Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Jason fell back. He drew his knees to his chin and wrapped his arms around them. He rocked back and forth, holding the shaking inside, and he tried to make sense of what he had seen leering back at him:

Miss Ruth Harper, her smooth round face and light brown curls reduced to a size as might fit on a doll; her wickedly charming smile not at all improved by the addition of two rows of sharp, glinting teeth.

§

The whistling changed. To Jason’s ear it became almost melodic—or perhaps it shifted subtly, to make the harmonies more apparent. Jason thought he might be able to make out three or four different sources, coming from variously the ceiling, somewhere underneath the beds, and somewhere in the dark of the hallway. As he listened, he developed another theory—that whatever it was that Dr. Bergstrom had given him to make him sleep, also brought on waking dreams. Dr. Bergstrom was enough of a no-good bastard to do something like that.

It was a lot more likely than some tiny, saw-toothed cousin of Ruth Harper prying its way into the quarantine.

At length, Jason unwrapped his arms from around his legs, lowered his feet to the floor and lifted the sheet onto his shoulders.

Run, Aunt Germaine had said. Jason was not sure he had a run in him right now—his legs were stiff and slow, and once outside—he’d be barefoot and naked. Jason bent down and scooped up the scalpel. He headed to the door, then, seeing how dark it was past it, turned back to the ward room to see if he could find a candle and something to light it with.

Jason found a melted-down candle in a dish on a table near the door. On another table, near the little iron wood stove, he found a box of wooden matches, and within a moment, he was back to the hallway with the glow of candlelight to guide him.

The hallway was like a narrow gorge, cut by a single axe stroke. The ceiling rested higher than the light would reach, and the space itself was narrow. It carried in each direction an unguessable length. Candles had their limits. Particularly in a quarantine building that seemed bigger than the actual hospital it was supposed to serve.

Because there was no better reason for him to head right, Jason headed left—the candle in one hand, and the scalpel clutched in the other. Only thing missing, he thought, was a ball of thread to help him find his way out of the maze.

§

At first, Jason thought the quarantine gigantic, it took him so long to move along the hallway, through a wider room and into another corridor narrower than this one. The narrower corridor bent, and presented a short flight of stairs up.

Jason stopped at the top of the stairs and listened. There was a sound that a man might make, faced with unimaginable grief. It had a rhythm to it, a cycle: first, a keening, high sound, wavering only minutely; then, as the throat constricted, a sound like a growl, if something signifying such pitiful surrender could be so named.

Yes, Jason was familiar with that sound.

He stepped into the new room, and said, “Hello?”

This room was filled with furniture more akin to the Cracked Wheel Town Office than it was to a room in a hospital quarantine. Jason stepped around a file cabinet and a wide wooden desk to see other things: what looked like tall wardrobes and bureaus and wide shelves. The crying stopped. And something moved—something in white, maybe a fellow wrapped in his bedsheet like Jason was.

“Hello?” said Jason again. “Were you trapped in here too?”

“Forgive me.”

Jason crept forward, trying to locate the voice. The man was hoarse from crying, and he gasped noisily after he spoke. No telling where he was, except not in sight.

“All right,” said Jason, “I forgive you. Now are you all right? You in here because you’re sick?”

“Forgive!”

The unseen voice snuffled, and there was the sound of something heavy dragging fast across the floor. Then the place went quiet.

“Hello?” Jason continued forward, to where he thought he saw that flash of white. There was another desk, this one with an odd glass bell jar in its middle. He stepped past it, and as he did, his foot came down on something different than the pine board that had made the floor in the rest of this place. It was cloth. A swath of cloth, dropped there on the floor.

Jason bent down to have a look. It looked like it might be a pillowcase, although Jason didn’t think it was quite big enough.

He set down the candle on the table, and played out the fabric. It was a pillowcase, in that it was a white cloth sack—except, as he looked more closely, for the two holes that had been cut in it. They were perfect eye-holes.

Jason set it down and picked up the candle again. He held it out at arm’s length, and turned around. “Hey,” he called, more loudly now. “You forgot your ghost mask, sir. Why don’t you show yourself?”