JRZDVLZ

by Lee Klein

  It was remarkably human to personify storm clouds as gods of thunder, but did Zeus or Thor ever feel humbled when their most impressive jagged streaks were channeled from their destructive goal by a simple rod of iron? There’s always been a popular saying about how behind every great man there’s a greater woman. If Stearns were a bachelor alone on his faux-English estate, a mad political scientist concocting nightmares to spring on an unsuspecting, impoverished populace, an evil entity without potential for ever making good, he would have been no more. Such a man would have needed to protect against assassination by numerous enemies, and so my task would be so much simpler, duller, and bloodier than it was. Instead, confronted by this mollifying touch of humanity, a woman I had protected as a girl now saved another’s life, whether she knew so or not.

  She may have only been possessed by the memory of her father’s encounter with the same finger that made her rise and come near enough to me so that when her fingertip touched mine, she whispered her father’s final words, said them so not even Stearns heard, said them with an earnestness that forced all human organs within me to sink as though soaring wings had given out.

  “I am the Leeds Devil,” she said.

  The proliferation of false devils rampant through the pines and Philadelphia, all those false devils were smote by a single true one standing before me when she pressed that bit of flesh to the rough edge of mine.

  A small change in attitude, a charge to my eyes worked wonders, bloodlessly. My most human element keyed a lock in Stearns that opened him to notions regarding the importance of survival.

  Meanwhile, the legend would soon be so widely dispersed that I would be forced to relinquish all claim to self possession.

  So much in motion, the widespread act uncontrollable once unleashed. Falconers strapped horns and tails to their birds. Animals were slaughtered, so many necks of innocent livestock punctured as though by vampire. Eventually it would end but there was no way to end it. I added to it, considered another element of the infestation of devils throughout the snow-blanketed region, a trick of consistent snowfall perhaps, midwinter fantasy and mesmerized delusion, something people wanted to see—needed to see—to make it to the turn of the season.

  Nothing unites like a common enemy: I improved the common good by flying through populated regions at dusk as the falling snow assumed a life of its own.

  If such flights helped or hindered was not my concern. Acceptance of self, regardless of the degree of one’s peculiarity, seemed a dream of pure water as well.

  I released myself from all alliances. All arguments were illusions, no water on the surface was pure, the only thing that mattered was that subterranean ocean within. From the first moments of life on, everything corrupted and pulled you out of it.

  I was not the only one of my kind: all men were devils. As humans evolved from clusters of cells to fish to their current form, by some celestial or terrestrial spark that slowly yet ceaselessly modified the dominant hominid, I became the first step toward the species’ future. All the rest were bizarre archaic forms, throwbacks to days we would soon prefer to forget. Yet exposure to them compelled our progress, as well as my will to propagate this new human form should ever I find a suitable partner—a willing one, more so. In short, I was Adam updated for the 20th century—and it was time to find an Eve.

  III

  Streaks of phosphorus, a rabbit with wings and a rat tail, antlers on animals that should not have antlers, a week of oddities, sightings, declarations, prayers, shuttered windows, absenteeism, closed factories, children escorted to school by armed parents. Never was the area so charged with terror. Cryptozoological infestation, if not a sign of the apocalypse, never signaled the best of times. The pines, as though mourning its primary owner, released its spirits into view, some even traveled as far as Philadelphia, attracted to the bustle, the pestilence, the byproducts of common plight.

  A week-long storm of sightings began late Saturday with streaking white phosphorus shot into the treetops, the sound of hissing, infant wails, a Victrola needle dropped on a disc of scratched steel. Dogs growled at a winged creature hopping and screaming—they chased the beast, never to return. An enormous glowing crane took flight off the Delaware. Footprints everywhere early Sunday. Muskrat trappers stalked a winged, bipedal cow. Monday: the first awake discovered tracks circling their homes and trash scattered as though by cyclone. Word spread. Doors were latched and barricaded, areas cordoned off. Prints on rooftops. Armed men prowled streets, seeking rewards. Tuesday: a woman watched the beast on her shed and told it to shoo—it barked at her then flew off. Elsewhere, a girl fainted when she saw an odd print in the snow and her sister encountered a retriever-sized rat, with wings and a chirping bark. An unusual antlered creature appeared outside a public library. Three-toed footprints were found.

  Wednesday: in Burlington, a policeman saw what he called “a Jabberwock with eyes like blazing coals.” In Pemberton, a reverend saw the devil. In Haddonfield, armed men found cow tracks that suddenly left no trail. In Moorestown, a man chased a beast with “arms and hands like a monkey, face like a dog, split hooves, and tail a foot long.” Elsewhere, a trolley driver saw a winged kangaroo cross the tracks. A puppy was found dead: odd tracks surrounded the body.

