JRZDVLZ

by Lee Klein

  Jermaine loped toward the house, a lone soldier invading an army, as his siblings held their ground. December crouched as though to hide behind her knees. Gus crossed his arms low across his belly, protecting upset guts the best he could.

  “A house like any other,” said Gus, “no need to worry.”

  “What’s that?” December whispered and pointed toward the entrance.

  “What do you see?” said Gus.

  “Through the trees, along the ground,” she said.

  Jermaine returned to their side. “Let’s wait,” he said.

  “For what?” said December.

  Coming toward them, a white apparition in the orchard. December started across the bridge. Her brothers looked at what walked toward them as their sister’s legs propelled her down a footpath along the other side of the river. Her brothers ran, too, more not to lose her than to flee the orchard, or so they later claimed.

  December had no trouble distancing herself from that bridge. She saw her brothers running, if not screaming as she’d be if she were closer to whatever she’d seen. Her first thought when she saw the wedding dress: her father’s story was true.

  Jermaine and Gus caught her, nearly to the ferry.

  “Does it follow?” she said. “Did you see it? Do you know what it was?”

  “I saw a wedding dress,” said Jermaine, “but that cannot be.”

  “If father saw what we saw and—” said December.

  “We chased after you,” said Jermaine.

  The ferryman was so settled in middle age his skin resembled chalky stone. Like his father and grandfather, he floated everyone across the river unwilling to swim. One could wade with careful paces along the coppery silt when it was slow and shallow. But who would do so as the ferryman watched? Now the river was swifter, colder, wider. Bridges had been built nearby but few walked to them when they could punt across here. The ferryman had a dinghy for larger groups, but mainly served solitary travelers.

  “Seen a ghost?” he said to December.

  She had expected something reassuring. “An apparition in white,” she said.

  “And these, your brothers, they also saw it?”

  “We all did—yes,” she said.

  “I have seen a much more terrifying sight.” The ferryman paused, unwilling to continue until they pressed him. But his three visitors stood as though a thin film now existed between them and him.

  “Have you seen this dress,” December said, “like the one that consumed our father?”

  “Your father?”

  “Branley Jukes, who—”

  “You are his children?”

  “Did you know our father?” said December.

  “I knew to warn travelers of his presence. He did more damage to my business than the worst winters, but now I see he stole so his young ones might survive and become children as healthy as these three.” The ferryman seemed caught in a spell. “Excuse me. Yes. Terrible what happened to him.”

  “What was that?” said Jermaine, on guard, taller than the ferryman by a head.

  “You must know better than I do.”

  “Do you know what became of him?” said Jermaine.

  “Some believe he took the form of the beast he talked about and—”

  “What is the house there?” said Jermaine.

  “Only every few years do I see its owner. Rumor is he’s not alone, but, as I mentioned, that orchard harbors something far more chilling than a dress.”

  The children stood as he communicated as though with someone well beyond an arm’s length. “I have always been here,” he said, “my father had always been here before me, and those who have passed through have always told us what they have seen and heard. Forever we’ve invoked legend when we fail to explain peculiar circumstances. We throw baffled hands in the air and assign misfortune to a mysterious force. We blame the Leeds Devil. Recently the beast has been seen, there have been sightings, many, many, but people keep largely quiet, not wishing to remind anyone of your father, whose madness assumed the form of taking arms against it, whereas everyone else who’s seen it, myself included, hesitates to mention it to those who might question our faculties.”

  “What have you seen,” asked Gus, “and where?”

  “I have seen it soaring overhead and stop to quench its thirst with river water. It has even approached me, cautiously, not at all ferociously. The feeling from it, my single lingering impression, was of fear—that it was afraid of me. Even if it’s harmless as a water bug, it is too terrifying to treat as anything other than a threat.”

  “So what about the dress?” said Jermaine. “Should we tell the people of Umbria? Alert them?”

  “I would not recommend it.”

  The ferryman took them across and did not ask for coins. Their father’s absence had paid their passage several times over, he claimed. More so, in case one fine morning they transformed into accursed monsters like their father, perhaps they would remember his generosity and haunt another road.

  II

  The Trachtens, the Worthens, the Dorwoods, and the Greers, the four main Altruist families, met once a season to discuss how to raise the area to a more respectable level, fulfill their moral obligation to perform acts of goodwill, and advance already honorable reputations. It could have been worse. The families had enough sway that if they decided to move twenty miles south, the rest of the community would follow or otherwise suffer.

  Jermaine’s adopted siblings wheezed, snored, gasped, and choked, all three Trachten children in the same large bed with him, cuddled together for warmth as he lay on its edge. Not quite asleep he imagined his brother in a similar situation, not quite awake either, aware of another groaning house not quite his home. The Worthens always seemed distracted, their heads turned when addressing Gus as though to flaunt remarkable profiles, the nose, chin, jaw, lips united in service of some royal ideal. He sensed December’s sleeplessness at the Dorwoods’ home, where she lived with two girls her age who, in the presence of their parents, showed December how to handle cutlery, for example, but treated her like a fork with twisted tines when alone.

