by Lee Klein
Fire, brothers, beast, river.
Perhaps it was the ice on my wings and in the crevices of my hooves, but, although seeing her warmed me, I froze to the spot, unable to conceive a harmless introduction. If I approached from behind ... From in front or the side ... if I said her name, kept wings down, and instructed her as softly as possible not to fear ... if I hovered above the ground just beyond the sculpture, wings spread—the most dramatic choice, the one most likely to alarm her.
As I hesitated, she ended whatever nocturnal confession she enjoyed with the snow sculpture and joined the light from her lantern with that of others inside.
I emerged from my spot behind the statue and stood where she had stood, my hooves on the matted areas her feet had made moments ago. Snow had softened the sculpture’s details. The wings were swept across its back, tense and ready and strong, the horns full and spiraling and intact, the noble horse’s head and smiling canine face, the tail coiled behind legs rising from a block of well-packed snow. Oh to have such a stable base. But alas, for all its artfulness, this representation would only rise into the air once it evaporated.
Had she made it? Or someone hired by Stearns? Such representations were part of their plan. Or so I’d been told. A proliferation of likenesses. She had treated it with respect, almost reverence. That little nod before she went inside could have been a bow.
Through broad windows I saw an enormous fireplace without much fire in it. Portraits of Stearns on horseback and generic pastoral scenes in gaudy frames. She looked unlike what I thought she might become. Her hair was long and full and lightened. Her neck was wrapped in silk the color of coral that made her eyes seem like elaborately grained ovals of glass. The expression around her mouth seemed ambiguous, present and vacant at once, perhaps the fault of the painter or maybe it recognized a tendency in her to slide into the past. Every aspect of the house seemed intended to fulfill the expectations of visitors. The distance in December’s eyes suggested her love for Stearns. The viewer was meant to marvel at Stearns for having such a wife and knowing such a talented painter, a currency among a limited set of citizens, as the rest drank putrid water.
A form appeared, a man’s back. Stearns was so close. Did he see me? He turned and ran a hand through dark and gleaming hair. He smiled and hitched his chin toward a shoulder and said something I could not discern from his lips. He could not see me, or else he thought I was another replica, an enormous marionette he could manipulate without bothering with strings. Perhaps he had said “excellent” or “perfect” before extinguishing lanterns. A squat hurrying servant followed and left the room thereafter in darkness.
Unless the doors were left unlocked there was only one way in. The fire was now warm ash. They had screened off the chimney against rodents and birds, but without much effort I pried away the grating and entered what seemed like a primitive oven. I stirred a cloud of ash.
Saturday morning would not be far off, a few hours left for a nightmare to stalk this dream house. The moon now found spaces between clouds and, reflected off the snow, it lightened the room.
I sensed the presence of sleeping bodies. But I did not expect that some of these would be children. The scent was unmistakable. A quiet cry grew until someone shuffled from an adjoining room. Children have a sixth sense for the likes of me. Hearing and taste and sense of touch combine into a radar that, like with Larner’s helpless rabbits, is ever-ready to sound the alarm. Detection of nightmarish intruders is intuitive for them, and yet, thankfully, they cannot articulate what triggers the response. An uneasy dream causes them to call for comfort, but rarely are dreams troubled by the actual presence of a beast.
My snow-wet hooves trailed ash as I explored. They would think the cloven footprints a prank, one among many that weekend, hoaxes of all sorts, as a brigade of craftsmen unleashed their work into spaces in the region’s psyches reserved for fear of the unknown, the impossible, the supernatural forces that some might argue were inseparable from the imagination’s creation of gods. Belief in powers beyond our perception makes one human.
If nothing else, I supplied a demand for monsters. Without monsters, what would unite many in fear and few in courage to show these beasts they deserved no place among men? Trouble started when one of us slipped from the imagination and interacted, or trailed hoofprints of ash down the hallway en route to a bedroom.
The monster’s fear in these situations is rarely discussed. The beast stalking the sleeping residents of a house is not without anxiety. Pulse quickened, thoughts sped, and there was also a sense that I was being drawn through space against my will, that I was not in full control, that my actions were directed more by innate behavioral wiring than what I had wanted to do. Of course I worried that this might go badly. Indiscriminate savagery. Carnage. Bodies strewn everywhere.
Should Stearns aggress at most I would maim him, make him whimper and repent and promise to change until he pleaded and sobbed.
In my mind, I turned Stearns’s agreeable and handsome face into something more befitting a rat, mixed with something more like Dade’s expression of fractured stone, stained by uprushes of bad blood and worse thought, always trying to sway, to probe, to ascertain weakness and manipulate it for his own reward, his breath run through with alcohol, his form from the neck down a flame that gave neither light nor heat, that only sought to reduce everything to ash from which he would rise like the legendary Phoenix (no relation or acquaintance of mine).
For now, I wanted the sun to rise and for Stearns to see me not as artifice but as force of nature against him, the real thing among multiplicitous imitations, the original Devil of Leeds Point.
My legs were the kicker, these lanky stalks best suited for a prim water bird weighing no more than half my wings.