  Thursday: in Camden, a beast peeked in the window of the Black Hawk Social Club. It turned tail when members screamed. Not much later, a trolley conductor saw a devilish kangaroo. In Trenton, a horse in a barn panicked and its owner saw a beast covered in fur and feathers, approximately the size of a canine mutt but with the facial traits of a purebred German Shepherd, its eyes emitting unmistakable anger. That same night, a city councilman heard wings flapping and discovered cloven prints on the roof—the same prints were everywhere in the city. Armed guards protected the trolleys of New Brunswick and Trenton. In Atlantic City, a telegraph worker reported that linemen saw “The Terror” on a pole. In Philadelphia, a woman saw a six-foot-tall creature covered in scaly skin. When flames spurted from its mouth, she screamed, her husband threw a rake at it, the creature flew off, and a carriage driver swerved to avoid it as it crossed Pine Street. Across the Delaware River in Camden, the beast attacked a woman’s spaniel and she beat it with a broomstick, but it lingered on a fence post. Police fired and it flew off.

  Panic throughout the state. Schools closed, offices shut down, workers called out sick. The mayor of Philadelphia asked the Governor to send troops to protect against the beast, and also against armed posses roaming streets ready to fire on anything odd. Was this the first instance of government protection against popular delusion in America? Had the snow falling for a week released this beast from captivity in the ground? Had an archaeopteryx risen from extinction? Was it a sign of the apocalypse, a plague of glowing eyes and wings and tails and hooves?

  Casts of prints were made, none varying much, and nothing was captured or confirmed killed. A threat to the collective sanity: news rippled through nights brightened by snowfall until a raccoon or squirrel, any sort of animal, any movement half-seen, conformed to reports. The reaction was not courageous and communal but locked doors. All human endeavor (armed posse formation notwithstanding) was suspended until the storm of psychosis passed. And in its wake, there was commerce: commemorative figurines, pewter dishes, my likeness burned into a yard of linen, woodcuts, specious rubbings of gravestones depicting similar beasts, and even a sideshow at Ninth and Arch Street in Philadelphia.

  Stearns had made me want to walk the city’s streets with the riffraff of Europe and the Southern states, all these newcomers coaxing their voices to speak a common tongue. Wharton had acquired the pinelands for them. Stearns had had them in mind when he thought to transfer the whole shambled concatenation of woodboards and bricks, all of it always liable to collapse, east to the pines once he acquired the land and proved it empty of beasts like me. I would have liked to have seen my funeral procession: a lifeless rendition in some glass casket, the expressions of all those drawn to witness the empty shell
of what once had been a phenomenal creature.

  If the pines were my Eden, I wandered the city once expelled from paradise. I walked in my wedding dress, which made me seem less like a hideous beast composed of thirteen animal elements and more like a healthy young man trying to maintain an even affect, disregarding comments from all angles. So conspicuous I was in the dress, I might as well have displayed my horns and wings. The dress was not my Eve. I imagined someone else might be out there not quite as disembodied, whose physical form I could see and touch and who didn’t transform my unconventional shape into something more common when I slipped her on.

  Jeers meant little to me, far less than gritty slush beneath my feet. The dress worked miracles, totally transformative wonders, yes, sure, but it was neither warm nor a socially acceptable garment for a man. In human form, I was susceptible to the cold, having only a vestige of anything one might call fur. In shop windows, in the odd expanse of mirrored glass outside a merchant’s, I saw soft hair atop my head, somewhat overlong in front, almost to my eyes. I recognized those eyes, sensed the familiar mechanizations of my internal organs, but all else seemed to belong to someone else.

  I was impervious to everything assaultive around me, that is, until I came upon a freckled man in a green velvet suit, like some overgrown elf, his orange sideburns ablaze.

  “The Leeds Devil,” he said. “Alive on stage. See it for a dime.”

  I stopped and stared at him.

  “You in the dress, blushing bride to be, any desire to see a monster more ferocious than the marriage you’re bound to endure?”

  Staring at him still, not reacting, he continued: “Oh pretty young wifey, come see a diversion more exciting than any likely on your honeymoon.”

  I winked at him. “Let me in for free,” I said.

  “Why’s that, lassie?”

  “Because I ask you,” I said.

  “A lovely young lady who believes she deserves all she wants, as always.”

  “Because I am the Leeds Devil,” I said, and now I stared at him deeply, my face drained of expression.

  I stepped closer as I said it. The unexpected aggression left the barker speechless for a moment until he muttered something like “All the better the more freaks inside” as I entered the darkness to glimpse myself.

  On stage, no longer a torment, now the prize possession of an Arch Street theater, this poor stable renovated and outfitted with benches, a platform, a makeshift curtain stitched from strips of common fabric. The walls were black, maybe charred or painted to resemble something more rustic and decrepit than it was. A few torches lit the room. I was comparatively clean, in permanently bleached white wedding dress, preternaturally shaven, a bright horizon after an interminable night.

  “In need of a groom, dearie?” said a man who followed me in from the shadows. He was ogreish and aged, rumpled, covered in dermatologic lichen.

  “All set,” I said.

  He didn’t persist, but as I settled into the third of ten rows, center stage, it seemed that everyone who entered commented as though I were the show itself.

  The barker emerged, quieting a crowd that seethed as though promised boiled meat after years of scavenged roughage.

