JRZDVLZ

by Lee Klein

  After Hopkins’ murder, the beast was seen again. Some claimed it was Branley Jukes in natural form, stalking his daughter’s capturers. Regardless, something far too large for flight had descended into the branches of an oak that under its weight thrashed as though in a windstorm. A man and not a man.

  That was the extent of news I detected thanks to civic scurrying and commotion. As far as I knew, the only ones with anything to fear were rabbits, doves, quail (particularly), a fawn at most when gluttonous. I tried to limit myself to corn and other vegetables, but we all succumb to instinct now and then. If one of her attendants wished to slit December’s throat, what could I do? But if I had a chance to intervene I would.

  To say Hopkins had represented order to the town was an understatement. His words had come in intelligible, predictable succession. His smile was even and slow, consistent in its ability to calm, and he’d seemed strong and compassionate. He was the sort who took a knee as though to pray or examine the dirt when collecting himself, trying to enter as deeply as possible into the complexities of a situation, opening himself to concealed shreds he would miss if unable to occupy the moment. His removal from the town had put them all on edge. No one protected them now.

  Some said they deserved it for agreeing to put the girl to death. Others said it was the girl herself who had done it, or at least she could be blamed. An airing of concerns stirred their confusion and fear. Voices relaying hysterical exaggeration and nonsensical psychosis united to improvise dissonant hymnals to Umbria’s state. Some said the Jukes had always been sensitive to instabilities in the land and atmosphere. Something about the terrain of this spot with three thousand miles of water and three thousand miles of land on either side, existence here experienced unexpected shifts as water and earth pushed and pulled one way and another. The death of Nathaniel Leeds was the first shot and now they were at war with some evil among them. The only way to appease it, obviously, was to sacrifice the Jukes girl. And those who protested that this plan was the truest demonstration of evil were howled down to such a degree they feared for their lives. She had to pay as soon as possible, they said, and so December’s attendants accelerated their operations.

  Armonica at rest beside her, Georgia Jukes was discovered in bed like Hopkins, another ram head and wings carved by a light hand into her stomach. If she had gone first, it’s possible that Hopkins would have discovered that December’s attendants had done it. But his successors were more or less inept. No apparent struggle. Skin that had stretched when pregnant with December was now tattooed with a pagan visage. News of her mother’s death seemed to come from another life. Her mother was already far too gone, so perhaps it was better, although she thought of little more now than spending an hour, let alone the rest of her life, outside again. Not long ago she had leaned on the trunk of a tree with her brothers. Not long ago she had slept in a shack in the woods with her family.

  The way Hopkins’s successor, a comparative halfwit named Sampson Torp, told December about her mother, it was as though he thought she already knew. The newly appointed Torp examined her face for an intimation of guilt, a sense she’d made her trackless way to her mother’s bed where she ended her mother’s life, motivated by the fact that her mother had failed to recognize the death of her sons and capture of her daughter.

  Something in Georgia Jukes had opened once they’d removed her from the woods. The specter of her husband had held her together, but once he was gone, beyond the rounded tones of her armonica, she had lost all shape. No one could say whether the instrument attracted the mad or whether it accessed something mad inside them the music externalized. Some believed her music had invited the devil to her room. It could not be a coincidence that they had also discovered an armonica in Hopkins’ sleeping chamber. He was not known to play it. Some believed the true culprit was, in fact, the instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin.

  Every armonica was smashed in the central square, the shards carried to the Mullica. For some, if no such instruments existed in Umbria, security would be secured.

  December’s attendants thought punishment should have reached them by now. Someone other than the incompetent Sheriff Torp should have discovered a footprint, a fingerprint, or through careful investigation deduced how Hopkins and Georgia Jukes had lost their lives. The town had gone so mad they blamed a musical instrument.

