by Jeffrey Ford
It had been three days since his journey to the waterfall. In that time there had been no change in his relationship with his newfound community. Even though the chief had undone him by throwing his rifle into the falls, and Cley had shown his anger to the young man, on the walk back to the village, it had been as if nothing had ever happened. Then there had been the vision of the veil drifting high over the thundering water. The hunter couldn’t decipher what this piece of magic had been meant to show him. It was obvious that when the chief had insisted he bring the rifle on their journey that day, it had been his intention all along to dispose of it. “Is this treachery?” he wondered. “Or is it a sign meant to assist me?” The only thing that was certain was that he still felt at ease among the Silent Ones and was loath to set out again into the lonely Beyond.
Wood had begun to grow restless. He would no longer allow the children to place the strands of flowers around his neck, and when the members of the tribe offered their noses for the dog to lick, he growled menacingly. Cley promised him one night in the hut that they would soon be on their way. The dog quieted down and brought him the book, which was a much slimmer volume than before. Someone had apparently been sneaking in when Cley was out and stealing pages from it. As far as the hunter cared, they could chew the leather cover if they so desired, but he understood that these thefts were upsetting his companion.
It was a hot night full of stars and mosquitoes. Cley sat cross-legged on the ground along with the rest of the tribe. Within the center of the perimeter of huts a huge fire blazed. Silhouetted by the flames, the queen danced with impossibly acrobatic flips and sensuous gyrations. Some type of drink was being passed around in gourds—a liquor that tasted of the yellow plums and orange berries that grew in groves nearby the village. Its inebriative quality was slight but enough to alter Cley’s usual blindness to the nakedness of the Silent Ones and recast her highness’s movements in the realm of the erotic. He swallowed hard and looked around to see the rest of the men doing the same.
Again he concentrated on the queen, who was by then directly in front with her back to him, bent over and wagging her rear end to some inaudible music everyone else seemed to hear. Cley felt a certain stiffening in the loins, then noticed that tattooed onto the left hemisphere of her shapely hind section was a portrait of a man he recognized. The face was heavy, the eyes small and set close together, the hair sparse. It was so clear to him that he knew this fellow, but the otherwise sexual nature of the dance threw his mind into such a state of confusion that he couldn’t recall from where.
The queen leaped away, tumbled on the ground toward the fire, and then came up with her arms waving above her head. Her speed of movement decreased, and she turned lethargically in tight circles. Each time her backside was to him, Cley tried to get a better look at the figure of the portrait. Suddenly, he looked up and saw that the queen, peering over her shoulder, noticed him focusing on her rear end. It was fleeting, but she shot him a look so obviously full of desire he instantly averted his glance. This was when he noticed that the chief had been watching the entire exchange between himself and the queen. Cley smiled, hoping the chief would return the imitation smile. He didn’t.
Luckily, the queen soon finished her dance. As she walked back to join the others gathered on the ground, she again glanced at Cley. He nodded to her to be polite, and she returned the sign by rolling her eyes so far back that the pupils disappeared beneath the upper lids and showed only white. She took her place next to the chief, who rubbed his left hand on the top of his head and blinked three times. At this signal, the aged body scribe slowly stood and hobbled out before the crowd.
He took a position in front of the fire and then he too began to dance. His movements, unlike the queen’s, were halting and awkward, so comically ungraceful that Cley wondered if he was simply a bad dancer or if he was drunk. His controlled stumbling lasted only a few minutes, and when he stopped, he lifted his hands to show that he now held a small songbird in each. The tiny creatures glowed unnaturally, like embers in the night. All around Cley, the people tapped their closed lips with their right index fingers. The hunter joined in. The old man threw the birds into the air, but before they flew five yards they burst into showers of sparks that rained down harmlessly upon the crowd. Next, he approached the onlookers and held up to them what appeared to Cley to be a small crystal. It glinted in the firelight for a moment before he placed it in his mouth. Then he turned and walked directly into the fire.
Cley almost shouted. He was about to lunge to the old man’s rescue but quickly changed his mind and held himself back. He had been duped too many times by the parlor tricks of the Silent Ones. Through the wavering flames, Cley watched as the tattoo artist disintegrated into a pink pillar of smoke. What began as a ball of smog the color of sunsets and certain flowers soon became a profuse trail that rose from the center of the fire. It started to take on a definite shape. At first it wriggled upward in a long, wide column, and then it turned downward and headed for the crowd. As it approached, a head grew out of the smoke—a monstrous snout, large, lidless eyes, pointed ears, and from between them, tapering down the vibrantly pink snake body, a row of spikes. It was an image of Sirimon as that creature might look in life, complete with skin and scales. The serpent, whose tail spike remained in the fire, slithered through the air, twisting in and out among the seated people, who inhaled deeply. Its jaws opened and closed, and there came from everywhere at once a terrible roar that startled Cley. The last thing he expected was a sound.
