“No. Just dead.”
Bergstrom smirked. “You really have no capacity for it, do you, Dr. Waggoner? You are just a low nigger, after all.”
“Dr. Bergstrom,” said Mrs. Harper in a sharp tone. “There are other matters at hand. Perhaps you could assist us in determining the whereabouts of my daughter.”
Bergstrom withdrew one hand from his pocket, and fanned his fingers out on the tabletop. The nails on three of his fingers had been torn, and the quick under them glistened darkly. “Your daughter. Ruth. She is with God.” Mrs. Harper gasped and clutched at her husband’s shoulders. Bergstrom’s coat flapped open.
“Oh, not like that. No. Sorry.” He smirked. “She still breathes, still breathes. All is well. And that is why I came here.” He withdrew his other hand, and leaned on it too. “To prepare us all—for as I said…”
Andrew stared at Bergstrom’s exposed mid-section. Nestled inside the coat were the things that Andrew had seen once before. On the hillside, crawling out of Loo Tavish. These were smaller than that creature, barely the size of a child’s hand—but they were unmistakable, crawling like thin, long-limbed rats across Bergstrom’s scarred, infected gut.
“The Father rejoins the Son today!” said Bergstrom.
Mrs. Harper shrieked—and Andrew counted five small creatures before they dropped like ripe fruit and scurried across the floor, before the whistling took up. Bergstrom straightened and cast off his coat, and tore away at his shirt. His flesh was bruised and swollen in places. It seemed to move with inhuman musculature. It only confirmed what Andrew had been thinking—it was the answer to the question he had asked Norma Tavish on the mountainside: Do these things ever lay their eggs in men?
Andrew was now sure that they did. The writhing flesh on Bergstrom was testimony to that. These things had laid eggs beneath that skin. But there was no umbilical—no uterine wall from which to feed. So they had immediately begun to feed off—what?
Andrew shuddered. Bergstrom had been a fat man in the fall. And that—his fat—is what they’d fed on. He had been their regimen…
… those tiny cherubs…
Andrew took a breath. It was hard to hold his eye on one of them as they drifted up onto the table, laughing in high voices that might have been whistles. He felt what seemed like a great, hot wind upon him, and when he looked up, it seemed as though the ceiling, the very roof of this house had been torn away—and above, the sky opened into a great vortex. If he looked at it long, Andrew was sure he would overbalance and fall up. But he looked up again, and the ceiling was as it was, bare pine boards, with great hooks for pots and other implements sticking out of the wide beams that criss-crossed it. The cherub that seemed to have been prancing on the table turned small, and squat—a greyish-pink thing, with no fur but a thin baby-fuzz, and long curved claws that clicked on the table. Andrew lifted his plate and swatted it. The creature howled and scurried off.
Then Andrew coughed, and bent, and looked around again.
Nils Bergstrom stood before him, arms spread and belly reshaping itself while Mister Juke’s demonic offspring scurried and danced around him. He glared across the table at Andrew, with what he must have imagined was divine wrath in his eye.
Andrew could understand that. Of everyone whom Bergstrom had caught meeting in this kitchen, only Andrew Waggoner had dared not bow down before his delusion. The rest—even Sam Green—had all bent low to the ground, trembling. They thought—believed—knew that what they were seeing was God manifest in man. Only Norma’s drug, and the things he had seen already, let Andrew see Bergstrom for what he was.
“You’re sick,” said Andrew. “You’re going to die from this.”
“I am reconciled,” said Bergstrom, his arms extended to either side and trembling, “to my God. Unlike yourself, Dr. Nigger. You cannot even look upon Him.”
“I don’t see God here,” said Andrew. “I see a trick—I see…” he motioned to one of the juveniles, perched like a Notre Dame gargoyle on a pine shelf behind where Mrs. Harper bent and wept. “I don’t see God.”
“Then you are blind.” He smiled. “Outcast.”
“Nils, you’re in grave danger right now, said Andrew. “Those things in you—they’ll kill you. Just like they did Maryanne Leonard. Only I think it’ll be worse for you. You’re going to need surgery—”
“Shut your mouth.”
Bergstrom held his hands out and shut his eyes, as though he were listening to some unheard voice. Then he opened them again and looked straight at Andrew. “Why are you alive, Dr. Waggoner?”
“I’m alive,” said Andrew carefully, “because I’m clever enough to know when I’ve overstayed my welcome. Nils, pull yourself out from this insanity. Drink some damn tea—” he offered his cup “—and sit down, and think about what you’ve done to yourself. Then we’ll go and cut those things out of you—as many as we can.”
His hand was shaking awfully as he extended the cup. Bergstrom, encumbered but still nimble, reached across and with a flick of his wrist, knocked it from his hand. The cup shattered on the floor.
“Keep your poison!” he snapped. “You cannot cut me out—that was among the first things that Nils learned when he began to study my effects.”
“Ah,” said Andrew. “So you—so Dr. Bergstrom, has been making a proper study of this.”
“Bergstrom has always sought truth in nature. That is why I came to him.”
Andrew chose his next words carefully. Bergstrom had tried to kill him—he’d thought, from pure wickedness. But he was vulnerable now, trapped in a delusion, speaking of himself in a disassociative way… as though it were someone else speaking through him.
But delusion or no, Bergstrom certainly came here with a message. Andrew thought he might have a better time drawing that message, and more, from the thing that Bergstrom believed possessed him.
“All right,” said Andrew. “Why don’t you tell me, how it is you came to Dr. Bergstrom. Why don’t you deliver me your gospel.”
Around them, the whistling grew. In a distant wing of the house, something that sounded like a gunshot rang out. But he didn’t let himself become distracted by any of it.
“Sit,” said Bergstrom. “I command you.”
Andrew pulled up a stool amid the grovelling others, and got ready to listen.
“My father,” said Nils Bergstrom, “is the mountains. He is the trees and the sky and the forest. All this.” He spread his arms above him to indicate the whole kitchen, and by implication, Andrew thought, pretty well everything else. “So has He been for as long as men have walked this land, He has been their protector.”
The Harpers had managed to climb as far as their knees, draw their hands together in prayer, and they looked up at Nils Bergstrom. Andrew didn’t have to guess; it was clear they were looking not at but through Bergstrom, at nothing but pure eternity. Sam Green was still bent over; his shoulders shaking, forehead pressed against the flagstone floor. The Jukes had withdrawn to shadow; they only revealed their presence by their soft whistling, the clicking of their talons on the tops of hanging pots and the beams of the ceiling. Andrew fought to keep his eyes off them all—all but Nils Bergstrom.
“Praise your Father,” said Andrew.
“And so men do. Those who praise. The Feegers.”
“Feegers,” said Andrew. “What do they have to do with—”
Bergstrom didn’t let him finish. “Yet lo, do they wither. Sickness and weakness and their own animal natures—lo, do they wither. Such a withering came upon the Father’s men, and their women and young also, not a winter’s past. They grew hot and cold and their chests filled with water and many died. The Father wept for them. And he cried out—and his angels, for there were many, cried with him. And in the depths of his despair—came a wandering man—this one.” Bergstrom jammed a thumb into his chest, while Jukes chittered from the rafters. “Come did he, with balms and knives and blankets, up the mountain-slope, and see to those folk as best he might.