  The Trachten kids slept enveloped in nothing close to silence as Jermaine slipped from bed already dressed and made his way out of the house to the woods without anyone wondering where he went so early. The arms they had stored were hidden among sticks and enough moss to protect from rain but still showing in case they had trouble finding the spot. Once Jermaine found them, excavated them, and dusted them off, he squatted, surrounded by the misshapen shadows of the pine trees. The soil was cold and moist and, minute by minute, he watched it in a hypnotic state as it steamed into light fog. He remembered how he had once been indivisible from the woods, calm and wild. Every effort now was made so he moved and spoke in ways the pines never knew or seemed able to support, its soil too porous to tolerate such uprightness. If he disappeared into the woods, his brother and sister would wander to that spot and stand over him. He’d overhear them say he was too willing to lose himself in acceptable behavior—and he thought the same about them. They needed a day of disorder.

  Gus found his brother against the trunk of a rare deciduous tree, collapsed into himself more than crouched. The ferryman had said he had seen a beast, something in the air, a monster, and they would end that rumor by proving it true. His night was troubled because this day might disrupt what had been established these past three years. The Worthens had taught him a way of life along a path he had always hoped to live, if only he had known such procession were feasible. Strength, humility, generosity, intelligence, uprightness, he could chant a list of virtues, words that entranced like a long-unknown spirit realm that had always existed in some figurative next room. The world as it appeared consisted of undiscovered empires if one knew to call an oak representative of endurance and strength and nobility, a stream representative of all that was delicate yet on the move, and when he considered the world within him, he understood it as endangered. How he smiled in mirrors at the Worthe
n’s house. Reflections he had never seen in the woods except in puddles. His smile he now knew related to the word ashamed, a bashful smirk, even when sincere and happy, as though something in the musculature of the face, the round and impure cheeks, the uneven measure of his thin dry lips, the moist and heavy eyes, suspected the release of control that allowed an expression altogether fragile that came from something even more fragile within only suggested by a mirror. Gus therefore perfected a reflection of what he saw in the Worthens, what he would like them to see when they looked at him. An expression of happiness agreed with the unasked question: do you wish to continue in this world? And the world now began with the Worthen’s home and the Umbria area and his small spot in both.

  He had shaken his head in all directions, before his father had left, instinctive rejection of the wilderness he had known. Civility he built brick by brick, raising a wall to protect where he was from where he had been. His older brother collapsed against a trunk in the woods, nearly a head taller than him now, so much longer in the limbs, looked unlike a brother at all. Guarding muskets disguised overnight as sticks reminded Gus of their previous life in the woods. If he were armed at that moment, to rescue Jermaine from the miseries of their former life, he would have taken ten paces ahead, aimed, and fired.

  Ten paces ahead, his brother’s head turned and nodded. Gus expected his brother to stand and shake hands as civility required but Jermaine sat and told his brother to wait for their sister.

  Gus hovered over his brother like he might kick his knee and make him stand as was proper, but instead he collapsed in uncaring leaves and together waited for December. After a time, they heard innocent whistling in the woods, a child hunting pheasant feathers.

  December, her hair restrained in two long tight braids for the occasion, was too aware she was alone, she was rarely alone, and so she accompanied herself with sound to ease her dread. It was like she walked to her own funeral, her energy seeping with each step into the woods.

  Her brothers leaned against a tree. She saw them and her whistle became a light-hearted greeting, her solitude replaced by these two with whom she’d always felt as though she were alone, so familiar they were she might have continued along by herself.

  “Come sit,” said Jermaine.

  “Why?”

  “Sit with us.”

  “But why?” “December. Sit.”

  She screwed her face but pressed herself into the space between them.

  “Now what?” she said.

  “Be silent.”

  “Why?”

  “December.”

  They sat in silence until they passed into a state of innocence, before they had been brought to Umbria proper, before they had seen their father hanging by the wrists, before they had known they were human: a space where they existed but did not know it. Only for a second did they sense this before a leg moved or a branch snapped or leaf fell or they heard wood chopped in the distance or imagined me, in all my hideous fragmented glory, wheeling over the outgrown apple trees surrounding the estate.

  “Shall we, darlings,” said Jermaine.

  They had lost all their blood while leaning against the tree. They had disappeared a moment, and now with each step they returned to life. The sky had whitened and they squinted. A leafless glare seeped into them, weakened them. They passed where they had lived and the separation between now and then widened and clarified.

  They hiked toward the orchard before they reached the river. Cutting northwest, they avoided the ferryman. They felt like the only moving part in this wilderness, aware of the inevitable appearance of another moving part. The ground sloped toward the rear of the house, which sprawled away from them, the orchard on its other side.

  “If we entered the house and—” said Jermaine.

  “What if an army occupies it,” said Gus. “Or if we force open a window and—”

  “We’ll circle the building and wait for whatever awaits us,” said the elder.

