David Nickle - Eutopia

But it wasn’t a soul that a man would be thinking of—any more than it was sleep a man thought of when morphine moved in his veins. It was all chemistry; chemistry in the service of these animals, chemistry that they used to hold a man’s attention and hold it for the kill.

Andrew stood up. Whatever chemical smell this thing had put in him, it had passed. He was here in his body—his arm did hurt, his joints did crack. And as to his soul—he felt only muddle-headed, as he would in a morphine aftermath. He stretched his legs and headed back upslope, looking for the path through the trees to the homestead.

“ Nigger .”

Andrew stopped and turned.

The voice was a girl’s. It had sounded close, as though the girl stood next to him and leaned nearer as he spoke.

“Nigger.”

She was not that close. She stood in the midst of a close cropping of young pine trees, maybe a dozen yards off. The needles intersected her nakedness, rustling as she moved in them. Her hands strayed up and down her thick naked middle like spiders.

“You the nigger that killed me,” she said in a voice clear as sky. “Killed the young one.”

“No I am not,” said Andrew. “A girl got killed. You’re just part of a clever trick. You here to show me the way to Hell now?”

Loo was not in an answering mood. The pine needles rustled and shifted, and Loo’s shade shifted and was gone.

“I guess not,” said Andrew, and he smiled grimly. This trickery—it wasn’t so different really than Klansmen, dressing up like ghosts, thinking they could put the fear in foolish Negroes.

Andrew made his way over to the baby pines, looked for the tracks, the trampled path through the underbrush that he knew would not be there. He knew, but he had to check, and check again. He was under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen—one that placed credulity on him. He pushed aside branches and looked down, and sure enough, there was nothing but needles and dirt.

“Doctor.”

Once again, the voice seemed right in his ear and it was the voice of a young girl, though not Loo. Andrew stood, and turned—and as he did, he stumbled and choked.

Thin, cold arms were wrapped around his neck from behind. A wet torso pressed against his back and a mouth blew warm, damp words into his ear with breath that reeked of formaldehyde:

“It’s me, Doctor,” whispered the shade. “Maryanne.

“Tell my brothers it’s good here.”

Andrew reached up with his good hand and locked it around the narrow wrist, tried to pull it away. The more he pulled, the tighter it seemed to grip. Sharp ribs broken by a bone-saw scratched at his back.

The voice giggled. “I won’t tell,” she said. “Don’t worry, Dr. Nigger.

“I won’t tell—how you came to me that night—how you put your filthy piece in me—how you made your little nigger baby in my belly, then ripped it on out with a pair of pliers—I will not tell, Dr. Nigger,” she said. “I will not tell what an awful surgeon you are—one-armed and weak and stupid like a nigger was born. It’s between you and me, Nigger. Oh I won’t tell I won’t tell I won’t—”

And with that, Maryanne Leonard snaked her hand free from Andrew Waggoner’s fist, and her fingers cupped over his mouth and nose—and Andrew fell to a powerful sleep.

“Hello, Andrew.”

“Hello. It’s dark here. Norma?”

“It is dark. Yes. Norma.”

“Am I blind?”

“It’s dark.”

“Didn’t answer my question.”

A laugh for an answer.

“What happened?”

“You’re safe.”

“You’re not answering any questions, are you?”

“You haven’t asked a good one yet.”

“All right—here’s a good one. What part of the trick is this?”

Norma didn’t answer right away, but Andrew heard a rustling, as of wings. In the distance, he saw a pale bluish light—like a star.

“Well, I’m not blinded,” said Andrew.

“Follow the light,” said Norma. Her voice sounded farther off—as though she’d set off through the dark toward this light and were still walking. “Only there is your salvation.”

“Only there, hmm?” Andrew pushed himself up from the ground and stood straight in the void. “Will that take me to the Ferris wheel? The Dauphin, with his giant wings?”

“Follow the light.”

“Yes, the light. It’s the sort of thing you’d say if you were dead, Norma—a soul guiding me on. But you aren’t. You’re alive right now, looking after a dead girl’s funeral. You have been working me with such lies, such lies.”

“The Dauphin awaits,” she said.

Her voice was near now—he could smell her breath, which was sweet. And she had lost the rasp of years.

“I think,” said Andrew, “that maybe I’ll stay here. You can tell that to the Juke , Norma.”

He blinked as he spoke. It was later in the day: the sun was higher than it was when he’d seen Heaven in it. And he had moved a distance in that time. He sat next to a low stump on a plateau of stumps and small pine trees. His shirt and trousers were filthy.

The day had also marched on since he’d last looked. Andrew thought the sun had moved a good three hours. Andrew was tired—deep, soul-tired—but he was elated.

I defeated it , he thought. I faced that thing down, and I defeated it.

Andrew pushed himself to his feet with a wince. The land here was clear for four, five hundred yards around him. Downslope, he saw wide paths cut in the trees, starting to grow in with underbrush. Harper’s men had been at work here, but they had not been back in some time.

Still, he could follow one of those paths and eventually find himself back at Eliada.

Andrew marched upslope a few dozen yards. His doctor’s bag lay where he’d dropped it as he twitched and stumbled down the hillside. Miraculously, it was intact.

No, Andrew corrected himself. There was no miracle because there had been no battle. He had not been attacked by her, any more than he had encountered Loo in the trees.

The mechanism of this thing had simply preyed upon his own doubts and fears and aspirations. It had somehow aided him in isolating something that for lack of a better word might be called “sin.” And for a physician, sin was failure.

Andrew shut his eyes. Oh yes—the Juke had done its work with the brainless cruelty of a clockwork. It had done everything that it might, to draw him into its web—to ripen him for what amounted to a religious conversion.

All of which gave rise to another question: why hadn’t the strategy worked?

It should have. Andrew thought himself clever enough. He had been a good student and, recent experience notwithstanding, a competent physician. But he was under no illusions that he possessed heroic will or genius insight. What was it that saved him?

Norma said the Juke tended to make its deepest mark upon close families—through the amniotic fluid and germ plasm of the host mother, no doubt. And Andrew was far enough from the stem of that family tree that he was barely affected at all.

He flexed the fingers of his broken arm, and thought then about another possibility.

Perhaps it was something in Norma’s remarkably curative tea.

What was it she had said? Good for the body and the soul. Might she have discovered some root, some concoction that lessened the ability of this thing to rob men and women of their wills? It would explain how it was that she and her ilk had lived in this place for so long, without falling into the thrall of these creatures.

I will have to ask her for the recipe—as soon as I find my way back, he thought as he hefted the bag in his good hand and started to climb back up the slope. It wouldn’t be hard—there was a good plume of wood smoke climbing into the sky. Perhaps , thought Andrew as he climbed, they are cremating Loo now.