David Nickle - Eutopia

“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?”