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.
You will not stop me, Aunt Germaine. For I am about to do what you lacked the courage to. And I will not forget your betrayal neither.
She might try to use her authority—those terrible eyes of hers—to dissuade him, but Jason would not heed them.
I mean to kill him, he would say. I mean to kill him before I burn his evil quarantine to the ground. Yes. Just like you did to my mama’s homestead. I am going to burn this place and everything in it and they can damn well hang me for it if they can catch me.
Aunt Germaine would shrivel before the onslaught of his venomous rhetoric, and thus unencumbered, Jason would stride down the hall, to the office where Dr. Bergstrom lived. He would kick in the door rather than open it, and when Dr. Bergstrom opened his mouth to shout, Jason would raise the revolver, sight down its barrel, and before he put the bullet between the doctor’s no-good eyes, he would say…
He would say…
The corridor opened up into a larger room that Jason remembered. But this time, without the candlelight to blind him, he was able to apprehend a rectangle of light, or lighter darkness at any rate. A window? No—as Jason stumbled toward it, he saw that it was more than a window. Cool night air—air unsullied by that strange sweet smell—wafted in through an open door.
“Ha!” Jason left his scheming for a moment and hurried toward it.
He stumbled a moment over some carpeting, but regained his footing and continued, wondering: Who opened that door? Maybe that fellow in white, on his way out?
Maybe—maybe those things?
Even as he wondered that, the lighter dark flickered for a moment, as a shadow drew across it. Jason stopped dead. He pulled the sheet close around him, pressing it against the cut in his hand.
The shadow came back. This one, at least, was not in miniature. It was nearly as tall as the door—definitely a fellow—but hunched peculiarly.
“Mister—Mister Juke?” said the shadow.
Jason said: “Who?”
The shadow stepped to the door frame, and reached out a hand. There was the sound of a match being drawn, and then, a tiny glow of light. Jason squinted and looked at the dark face behind the flame.
“The Negro,” he gasped.
“Who are you?” said the Negro, holding the match forward and looking Jason up and down. “And what happened here?”
And then the match went out and the darkness closed back in on them. That did it.
“You better step out of the way, sir,” said Jason, “because this place is filled with Devils from Hell and I don’t want to stay here a minute longer.”
10 - The Autopsy
Andrew Waggoner stepped out of the way, and let the boy out. He looked like a performer in a Greek play—robed in a blood-spotted sheet, face twisted in agony. Andrew was in his own kind of pain. Two nights after his incident, and he had still managed to keep off the morphine, and here he was, gallivanting in the middle of the night outside the quarantine. But one look at this boy, the blood, the wild expression in his eye, ignited his physician’s instincts and let him set his own troubles aside.
“Come on,” he said, leading the boy over to a little stone bench. “Sit.”
“I want to get as far from here as I can.”
“That’s fine. But not before I get a look at you. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”
The boy squinted at him. “You’re the Negro doctor,” he said. “That right?”
Andrew let himself crack a smile. “Dr. Andrew Waggoner,” he said. “I prefer that to Negro Doctor, if you don’t mind. Particularly coming from a boy wearing a sheet.”
The boy nodded. Andrew was glad to see he seemed to be calming down.
“I’m Jason Thistledown,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Waggoner. Sam Green says you’re going to make trouble here. That’s good, far as I’m concerned.” He put his hand forward. It was covered in blood that welled from a long slice up the palm.
Andrew lit a match on the stone bench and took a closer look at it. The wound was deep, like he’d cut himself with a straight razor. “How’d you get this?”
“Scalpel,” said Jason.
Andrew looked him in the eye. “What are you fooling with a scalpel for?”
“My aunt gave it to me.”
“Well, I’ll have to give your aunt a talking-to. This is going to need stitches.”
“Fine by me on both counts, Dr. Waggoner. Now can we get away from here?”
“Of course we can,” said Andrew. “I think we’re going to have to help each other getting back, though. Neither of us is in very good shape tonight.”
That was an understatement. Andrew had not been in very good shape for two nights now. The first night he’d tried to get outside, have a look at the quarantine in the cover of the moonlight, he had been in such poor shape that he had only gotten as far as the south staircase before the pain forced him to turn back. Tonight, it had taken him half an hour to make it downstairs and out the back of the hospital. The best that he could do for it was stay still, work the bruised and pulled muscles slowly back to health.
But he knew that something was odd in the quarantine. And there were questions to which he’d received no satisfactory answer.
He had been standing outside, staring at the open door in the front of the great building, willing himself the strength to go a little farther, step inside, when the boy appeared in his bloody sheet.
Well, he thought as he tore a strip from the sheet and tied a bandage around Jason’s hand, there’ll be no more exploration tonight.
“You want help walking back?” said Jason. “My hand’s bad, but I can sure walk all right. And you—”
Andrew nodded. There was no point in standing on pride. “I’d appreciate it,” he said.
“The Klansmen do this to you?” asked Jason as they moved away from the quarantine, across the clear lawn between there and the back of the hospital.