The saddest thing would be hope for romance. I was not deluded. I had seen my reflection in mirrors, panes of glass, the water of clear ponds, and the horrified faces of those who saw me. Whoever invented me—Benjamin Franklin, biological chance, or some prankster god—had paid scant attention to the parts of me, at least in my devilish form, required to engage in satisfactory acts of carnality. The horns of a ram, wings of a bat, tail of a rat, but not the endowment of a horse. Temporary pleasures and immersions in another I have seen occur among animals and men, a sight that hypnotized as though the gyrations, the alteration of tender, forceful, passionate embraces, the apparent suffering of it, seemed unlike something I would enjoy, largely because I could not imagine someone deriving pleasure from proximity to my form, wrapping legs around the spot where my tail emerged or grasping my horns to better balance atop me.
To think too much of such interests strikes me not as a unique human characteristic but something shared by all species, ant to virus. The whole world was about to unleash an inexorable spate of copulation, cruel breeding, green shoots bursting from life drained of color. Imagine that happening to one’s own arms or the tip of the fingers, an outburst of flora, the birth of hundreds of stems giving way to leaves and further growth around one’s trunk. It’s almost painful, the repeated process, I suppose. The cycles of lust, or for some the constant presence of it. But with December, it’s different. It comes from a desire to assist another, to release oneself from the world in favor of another. The sensation was similar to flight, an airborne-ness that came from projecting thoughts and feelings toward another and wishing the best.
December, now, was asleep, either beside Stearns or elsewhere. Stearns was surely a human being, same as I was, same as everyone. Maybe another facet of humanity was a inclination to say that any attempt to recognize natural complexity was misguided, things were simpler than they appeared, and enemies were better off with their humanity replaced by abstractions like the serpentine flame I imagined Stearns to be. He was a fire-bearing snake, a true devil, whereas I was a man in the shape of a collage of a dozen animals.
Either my eyes had adjusted and now what I saw of the night seemed more gray than black or the sun was nearing the horizon. The sn
owfall had resumed, maybe enough to cover my tracks, though of course not to hide the ash prints down the hall. The servant would soon rise. And so, with the urgency of a common vampire (also no acquaintance or relation) I explored the house for a hiding spot.
II
The home seemed larger once inside it. Hallways and doors and staircases, all unfamiliar, each a different fate. Most rooms were empty, as though waiting for a purpose. All seemed too spare except for a library of sorts, with more books than I would have expected, if nothing like Larner’s stacks. Globes, maps, mostly local, but also framed depictions of the continents so old the boundaries seemed estimated, cloud-shaped, labeled with the names of countries now conquered or gone.
Hours passed as the Stearns family rose with the reappearing sky, the snow still falling, the sky gray, not quite awake, not as animated as their now-moving bodies, the world still a dream. If I stood still enough when discovered, someone half-asleep might consider me a statue. The first thought would not be that I was alive. Even if I moved, the viewer would question if she were awake or mad. No one came into the study. Instead, they ate. Conversation was quiet, muffled, functional. Their mornings were a ritual of ordered movement, unlike December’s upbringing and Umbria’s chaotic decline.
Her voice could have been anyone’s, more British and slower than the flat, quick tones of the former colonies. Unseen in the next room, I imagined her grown, her features matured, her face drawn but in good health, something almost severe in her cheekbones, her eyes creating the impression that she hovered. There was something avian about her, restrained in Stearns’s transparent cage.
All conversation targeted the children, two boys, named for December’s brothers. I would spare them the sight of me, if possible, and not reveal myself as they finished their porridge and eggs. From the study window I could see the snow sculpture, its details covered in the morning’s accumulation. The trees hung with it. A birch stooped to the ground like a loaded catapult.
Finally, the children were allowed outside, young boys, five or six years old, just the age to admire me and know I’m not an enemy, our difference not a liability.
Stearns and December moved elsewhere. I lost track of their movements. I stood along the wall farthest from the windows, trying to camouflage myself against the bookcases, transform my skin to the earthy hue of leather-bound volumes. The maid entered and took something from a table near the entrance to the room and then left.
My tail coiled and flexed and snapped like an angry cat’s. I opened my wings and almost yelled something confrontational, set again to engage brave men. Maybe that would be the way to release December from restrictions that fell on her since that day at the river.
“Stearns!” I shouted. “I am here.”
Something else that makes us human: our ability to restrain our compulsions, to staunch our urges. And another: cognitive somersaulting as a consequence of slip-ups, complete presence in the moment when body and mind pursue a single goal.
Had he heard me? Had I even yelled it?
I peeked outside the door, the larger room with paintings of December and the pastoral scene and a young Stearns outside on a magnificent horse, maybe the same one Wharton had mounted, a beast that had made me reconsider my uniqueness and strength. The statue of horse and rider outside must depict young Stearns astride his first love. I had not seen the likeness in the half-light last night.
The house seemed abandoned. I heard footsteps and then a door opened and slammed. I hurried toward the sound—no one jumped from the second level to spear me. I opened the front door.