  On the morning of their sacrifice, as they envisioned it, the water slides by like coppery oil, its red enhanced by new green boughs and flowers of every color, some as tall as saplings, and once at water’s edge the girls see everyone transform into half-flower human-sized daffodils, irises with crocus children accompanied by yellow-rose servants, followed by marigolds, the air suffused with pollen dust and a steady hum, an open vowel, nothing more. The girls wave goodbye to family and friends and kiss all goodbye as tears meet the warm and flowing water. On each forehead they feel the touch of Umbria’s attention, anointed, celebrated, everyone so thankful, wishing them well in the afterworld, everyone in bloom with a paradise to come. As the girls step into the water and sub-merge, their ceremonial veils spread as they float and rotate downstream like imitation water lilies.

  Such a peaceful, joyous, celebratory, perfectly clear May morning no longer seemed possible. After the smashing of the armonicas it seemed that, unless the town calmed, its citizens would unleash their fear in another violent event. The girls now envisioned their inevitable end: cooked on a spit and consumed by all.

  Each day proceeded as though torn apart by their guilt and their ceremonial dream, and yet each day they visited December who, unlike everyone else, reflected no change. She rarely smiled, her body thin and tender and tensed, expecting a flurry of punches or even a knife in the neck, as though she could sense that the girls’ attention was now an act.

  The bartender of the Bucket of Blood lay dead in his bed. On his bloated hairless stomach they found a ram head and wings. The pagan image leaned to the left this time, rushed, dug deeper into the flesh, a sketch more than a diabolical mark executed to perfection. Nevertheless, this matter was not widely broadcast as the Bucket was shuttered and searched and they held everyone who had ever entered for questions.

  Among themselves, the attendants insisted not to have done it. Each swore it hadn’t occurred to her to repeat their atrocity alone. None could imagine how she might seduce him, coax the poison into his mouth, and drag him to his final resting spot without at least three others or the help of a man.

  But what about you and your older brother?

  He’d never conspire with me. He’d throttle me, simple moralist, you know that.

  But your uncle knows no morality, drinking partner of that murdered Merkins, maybe he avenged the pints the bartender had failed to stand him?

  If we didn’t do this then who did?

  A devil?

  There is no devil. We are the devil. We did it.

  The devil is our dream, our desire.

  The devil is December Jukes, full stop. We blame this on her.

  But she’s done nothing. She’s done all.

  Since her return it has been mayhem. And we have behaved as though possessed.

  We are not to blame for any of this. We have done nothing.

  We know we’ve done terrible, twice.

  For all we know we did what happened last night, too.

  But we didn’t.

  Who can say what happened?

  One thing we can say is December is to blame. No one else is suspected of extraordinary powers. But what now is our desire, our dream?

  V

  Umbria whirled in ragged circles around her unmoving center. All now transformed into something less than human. To see behavior devolve complicated my urge, my need, my hope. The more I watched these people, the more I thought that not even the highest power might comprehend their actions. All sense of order and justice and good seemed upended by fear. They planned to marry the girl to the Mullica, but the longer she lived, the more the town did itself in. />
  Another three bodies were discovered, no marks on their stomachs, no hidden armonicas, not the holders of titles of particular importance. They were anonymous members of the community, seemingly chosen at random, or chosen per dissimilarities, and these three sent the town into open madness.

  No one thereafter would let themselves be alone. The weather had warmed and it was wet, the center of town a mud pit that might soon see Umbria’s extinction. All spent their days in plain sight, a joyless celebration intended to advance one’s innocence and achieve protection of the masses. Viruses spread among them, excremental maladies, hacking coughs, unending phlegm spat at the earth. Pregnant mothers held their stomachs and tried to evade pervasive terror. Men on knees clucked along with rags on their heads, hoping to discover a cure for visibility. Some rode piggyback to become superhuman, trying to glimpse a far-off moment of peace. Into trees others climbed and from there were safe but exposed to the sight of civil disorder. Beatings, lashings, flailing of self and other. Hands together, some beseeched heaven for a remedy, only to receive a secular knee to the nuts. Slop was spilled and filth strewn as though one must keep all trash airborne. Bandaged skulls, bloody limbs, the new leaves a testament to the season’s cruelty, hair pulled out in clumps, a wooden leg used to ram the door of a dwelling, no one trying to bring peace. Confusion became so severe on the ground it seemed the sky had opened and from it poured armies of rebellious angels, overgrown mosquitoes, sexually suggestive manta rays imitating harmless orchids, beams of light solidified into glowing silver trumpets, enormous worms, gargantuan crab shells, an egg twice the size of December from which perhaps a sense of order might soon hatch.

