Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

He made almost a complete circle with the candle looking for the fellow but stopped before he finished. That was when the candlelight fell on the huge wall that climbed high into the dark, with a set of double doors on it that were so high the candle could not see their top.

“Well,” said Jason, setting down the sheet on the table, “I’ll leave it here for you.”

He stepped up to the doors and started looking for a handle. Maybe this was the way outside.

It wasn’t. The doors were huge—the size of barn doors—and about as well-made. Where the rest of the quarantine seemed newer, designed to keep the bad air of one room from leaking into the next, the boards that made these doors were warped and decayed with gaps as big as fingers or wider going through them. And the breeze that came out did not carry the smell that Jason associated with a mountain town at night.

The air had that same thick sweetness, the smell of his mama and Cracked Wheel in their dying time, the smell he’d sniffed earlier. The air that wafted out was warm, too. Jason could not find a handle for these immense doors, but after a time he stopped trying. He pressed his face against the slats, and, one eye closed, used the other to peer inside.

He smiled in disbelief. There was some terrific party going on in there—filled with some of the most beautiful creatures he’d ever seen. There were what looked like hundreds of them, dancing and spinning—laughing as their hair whirled out from their heads, their arms akimbo. Every so often, one or the other of them would leap, into an arc twice the height of the others’ heads, spreading fairy dust behind it. And in their centre…

In their centre a figure sat that Jason had difficulty looking at. He was tall—a giant among the other revellers—with arms skinny like a scarecrow’s, and a head that was long and bent kind of funny in the middle, like it had been smacked with one of those mill logs that Sam Green talked about—and hair, that grew from his skull in tangles like branches off a deadfall. He looked around him, then up at Jason’s single eye staring through the wood—and then Jason stumbled forward as the doors swung inward, and the candle fell from his fingers and went out on the floor—and when he looked again, he stood in darkness.

The whistling enveloped him, and Jason felt an odd queasiness in his belly. Things moved close to him, nipping at his heels like cattle dogs—moving him forward. And he found that although it was dark, he could see—that the giant that stood in front of him was opening itself up, as though preparing for an embrace.

He realized then that his hand was wet. Warm and wet, where he clutched the scalpel at his chest. And it hurt.

He opened his hand, and delicately pulled the scalpel away from the wound it had made in the webbing at his thumb.

The pain must have done it. Jason was loose, from whatever odd spell had held him. Now it was a matter of taking the next step.

Hand bleeding into his sheet, pain thrumming up his body, Jason Thistledown turned on his heel and ran back into the dark depths of the Eliada quarantine.

§

Crossing the strange room with the desks and the cabinets was like crossing a continent. Several times Jason almost lost his sheet as it caught on corners of desks or warps in the floorboards. Finally striking the far wall, he was able to find the stairs again to return to the hallway, but if he had not thought of that he might have been in the room forever.

When he made it to the hallway, the whistling grew louder and he felt certain that as he made his way along tiny hands were grasping at the edge of the sheet. The pain in his hand grew stronger.

As did the anger. Jason thought he understood how it was that people got mad enough to kill. It was not a matter of defending your dead mama and her homestead from bandits: that was not what made you pull the trigger. It was rage—keening rage that went along a fellow’s nerves and mingled maybe with some physical pain that was there already, to make something truly powerful.

The good thing about that rage was it helped a fellow push down the terror. So as he worked his way down the hall, with tiny creatures perhaps dogging his steps and trying to draw him back to that—that leering thing—he stoked it, let it build, started to make himself some plans.

There were two guns in Aunt Germaine’s possession now—the Winchester, and the revolver. Well, he thought, I’ll only need one to do the trick. And it will be the revolver because it’s easier to stash under a coat.

He stumbled and nearly fell down the stairs when he came upon them, but quickly found his balance and continued. The blood in the sheet was slick against his bare chest, and he felt like he might faint or upchuck or both.