David Nickle - Eutopia

Which was something Nils Bergstrom had over Andrew Waggoner. When Andrew had made his cut, he hadn’t even been sure he could help her; he was in fact fairly certain that he could not. Andrew was looking after his own curiosity and nothing else.

And now, crouched in the darkness of the cabin, he was tending it some more. How hateful, he thought.

Norma came in to get him at lunchtime.

“Come on,” she said, laying a cool hand on his shoulder. “You’re in no shape for this.”

He looked up at her as she guided him to his feet.

“No,” he agreed, “that is true.”

He went back to Norma’s house, and drank down a tea of rose and mint and something else he couldn’t identify. He lay down in the bed while she changed the dressing on his older injuries and packed them with a compound of mud and twigs.

“What is all that?” he asked.

“Remedies,” she said.

“What kind of remedies?”

“Wild onion and ginger. Fireweed. Some yarrow. Rose and mint in the tea. Other things.” She squinted at him. “Good for body and for soul. Don’t argue. You’ll do better with them and a bit of rest. Now I got to go see to my kin.”

Andrew didn’t argue, and he did rest, and Norma was right: he did better by it all when he woke, in the pre-dawn of the second day.

He lowered his feet to the earthen floor and stood, flexing his hands in amazement. There was pain, but it felt as though it had aged, as though bones were knitting, wounds were closing. Norma was nowhere to be seen. That was fine—Andrew didn’t need to talk.

He thought that he might try another look at Loo.

Quietly, he pulled on his coat and found the physician’s bag, and made his way to the death house.

Standing outside in the crisp mountain air, Andrew thought a storm might have passed in the night—a storm that stirred up the scents of the forest floor—that somehow refreshed things, washing away the old. He shivered and gave his head a quick shake, and felt himself smile.

It didn’t take him long, however, to see that he might have a hard time conducting his examination. Lamplight flickered first between tree branches, and then as he drew nearer, from the windows of the house. Andrew could hear something like singing coming from inside, faint but certain. He slowed his step and crept closer.

In spite of his good feeling, he was not anxious to intrude, so he moved near one of the windows and tried to peer inside.

The space was almost as crowded as when he’d first arrived. But this time, things were busier. A couple of the women were going at the sheet with needle and thread, sewing it shut. Some others were sipping from mugs.

And it seemed like everybody was humming—some tune that Andrew couldn’t make out. He raised up on his toes to get a better look around, and that was when he felt the hand on his arm.

“Hem.”

Andrew turned. He was looking at Hank.

“I—I’m sorry,” said Andrew.

“You already paid your respects,” said Hank. “Time for us.”

“Of course.”

“Then go on.”

He let go of Andrew. Andrew nodded, and stepped away.

It was fine. He would not dissect the body at its funeral. He would not bother the families. He took a walk.

As Andrew walked, he found himself humming. Cheerfully. There was a tune to it, but Andrew did not think to try to place it. It was more like he followed it, as though he were listening a song some minstrel might have been playing in the woods downslope. A minstrel, or a choir.

He stepped around a copse of tamarack, onto a little shelf of rock, and when he was through that, the sun came up. There was no missing it, standing as he was on the east slope of the mountain. It gilded the rock-face—brightened the green of the moss and lichen and daubed the tops of the trees below with honey. Andrew blinked and squinted in the light, and fell back, and watched, as the breadth of the Kootenai River Valley below him was obliterated—by Heaven.

He blinked and his breath hitched, as he caught himself using his good arm against the rock.

There were gates in the sky: gates marked by two tall monoliths that bent toward one another at their peak. The gates themselves were covered in hammered gold and pinkish-white stonework and they hovered like storm clouds over the river valley. The sun rose beneath them like a straining bloody red bubble; yet within the gateway, another sun shone—this one of purest white, a light that tickled Andrew’s flesh where it touched. Andrew looked into its naked brilliance. He could not look away.

Things moved in that light—they moved, and they sang.

Andrew hummed along, and he realized that he was humming that tune that he’d half-heard in the forest, and as he did, it occurred to him that this was the same tune that he had heard coming from Loo’s death house.

Of course , a small part of him observed. It is a trick of the mind. The Juke is working on you and pulling things out of memory. The song’s part of the trick .

It was one thing to observe that in small measure, another for Andrew to entirely accept it, particularly faced with the spires and arches, the manicured gardens of the City of Heaven. A great Ferris wheel turned in its midst, carrying laughing cherubs nearer the sun, letting them fly at its crest. Marble bridges arched over canals lined with tall trees, carrying long boats painted a brilliant green.. Atop a great flight of stairs, a beautiful Dauphin sat on a throne of hammered silver in robes of white, surrounded by a dozen maidens wearing thin shifts with fine yellow hair tumbling to their waists. Wings emerged from behind him—great white expanses that Andrew first took to be part of the throne, then as they spread, he understood to be coming from the shoulders of the Dauphin himself.

As Andrew looked at him, so the Dauphin looked back. He must have been miles off—but it was as though they stood face to face, as though Andrew could feel his warm breath on his cheek. He looked into his eyes, the irises of which were at first a brilliant blue—then into the pupils, which were black as night sky.

Free thyself, Andrew Waggoner, of thy Earthly bonds .

And as Andrew listened, the irises narrowed, and the blackness of the Dauphin’s pupils became absolute, and he did as he was told.

Higher and higher, Andrew fell.

Shadows appeared and shortened on the mountainside and as they shifted, the colour changed too. Pink turned gold turned silver turned to nothing but the colour of tree and rock and blue, clear sky. There was a scream. Andrew Waggoner’s right hand twitched in its splint. A hundred wings pounded the air not far off, and then—another scream.

Heaven had come, Heaven had gone. Andrew had stayed put.

He blinked, and drew a breath, and squinted toward the sun. No gates. No city. No Dauphin.

Andrew let out a long, slow breath. “Redemption,” he said aloud. The Juke had offered him redemption. It had brought him low, and lifted him high, and it had offered him redemption from a Heaven of Andrew’s own devising. And that last trick…

His knees trembled as he stood up. He looked at his hands; flexed the fingers on both; his broken arm gave off waves of pain, but it was as though he were listening to the pain rather than feeling it. As though he were a larger thing now, that encompassed the trees and the rocks and the sky, that sun that was too bright to look at.

That last trick… that glimpse of forever …

“You clever beast.” The Juke—the creature in the jar that killed Maryanne Leonard, that had led him to the killing of Loo—the bastard had figured a way to a man’s soul. Or at least to the parts of a man that got agitated when he started thinking of his soul.