David Nickle - Eutopia

“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 .”

Around them, the whistling grew. In a distant wing of the house, something that sounded like a gunshot rang out. But he didn’t let himself become distracted by any of it.

“Sit,” said Bergstrom. “I command you.”

Andrew pulled up a stool amid the grovelling others, and got ready to listen.

“My father,” said Nils Bergstrom, “is the mountains. He is the trees and the sky and the forest. All this.” He spread his arms above him to indicate the whole kitchen, and by implication, Andrew thought, pretty well everything else. “So has He been for as long as men have walked this land, He has been their protector.”

The Harpers had managed to climb as far as their knees, draw their hands together in prayer, and they looked up at Nils Bergstrom. Andrew didn’t have to guess; it was clear they were looking not at but through Bergstrom, at nothing but pure eternity. Sam Green was still bent over; his shoulders shaking, forehead pressed against the flagstone floor. The Jukes had withdrawn to shadow; they only revealed their presence by their soft whistling, the clicking of their talons on the tops of hanging pots and the beams of the ceiling. Andrew fought to keep his eyes off them all—all but Nils Bergstrom.

“Praise your Father,” said Andrew.

“And so men do. Those who praise. The Feegers.”

“Feegers,” said Andrew. “What do they have to do with—”

Bergstrom didn’t let him finish. “Yet lo, do they wither. Sickness and weakness and their own animal natures—lo, do they wither. Such a withering came upon the Father’s men, and their women and young also, not a winter’s past. They grew hot and cold and their chests filled with water and many died. The Father wept for them. And he cried out—and his angels, for there were many, cried with him. And in the depths of his despair—came a wandering man—this one.” Bergstrom jammed a thumb into his chest, while Jukes chittered from the rafters. “Come did he, with balms and knives and blankets, up the mountain-slope, and see to those folk as best he might.

“The Father’s folk were fools—they tried drive him away, and nearly they did, swinging sticks and axes and knives of their own. They chased him ’round the great lake atop the mountain, nearer the Father. And there—the Father picked up his scent, he did. And he knew, though the people were fool enough then—he knew that the wandering man had a place for him. So—so he sent me.”

Andrew could no longer keep silent. “You,” he said.

“Mister Juke.”

“I thought you didn’t care for that name.”

“Nils does not, but I—” he stood straighter, glared down at Andrew “—I take the name my worshippers give me.”

“Your worshippers. You don’t mean the folk in the hospital.”

“Those who would have destroyed me came to love me,” he said.

Norma and her clan knew about that; knew how to defend against it. Nils Bergstrom would have had no opportunity to share that wisdom. So when he went to the place where the Juke came from, and stole it away… he would have been defenceless.

And now he was gone, his mind twisted into what he believed was a personification of the Juke.

“I came,” said Bergstrom, “to this place but a babe—swaddled in a crib, carried by this one. He wanted to know me, but was not yet faithful. And so he kept me away in a place cold and bright—and he did feed me and question me and watch me as I grew. I was his secret.”

“I had thought you came here on your own,” said Andrew.

“That is a false gospel.”

“And why would you allow a false gospel to be spread?”

“The folk had to meet their God quiet.”

Andrew considered that phrase: meet their God quiet .

The thing was a secret, because it had secret work that early on the folk of Eliada would not agree to: it would have to sneak out in the night, meet up with girls, and plant its seed.

For what was it that Norma had said before she’d been killed? The thing did not preach to someone until it had a taste of their kin; until it maybe had such a taste as only could come from the inside of them.

“And so you walked the land here in secret,” said Andrew.

“And so I did.”

“And Maryanne Leonard?”

Bergstrom smiled. “I came to her in the night—while Bergstrom watched from a perch—I came upon her in secret, as she walked through the night, and she met my eye, and knew my love.”

The one part of things that was true, then—Mister Juke was a wandering rapist.

And Bergstrom—he had aided.

Andrew imagined how it might have been: whether Bergstrom had taken the young, small Mister Juke from the quarantine one night, led him over to the Leonard house; or perhaps just followed the creature through the snow, checking his pocket watch to mark its progress, then merely crouching down out back of the place, while the creature mesmerized and ravished the child. He wanted to strike him for that, as much as he did for the thing that he later did to Jason Thistledown; the thing he’d tried to do to Andrew. But he contained himself. Nils Bergstrom was in deep with his fancy; he had been as much a victim of this creature as a fine dog is of rabies. Bergstrom’s head had bent back now, as though he were looking to Heaven and not just the rafters.

“Maryanne,” he whispered, and Andrew followed his eye to the rafters.

From those rafters, Maryanne Leonard stared down, her face a ghastly, necrotic ruin. She grinned at Andrew with a mouth too wide, teeth bent and pointed. Andrew felt his breath freezing in his chest.

“She bore angels,” said Bergstrom, his voice taking a hideous, doting tone as Maryanne drew down, moving like some immense and bloated spider toward Andrew. Over her head, the ceiling opened up to light—pure and celestial—bursting out between floorboards.

Andrew tried to look away. “That’s not right,” he said. “There is no God here. There is not—”

Andrew felt it pressing him down—to the floor, to join those others already deep in their worship. There was another pressure in his heart—an expansive feeling, as though he might grow immense within himself, and be so joyful as to only sing the praise; another thing, that feared the apparition above him like a tornado, like a sandstorm—like nature, made manifest.