A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Take Cynara and go and fetch the Pretty boy.”

  Jundle dropped a little pile of turds, grumbled, and trotted off.

  “Done and done,” said the old lady. “Now let me make you kids a snack.”

  She led us into her house, through the kitchen and into the parlor, all lace doilies and puffy furniture in pea green. There was a small chandelier above, its pendants glinting, and below a braided rug in blue and silver.

  “You can sit on the love seat,” she said and pointed at a small couch. “I’ll be right back. Gon fetch you some of my special cookies.”

  When she left the room, we saw it. It had been sitting behind her on a shiny wooden pedestal. No, not a radio, but a big clear glass ball with a man’s head floating in it. I jumped at the sight and Alice whispered, “What?” And “what” was right—a head with wavy black hair, waving in the water, a black beard and mustache, eyes shut and mouth part way open to show a few teeth. At the bottom of the glass ball there was sand and a little hermit crab scuttling around in it. Tiny starfish were suspended around the head.

  Mrs. Oftshaw suddenly appeared with a tray full of cookies and two glasses of what looked like yellow milk. “Have a treat,” she said and laid it down on the little table in front of us. She backed away, and said, “Go ahead.”

  The cookies were fat and misshapen, the color of eggplant, with shreds of something sticking out all over. Neither of us made a move for them. She sat down in the armchair next to the pedestal. “I see you’ve met Captain Gruthwal,” she said and pointed to the floating head.

  We nodded.

  “Have a cookie, and we’ll wake him up.”

  Alice leaned over first and took one of the lumpy “treats.” I followed her lead. The thing was soggy as a turd and smelled like what Pa used to pull out of the gutters in spring. We bit into them at the same time, like biting into a clod of dirt, but the taste was better than sweet and made me shiver. One bite and you wanted another till the thing was gone. We each ate two more, and every time one of us would slip one off the tray, the old lady nodded and said, “That’s right. That’s right.”

  After the third, we sat back. I don’t know about Alice but my head was spinning a little and I felt kind of good all over. I looked at her and she smiled at me, lids half closed. “Drink your peach milk,” said Mrs. Oftshaw. It seemed like a good idea, so I did and so did Alice. I can’t recall what the peach milk tasted like, whether peaches or something else. We put the empty glasses on the tray, and the old lady turned to face the glass globe beside her.

  “Wake up, Captain Gruthwal,” she said. “Wake up.”

  I swear, Alice screamed louder than me when the eyes of the floating head opened and stared at us. “Captain,” said Mrs. Oftshaw. “These children want to know about the big-headed boy.”

  The floating face grimaced, as if annoyed at being awoken. Its eyes shifted toward the old lady and then rolled up, showing only white. The captain’s mouth opened wider and then wider, and I thought he would scream in the water. We waited for a torrent of bubbles and the muffled sound, but instead something showed itself from within the dark cavern. It was a pale knob, like a diseased tongue but much larger. It filled the rim of his lips and continued to squeeze itself out from inside him. Two tentacles emerged and then more. “An octopus,” I said and gagged.

  “Ugghh,” said Alice and turned her face from the sight.

  “Watch it, child,” said Mrs. Oftshaw. “Watch it good. The captain’s gonna show us something.”

  I felt Alice’s hand on my shoulder, as the octopus, now free, swam, pulsing its tentacles in circles around the floating head. As the pale sac of life swept in orbit around the captain, its ink oozed out of it in black plumes. Alice’s grip tightened as the face and everything else inside the globe was slowly obscured.

  “Like a dream,” said Mrs. Oftshaw, and out of the murk came an image of Pretty Please walking along the side of the road in the moonlight.

  “Pretty,” yelled Alice, and her brother turned his potato head and glanced over his shoulder. She yelled again, “Come back,” but the ink was already swirling the image away to reveal a different scene of Jundle riding atop a sorry old cow all skin and bones, the way a person might, straddling its back. They moved along at a snail’s pace, the hog strumming the steel strings of a little guitar and grunting softly.

