The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  At first he thought it was the crab soufflé he had had for lunch, but then realized, too late, that something in Carlotta’s blood was causing a strange transformation in him. With a popping of bone, a stretch of incisors, a whisper growth of fur and the shrinking of skin, he stoops to become a dog. His last oath is excremental before his words give way to growling.

  The inhabitants of Absentia mention to each other the clever little hound that now wanders the streets looking for scraps. One boy tells how he heard it cry human, and the men who mine Mount Alfarabi are amused when the beast tries to have its way with a lady’s shinbone outside the beer hall. Meanwhile, everybody who is anybody is seeking out Harding Jarvis for a ride in the car, a game of tennis, a cocktail party.

  Pharsalus, the hunter, comes in from the wilderness with furs to sell and wild turkey feathers in his hat. With the money he makes, he goes directly to the beer hall and drinks many mugs. He tells those he hasn’t seen in three seasons about the demon he shot and about the beautiful paradise surrounded by hundreds of miles of ice. For proof of the demon, he displays a pair of gnarled horns which he pulled like teeth, with a pair of pliers, from the forehead of the creature. As for paradise, he offers only a shrug.

  The days of Night fall while Pharsalus is drinking. When he steps out of the beer hall, there is a brisk wind and winter chill. He stares up at the ice-bright stars and remembers tracking white apes at twilight. They moved like ghosts among the giant pines. They died with a cough of steam and a trickle of blood.

  When his memory clears, Pharsalus notices a dog sitting in the street in front of him. Because the first hours of Night each year give him a desire to speak to something other than only the earth and wind, he decides to adopt the mutt as a hunting dog. Using scraps of dried caribou, he lures his new companion out of town and into the uncharted wilderness.

  Night in the forest is either stone silence and falling snow or the sound of something dying. Demons fly out of the trees without warning, and Pharsalus is always ready with his gun. When they jump him from behind, he uses his long, curved knife and engages them in hand-to-hand combat. The dog helps in the kill. As the demons’ mauled bodies expire at his feet, he questions them about the path to the Earthly Paradise. Some of the dying offer clues, but most go quietly, their barbed tails thrashing the snow. Pharsalus writes whatever they tell him in a little notebook and then pulls their horns out with a pair of pliers.

  In spring, the hunter and dog traverse a pass that leads over the mountains. The sudden return of the days of Morning brings light that blinds. In those mountains there exist hundreds of small caves formed long ago in the Ice Age. Each year, he hunts them for snapping yellow back and artifacts left behind by the ancients who had once inhabited them.

  In one cave, the hunter discovers the frozen corpse of a man, sitting on a large stone at a table hewn from rock. Icicles hang from the man’s nose and frost glazes his eyes. From the worm-eaten journal laying open in front of the dead man, Pharsalus learns of his father’s search for him. The hunter puts his arms around the dog and cries.

  In one entry in his father’s journal, the old man describes his love affair with a woman who lives at the bottom of a lake. Her skin is blue and her hair so long it turns into sea grass and trailing vines. He descends from his mountain perch every night to meet her on the shore of her lake.

  They sit beneath a tall dune, the wind blowing around them. Above, stars smash into stars. He tells her how fifteen years earlier he left home to search for his son who had become a hunter in the wilderness. As he kisses her, he hears the immensity of paradise singing across the water to him.

  Pharsalus dreams every night of the only beast he has any desire to hunt. It is a creature he has never actually seen, with many jumbled attributes—scales, fur, talons, fangs, feathers beneath and around the hide and hair. Every night it comes vividly to him and fills him with longing to hunt it. In the dream, he always hears it flying. There is a struggle and it bites him, like a snake, in the heel. He always awakens wondering if the bird part is rooster. But since he has gotten the dog, it has become more and more difficult to envision the dream kill.

