Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

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.

He swallowed, and shut his eyes, and drew a sharp breath, and when he opened his eyes again, it was only rafters overhead. And there was Nils Bergstrom, shirtless and bruised and emaciated, like a refugee from a war. His flesh crawled with the maggoty young of Mister Juke.

“Nils,” Andrew said, standing and reaching to him. “Let me get you under a knife. I don’t know—but I think it’s the only hope for you.”

Bergstrom looked back at him, and reached out his own scabrous arm.

Maybe this is the benefit—the good thing that comes from the Jukes, thought Andrew as he reached, and the two touched. Weren’t there good works done by churches around the world? Didn’t religious feeling fundamentally provide for those things of value? Compassion—pity—forgiveness—community? That was Garrison Harper’s theory—and maybe… maybe wasn’t there something to it?

But Heaven wouldn’t leave them alone. As he stood there, the door behind them flung open and light flooded in.

A giant stood at the door.

He was big enough the frame barely contained him. His hair was black and a beard hung down over his home-sewn buckskin coat. He stepped inside, looking around with an almost childlike fascination, as light from the doorway haloed him. He carried a sword, long and dark and curved slightly like a sabre.

Another God-damned hallucination. Andrew shut his eyes to it.

Bergstrom’s fingers touched Andrew’s; and he said, in a high, childlike voice of his own: “You see, Nigger? They come.”

“No,” said Andrew. “This is another lie, Nils—another—”

He didn’t have the opportunity to finish the sentence. Bergstrom’s finger jerked away, and there was a sound like an axe-blade splitting kindling, and when Andrew opened his eyes, he saw—there was Bergstrom, on his knees, bright arterial blood spraying from his shoulder. Andrew couldn’t look away from his eyes—wide and wet, first pleading and then diminishing, as what life was left in him drew back and away into whatever the Juke had tricked him to thinking came after.

Andrew stumbled back, in time to avoid the tip of the giant’s sword-blade as it cut the air at the height of his throat. For an instant, he met the giant’s eyes, and he thought he could read the disappointment in them—

—disappointment, at having failed such an easy swing at the nigger doctor’s throat.

The giant raised the sword for another try, but Andrew was on the move. He half-ran, half-fell to his left, toward the door. He screamed in pain as he did so—the move pulled his bad arm in a way that it did not want to go—but the sudden move was enough to once more bring the blade up short.