A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  “The appearance of industry and yet the manufacture of nothing,” said Thrashner, closing his eyes in delight.

  By the time Benett left Thrashner’s veranda, he had the old man’s agreement of political and labor support but also a promise of cash for a share in the enterprise. After a year of work, Benett’s scheme was beginning to take shape. He felt so good, he gave an order to the Jennings lad to troll the city streets for a pretty, young dolly mop for hire. “Be courteous, boy,” he reminded the driver. “We must respect how these women have turned themselves into factories.”

  Down by the waterfront, the carriage slowed to a crawl. Benett slid back the glass of the window and leaned out. Up ahead a few feet, standing to the side of the cobblestone lane beneath a dim gas lamp, was a young woman with her blond hair in barley curls. He quickly checked the condition of her clothing, which let him know how long she’d been on the street plying her trade. When he decided he could live with their degree of shabbiness, he said, “Young miss, would you like a ride?”

  “Where will you take me?” she asked.

  He noticed she was wearing boots without socks and this put him off, but her face was lovely. “I’m inviting you to my mansion to drink champagne and to celebrate.”

  “A party?” she said.

  “Of course,” said Benett and did his best to smile. “Come now.”

  She nodded and stepped toward the carriage. Jennings held the horses still for her to get in. As the girl was getting situated on the bench next to Benett, he banged on the ceiling of the cab five times to indicate to the driver to go as fast as possible. “What’s your name, miss?” he said. The horses lurched forward and threw the passengers together. Gas lamps seemed to fly past the windows, and the racket of the wheels on the stones was hellish.

  “My name is Tima Loorie,” she said.

  “What?” said Benett, and put his hand behind his ear to hear her better.

  She pulled him to her and brought her face close to his as if expecting a kiss. Benett acquiesced and opened his mouth in preparation. He waited for her lips to touch his, and then she spit directly into his mouth. He was paralyzed with astonishment, and before he could utter a groan, he felt the thing slide down his throat with the heft of an oyster, tasting of bile and rot.

  “Tima Loorie,” she shouted.

  This time he heard her and lunged, brandishing the stick, but with one graceful move she opened the carriage door and leaped out. Benett managed to close the door and bang on the ceiling once for Jennings to stop. When the horses came to a halt, he called up to the boy, “Head slowly back the way we’ve come. The fool girl jumped out. We need to find her.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the boy.

  “And Jennings, have you got the derringer?”

  “In my pocket and loaded.”

  They drove slowly back along the streets they’d galloped through, but saw no one. Eventually, Benett had to satisfy himself with the idea that the carriage was moving so fast that she’d no doubt broken her neck in the fall. He finally signaled for Jennings to head back to Whitethorn. The moment he got into his study, he downed three quick glasses of whisky in hopes it might kill the witch’s scurvy spit he could feel swimming in his stomach. That night he needed no further driving in the carriage to sleep. He fell into utter darkness, fully clothed, in the chair by the window.

  He woke late the next morning, unusual for him, yet still felt exhausted. Using a hand mirror, he gazed upon the dark circles surrounding his eyes, his pale complexion. His gut was in a turmoil, and every time he thought back to the spit, he grew nauseous. He went to his bedchamber and got beneath the counterpane, pulling it up to his chin. Farting and shivering, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but the phrase “fruiting body” repeated in his thoughts in the voice of Tima Loorie. At noon, the elder Jennings came in to deliver a message that had just been brought by Thrashner’s man, Binsel.

  My Good Benett,

  I’ve been up and at work early today on the fairy enterprise. Drinks at my place this afternoon at 3:00 with Lord Smith. He’ll take our money in the long run, but he’ll want us to grovel a bit in his presence. We can’t do anything without him on board. I’ve invited a few others so as not to make the scene too awkward.

  Your Partner In Manufacture,

  Thrashner

  He needed both Jennings and Jennings to pull him out of bed and get him into his formal attire. He said little but belched profusely, and the father and son, one on each arm, led him to the carriage. In the fresh air, he felt a bit better and managed to get into his seat by himself.

  “Shall I accompany you?” asked the elder Jennings.

  “Don’t be a fool. The boy will take me.”

  Only moments after pulling away from Whitethorn, Benett grew worse. Waves of nausea and difficulty breathing through his nose. He pulled out a handkerchief and blew. For a moment, it felt as if he was bleeding, and he looked into the folded handkerchief to check. What he found there wasn’t the red stain he feared, but a tiny green man, struggling to be free. The creature scurried across the expanse of material and then leaped to Benett’s knee. He felt the thing land and brought his fist down, but too late. It had already hopped into the shadows below. For over a quarter mile, Benett stamped his feet around the floor, hoping to crush the thing he’d convinced himself was an insect.

  The affair at Thrashner’s was crowded with important people who no doubt sensed palm-greasing in the offing. Benett struggled from room to room, meeting the highwaymen of the aristocracy. The most difficult thing for him was smiling. His guts were twisting like a pin wheel, and the sweat was pouring off him. Before he’d yet run into Thrashner, Bensil handed him a brandy and introduced him to Lord and Lady Smith.

