JRZDVLZ

by Lee Klein

  Nathaniel Leeds oversaw the press at the Umbria newspaper and distanced himself from the spoken-word world of the tavern. Illiterate Jukes had forever passed Leeds as though he were words on a page. But now the former approached the latter after thirty years of no more than a nod.

  “Mister Leeds. Honorable Leeds,” said Jukes. “Please confirm your relation to the Leeds Devil.”

  Nathaniel Leeds laughed. “No one has ever mentioned the similarity in surname other than my father, who said it related to a legend based on an old almanac we possess. My father asserted it was composed for monetary purposes, but he also said the Genuine Leeds American Almanack could be as valuable as I wanted it to be. I value its connection to predecessors. Impossibilities in the text— the monster that slaughters its family—I have always understood as sensationalist hoax.”

  Nathaniel Leeds had also always understood Jukes as crazed. Jukes’ father had been unpredictable: at times noble; at times volatile; at times he’d help anyone who needed it; at times he was reckless, dangerous, liable to beat with fists those he had helped. Now, this current Jukes—younger than Leeds by half—haunted the tavern and sand trails, and preyed on travelers through the pines like some utterly unremarkable beast himself.

  “Mr. Jukes,” Nathaniel said, his voice searching for tones suitable for confession more than lecture, “as I have aged, I have taken more interest in descriptions of William Leeds, in fact, than the so-called Leeds Devil. There is a fantastic call for information about him in the form of an annotated man, as well as excerpts of William Leeds’s apocalyptic writing from previous issues. These may fire your imagination as they have mine. The family history my father handed down—I am more stable than my distant relative, of course, but the era is easier now. I believe the obvious fantasy of the beast was conceived to regain readers lost to the work of Poor Richard Saunders. Confronted with such competition, their compendium of predictions, prophecies, and sundry usefulness they transformed into a purveyor of simple hoax. It was original and ambitious, and charged with such violence, it would have restored their almanac’s reputation had it been widely distributed, so entertaining, if not necessarily functional, were the drawings and prose.”

  Leeds’s words fed those blue-white, all-too-open eyes, and once Jukes thanked him excessively for the information, oh how Leeds regretted it. The tavern soon burned with so much talk about the Leeds Devil that it seemed Nathaniel might soon find himself at the center of renewed interest in the hunting of witches.

  Jukes ran with the news. He knew no division between history and fiction. “It’s true, true, all true,” he said. It became a chant, an incantation. Those in the tavern retold his stories to charge otherwise dull evenings with the imminence of slaughter. Peace and quiet were like a layer of ice—these tales pressed down until a boot cracked through. A week after his first visit to Leeds, Umbria seemed to shimmer. Any minute, Leeds’s skin might turn scalier than old man’s sclerosis. Was it not possible that beneath hat and coat were horns and tail?

  Leeds meanwhile proceeded as though he’d never said a word to Jukes. He did not act—had never acted—like a beast. He had always been reticent and hard-working, preferring The Crier to a society of open words. But ever since his children had left and his wife had died, some said he had not been the same and perhaps this heralded a shift of shape. Something was not right with him, anyone could tell, and yet he withheld that peculiarity, gracefully, stoically, very much unlike Branley Jukes.

  Jukes wore his sleeves long. He liked to tie a noose around his wrists and hang from the rafters. It pleased him to see the faces of his children when they found him. He savored the sight. When Branley was six, his own father properly hanged himself. Hanging from the wrists gave a sense of what the noose had done to his father’s neck. His children untied him. Blood-black bruises wound around his wrists like the handcuffs of an obscure sentinel.

  He had not hung himself by the wrists for weeks before he met us on the path to Umbria. But now he believed we were the ones who needed to hang from rafters until the evil in us dripped out and returned to its source in the sand.