  More swirling of the ink and image and then we were back to Pretty and saw him standing next to a one-story house, not much more than a shack. He was peering in a window with the moonlight shining over his shoulder. Through the dirty glass and the shadows, I saw two people sleeping in a bed: a man and a woman.

  “That’s my ma,” said Alice and stood up.

  “Very good, child,” said Mrs. Oftshaw.

  “What’s that in Pretty’s hand?” I asked, noticing something glint in the moonlight. I squinted and saw it was an open straight razor, the one Pa had left behind in the bathroom cabinet. “Either Pretty’s ’bout to do some shavin’ or he’s possessed by a bad idea,” I said.

  Alice noticed the razor and stepped toward the globe. “No, Pretty,” she said. Her hands, fingers spread wide, reached for the glass.

  Just then he lifted the blade and the man in the bed next to Alice’s ma, my pa, opened his eyes and witnessed the scene at the window. We saw him shake his head, look again, and heard, muffled by the window glass, him yell, “Mattie, your nitwit kid’s outside and he’s totin’ a cutthroat.”

  “What?” said Mrs. Adler, and she woke and looked and shook her head too. “Christ, it’s him. How can it be?”

  “It’s bewitchment,” said Pa. “I’m gonna take care of this right now.” He stood up, naked, in the further shadows behind the bed. I lost sight of him for a moment, and then he appeared again in the moonlight, holding his 22 rifle. He left the room.

  “Ya can’t shoot him,” called Mrs. Adler.

  As the front door to the little house creaked open, we could hear Pa yell back, “Self-defense.”

  Alice screamed, “No!” and lunged at the globe. She tripped, hit the pedestal, and although Mrs. Oftshaw moved to catch either her or Captain Gruthwal, she caught neither. The globe hit the floor and exploded into stars of glass as the ink seeped into the parlor. There was more blackness in that glass bubble than you could have guessed. Darkness filled the room by the time I’d grabbed Alice’s hand and was helping her off the floor. I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I held on tight to my sort of sister and she held on to me until the moonlight shone.

  We were standing in the clearing of pines where the shack was. Pretty was walking around the side of the place, obviously heading for the front door, while Pa, naked as a jaybird, his pecker flopping, the 22 raised and aimed, was heading for the side. At the corner they met face-to-face.

  “Say yer prayers, tater face,” said Pa, and I yelled out for him not to shoot.

  He turned quick and saw me and Alice standing there, and his eyes bugged. “Oh,” he said, and it was like he lost his breath for a second. It was the first time I seen him scared.

  “The whole fuckin’ family,” he said. “No problem, I’ll plug all you crumb snatchers at once.” Mrs. Adler was at the window just plain screaming, not even saying anything.

  Pretty swept the razor in front of him and slashed Pa’s forearm. The gun dipped down for a moment, but Pa groaned a little and raised it again. I couldn’t look and I couldn’t not look, expecting any second for Pretty’s head to be shattered like the glass globe. He brought the razor up as if he meant to split Pa down the middle, and Pa froze in his usual stance when he was about to pull the trigger. Before he could fire, though, we saw some shadow, moving low through the night.

  Jundle hit Pa behind the knees and my old man crumpled up and whimpered, the gun flying out of his hands. I dove for it and grabbed it away, but backing up I fell
onto my ass. Pa kicked the hog in the head and scrabbled after me on his knees. “Give me that gun, Jr. That’s an order.”

  He got up and stood over me with burning eyes and a hideous expression. In my fear, I pulled the trigger, and the bullet went through his left eye and come straight out the back with the crack of bone and a splurt of blood and brain. He stood there for a second, that eye hole smoking like the ash on one of Jundle’s cheroots, and then he fell forward like a cut tree. I rolled out of the way. He was so heavy with death that he would have made a pancake of me.