White light flooded the foyer. Snow fell over tracks of hasty retreat. December and Stearns ran from the house to a barn, stumbling all the way. December turned toward the possessed house. Stearns kept on a few strides but then stopped.
I must have been a sight in front of the house: wings spread, snout open, laughing and snorting, reveling in their retreat across the snow as December stood unwanting or unable to move.
Stearns disappeared into the servant’s quarters slightly uphill, perhaps expecting December would follow or maybe he had no concern for her. He only seemed to think about distance, putting more of it between himself and his house.
I was not a hoax. I could not be simulated by craftsmen.
December held her ground and looked at me with the conviction of last night’s confessional, bowed as though the image weighed on her. I felt released from the night, the darkness of the house, the restrained time in the study. All that now seemed expelled into January sunrise across this pasture, the sun a pale disc cutting through clouds to create an eerie rainbow of snow.
Far to the side of the house I heard the children playing, accompanied by the maid, not knowing that their parents had fled out the front door. If I were a base and singly motivated monster, those young ones would serve as appetizers before an adult-sized meal. Life would have been so much easier if it had been simplified as such for me, every day my ghastly desires fulfilled. There would be no questions, no caverns of the mind to crawl from. So much easier to gorge on flesh and then sleep the sleep of the over-sated.
Now what should I do? A beast damned to indecision. Surely I was invented by Franklin, his humor showing through, my wings and teeth and general external beastliness juxtaposed with crisscrossing undulations of internal rumination.
Something must have stopped her as she ran. She turned to see that it had all been real. I had appeared to her at the river and protected her once. My presence now proved she had not been mad. She had seen me again, unlike her father. Not seeing me twice perhaps caused her father’s descent, or so she may have thought. Imagining the beliefs of others differentiated humans from ram, bat, kangaroo, or crane.
I took to the air and descended to the rut through the snow Stearns and December had made as they ran from me. December’s expression became all rounded eyes and open mouth. I slipped but regained my balance to greet her with a polite hello.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“Welcome is always a good start,” I said, with a deep bow, flourishing a wing like a cape.
I had looked forward to this encounter for as long as she had. She weighed her response as though she’d spoken to me many times when alone but now was surprised to have no control over what I said.
“Welcome then, Sir. It has been quite some time since last we met.”
“Your circumstances have changed for the better I presume?”
“Blessed yet not without trials.”
“I hope I didn’t cause too much trouble this morning.”
“Your arrival was unexpected.”
“I apologize for the intrusion. I rarely call on dignitaries such as your husband.”
“What brings you here? I ask but am aware of the likelihood of your answer.”
I began to explain that it was more than just the hoax, more even than the possession of my territory and Wharton’s dream of pure water, when Stearns emerged from whatever structure he had entered. He now made his way toward us, aglow with the sort of bravery that had damned men like him throughout time. He leapt across tracks in the snow he had made in retreat, following his steps toward the mother of his children. Stearns yelled something as he approached and, with a long pistol drawn, indicated that December should move away from me. He slipped and fell to his knees, keeping the pistol in the air. As he rose, with his spare hand he took a mouthful of fresh snow as though it might energize him through this confrontation with what? What could he imagine I was? As he rumbled through the snow, I saw that he had a small scythe at his side, prepared for intimate battle if the pistol did not end me.
We watched him approach.
“I won’t let him hurt you,” she said.
“I’m not concerned.”
“He will not stop until you are flayed.”
“I had heard he was diplomatic,” I said.
“I doubt he considers these circumstances negotiable.”
She raised her ar
ms and shouted for him to stop, but he did not stop until he was ten paces from us. December stood in front of me as though willing to sacrifice herself.
“He is no trouble,” she said.
“His presence is trouble enough,” Stearns said.
Closer now, I recognized the man in the flesh from descriptions I had heard when in the pines and the portraits. No longer rendered in oil on canvas, he was older and more unkempt, clearly not in possession of his famous composure.
“I am here to dissuade you more than ensure your demise,” I said.
His reaction to my speech was expected. It wasn’t the first time such articulation impressed an assailant. But he shook it off and recommitted to whatever survival instinct now held him.
“December, step aside,” he said. “Step aside so I can dispatch this devil, display its form, prove legend true, and end this era of terror.”
“I have hardly terrorized anyone other than your family, and for this—”
“Step aside,” he shouted. His voice forced its way across the space between us.
“You mustn’t,” she said, “it will do no good.”
“Step aside,” I whispered. “Let him do his worst.”
She ceded the spot between us.
It was now a sort of duel. Stearns took aim to end me. I spread my legs and threw out my chest, opened my wings, and raised my snout at a proud angle, maximizing his target. The sting of the pistol’s ball would be nothing compared to the sorrow he wished to inflict on so many innocents.
Something about my posture—wings open and held behind me as though in mid-soar, yellow pelt over the muscular lobes of my chest, the thick trunk of my neck and sinews of my throat— required my life to end in service of something beyond itself. It was a moment of martyrdom. My chest offered to the enemy, I sacrificed myself for the dream of pure water. A blast and rise of smoke and before it cleared I would be splayed in the snow, no longer an earthly form, my spirit dispersed into its essential shape: legend proved true.