  He had not hung himself since his focus turned to rooting me out, capturing me, killing me, and bringing about eternal paradise—the end of disease, misery, shame, poverty, death. But now Jukes tossed the rope over the strongest beam. He fished wrists through the loop and pulled it tight with his teeth. He stepped from the chair. Sinews stressed. Cruel thoughts magnified complaints beyond anything sane. All frustrations took the form of that threatening growler. Pain in his wrists scorched territories within him and a corresponding X marked the beast’s location in Umbria. Discovered hanging and helped down, Branley soothed his wrists in cloth soaked in fat and hurried to that spot. He peered through the window of a home to see Nathaniel Leeds leaning into a book, inhaling its essence.

  “The book,” he said, “if I get it I will get the beast, if not, no eternal paradise, no ever will we never die.”

  Pine needles carpeted the woods a soft orange. Anyone could creep around and not be heard, even a tavern-born troglodyte like Merkins, a former teacher who wore a beard that reached his cavernous navel. He did not value his remaining days too highly, but he did look forward to many more drinks before he reached the afterworld, and so he consented to Jukes’ demand for company. They waited until night. The trees revealed black limbs. Leeds’s house was isolated from others, and so they did not fear being seen. They stood at the window.

  They saw Leeds remove the Genuine Leeds Almanack from a glass case and a wrapping of silk. By candlelight, he read closely, attentively, hunched over, and then he leaned back. Eyes closed, he held his breath and exhaled before he returned to the pages.

  “Might he ever tire of it?” Jukes said.

  “Must be a splendorous work,” slurred Merkins.

  “The book of the beast,” said Jukes.

  “A righteous man would savor another book, would he not?”

  “Accursed histories. The way he sighs he sees his future there,” said Jukes. “Leeds the same as the old man I saw, shifts shapes, costumed now as a man.”

  “We should neither break into his home nor assert ungranted authority,” said Merkins.

  “We act in best interests and rightful causes,” said Jukes.

  “Only Sheriff Hopkins has that power.”

  Only Jukes had seen that claw, only he had heard Leeds’s story, only he had made connections, only he had brought the beast to life, only he would track it down. He would not submit to an authority other than his own awful obsession—fantasy would not bow to official realities—the law worked for pay instead of the fulfillment of undeniable instinct.

  Jukes knocked on the front door. Leeds opened it as though wary it might fall from lack of use. He let them in. A two-room cottage in which one old man had made himself comfortable through many winters. He had lined the windowsills with evergreen boughs and lit oil lanterns so the room glowed. A cone of cinnamon smoked on a silver tray.

  “Mr. Jukes,” Leeds said, “a pleasure to host you.”

  “The book,” he said. “We come for you to read it.”

  “The almanac?”

  “Merkins comes with me, do not worry, a respectable man, most respectable.”

  “An honor, sir,” said Merkins. “Most agreeable home you have.”

  “Why tonight, of all nights?”

  “Brisk and blustery, perfect for deviltries.”

  “Not so devilish,” said Leeds. “I read from it nightly and never tire.”

  I watched through the window as Leeds read Japhet’s account of my birth. He read like a performer. So familiar with its rhythm and texture, his visitors for a time seemed enchanted. Midway through the reading, however, Jukes and Merkins shared a look.

  “The game’s the fresh meat, isn’t that right?” said Jukes.

  “I don’t understand,” said Leeds.

  “The game’s the fresh meat, do you believe it?”

  “I understand you
r words but not their intent,” said Leeds.

  “He doesn’t understand,” Jukes said to Merkins. “A mark.”

  “Of what?” said Leeds.

  “You know nothing of fresh meat?”

  “Is this some riddle?”

  “The game’s the fresh meat, I say.”

  Leeds pronounced the opaque phrase, rounding out the words instead of slurring them, saying each slowly and clearly as though proper enunciation might break the code.

  “The game is the fresh meat!” shouted Jukes.

  “I neither understand this phrase nor why I let this madman into my home.”