  The house was a pulsating leviathan in the woods. It seemed set to imitate a landslide and crush them like some vast and malevolent worm. They hesitated toward the river. The air became colder. They thought my dress had assumed the contours of the sky.

  I intended to welcome them. I had spent time in the orchard and around the river, staying as far as I could from Larner, who let me live in peace. Now that I regularly assumed the shape of a man, the question was what would I do. In conventional shape, altogether wingless, I couldn’t soar over the woods, surprise a deer and feast on it, let alone smell or hear so well. All I could do was walk through the orchard on long flat feet, speak to myself, sit by the river, admire the whorls in soft fingertips, and gaze into my reflection.

  I had seen them come and run off. Had they seen through the dress and my disguise of skin? Was I still only something to run from? After seeing them flee, I stored the dress in a cave not far off and spent days perched atop the house’s tower, from where I could see to all horizons.

  I admit that I often tried to avoid Larner, my first and only friend, my crucial tutor, who had developed an obsessive interest in Benjamin Franklin. He attributed all inventions to him whether they pertained to Franklin or not. He suggested that William Leeds had journeyed to Philadelphia to confront Franklin after insults related to Titan Leeds appeared in Poor Richard’s Almanack. The famously libidinous Franklin must have become curious about my mother Mowas when he heard William mention her, and so Larner concluded that the seductive British solider who sired me was Franklin in disguise. Larner now only saw the world in terms of the thirteen commandments determined by Franklin and described in his autobiography that one must follow to attain moral perfection. He pronounced associations among Franklin’s thirteen commandments and the thirteen original colonies and what he deemed the thirteen signs of the zodiac, having invented a thirteenth constellation that assumed the form of the thirteenth child of Mowas Leeds and reigned over a mystical thirteenth month, also originally invented by Franklin.

  In short, my only friend had ceased to exist long before his death.

  Lacy white sky let through enough blue to strain my eyes. What I understood as my most human part saw three humans come, and so I leaped from the tower, an extraordinary jump, and as I began to fall toward the ground I opened my wings and soared as high as I could to where the air thinned. Larner may no longer be in possession of the majority of his cognitive marbles but he was right: I was an improved human variant, a beneficial and superior virus, that everyone should contract so they too could one day rush through the atmosphere like this. The world fell away and could be seen for what it was, so peaceful and empty of all those who sullied it with acceptable human forms and virtue. I hovered at the highest possible point, letting my wings fill with the world below, and then I dove like a spear thrown at the earth’s core.

  My belly skimmed along the river and I dragged my tail to create a wake. Three children walked the banks of the river heading toward the bridge. I passed at maximum velocity and then shot up and circled back to the bridge where I landed to wait. The children threw themselves into the muddy banks. On the bridge, I held my wings as wide as I could and released a sound I hadn’t let myself make in years, a sound I had learned to control so it would be intelligible in common words. It was time for these children to hear it for what it was and maybe learn to make a similar extraordinary sound themselves.

  I stood on the bridge, spread wings, and howled. The children kneeled. They seemed to experience something that surpassed fear, that almost resembled peace. It felt so good, I could howl like this forever.

  The children shaded eyes as though the sound were responsible for the glare. Once I stopped, in quick hushed speech, they said I seemed smaller than they’d imagined. They’d pictured something so large it could not fit in the house. The ferryman had described more of a dragon than this beast no larger than a man once the wings were closed.

  “Shall I shoot?” said Gus.

  “We must get closer or wait unt
il it makes another pass.”

  Jermaine loaded his musket and crouched as though hunting an animal that didn’t know he was there. He crept with weapon held out like a blindman’s cane.

  Gus started after his brother and tried to load his weapon as he hurried.

  December lay against the muddy riverbank. Her braids had come undone and she seemed on the way back to a half-feral state. She looked at her brothers hunting something that could not exist. “Wait. What if—”

  Wings down, I seemed to them no more than a kangaroo-shaped heron with the horns of a ram, vaguely snorting from my canine snout.

  “Almost there,” said Jermaine. I could not be anything other than the beast his father had once met. Those long pointed fingers. Their father had not been insane—meeting me had set him off.

  Protected by muskets, they had courage. They did not run.

  The girl said, “Our father!”

  Jermaine fired as December pushed him in the back. The shot met river water. Gus, primed, held off as his sister threw herself at him.

  “Father said I am the Leeds Devil,” she said. “What if that’s why his father hanged himself and his grandfather walked into the ocean, to stop transforming into this beast?”

  The same girl who had run from a white dress moving through the trees, now confronted with my howl and an even more impossible sight, stopped them from finishing their father’s work and restoring the family name.

  “You endanger us all,” said Jermaine, who packed another round into the snout of his rifle.

  “He doesn’t attack,” said December, “because we are his children.”

  “Shall I restrain her,” Gus said. She flailed her elbows and he stepped away as though she herself were fearsome.

  “Hold your fire until it flies toward us,” she said.