Eventually, the Sirimon drifted apart into misty tatters that melted into a pink haze and hung in the air around the village. Standing before the fire was the old man, his head bowed, his eyes closed as if he was asleep on his feet. Cley assumed the celebration was over when the members of the tribe began to rise and head toward their huts. He followed their lead and made his way in the direction of his own place, where Wood sat waiting for him. On the way, he passed the body scribe, who was now miraculously before him instead of behind. The old man took no notice of Cley but stared straight ahead. As the hunter passed him, the artist reached quickly over and slipped something into his hand. Noting the secretive nature of the act, Cley did not make a show of looking at what it was but stashed it quickly into his pocket.
In the hut, by candlelight, Cley inspected the secret gift. It was a crystal, much like the one the body scribe had put in his mouth before stepping into the fire. The stone was a perfectly clear, smooth oval—most pleasing to hold. The hunter took off his clothes and lay on the reed mat, staring into the stone. He wondered what prompted the gift and why the clandestine nature in which it had been given. These thoughts would have to wait, though, because Wood was beside him with the book.
They could not read fast enough to keep up with the theft of pages. Each night they landed in the middle of a completely new subject. The dog was genuinely put out by the lack of linearity in the reading, but Cley found a certain amusement in trying to guess what hobbyhorse the metaphysical author would be riding. One night it was “the power of faith,” another, “the connection of the mind and the universe through a certain pealike structure in the brain,” and on this particular occasion, “the souls of inanimate objects.” He thought the subject mildly interesting, but could go no further than two pages owing to the effects of the drink served at the celebration.
Wood, for all of his insistence on hearing the words, was asleep before Cley closed the singed cover. The village outside was still, and the cry of a lone night bird sounded from a distant grove. Before extinguishing the candle, he rested back on the mat and held the crystal up to look at again. In his memory, he saw the old man step into the fire and become a cloud of smoke. “How?” he whispered. What was yet more difficult for him to figure out was how the pink illusion of Sirimon was made to roar.
If he had learned anything valuable from the Silent Ones it was that he needed to change the way he thought about the Beyond. This, he saw, was a key to his survival. Somehow
he had to find harmony with the wild territory. All of his long-held beliefs, garnered from a lifetime in the realm, were causing him to struggle against the wilderness. He was an infection, an invading parasite the land had identified as alien. The secret was to become like the snake that lived in the belly of the creature he had shot on the trip to the waterfall. In order to accomplish that, he decided he would have to prolong his stay in the village.
As he rolled over to blow out the candle, he was interrupted by the sound of movement just outside his hut. He turned back and saw the animal-skin flap being lifted. Slipping through the entrance was the queen. She came toward him, holding a drinking gourd, with a most seductive look on her face. Cley reached over quickly and covered himself with the animal skin that was his blanket. Although he knew speech was useless, he asked, “Can I help you?”
She crouched next to him and handed him the gourd. He looked at her and she at him, and he knew he would have to drink. Thinking it was the same mixture that had been served at the celebration, Cley leaned back and dashed off three-quarters of the brew. Only when he had finished the rest of it did he realize that this drink was something completely different. It was much stronger, more bitter, and he choked on the aftertaste. He handed the gourd back to her, and she nonchalantly knocked it out of his hand. She grabbed the edge of the animal-skin blanket and pulled it away from him.
“Excuse me,” said Cley.
He looked at her and she was beautiful, but the look on her face was one of such fierce determination that she also frightened him. For the first time, he noticed that her eyes were a dazzling shade of green, and that etched everywhere upon her shoulders, along her neck, across her forehead were tiny blue crickets. She leaned forward and licked his throat. He reached forward to touch her breasts.
“Trouble,” he thought, but the intimacy was something he had longed for.
She moved one leg over him, straddling his middle, and then reached down and maneuvered his member inside herself. Cley felt the drug she had given him begin to work. It moved as swiftly as fire from his toes to his chest, a wave of paralysis sweeping up the length of his body. He could no longer move his feet, his legs, his arms, his hands.
The condition galloped onto his neck, and, as he tried to cry out, his tongue became paralyzed and all that came forth was a grunt. Although he was completely numb, he could see perfectly in the flickering candlelight. The queen sat up straight above him and looked down past her breasts. Now he heard others entering his hut. The chief was there, looking over his wife’s left shoulder, smiling mechanically, while the old man peered from over the right shoulder. Behind them there were other members of the tribe. As Cley began to lose consciousness, the queen swept down and licked his right ear.
“Pa-ni-ta,” she whispered.
