Andrew drew back.
Spread My word
.
“No,” he said again, and allowing himself one last glimpse of Heaven, drove his head into the corner of the cabinet.
“Dead?”
“No.”
“Oracular?”
“Don’t know. Maybe.”
“Need to know.”
“There be only one way to.”
“Leave him to it?”
“With the rest.”
And so, higher Andrew Waggoner fell.
Not so high as Heaven, though. Not so high as that.
“The Negro wakes.”
Cool water on the forehead, a damp cloth mopping it up. “Annie?” The sound of water wrung from cloth into pan. A laugh.
“Oh, no. Not her.”
Andrew blinked in the light. He was on his back, on a soft-mattressed bed, staring up at a high plank ceiling.
“Mrs. Frost?” said Andrew. He pushed himself up in the bed. Annie Rowe might’ve stopped him, but Germaine Frost kept her distance. She sat on a metal stool near his bed. On the right side of her forehead, someone had taped a thick pad of gauze. The reddish-brown of dried blood frosted its edges.
She sat with hands folded, and nodded. “You’re not addled, Dr. Waggoner,” she said. “That’s good.”
“I’m addled,” he said, looking around. They were in a ward room that he’d never seen before. He wasn’t alone. The room was filled with beds—and patients. Beside him, a woman stirred underneath her sheet, pulled it to her chin.
“You must be in great pain,” said Germaine.
“I am,” said Andrew, and he wasn’t lying.
“Yet you don’t flinch.” She nodded, slow. “You are really a fine specimen.”
He looked at her levelly. “I’m not a specimen, Mrs. Frost.”
“Of course you’re not. It’s just this—place. And I meant it kindly, in any case. You’re a man of resource, Doctor. I can see why Mr. Harper selected you.”
“Mr. Harper is dead.”
She pursed her lips, stood and dipped the cloth into the pan of water. Wrung it out, and examined it an instant before handing it to Andrew. “Hold it to your forehead,” she said. “You’ve taken a trauma there.” Andrew took the cloth and pressed it there, and Mrs. Frost sat back on her stool. “Dead, you say? Well, given the march of events these past few days, I shouldn’t be surprised. Yet I am. He was a visionary.”