  In their wandering, the hunter and companion stumble upon a beautiful garden locked in ice. At the last second the Delicate steps out of the sloughed skin of the mutt to take the hunter by the throat. Lips meet lips and breath begins leaving, begins arriving. When the hunter is blind in one eye and his left rib cage shattered by the internal pressure, he summons those years of the kill and thrusts his hunting knife into the thorax of the Delicate. Streams of agony intermingle and separate out into fields of bright color. With a simple cracking noise the monster pushes a bony finger through the hunter’s chest and turns off his heart.

  But the Delicate is dying from his wound. He stumbles through the wilderness clutching his oozing side with a slim, sharp hand. He kneels and prays to heaven but nothing happens. The memories of other lifetimes swirl in his memory with an anguished forgetting of paradise. He cries for the loss of his delicate form, his exo-skeleton now a crystal meteor. If only he could change into a dog, he thinks, as life leaves him in a cascade of steam. With little conviction, he sucks it back up as it goes. In no time, he’s good as new.

  Back in the town of Absentia, in the very room of the Hotel Providence where he took Carlotta, he’s now taking them two at a time. The empty husks of life pile up like fresh-cut bales of tobacco in his closet. Men catch their wives sneaking to his door. Wives catch their husbands at some shadowy rendezvous with him, and he takes them both as quick as you please. He takes the contessa from behind as she leans over to adjust her corset. Her piles of hair almost save her, but, in the end, she is as easy to draw the life out of as is Master Cley, or the mayor, or Madam Silwort, or the Grossdig Twins.

  Someone notices the population of the town dwindling at an alarming rate and wires for the government to send troops, before the Delicate can snip the telegraph line with his incisors. When the army arrives and surrounds the town, he is huffing, as if taking snuff, the last few morsels of Mrs. Fleacox. He realizes too late that she has long since gone bad as a soft melon even though she keeps right on talking till the end. Her pointless words infect him with flexis midocarsis, and he slowly begins to disintegrate. In his final hour, he stands upon the balcony of the mayor’s house, staring out over the wilderness, playing the violin until his fingers turn to salt and the instrument falls to the floor.

  The soldiers break into Absentia, machine guns blurting out death, air cover dropping flames as if the clouds were on fire. They find the Delicate—a sorry, prodigious pile of cigarette ash. Mrs. Fleacox is lost between life and death, and they call for a specialist to administer the needle to the base of her spine. They collect the creature into a plastic bag and freeze-dry him. His remains are taken to Spire City in the Sunbelt where they are stored for the edification of future generations. The funding never comes through to study the crumbs of the Delicate, so he lies in a bag on a shelf and waits.

  There were a number of reasons why I wanted to include “The Delicate” in this collection, none of which has anything to do with the quality of the story. I do think it is an interesting little surreal fable that works in a number of different ways, but it has as many problems as it has merits.

  The first and foremost reason that I include it here is because I wanted a representative piece from my publications in the magazine Space and Time. This venue was so essential to my writing career as was its editor, Gordon Linzner. Gordon has been publishing Space and Time for, I think, over thirty years now, and it remains a viable and interesting publication. He gave many an aspiring writer and artist a chance to break into print. I remember reading very early work by Joe Lansdale, Scott Edelman, James Van Pelt, and Allen Koszowski back in the ’80s.

  Gordon has great eclectic tastes, printing sword and sorcery stories in between surreal fantasy and contemporary horror. As a reader, part of the fun is that you never know what you are going to get in each issue.
He is also an editor who is not afraid to take risks and publish someone new or something really out there (as evidenced by “The Delicate”). An enterprising interviewer will eventually tap into Gordon’s long history and experience in the field and come up with some amazing testimony. A million thanks to Gordon Linzner.