  Benett knew he needed to rise to the occasion, so he stretched his smile another agonizing jot and took a sip of his drink to seem debonair. “A pleasure to meet you both,” he said. The brandy set fire to his insides.

  “Likewise,” said Lord Smith, a stately man whose eyes barely opened. “Lady Smith and I would like you to do us a courtesy, if you would. To the gathering today my dear lady has brought a new dish she has invented. She’s a culinary expert, of course, you know. In the French tradition. She’d like you to have a taste and give her your unmitigated opinion.”

  Benett looked to Lady Smith and bowed slightly, for the first time noticing the platter she held in her arms. The aroma struck him, and he felt the saliva coursing to the corners of his mouth. He knew he dared not look, but he did. Slices of gray meat in what appeared a dishwater sauce. Breathing deeply, he managed to regain a modicum of composure.

  “Orange goose,” she said. Her outfit, to Benett, made her look like some kind of circus performer. The sparkle of her diamonds prevented him from seeing any more of her. She stabbed a slice of goose with a long thin silver fork and held it up to his mouth.

  Lord Smith looked on, smiling. Thrashner suddenly appeared behind the lord and gave a quick hand motion and a wink to convey the message, “Eat it and like it.” Benett closed his eyes and opened his mouth. He couldn’t help a slight gag when it touched his tongue. Slowly he chewed it as it seemed every guest looked on. The goose was tough as gristle. It became evident during that eternity of chewing that he’d need a visit to the crapper post haste. Through clenched teeth, he announced, “Delicious,” and then excused himself for a moment.

  He could have thrashed Thrashner with his stick, he was so angry with him. “No wonder Lord Smith’s smile had no sign of pleasure,” he grumbled, scuttling down a long hallway. One thing he could say for his business partner, though, he had the state of the art in toilets. Benett locked the door, hung up his jacket, undid his trousers and settled onto the bowl. He was breathing heavily and his heart was racing. There were periods where the dizziness swirled toward a blackout and then pulled back. He leaned forward and st
rained to free the beast. Trickles of sweat fell from his forehead. As they tumbled through the air, they became tiny blue women, who landed in a crouch on his bare knees and then sprang away onto the floor.

  He cried, and his tears became fairies that he brushed away into flight. A belch became a will-o’-the-wisp, glowing as it issued from the cave of his open mouth. He felt them crawling from his ears, down his cheeks to his shoulders. Then turmoil below, and a riotous gang of goblins clawed their way out of his quivering hindquarters with a cumulative birth shriek. He heard them laughing and swimming in the water beneath him.

  Jennings was sitting on the driver’s box when Benett appeared from behind a hedge. One quick glance and the boy leaped down and caught his tipping employer by the sleeve of his jacket.

  “What’s wrong, sir? You look horrible.”

  “I shat a populace.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get me home, lad.”

  As soon as Jennings managed to get him in the carriage and start on the way, Benett felt their pointy heads poking up through the pores of his skin like a living, writhing beard. He whimpered as they bored and poured out of him from every conceivable egress. It was like his body was turning inside out, and the agony of it was mythic. He beat himself all over and clawed at his own face. Then he felt the spades dig in at the corners of his eyes, and the light failed.

  Back at Whitethorn, when young Jennings opened the door of the carriage, he saw no fairies, though in the course of the ride Benett had manufactured thousands. A strong, sulfurous breeze blew out of the box, and behind it sat the master’s corpse, desiccated, full of holes, the sockets empty. The boy ran to the house to get his father.

  It’s said that Benett’s fairies spread out around the city and multiplied. They weren’t the good ones that he’d intended to produce but were ones who thrived in soot and took energy from iron. They found homes in all of the myriad factories and worked their enchantment to cause accidents, sabotage machinery, create explosions, set fires, and generally gum up the works. They were responsible for more than one industrialist, of his own volition, leaping into a smokestack.

  As for Benett, Jennings and his son found an old whisky barrel and rolled it into the courtyard. They didn’t spare the kerosene. When the elder threw the three matches, a pillar of fire shot up into the night. Eventually the flames settled down and the skull popped in due course. Jennings retired just past midnight, but the boy sat alone by the barrel and waited for the libban until the dawn revealed a smoking heap of ashes and bones.

  The Last Triangle

  I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker, in Fishmere, part suburb/part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people’s yards and pawned it or sold it on the street. One night I didn’t have enough to cop, and I was in a bad way. There was nobody on the street to even beg from. It was freezing. Eventually I found this house on a corner and noticed an open garage out back. I got in there where it was warmer, laid down on the concrete, and went into withdrawal.

  You can’t understand what that’s like unless you’ve done it. Remember that Twilight Zone where you make your own Hell? Like that. I eventually passed out or fell asleep and woke, shivering, to daylight, unable to get off the floor. Standing in the entrance to the garage was this little old woman with her arms folded, staring down through her bifocals at me. The second she saw I was awake, she turned and walked away. I felt like I’d frozen straight through to my spine during the night and couldn’t get up. A splitting headache, and the nausea was pretty intense too. My first thought was to take off, but too much of me just didn’t give a shit. The old woman reappeared, but now she was carrying a pistol in her left hand.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

  I told her I was sick.

