Lothar was at peace with that; same as any man, he would stand aside for God. Why, if God chose to murder young Missy, strangle her in the space between beds—leave her there, as the Mothers squirmed and cried out…
If that were His choice—Lothar would not object.
But the nigger… the pretending nigger—taking up the song, standing here at his Oracle’s side…
Lothar wouldn’t allow it.
Lothar stepped out—he resisted the song, with all the agony in his heart.
He would show her, the sweet girl who would not spill more blood than she needed. He would show her, what the crone and the nigger had done to her sister.
Lothar pushed forward, and knocked the pretender aside. And as the Oracle stared at him, he dropped the still corpse of her sister at her feet. And the nigger… he screamed like a pig.
The cyclone stilled, and Heaven sloughed away; what had been gates made from gold, turned back to weathered grey timber. Those multitudes, ready a moment ago to do battle for their God, knelt in mud. Andrew Waggoner crouched not at the top of a great stone staircase, but on the loading platform of the sawmill at Eliada.
At his knees—
—a dead girl. Just a child—the child that Germaine Frost had murdered, while Andrew stood helpless.
That’s three you didn’t save.
Andrew drew a ragged breath. There was no time for remorse; he’d been given a reprieve, the pain that sheared up in his arm gave him a moment away from the sorcery the Juke worked. And that remorse—that guilt—was a fast route back to the lie.
He blinked in the morning light and took stock. The girl was on the deck in front of him; to one side, a black-haired young man dressed in the buckskin uniform of these people, a hatchet in his hand. The Oracle girl knelt now to touch the child’s brow; her sister, Lily, stood with her fists bunched, eyes in tears. And just beyond, stood Annie Rowe, her hands clasped in prayer as she looked with eyes that nearly glowed, to the open doors, the dark cavern of the sawmill itself—like she was looking through the Gates of Heaven, toward salvation. Andrew looked there too. It was all dark, but for a square of light at the corner. It could be salvation; that was the riverside loading bay. Past it was a dock, and then the frigid waters of the Kootenai.
Andrew got to his feet, biting down on another scream. His arm was bad now—and he wondered if he would be able to keep it when this was all done. If he survived.
He staggered to Annie, and grabbed her with his good arm.
“Come on, Annie,” he said, and when she looked confused, he added: “Let’s go see Jesus.”
That was all it took to convince her. The two of them dashed into the belly of the sawmill, stepping into shadow even as the buck-skinned man pointed his hatchet at them and bleated into the silence.
The angels became quiet, and fell to the earth, the trunks of trees, and a silence fell upon the world. Ruth blinked and looked around, and down at her gun. The angels looked around themselves too, their faces wide, innocent—as Ruth Harper’s, only in miniature, in a multitude.
Jason opened his mouth to speak to her, tell her to put the gun down, but no words would come. He looked from one to another—to Ruth Harper, perched in the low crook of a branch, to others on the edge of the road, peering between strands of grass; still more higher in the branches of the tamarack, gazing down at him. Silent.
“They’re foolin’ you, Jason,” said Sam Green.
“I know,” he whispered.
“They’re the Devil.”
Jason looked down at Green. “Ain’t so,” he said. “They’re animals.”
Green looked up at him, his eyes ghastly white in their sockets. “They’re more than animals. They’re liars, Jason. They could… they make you think they’re God. They could be… they could be God.”
“You sayin’ there’s no God?”
“Don’t blaspheme,” he said. “God’s great and true. But these things… They act so much like God… like Jesus… A fellow could be made to wonder, where to place his faith exactly. In God and Jesus, or these things that look just the same? And that’s the Devil’s work.”
“I’m not fooled,” said Jason.
“Yeah,” said Green. “Not now you aren’t. That whistling’s stopped. You have to make up your mind. Before it starts.”
“It starts.”
The voice came from everywhere—all the creatures, in words and whistling. Ruth—the hundred or more of her, that inhabited the trees—they all looked up, and Ruth opened her mouth and the song came up again, and the face of Ruth Harper faded from the world, until it was only Her own, held high.
Jason looked at Sam Green—watched him shift and change again, the features melt, and him grow, until it wasn’t Sam Green anymore—but John Thistledown, burned not from a battle at the Harper mansion, but ten years in Hell. Ruth was singing this—making another lie for him, the way the song had before. Filled with the Juke’s issue, she was spinning its lie where the other had stopped.
Jason stood up, let go of the jar.
“Go on,” he said. “Do the hard thing. Stop the spread.”
“Good boy,” said the apparition.
And then, as the song she sang grew, Jason stepped up to Ruth Harper.
And she sang, and Jason said, “Yes,” and then took hold of the gun in her limp hand. Before she could let go of it, he squeezed her finger on the trigger.
Andrew wished he had a notebook, or better, a camera, and the wit and time to use it. Standing before Mister Juke, stripped of illusion, it occurred to him that he might well have been the first man—the first scientist—to properly see this thing… .
This God.
Mister Juke hung in the rafters of the great building; stretched out, the creature almost extended its full length, like the branches of some tree. Any resemblance to a man was gone now. The construction that Andrew had made in his own mind, of some great Dauphin, the all-seeing giant who ruled over a Parisian Heaven… that was nowhere to be seen in the thing this creature had become. One might be tempted to call it formless, for it was hard to see where a head, arms—even an abdomen—might begin and end.
The only feature Andrew make out clearly was its mouths.
They descended on fleshy stalks, from the rafters over the great saw-blade which now sat still. They were circular too, those mouths, like those of a lamprey eel’s. Andrew wasn’t close enough to tell if the similarity extended to concentric circles of teeth; the way they dangled and twitched, he decided it best not to check. But small wonder that the attempt to hang this thing had so little effect. Who could say what shape the Juke had possessed, even when Bergstrom took it down from the mountain in its infant state? The creature’s seduction of this town, of the fools who would first try to kill it, then attempt worship of it, had drawn its lies from their hearts from the very first. Man or woman or hermaphrodite—the thing was as suggestive as a cloud, and as malleable.
“What—oh Lord,” Annie said, and Andrew squeezed her arm hard.
“We have an instant, Annie. And then we’re gone.” He pointed to the far side of the sawmill, where the bay opened up onto the river itself; he spared a glance over his shoulder, where the north-facing bay filled with shadows of the Feegers.
“Stay!” he shouted at them, and still conditioned to hear his voice as the Juke’s, they obeyed.