Minutes later, Jason had the lock off and the door open. The room was dark, and damp, and he held the candle over his head he saw them: Ruth, crouched as if in prayer, hands held together and eyes wet—and behind her, Louise; lying on the floor, curled around herself.
Ruth stumbled to her feet and ran to him. Jason caught her in one arm, as he stepped inside and pulled the door shut.
Ruth pulled back and looked at the door. “Wh-what are you doing?” she said. “We have to get out of here—warn my father and Mr. Green and the Pinkertons! Your aunt—”
“Just a minute.” Jason squinted around the room. The shelves were still filled with jars containing the grotesqueries of the Eliada surgery. It didn’t take him long to find the other, tiny earthenware jar, sitting on a shelf near the door, its lid removed.
“We can’t leave,” said Jason, letting go of Ruth and stepping up to the jar. He peered into it—there was a tiny twist of something that looked like a root, but streaked with white. He carefully picked up the lid and screwed it back on—and then, although he knew it was pointless, Jason dribbled some candle-wax over it. He looked at Louise, who was beginning to stir from a very deep sleep, and turned back to Ruth.
“We have to stay here,” he said. “It ain’t safe outside.”
Louise sat up and coughed. She regarded Jason, or at least the candle that he held, with narrowed eyes. “You shouldn’t leave that going in here, if we’re to stay, she said sleepily. There’s not much air circulation here.”
Jason blew the candle out. “We’re to stay here,” he said. “So we’ll leave the candle out.” The darkness was suffocating and disorienting. Jason groped in it, until he found Ruth’s arm. He drew her to him.
“You do mean to stay,” said Louise quietly. “That’s kind of you.”
Ruth stood close to Jason. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. You—”
“It’s all right,” said Jason.
“I so pushed you to come out last night; mocked you for being afraid. But I know—there are some things that you should be afraid of.”
“It’s all right.”
Jason led her away from the door, taking care not to knock anything over. “But as dangerous as it is out there—we can’t wait here. They’ll come back!”
“We have to wait here,” said Jason. “No choice.”
“Jason is right,” said Louise weakly, in the dark. “No choice.”
A shiver went through Jason. “Hey Louise,” he said, “you remember what happened to you?”
Louise sniffled. “Yes. I took the material back to my room and was reading it by lamplight. Your—your aunt came in. She was accompanied by—”
“Say it,” said Ruth, acidly. “She was accompanied by Mr. Harris. The very fellow who had brought us her bag in the first place. What a traitor.”
“She didn’t say anything,” said Louise. “I tried to apologize, but she struck me. I woke up here.”
“You all right?” asked Jason.
“No,” said Louise, miserably. “No.”
“She hit Louise on the head,” said Ruth. “It’s a wonder she didn’t kill her.”
Jason didn’t think that Louise was being troubled by a sore skull right now. And he thought she knew that as well as any of them.
“Louise,” he said, “how far did you get in Germaine’s letters?”
“Not far,” she said, a little too quickly. In the dark, Jason nodded.
She knows, he thought. She knows that we’re locked in here with the Cave Germ. She knows what it did to Cracked Wheel; she knows what it is likely to do to both her and Ruth, and she’s probably figured out what it is already doing to her.
And for whatever reason, she’s not told Ruth a thing about it.
“That’s too bad,” he said to Louise. And to Ruth: “Let’s go sit down and rest a spell. You can tell me what happened to you.”
“Ah, of course,” she said as they settled down against the cool stone of a wall. “You must have so many questions.”
“Last I saw you, you were bustin’ into the quarantine,” he said. “Did you—hey!”
Jason rubbed his shoulder where she’d punched it.
“So many questions,” she repeated.
“Sorry,” said Jason, and she hit him again—not as hard this time, but still firmly.
“Stop apologizing. All right, then—let me set an example. This, Jason, is how one answers a question honestly put. I didn’t bust into the quarantine. I fled there. The forest—it seemed to me that it was filled with beasts. That thing that had attached itself to the girl in the woods… there were more of them. Countless…”
“I know.”
“I suppose that you do. My God, how did you escape them?”
I didn’t, he thought.
“Well. I bolted across the green, and as I fell against the wall, I was fortunate enough to see a crack with light coming through. So I tried my luck—and fell inside.”
After a moment, Jason asked her what she saw in there.
“Light,” she said. “Brilliant light.”
“And what else?”
“It—” she paused again. “It’s hard to say, because… sight was not a part of it. What I saw was—well, something larger.”
Jason decided to help her along: “Like a very tall man, with tiny creatures dancing around it in a circle?”
“Now you’re making fun,” she said. “No. No tall men. No tiny pixies. Just—a kind of brilliance. A kind of basking warmth. I felt as though I were—not vanishing, that’s not precisely the word… but—cut loose, perhaps.” She paused. “Are you making fun of me?”
“No ma’am,” said Jason.
“Then what do you mean, some tall fellow, with creatures dancing around it?”
“It’s only—that is what I saw, when I went—when Bergstrom locked me up in that quarantine. Don’t you remember? I thought I told you about them back in the orchard.”
“Did you?”
“I’m pretty sure of it.”
Ruth sat quietly for a moment. “Yes,” she said, “you did. I remember now. Why would I have forgotten that?”
“Maybe all that brightness shook you up.”
“Maybe. Things took a turn then. I felt—I felt as though in the midst of this, someone—something, perhaps—glimpsed me. That I stood naked before… something that was… vast. As big as a mountain. Perhaps that was your tall man?”
“That sounds a lot bigger—” Jason stopped himself. He remembered what Sam Green had told him: the Juke was growing. “No, no. It could well be.”
“And then…”
More quiet. Ruth leaned against him, rested her head on his shoulder. Finally, Jason prompted her to continue, but it wasn’t Ruth who answered.
“That’s all she remembers,” said Louise. Although she sounded weaker before, her tone was firm “If you are going to remain here, you should let her rest.”
“All right,” said Jason. He shifted so that she rested against his chest and not his shoulder. She snuggled close and wept quietly, her tears cooling on his shirt, and Jason struggled to control his own.
“Do you believe in fate, Jason?”
“We talked about this.” Jason was having a hard time keeping his eyes open; the air in here being as stale as it was, and with the sickly fumes from the pickled innards all around them, he wanted to pass right out. “Back at the party.”
“It was outside the cider house actually,” she said. “And I believe I told you I believe in fate. But you never answered me.”
Jason was quiet until Ruth said, sharply: “Jason!” and he sighed.