Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

She took hold of the girl by the hair and tugged, but the child didn’t cry out: Mrs. Frost had already jammed the wadded-up cloth into her mouth, and with her first and middle finger, pushed the soaking wet cloth into her nostrils. The girl took hold of Germaine’s wrist with both hands and tried to pry the hands away. Mrs. Frost set her mouth and held fast. The girl soon gave up on wrist, and tried to claw at Mrs. Frost’s eyes. She got close enough to knock Mrs. Frost’s glasses from one ear, so they dangled over the bridge of her nose. Mrs. Frost responded by bearing down on the child, and pushing her to the floor between the beds.

Andrew rolled off the bed, and nearly fell as his feet hit the bare wooden floor. He clutched Mrs. Frost’s stool like a walking stick and, bent like an old man, moved from that to the foot of the bed beside him, and the bed beside that.

He managed to stay upright as he looked down on Germaine Frost and the child. All he could see of Germaine were her shoulders, wide and round enough to nearly fill the space between the bed. They worked and shifted as though she were kneading dough.

Her skirts were hiked past the knee, her stockings torn to reveal long ovals of pallid flesh. All he could see of the child were her feet. They were pinned beneath Mrs. Frost’s crossed ankles, so she couldn’t kick or make noise on the wooden floor. She could not make any noise at all by now. She was barely struggling.

Andrew reached down with his good hand and grabbed Mrs. Frost’s shoulder. She shifted her weight, and smashed his fingers between her arm and the bed next to it. Andrew gasped. She spared him a glance over her shoulder, catching his eye.

“Don’t interfere,” she whispered. Andrew tried to lay hold of her again, but it was impossible—the space between the beds allowed him no room to get in and stop it.

Soon—too soon—the feet stopped moving, and Germaine Frost was able to stand, and brush herself off, and turn to Andrew Waggoner and, as though nothing had transpired between them, say: “We have to go now.”

§

All Andrew could do was go. A small part of him wanted to strike Germaine Frost down, raise an alarm—shout murderer! But if he did so… what would become of Jason? Germaine Frost was his only thread through this maze.

The girl was dead. Lips blue, no heartbeat, wide eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Germaine bent and rolled her beneath the bed, and took hold of Andrew and led him to the door. It wasn’t locked. Beyond was a hallway, and they followed it, and climbed down some steps, and finally came upon a bright room: a small surgery, with a skylight, which was badly cracked. Water rained down in a small torrent onto the bare wooden operating table, in turn dribbling down to the floor. Opposite them was another door, and when they went through this, they stepped outside.

They stood next to a stand of tamarack—not far off was the fallen log where Jason Thistledown had given Andrew Waggoner a pack of meagre supplies and sent him into the wilderness alone.

“What luck!” she exclaimed. “Not a single one! What luck!”

Not a single one. There was one, thought Andrew. “She was a child,” he said. He was shaking. “A silly child who they’d let in on her own. You—”

“She would have raised an alarm,” said Mrs. Frost.

“Perhaps,” said Andrew. “But there might have been another way. There must have been another way. And how did you know she was alone? That her guard wasn’t waiting for her outside?”

Mrs. Frost shrugged. “They are degenerates,” she said. “Inferior. They have not the wit. Now tell me, Doctor—do you want to meet my nephew or do you want to question good fortune until pneumonia sets in?”

Andrew didn’t answer that, but Mrs. Frost evidently took silence as its own response. “Then come along,” she said. “Come along.”

Andrew followed her around the corner of the building, and the hospital was in sight, rendered grey and deathly through the driving rain—a silhouette, almost, among… other shapes.

They both stopped and stared, at one of those shapes. It might have been a tree, but it would not stay still—it bent low and climbed higher than the eaves, as though it were in the clutches of some cyclonic wind. As they watched, it moved past the hospital, and then further along, toward the town. It moaned, a deep, bassoon-like sound, and accompanying it came a song, in clear and high voices. It might be that all of Eliada rose up in song, as the thing—as Mister Juke—roiled and crawled and strode toward the docks, and the town and those many, who had watched and prayed as the Feegers hauled Andrew Waggoner to the quarantine, now awaited their God, as the Feegers led Him to them.

And so it was that unmolested, unnoticed by God or Man, the two of them made their way to the shelter of the hospital’s unguarded back entrance and slipped inside.

28 - The Old Man

“How do you know where he is?” asked Andrew as they skulked down the corridor that ran the spine of the hospital’s basement.