“We ain’t to burn the Mother,” he said, as though that explained everything.
And before Andrew could say anything else, Norma whispered to him: “Don’t fight him. You got wounds to tend, Doctor.”
Now the fire was roaring, billowing smoke into the pines, over the roofs of the other shacks up here. The forest was filled with the sound of it crackling, of it whistling.
“They’re fightin’ it best they can,” said Norma. “Smoke distracts them. But… it’s goin’ to be a hard fight. They could be headin’ to the hill, before too long. Worshipping.” She said the word the way other old women might say “fornicating.”
Andrew shook his head. “I thought you folk didn’t care for God and priests.”
“Faerie King’s changing ’em. Working ’em.”
“Why are they like that and you all are free?”
“I’m older,” said Norma. “They’re younger. They’re all more one family then I am.”
Andrew nodded. Norma was older—in terms of her own germ plasm, she was a generation or two removed from most of these others.
“And the Juke does best in a family.”
She shrugged. “If I let it, over time it’ll get to me too.”
“I met one of those things, you know,” he said. “At the hanging tree.”
She didn’t say anything—just squinted at the smoke coming up.
Andrew thought back, to that small face he’d seen for a moment, the thing crouched on his chest. He thought about the creature that had gone after Jason in the quarantine. The quarantine where Dr. Bergstrom had hidden away his own Faerie King, the strange hermaphrodite Mister Juke. Hidden away, like, Andrew thought now, some secret, mystical treasure. A treasure that he would not let an outsider—an infidel—a nigger—like Andrew Waggoner lay eyes upon.
“If they fail… They’re going to want the baby Juke,” said Andrew. “Aren’t they?”
“They think you’re carin’ for it,” said Norma. “That’s the only reason they’re leavin’ you alone. Soon, I’ll be able to help them. But soon ain’t now.”
He let the door close slowly and turned to look at her. “You have a pretty good idea about how this goes. Norma, have you seen this happen before?”
She looked back at the jar. From inside, the thing might have been peering out. She nodded slowly.
Andrew took another stab in the dark. “Feeger,” he said. “That doesn’t mean feeble, does it?”
Norma shook her head. “It don’t mean feeble,” she said. “It’s a name—a family, lived here as long as us.”
“And Hank doesn’t want to ‘turn Feeger.’ That means—this family, they fell into the thrall?”
“We should kill that thing,” said Norma, stepping toward it and staring at it. “Cover its air-holes and let it smother.”
Andrew kept Norma clear of the jar, but he wasn’t trying save the thing’s life. He was being a scientist, he told himself: staying near, watching it through the glass, wishing again he had something to write on to record his observations. Because damnation, they were inconstant.
Was it elongate, mantis-like? A fat toad, with silvery-grey flesh pressed against the side of the glass like bloated fruit in a preserve?
A baby?
Light?
It might have been all of those things at one time or another. Notes might have helped, later.
It sat still for an hour, staring out with black and unblinking eyes. Then it became agitated, throwing itself against the sides of the jar. Andrew held it still so it wouldn’t shatter; this made the creature angrier. It whistled—that sound that Andrew had heard before, and he surmised was the thing’s speech. He sent Norma to the door, to see if anyone were coming but no one was—they were all in their mystical trance around the bonfire.
“You make them see God,” said Andrew as the thing slid down the side of the jar, like it was falling into despair. “That’s how it works, isn’t it? You make them see God with your narcotic fumes, and so they think they’re special, and that makes them think you are special. They start to worship. That how it works?”
The thing ran a clawed hand down the glass.
“Then what happens? You get bigger, with all the food they give you—and you go lay your eggs in one of their girls? And so it goes?”
“Hey,” said Norma. “Don’t be talkin’ to it. That’s how it starts!”
“Shhh,” said Andrew. He felt an awful black thing welling in him—a deep hatred that he could barely put a name to. He saw Maryanne Leonard, he saw Lou-Ellen Tavish… he saw Jason Thistledown, trapped in the quarantine. Dr. Nils Bergstrom, driven mad by it he figured, pulled from his course of sterilization. And he saw this thing in the jar, a dim angry shape, ever-changing, like a djinni in a bottle.
His hands were shaking as he lifted the jar off the shelf. He sat down by the stove, with the jar on his lap. The thing was moving in circles now. Spinning. Let it spin, he thought nastily, wear itself out.
“All because we’re willing to believe,” said Andrew. And with his good hand, he covered the air-holes, but he couldn’t bring himself to keep it there. He half-turned back to Norma.
“You were right to want to kill it,” he said, as the thing flopped and struggled and cursed, its whistles muffled by suffocating glass.
Andrew did not kill the thing right then. But it died on its own all the same. If it were older it might have made it—like the Juke that’d hung and lived in Eliada. But this was a baby—a newborn. It sent noise from the jar as it expired—tapping and scratching and whistling. It was hard to see what it was doing, because the glass was so streaked with mucous and blood. But its death was not quiet.
As the creature died, Andrew huddled like a boy in the arms of the old mountain woman, curled around the raw spot in his middle where so far as he could tell, his soul had once resided; while around them, the forest whistled and screamed the baby Juke’s dying lament up and down the mountainside.
PART II
Nature
16 - Saint Lothar
The Oracle woke a-screaming that night.
Before she was done, she was joined by her sisters—Missy, who was waiting up during that part of the night anyway, hunkered in the crook of a fallen tree—and then Lily, who slept on the flat of a creek-side rock.
The three girls screamed until they lost their wind and paused, looking around blinking to see what attention it brought them.
It took time to find out. The rest of the Feegers were camped downstream, most all of them out cold from the labour of the past days, preparing the march and making that first hard climb, down rock-face and scrub slope, carrying all they needed. By the time they got down to the stream, a spot in the crook of two mountains like the bend of a lady’s middle, they curled up and slept like the dead.
And you don’t wake the dead with just a shout. So it took time, and that did not make the Oracle happy. She demanded to know where the Feegers were. Just to show she meant business, she swatted Lily a good one across the ear.
“I have word from Him,” said the Oracle Patricia. “Gather my people.”
And so Lily and Missy took off for the camp, and the Oracle was left alone a moment before they came. She calmed herself, hand on belly, walking into the rushing stream that was made dim silver by the moon. She caressed her belly, which was still small.
She dropped to her knees in the cold mountain water, felt the ice travel up her thighs to her middle, where the Host waited for their larder to fill. If it weren’t filling, they’d start in on her straight away—but they were wise enough to know that there was a proper time of things.