  The second reason for including this story is for those readers who have followed my trilogy, beginning with The Physiognomy. “The Delicate” was a kind of condensed sample of that larger story. I was trying to work out a certain tone and setting I had been carrying around in my head for months before committing to the larger work. As can be seen, from early on, I had the mining town, the character of the Delicate, the idea of a hunter’s journey through the wilderness, in mind for the longer narrative. I know some detractors of the trilogy have said that I just added on books to the first one as an afterthought in order to make scads of money. (I’m still waiting for the scads of money.) But it had always been my intention, from the very start, to write three books and to include all the elements that appeared in this brief piece. I knew that trilogies were not the hippest thing to do at the time, but I have always been and remain a writer interested in representing my personal vision, whether it be deemed in or out of fashion. For all those who doubt me, may you do lunch with the Delicate.

  Malthusian’s Zombie

  1

  I’m not sure what nationality Malthusian was, but he spoke with a strange accent; a stuttering lilt of mumblement it took weeks to fully comprehend as English. He had more wrinkles than a witch and a shock of hair whiter and fuller than a Samoyed’s ruff. I can still see him standing at the curb in front of my house, slightly bent, clutching a cane whose ivory woman’s head wore a blindfold. His suit was a size and a half too large, as were his eyes, peering from behind lenses cast at a thickness that must have made his world enormous. The two details that halted my raking and caused me to give him more than a neighborly wave were his string tie and a mischievous grin I had only ever seen before on my six-year-old daughter when she was drawing one of her monsters.

  “Malthusian,” he said from the curb.

  I greeted him and spoke my name.

  He mumbled something and I leaned closer to him and begged his pardon. At this, he turned and pointed back at the house down on the corner. I knew it had recently changed hands, and I surmised he had just moved in.

  “Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said.

  He put his hand out and I shook it. His grip was very strong, and he was in no hurry to let go. Just as I realized he was aware of my discomfort, his grin turned into a wide smile and he released me. Then he slowly began to walk away.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said to his back.

  He turned, waved, and let loose an utterance that had the cadence of poetry. There was something about leaves and fruit and it all came together in a rhyme. Only when he had disappeared into the woods at the end of the block did I realize he had been quoting Alexander Pope:

  Words are like leaves; and where they most abound

  Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

  As a professor of literature, this amused me, and I decided to try to find out more about Malthusian.

  I was on sabbatical that year, supposedly writing a book concerning the structure of Poe’s stories, which I saw as lacking the energetic ascent of the Fichtean curve and being comprised solely of denouement. Like houses of Usher, the reader comes to them, as in a nightmare, with no prior knowledge, at the very moment they begin to crumble. What I was really doing was dogging it in high fashion. I’d kiss my wife goodbye as she left for work, take my daughter to school, and then return home to watch reruns of those shows my brother and I had devoted much of our childhood to. Malthusian’s daily constitutional was an opportunity to kill some time, and so, when I would see him passing in front of the house, I’d come out and engage him in conversation.

  Our relationship grew slowly at first until I began to learn the cues for his odd rendering of the language. By Thanksgiving, though, I could have a normal conversation with him, and we began to have lengthy discussions about literature. Oddly enough, his interests were far more contemporary than mine. He expressed a devotion to Pynchon, and the West African writer Amos Tutuola. I realized I had spent too long teaching the canon of Early American works and began to delve into some of the novels he mentioned. One day I asked him what he had done before his retirement. He smiled and said something that sounded like mind-fucker.

  I was sure I had misunderstood him. I laughed and said, “What was that?”

  “Mind-fucker,” he said. “Psychologist.”

  “Interesting description of the profession,” I said.

  He shrugged and his grin dissipated. When he spoke again, he changed the subject to politics.

  Through the winter, no matter the weather, Malthusian walked. I remember watching him struggle along through a snowstorm one afternoon, dressed in a black overcoat and black Tyrolean hat, bent more from some invisible weight than a failure of his frame. It struck me then that I had never seen him on his return journey. The trails through the woods went on for miles, and I was unaware of one that might bring him around to his house from the other end of the block.