  My association with some of the area’s wealthiest men made all those around seem all the more different. Other than their scent and unclean fingernails—so distant from godliness, per the saying, they seemed insectile, like the obsidian shells of cockroaches, liable to scatter with the slightest movement—what differentiated the crowd was their apparent unpredictability. Wharton, Stearns, Braddock, Vermeule, even Larner before his latter years: wealth engendered self-possession, self-control, a steadiness restraining flailing movements. I do not refer only to grace, composure, posture, but everyone who had paid a dime to see some impersonation of me seemed constantly on the move, blurred, likely to twist with unexpected violence in any direction, or stand and flail, possessed of urges that released within them a moment of bliss when they gave into them.

  I sat as still as I could, trying to convince my neighbors that I was a wax figure the theater displayed as complimentary amusement. My fellow theatergoers seemed engaged in a struggle with their patience, physically present in the room in a way I never could be. We were less a crowd than a coven gathered to attend a fire sermon of some notorious half-human, half-goat warlock. Presence at such an event screwed one’s features toward the animalistic, everything sharpened and exaggerated and shadowed until cheeks streaked with coal and the irises of everyone’s eyes contracted into serpentine slits. Whatever sun had once existed within the crowd was now eclipsed. This ragged theater elevated and exaggerated basest elements in each occupant. I’m sure each in attendance was born perfectly cherubic.

  The churning, unpredictable scrum of impatience seemed set to overcome the curtain and become the show itself. The crowd was now the Leeds Devil, waiting for an up-close sight of a captured beast, heart-rending simulacra of the new Adam, and yet the oversized elfish barker did not phrase his introduction in such terms. The past he mentioned more than the future. Satan he referred to often. Adam not once. Something else he said struck me and rallied the crowd’s fervor: this was the last show, the final rising curtain for this beast. The significance of this statement was understood at once. Neighbors jostled me, nudged me, streaked my garment with their filth. One even presented his cracked, unwholesome palm, seemingly indicating that I should slap my hand to his in a gesture of complicit appreciation of what we might soon witness.

  The barker stepped on stage, pitchfork in hand, tiptoeing as though hunting rare game. He turned to us and held an outstretched finger to his lips, a gesture others replicated with shushes. He extended the points of the pitchfork low to the ground, as though to prick with it the curly tail of a piglet. He pretended to scan the horizon, a pantomime of the hunt. Hecklers suggested he might improve his view if the curtain were raised.

  “Silence!” shouted the barker. This entrance into the room’s sonic territory struck us so forcefully that even the scariest in the audience (my suitor, for example) giggled in response. “This hunt is no matter for fools. Your voices scare off the beast, the one and only Leeds Devil that has invaded our city and its outskirts and caused so many lovely young ladies to fall into our arms in fear.”

  He now cradled his pitchfork like a beloved. He mooned over its spears.

  “Yes, my darling,” he said, addressing the pitchfork in his arms, “a most unpleasant week. Every movement, every sound, a sign of impending doom.”

  He spun the pitchfork out so it assumed the form of a dancing partner. He held it upright in his outstretched hand. “But now you are safe for we have captured the beast. We risked our lives, coming close to losing many a limb. My associate here, in fact, lost half his arm to the jaws of the beast. Forever damn its insatiable demand for human flesh!”

  A dwarfish fellow waddled on stage to gasps as he rolled up a sleeve to reveal a stump where elbow should have continued to forearm and hand. The little fellow waved with his good hand and wiggled the stump as though its ghost were visible, and then he turned offstage as quickly as he had appeared, a prop no less than the pitchfork.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” began the barker, “swallow all capacities to shriek, for the sight forthcoming shall do more than haunt pleasant dreams. Your most pleasing noontime reveries will roil with gales of nightmare. What you are about to witness will burn across your vision when least expected. I raise expectations, knowing all hopes you have will be exceeded, for tonight we shall impress upon your memory and soul an everlasting image of horror. All those who now look toward the exit, doubting their capacity to withstand what follows, I suggest you stay in your seat or else pay an exit fee levied to discourage you from suffering regret. Yes, you heard it right, you must pay to leave before the show is over, so assured we are you will find the proceedings, if not entertaining, at least so peculiar you will never be the same. I did not coax you inside with promises of anything more than a look at
the captured Leeds Devil, but we offer tonight, for only a dime admission, something unexpected. It was never our intention for the show to end as it will tonight, but it must, and other than proceeding as we have the last few nights, we herein close the most remarkable run at this theater with an unforgettable final act, one to triumph over all others and secure our names among the immortals of the stage. And without further preamble I present the beast that unleashed itself upon us for an entire week, slaughtering livestock, terrifying schoolchildren, charging every element of the world with threat, some hundred and seventy-five years after its purported birth. I present to you not only the Leeds Devil, but also its execution and death.”

  In my name, some poor animal would be slaughtered for entertainment’s sake. I could neither watch as the curtain rose nor avert my eyes. I faced the decision to throw off the dress and save the beast or else forever regret. Only the real thing could save the replica. If wearing a wedding dress, who would heed my calls to rationality? Within every one of them was a capacity to choose mercy if others first were swayed. They seemed to want one voice with which to pass unanimous judgment. Yet I feared their bloodlust could only be expunged by serious threat.