  I watched human citizens transform more or less into beasts, the evil always concealed in the land now out in the open. In comparison, I was a tender flower, forever repenting as they churned to prove their innocence. And then out of the unhinged and improvised ceremony of sinfulness, a cry emerged for the sacrifice of the town’s most precious and innocent: the attendants surrounding the damned.

  They took refuge with December as madness raged. They wanted to run outside and stop it, and yet all along I reveled in it. Every fallen moment of humanity made my state seem more common. Few devoured their family, yes, but look at Umbria: did it matter if the ravaging came at first breath or when everyone was fully developed? What was the benefit of advancing age if all purported good would be tossed into a swirling cesspool of worst urges? I revealed myself then, flying above, through them, among them, but either they were blinded by madness or now I fit right in.

  It was Umbria’s last gasp, this proclamation to round up the children who attended December. The chaotic sprawl funneled toward the humble holding shack. The attendant’s parents, most of them, assented, convinced that sacrifice was for the greater good. One mother objected, but they dragged her into the woods.

  That no one spotted me, that I didn’t distract from the fury, suggested how far Umbria had fallen. Yet all I did was fly among them, another element of nightmare, hovering above as the door to December’s shack was torn from its frame to better accommodate the men who pulled out their quarry. December, too, they extracted into daylight but let her stand and watch what they did with the girls who pleaded their case through cries and kicking at first, and then once their innocence was presented as the reason for their sacrifice, they screamed their guilt for the first two murders, statements laughed away as the stuff of panicked minds offering whatever preposterous claims might set them down.

  Each child was strapped to a beam of oak and held aloft, muttering confessions, calling themselves killers. The town entire trundled en masse, hooting, roaring, like a bloated sidewinder snake, as it made its impassioned way to the river, the color of which now seemed stained by bloodlust more than cedar bark.

  I watched December watch them as they went to the river. She followed, no longer the devil’s spawn, now a bystander to sprawling ill will, a madness in comparison to which her father’s seemed manageable, preferable to a civilization’s collapse.

  Speakers at the river competed for the common ear, each intoning bombastic judgment upon the girls, sentences the river would execute: In the name of the Lord and the common good, so our safety and commonality might not be slighted, we relegate our purest urchins to propagate their innocence throughout the area so it might return to a state of grace. These children are our saviors and today shall forever be celebrated and their sacrifice be honored as the most recent holy covenant of heaven and earth, and as we cleanse our illness in these waters we shall listen for their final words expressing accomplishment of their duty. The Lord too suffered forsaken, and these children, the lambs of our flock, have struggled, their innocence stirred by aghast countenance and preposterous confessions of crimes they never could have committed. Now as we release them into paradise, we expect to emerge into a state of grace surpassing any achieved since these colonies transformed into country.

  I would not intercede. It wasn’t worth the bloodshed, the hysteria. Better to pass into legend and limit myself to a witness role. And so the girls were introduced to their groom—the extra-animated Mullica River—warmed perhaps by their struggling bodies. How quickly the girls’ desires had shifted. The ends were the same (sacrificed), but the means lacked the posturing, the planning, the graceful determination, and of course the respect accorded to those ascending to the pantheon of holy martyrs. It seemed everyone wanted to kill off their most promising aspects, their hope. Like some eugenics program in reverse, they exterminated their privileged and most promising so the rest might rise in emulation of those removed.