  I introduced him to Susan, my wife, and to my daughter Lyda. There, at the curb, he kissed both their hands, or tried to. When Lyda pulled her hand back at his approach, he laughed so, that I thought he would explode. Susan found him charming, but asked me later, “What the hell was he saying?”

  The next day he brought a bouquet of violets for her; and for Lyda, because she had shown him her drawing pad, he left a drawing he had done, rolled up and tied with a green ribbon. After dinner, she opened it and smiled. “A monster,” she said. It was a beautifully rendered charcoal portrait of an otherwise normal middle-aged man, wearing an unnerving look of total blankness. The eyes were heavy lidded and so realistically glassy, the attitude of the body so slack, that the figure exuded a palpable sense of emptiness. At the bottom of the page in a fine calligraphic style were written the words Malthusian’s Zombie.

  “I told him I liked monsters,” said Lyda.

  “Why is that a monster?” asked Susan, who I could tell was a little put off by the eerie nature of the drawing. “It looks more like a college professor on sabbatical.”

  “He thinks nothing,” said Lyda, and with her pinky finger pointed to the zombie’s head. She had me tack the drawing to the back of her door, so that it faced the wall unless she wanted to look at it. For the next few weeks, she drew zombies of her own. Some wore little hats, some bow ties, but all of them, no matter how huge and vacant the eyes, wore mischievous grins.

  In early spring, Malthusian invited me to his house one evening to play a game of chess. The evening air was still quite cool, but the scent of the breeze carried the promise of things green. His house, which sat on the corner lot, was enormous, by far the largest in the neighborhood. The lot encompassed three acres of woods, which, at the very back, touched upon a lake that belonged to the adjacent town.

  Malthusian was obviously not much for yard work or home repair—the very measure of a man in this part of the world. A tree had cracked and fallen during the winter and it still lay partially obstructing the driveway. The three-story structure and its four tall columns in front needed paint; certain porch planks had succumbed to dry rot and its many windows were streaked and smudged. The fact that he took no initiative to rectify these problems made him yet more likable to me.

  He met me at the door and ushered me into his home. I had visions of the place being like a dim, candlelit museum of artifacts as odd as their owner, and had hoped to decipher Malthusian’s true character from them as if they were clues in a mystery novel. There was nothing of the sort. The place was well lit and tastefully, though modestly, decorated.

  “I hope you like merlot,” he said as he led me down an oak-paneled hallway toward the kitchen.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s good for the hear
t,” he said, and laughed.

  The walls I passed were lined with photographs of Malthusian with different people. He moved quickly and I did not linger out of politeness, but I thought I saw one of him as a child, and more than one of him posing with various military personnel. If I wasn’t mistaken, I could have sworn I had caught the face of an ex-president in one of the photos.

  The kitchen was old linoleum in black-and-white checkerboard design, brightly lit by overhead fluorescent lights. Setting on a table in the center of the large expanse were a chessboard, a magnum of dark wine, two fine crystal goblets, and a thin silver box. He took a seat on one side of the table and extended his hand to indicate I was to sit across from him. He methodically poured wine for both of us, opened the box, retrieved a cigarette, lit it, puffed once, and then led with his knight.

  “I’m not very good,” I said, as I countered with my opposite knight.

  He waved his hand in the air, flicked ash onto the floor, and said, “Let’s not let it ruin our game.”

  We played in silence for some time and then I asked him something that had been on my mind since he had first disclosed his profession to me. “And what type of psychologist were you? Jungian? Freudian?”

  “Neither,” he said. “Those are for children. I was a rat shocker. I made dogs drool.”

  “Behaviorist?” I asked.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” he said with a laugh.

  “I teach the Puritans with the same method,” I said and this made him laugh louder. He loosened his ever-present string tie and cocked his glasses up before plunging through my pitiful pawn defense with his bishop.

  “I couldn’t help but notice those photos in the hall,” I said. “Were you in the army?”

  “Please, no insults,” he said. “I worked for the U.S. government.”