  I wanted to think about the fact that I’d just killed my pa, but there wasn’t a second. Alice was standing at the window staring out like she was hypnotized. By the time I reached her, Pretty had already commenced slicing up Mrs. Adler. She was slit open from the chin to belly button and blood was everywhere, soaking her night gown, pooling on the floor in the moonlight. I saw her heart beating inside her. She moved her mouth to make a blood-bubble whisper, and I could tell by reading her lips that her last words were “Pretty Please.”

  I pulled Alice away and put my arms around her. She didn’t move a muscle and was cold as stone. When I drew away, I found a huge grin on her face. Next I knew, Pretty was beside us, drenched in blood, laughing, with an arm around each of our shoulders. “How’d we get here?” I asked Alice when the hug broke up.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but let’s get.”

  I looked around and saw Jundle, recovered from his foot to the face, taking a piss against the side of the house. When he was done, he took the burning cheroot from his mouth and touched its red-hot tip to the planks where he’d relieved himself. Fire sprang up as if from gasoline, and in a blink the flames were creeping up the side of the shack.

  The hog trotted over to us and made a motion with his head that we were to climb on his back. Somehow, though it didn’t seem possible, we all fit. He grunted, squealed, farted, took three enormous jumps, and lit into the sky. We were flying upward on the back of a hog. I was petrified, and could feel Alice’s arms wrapped around my chest and her face pressing into my back. I couldn’t see Pretty, and didn’t know how he was managing to hang on, but I still heard his laughter, which hadn’t ceased since he sliced up his ma.

  At one point Jundle swept down low over a dirt path through a wood, and we saw the shot and butchered bodies of our parents riding the back of Cynara the old heifer, heading off to, I guessed, hell. By the time Jundle reached an altitude where we were soaring through white clouds and stars, I was exhausted. It was peaceful way up there. I wrapped my arms around the enchanted animal’s thick bristly neck as I fell forward into sleep.

  I woke, confused, in my own bed the next morning, and so did Alice and Pretty Please. Ma, who had our breakfast ready as always before leaving for work, seemed never to suspect a thing. We couldn’t wait for her to leave for work. When she finally did, Alice said to me. “What do you make of it?”

  “Did we kill your ma and my pa?”

  “I guess we did,” she said.

  Pretty actually nodded.

  “It ain’t possible,” I said. I ran to the bathroom and checked for the razor in the cabinet. It was gone. I ran back to report to Alice.

  “We gotta act like nothing happened,” she said. “Deny everything.”

  “Its gonna be hard to forget. How’d we get back from Mrs. Oftshaw’s?”

  “Jundle,” said Pretty Please, and me and Alice almost fell over. It was the first time her brother had said anything but that which had become his name.

  Later that morning, we were back at the rose garden of the church in order to keep our deal. We sat on the bench, looking at the fountain, all of us still tired from the doings of the night. Eventually the minister came out to see us. We gave him a seat on the bench between me and Alice. Pretty didn’t budge for him.

  “Did you go and look in on Mrs. Oftshaw?” he asked.

  I nodded, and Alice said, “We did.”

  “She’s got a magic hog,” I told him.

  “She’s got a man’s head floatin’ in water,” said Alice.

  “We shaved,” said Pretty Please, another surprise.

  The minister looked quizzically at us. “You must tell me the truth,” he said.

  “Us deputy angels got inside her place, and I took this little box,” said Alice. “I spied on her whispering into it. Then she shut the lid down tight. Must have been a curse or something.”

  I looked at Alice, but she wouldn’t look at me.

  “Give me that,” said the minister and took the fancy box from her hand. “There’s no such thing as curses, dear.” He pulled the lid off and held it up to look inside. We saw it there, a shiny red wasp with a long stinger that looked like a piece of jewelry cut from ruby. Only thing is, its wings started to flutter, and then all of a sudden it took off. It flew straight up into the minister’s face and sunk that long stinger into the white jelly of his left eye. The box hit the paving stones, and the poor man screamed, bringing his hands up to cover his face.