  “I’ve seen you around town,” she said, “you’re an addict.” She didn’t seem freaked out by the situation, even though I was. I managed to get up on one elbow. I shrugged and said, “True.”

  And then she left again, and a few minutes later came back, toting an electric space heater. She set it down next to me, stepped away, and said, “You missed it last night, but there’s a cot in the back of the garage. Look,” she said, “I’m going to give you some money. Go buy clothes. You can stay here, and I’ll feed you. If I know you’re using, though, I’ll call the police. I hope you realize that if you do anything I don’t like, I’ll shoot you.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion, and, yeah, I could actually picture her pulling the trigger.

  What could I say. I took the money and she went back into her house. My first reaction to the whole thing was I laughed. I could score. I struggled up all dizzy and bleary, smelling like the devil’s own shit, and stumbled away.

  I didn’t cop that day, only a small bag of weed. Why? I’m not sure, but there was something about the way the old woman talked to me, her unafraid, straight-up approach. That, maybe, and I was so tired of the cycle of falling hard out of a drug dream onto the street and scrabbling like a three-legged dog for the next fix. By noon, I was pot high but still feeling shitty, downtown, and I passed this old clothing store. It was one of those places like you can’t fucking believe is still in operation. The manikin in the window had on a tan leisure suit. Something about the way the sunlight hit that window display, though, made me remember the old woman’s voice, and I had this feeling like I was on an errand for my mother.

  I got the clothes. I went back and lived in her garage. The jitters, the chills, the scratching my scalp and forearms were bad, but, when I could finally get to sleep, that cot was as comfortable as a bed in a fairy tale. She brought food a couple times a day. She never said much to me, and the gun was always around. The big problem was going to the bathroom. When you get off the junk, your insides really open up. I knew if I went near the house, she’d shoot me. Let’s just say I marked the surrounding territory. About two weeks in, she wondered herself and asked me, “Where are you evacuating?”

  At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Evacuating?” Eventually, I caught on and told her, “Around.” She said that I could come in the house to use the downstairs bathroom. It was tough, ’cause every other second I wanted to just bop her on the head, take everything she had, and score like there was no tomorrow. I kept a tight lid on it till one day, when I was sure I was going to blow, a delivery truck pulled up to the side of the house and delivered, to the garage, a set of barbells and a bench. Later, when she brought me out some food, she nodded to the weights and said, “Use them before you jump out of your skin. I insist.”

  Ms. Berkley was her name. She never told me her first name, but I saw it on her mail, “Ifanel.” What kind of name is that? She had iron-gray hair, pulled back tight into a bun, and strong green eyes behind the big glasses. Baggy corduroy pants and a zip-up sweater was her wardrobe. I definitely remember a yellow one with flowers around the collar. She was a busy old woman. Quick and low to the ground. Her house was beautiful inside. The floors were polished and covered with those Persian rugs. Wallpaper and stained-glass windows. But there was none of that goofy shit I remembered my grandmother going in for, suffering Christs, knitted hats on the toilet paper. Every room was in perfect order and there were books everywhere. Once she let me move in from the garage to the basement, I’d see her reading at night, sitting at her desk in what she called her “office.” All the lights were out except for this one brass lamp that was right over the book that lay on her desk. She moved her lips when she read. “Good night, Ms. Berkley,” I’d say to her and head for the basement door. From down the hall I’d hear her voice come like out of a dream, “Good night.” She told me she’d been a history teacher at a college. You could tell she was really smart. It didn’t exactly
take a genius, but she saw straight through my bullshit.

  One morning we were sitting at her kitchen table having coffee, and I asked her why she’d helped me out. I was feeling pretty good then. She said, “That’s what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”

  “Weren’t you afraid?”

  “Of you?” she said. She took the pistol out of her bathrobe pocket and put it on the table between us. “There’s no bullets in it,” she told me. “I went with a fellow who died, and he left that behind. I wouldn’t know how to load it.”

  Normally I would have laughed, but her expression made me think she was trying to tell me something. “I’ll pay you back,” I said. “I’m gonna get a job this week and start paying you back.”

  “No, I’ve got a way for you to pay me back,” she said and smiled for the first time. I was 99 percent sure she wasn’t going to tell me to fuck her, but, you know, it crossed my mind.

  Instead, she asked me to take a walk with her downtown. By then it was winter, cold as a witch’s tit. Snow was coming. We must have been a sight on the street. Ms. Berkley, marching along in her puffy ski parka and wool hat, blue with gold stars and a tassel. I don’t think she was even five foot. I walked a couple of steps behind her. I’m 6-4, I hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in a long while, and I was wearing this brown suit jacket that she’d found in her closet. I couldn’t button it if you had a gun to my head, and my arms stuck out the sleeves almost to the elbow. She told me, “It belonged to the dead man.”