  The Mullica accepted anything offered it. The girls were no exception. The succession of wavelets on its surface broke open and shifted toward spitting whitewater, like woodchips airborne after the fall of an ax, and then it settled and returned as though nothing had happened. These masses along the banks of the Mullica did not witness everything become orderly as their unrestrained actions gave way to patience and respect and reasonable plans. Voices fell after salutes and hallelujahs, and in that silence they sensed that before paradise were achieved they would need to finish the work they had started. To restore their former state, they first needed to reunite December with her attendants.

  She had almost blended into the crowd. She had watched as the girls tied to weighted oak were introduced into the river, dragged across its soft, inky, withdrawing flesh. Her father had said he was the Leeds Devil, but the Leeds Devil in human form was a disappearing act, something almost like death, out of sight, with no hope for return. Yet if she looked up she may have seen a shadow move across the uppermost branches of the trees, a presence if not quite her protector.

  December would not struggle or run but give herself up as though happy to relinquish doubts of the last hundred days in favor of the certainty of no future, or at best transform beneath the river into tadpole, algae, water spider across the surface consumed soon enough by trout or crane. She preferred this fate to a future around those she’d orbited but could never live among without violent impact. She was a comet. Beneath the Mullica she would be celestial.

  I restrained an urge to give into basest desire and punish humanity. Everything I learned of them convinced me of my rightful inclusion.

  It was then, as speeches soared and weights were attached to a beam of oak that would transport December into the Mullica, they saw him. The sight must have rivaled the natives’ first glimpse of conquistadors on the backs of stallions, for if anyone had ever appeared from some distant land, inherently superior with a powerful obsidian horse beneath him, if anyone could sit as upright and as natural as though the beast were an extension of his body, it was this man. He was accompanied by two others, fat and thin, the voices of contrary advice and attitude most likely on which the great visitor depended, both atop gray fillies that seemed more like ponies next to the central man’s steed. Behind them, teens followed on knock-kneed quarter horses, though the effect was of an undefeatable army. The crowd
parted to where December lay on the bank of the river, bound, silent, ready for sacrifice.

  The crowd gave way without struggle thanks to the extreme vitality of the arrival’s steed. Proud across the chest and neck and hindquarters, it was the apotheosis of horse, so much so it edged into other orders of animal: lion, panther, god. The animal seemed to absorb all possible goodness into its hide and project it outward. That a man rode this horse was remarkable. The sight mesmerized them in their weakened state, like news from the world indicating how far Umbria had fallen. December’s salvation was more dramatic than escape into skies. The man on the horse seemed drawn to the scene like a conquistador to some lost city of gold. He offered to buy everyone’s land. All accepted, wide open now to the prospect of change. And so the paradise they sought was attained, in a way, and Umbria’s ruins surrendered to the woods and fire and time.

  The Dream of Pure Water

  EXTILE MILLS, iron works, paperies, tanneries, hundreds of thousands of citizens spewed filth into rivers. All tributaries became open sewers, all water impure, all life endangered. Pestilence and stench mixed with the rattle of plodding mortuary wagons through brick and cobbled streets. In elegiac gridlock, funeral processions en route to burial grounds stalled at intersections. The port received cargo from the tropics conveying mosquitoes, insignificant as eyelashes, thirsty for human blood, carrying yellow fever. Those in the know covered their mouths. Those with sense left the city, draining a population weakened by death and disease. Immigrants filled occupancies and contributed to urban atherosclerosis as unregulated industrial waste mucked the rivers. The city had risen like a wart, a lump, a tumor. No Mid-Atlantic winter of sleet would ever heal it. Outbreaks of typhoid and cholera challenged mortality records set by yellow fever. No mosquitoes this time, just mess, and those responsible for public good were leaders of private industry who entered the city from pastoral retreats, repeating the word purity. Fresh or filtered, pure water must be served, somehow, before the streets of this long-thriving site turned viscous with waste.