  We never got paid for spying that day ’cause we ran for our bikes with Pretty hot behind us. We pedaled like mad back home and hid with the curtains pulled over, expecting Sheriff Bedlow any minute for hours on end. But he never did come, and the minister never told on us. Maybe he was afraid that people would find out he’d promised to pay us for spying on Mrs. Oftshaw. As it was, he had to start using the Mount Chary Galore on that eye, the only thing he claimed would stop the burning.

  The summer ended and it was time to return to school for me and Alice, and Pretty had to go back to the basement. We thought that he’d start using more words now that he’d said a few, but that petered out soon enough. A few weeks had gone by, and I still didn’t know what to make of that crazy night. Then one day my ma called all us kids together when she returned home from work. Before we ate dinner, she sat us down on the couch, herself in a chair across from us.

  “I hate to have to tell you this,” she said, and I could see her grow weak. She lowered her head slightly so we couldn’t see her eyes. “Your ma,” she said, nodding toward Alice, “and your pa,” she said to me, “are dead. I don’t know how else to put it.”

  Neither Alice or me said a peep. If my sort of sister was half as surprised as I was, her tongue felt turned to stone.

  My mother cried, and we moved closer and put our arms around her. Finally Alice said, “What happened?”

  My ma just shook her head.

  “How’d they die?” I asked.

  She was silent for a time, drying her eyes, and eventually said, “Car crash out in California.”

  “That ain’t really what happened, is it?” asked Alice, softly, stroking the back of Ma’s neck.

  Ma shook her head. In a whisper she said, “No.”

  “What then?” I asked.

  “It’s too terrible. Far too terrible to describe.”

  A few days later, the summer ended. Me and Alice had to go back to school and Pretty was sent to the basement. He’d slowly lost all his new power of speech, but not before my ma got to hear him say the word “Love,” which managed to lift her out of the funk caused by finding out about Pa’s death. From then on, when Mrs. Oftshaw was coming to the house, me and Alice made sure we were out. We’d had enough of her magic, but it was our secret and we talked about it when we’d slip out into the woods to kiss. Late one afternoon that fall, after the weather had gone cold, I spied Mount Chary bathed in the last golden light of day, like an ancient, gilded pyramid, looming in the distance down the end of the one road out of town, and I got a feeling for the first time in my life that everything was finally right.

  A Natural History of Autumn

  On a blue afternoon in autumn, Riku and Michi drove south from Numazu in his silver convertible along the coast of the Izu Peninsula. The temperature was mild for the end of Octo
ber, and the air was clear, the sun glinting off Suruga Bay. She wore sunglasses and, to protect her hair, a yellow scarf with a design of orange butterflies. He wore driving gloves, a black dress shirt, a loosened white tie. The car, the open road, the rush of the wind made it impossible to converse, and so for miles she watched the bay to their right and he the rising slopes of maple and pine to their left. Just outside the town of Dogashima, a song came on the radio, “Just You, Just Me,” and they turned to look at each other. She waited for him to smile. He did. She smiled back, and then he headed inland to search for the hidden onsen, Inugami.

  They’d met the previous night at the Limit, an upscale hostess bar. Riku’s employer had a tab there and he was free to use it when in Numazu. He’d been once before, drunk, and spent time with a hostess. Her conversation had sounded rote, like a script; her flattery grotesquely opulent and therefore flat. The instant he saw Michi, though, in her short black dress with a look of uncertainty in her eyes, he knew it would be a different experience. He ordered a bottle of Nikka Yoichi and two glasses. She introduced herself. He stood and bowed. They were in a private room at a polished table of blond wood. The chairs were high-backed and upholstered like thrones. To their right was an open-air view of pines and the coast. She waited for him to smile and eventually he did. She smiled back and told him, “I’m writing a book.”

  Riku said, “Aren’t you supposed to tell me how handsome I am?”

  “Your hair is perfect,” she said.

  He laughed. “I see.”

  “I’m writing a book,” she said again. “I decided to make a study of something.”

  “You’re a scientist?” he said.

  “We’re all scientists,” she said. “We watch and listen, take in information, process it. We spin theories by which we live.”