  “Can you imagine me a madman, Merkins, when Leeds’s so mad he’s no inkling of what it means when we say fresh meat’s the game. Do you see him with such a bitty bearded face, cruel fingers, horns hidden, saying I’m lunaticked ... when I acknowledge the game is fresh meat, and yet he denies it. Do you think if my fathers or his father or someone even farther down the line of fathers left a record to say why it was they did what they did, do you think I might invite someone to my home to hear me read from it? The game, you see, is the fresh meat.”

  Branley shot his sleeves so they fell about the elbows. Leeds saw the bruises on his guest’s wrists. He seemed almost to understand this talk of fresh meat.

  “First,” said Leeds, “I did not invite you to listen to my relatives’ story. Second, I knew your father. He was not an unkind man, though few understood him, for, like you, he was not easy to understand. He was a man whose sensitivities, whose tenderness, gave way to regular violence. I did not know you discovered his—”

  “You tormented him so he roped the roof, you churned the oceans that took my grandfathers, made my mother run into wildfire, my grandmother swallow mercury, it was you, the beast, the fresh meat, the game. It was you, the quarry, the hunted, the target. Let’s sees your horned hands. The beast himself here, those horned fingers, let’s hear again that growl.”

  “I have told you a number of times that the beast, if it exists, is not my relative by blood. This is a simple almanac, something I read to fill my time. You cannot hold it, but Mr. Merkins can look on these pages and see that what I say appears here in print.”

  Merkins sat with excellent posture, but leaned alternately to the left and right, like a bearded metronome about to nap.

  Jukes slapped Merkins’ shoulder. “Confirm what he reads.”

  Leeds politely held the back of his hand to mouth and nose. Merkins must have smelled of stale brandy, whiskey, mead: sweet scents cutting through others more sour.

  “Merkins?” said Jukes.

  The words swam one into the next: if reading the Constitution, he would not have recognized We the People. Merkins raised a cracked red hand over an eye.

  “It says here,” he said, “it says ...”

  “Yes, yes, what’s it?” Jukes leaned forward, suspicions confirmed.

  “It says the beast is this man here. It says the beast is a dangerous bird.”

  “A dangerous bird?” Leeds mocked, incredulous. “It says nothing of the sort.”

  “No, no, right here, right here.” Merkins pointed to an arbitrary line.

  “Sinister. Yes. That word appears. Wings are mentioned. Yes. But—”

  “You want me to believe you when mine good friend Merkins here, a schoolteacher, once the finest, confirms you untrustable.”

  “I see the words clear as the flame of that candle and your friend covers an eye to read yet might as well have both eyes shut.”

  “Oh here we go, here we go, Merkins, now this old man forces us out of his house, and how will he force us out with no strength in his arms at all? How might he manage, you think?”

  Now covering the other eye, squinting, Merkins said, “Well, it does say here he’s the beast. It says a man like him will haunt the land forever and not until he is deposed will we know paradise.”

  Merkins was not drunk enough to forget that Jukes carried knives—he’d often seen Jukes sharpening them—and he knew Jukes liked to throw them. They were not something Merkins wanted to enter his heart. And so he chose to let Jukes hear what he had wanted to hear. Yet if Jukes attacked this poor old man, Merkins believed he would protect him best he could.

  “Take your finger from the book,” Leeds said. “It’s filthy, and the book is delicate.”

  “Merkins, he values books more than his lives.”

  “I value my peace and sanity,” Leeds said, “and you are upsetting both.”

  “Transform then, beast, to protect yourself.” “If I could I would to run you out.”

  “He threatens us, Merkins! He threatens us with transformation and death.”

  “I have coins and modest jewels from my late wife. They are yours if you leave.”

  “Hear that, Merkins. Show us shiny things, all smiles and peace. So easy he thinks it is. Gives us the book and we spare you.”

  Leeds held the book as though some force within it protected from intruders. Perhaps Jukes was right about its abilities. An impossible beast might burst from the pages and protect those who loved it. If only the drawing of William Leeds emerged to annihilate these intruders.

  The book was not much taller than the fists that gripped its sides. Leeds closed his eyes, pulled the book to his chest, and threw his arms toward the men again. He shoved the cover at his guests and unleashed a breath he’d been holding since he read to the men, before they had arrived, before any of it—a breath he had begun holding before his wife died, before his children were born, before he himself was born—a breath he’d started holding when the creators of the almanac encountered competition from Benjamin Franklin, when they concocted fictions to secure advantages for their practical compendium, when William Leeds walked into the wilderness away from wife and a dozen children, when they came to this country, when dissatisfaction spurred them to cross an ocean to this unproven place.

  Leeds released his breath in a shockwave shout. So uncommon in his silent home, it seemed the windows would shatter once ears stopped ringing with the violence that had come from him, propelled by blood more than voice, from veins more than throat.

  “Feisty, isn’t he?” Jukes said and stood. He reached for the blades strapped to the small of his back.

  “Leave him in peace,” Merkins said. “He’s no harm. Let him rest. Look at him.”

  All Leeds had to defend himself was this demonstration of his lack of defenses. The book he held in front of him like it could ward off evil. He stood frozen as though the men would leave if he tightly closed his eyes.

  “You think I can throw a blade through the pages all the way to his skin?”

  Jukes held a knife out so the handle pointed at Leeds, who saw no evil, heard no evil, as though his shout had devastated his senses.

  “Flick wrist, pierce book and heart, nights end, summers stay forever. A blade that changes night to day, famine to feast.”

  “Let’s make it back to the Bucket for a glass,” said Merkins. “It’s a book—no more, no less—and it’s a man, no better or worse than any other.”

  “You read from it, you read from it, and you said it’s the beast, you read from it and said the beast’s in it. Look at him and tell me he’s not the beast, skins thickening, hardening, scaling into rightful self. I see the beast in this statue of a man. I throw this blade at the book without wasting more words.”

  Merkins moved in front of Leeds. “I could not see the words well enough and only said what I said to appease you,” he said.

  “Move away now so I can do what needs to be done.” Jukes flipped the blade he held in the air and caught it by the handle and with his other hand removed another knife and held both blades out.

  Leeds’s eyes were shut so well he probably hardly heard what Merkins had said. If Leeds’s eyes were open he would have seen a swift movement in front of Merkins who stumbled toward Jukes and collapsed. Jukes flipped his blade again and pointed the handle at the book and threw it, one eye squinted for accuracy. If hi
s eyes were open, Leeds would have seen the blade tumble toward him and enter the Genuine Leeds Almanack, dead in its center, and not continue through to skin.

  He held the book so tightly it did not tear or fall. If Leeds’s eyes were open he would have seen Jukes pull the blade from Merkins’s throat and wipe the blood on his gasping friend’s leg. And then Leeds would have seen Jukes step ahead and flip the same blade that had downed Leeds’s defender and he would see the blade tumble through air again to enter his chest. His grip on the Genuine Leeds Almanack loosened, the book dropped, he lived for another moment on the fumes of what had been his life, legs liquefied, and there on the floor Leeds would have died if he had not released his grip on life the moment he had thrust the book at Jukes and exhaled that shout, hoping a fiction might emerge from the pages and protect him.

  II

  Jukes lifted the impaled book like it was unrelated to the man at his feet. He extinguished the candles, stepped around Merkins and Leeds, and then slipped into the night.

  He headed toward town as though conveyed by the path at his feet. At the door of the Bucket he hesitated, impaled almanac in hand. An ordinary man may have taken this time to escape before the bodies were found and the hunt was on. But Branley Jukes was extraordinary.

  He pushed open the door. Safe place, he thought, no one looks for me here, invisible like old smoke, no one knows where I went, what I did. Look at them alive in paradise, no one knows it’s the end of sorrows, our only trouble an overabundance of ease. No one knows they’ve entered a new realm now, summer heat will rise with the sun and never leave again, the beast slain by a most valiant Umbrian knight. Once they discover the beast they’ll rename the town for generations accused who sacrificed themselves so I could save everyone.