The last thing the hunter was aware of was the raucous laughter of the Silent Ones.
others
Believe me, I have kept my vigil every evening here at the desk, juiced to the tips of my horns with beauty, waiting for the wilderness to seep out onto the paper. I could feel the Beyond behind my eyes, like a ball of ice with the potential to melt into a river of words, but the blackness in which I had last left Cley kept it frozen, and I could not generate the creative warmth necessary to get things running, no matter how many cigarettes I smoked or how I grimaced and muttered.
I poked around in the old, dust-covered files of the Ministry of Justice, reading some of the prosecutions Cley had been involved in when he had been Physiognomist, First Class. A good many of these had fanciful titles—“The Latrobian Werewolf,” “The Grulig Case,” “The Unseeing Eye,” “The Guilt of Flock”—and read much like fictional stories. I had hoped that reading about my subject in a different context might help me find him again in my own thoughts, but the Cley of those older times was a different man entirely.
My frustration even led me down beneath the remains of the Academy of Physiognomy, through a tight aperture in a passage choked with wreckage. There, in a well-preserved marble room, one massive wall of which was lined with three-foot-by-three-foot metal vault doors, I paid a visit to number 243. Behind each of those doors was the body of a mechanized human being. These individuals were victims of Below’s experiments. He had created a small population of organic automatons that could be brought to life by pressing the backs of their necks. From what Cley had told me, they were wired from within and their neurons had been replaced with those of dogs. Though they looked in every way like normal people, the Master’s abilities were not capable of capturing the inner humanity. On our journey to the Beyond, Cley had confessed to me one night that when he was a student he had fallen in love with the physical beauty of one of these monstrosities.
Years ago, when I had first returned to the ruins, I remembered his story and came in search of them. I found the very one he had mentioned and brought her to life for an hour. The sight of her elicited in me an overwhelming reaction of pity, for her as well as myself. I can’t say why I recently thought another meeting with number 243 would somehow focus my vision of Cley in the Beyond, but I went and brought her to life. Perhaps it was just the peripheral connection to my subject, perhaps something else entirely. The movements of her beautiful body made me think, for a short time, that I was onto something, but her first horrible grunt in response to a voiced thought of mine was enough for me to lead her back to the rolling slab behind the door and return her to merciful sleep. I fled the basement of the Academy more confused and depressed than when I had entered. I swore to myself never to return to that hell.
Following the ill-fated meeting with 243, I injected myself with so much beauty one night that I thought I was going to drift out of my own body. No writing came of it, but I was visited by many apparitions of those whom I had known and those I never knew. My father, Drachton Below, made an appearance and admonished me for my desolate existence. He told me he wished I had never discovered the secret trove of the drug he had stashed away in the underground tunnels. “Face it,” he told me, “you are a man. Now start acting like one. Guilt is the food of the weak and the useless.” At the end of his speech, he forgave me for my sins and moved close to put his arms around me. Yes, I wanted to feel that embrace, the comfort of it, even though he had been a murderer and a tyrant, but, alas, he fizzled into nothing and was gone.
In that same monumental stupor, I saw the girl, Emilia, who had come to visit me, and it struck me that my problem was not that I could not find Cley in the Beyond, but that I longed to speak with her again. I could not go on with the writing until I settled this dilemma in my own life. Although the beauty had never been able to catch me up in addiction, I was now addicted to the notion of having a friend. Her visit made my loneliness so much more apparent to me, and it became clear that this was the very winter that kept the particulars of Cley’s journey frozen like a ball of ice behind my eyes.
The discovery stayed with me when I again became sober, but I was, of course, too much a coward to act upon it. What was I to do, fly to Wenau and sneak up to her window at night to speak with her? When I flew her home, I did not enter the village, but left her on its outskirts. I had no idea which of the many houses was hers. Now, with all of the new growth of that village, there are so many buildings. Instead, I spent my nights stealing and smoking fresh cigarettes and staring at the moon.
Then, two days ago, she returned, this time in the flesh, with others. I was in the ruins of the laboratory, marveling at a green, female human head with long black tresses that I remembered had once floated in a giant jar of clear liquid until the werewolves had ransacked the place and broken all of the glass. The many years the thing had been exposed to the air had mummified it. Though it was shriveled, it still retained all of its features. I had never put it together before that this was either the prototype or the corporeal conclusion of the Fetch, that disembodied head that flew through the Master’s memory palace. How he expected to achieve the same ends with it in reality, I had no idea. For Below, imagination,
memory, reality were all one and the same. I wondered, “How might that belief govern one’s life in the world?” and at that moment, I smelled them approaching.
Perhaps I should have been more cautious, but I knew from my senses that Emilia was among them. If it was to be a trap, I didn’t care. I instantly lit into the air through a hole in the roof and was above the city before they had left the fields of Harakun. From my vantage point among the clouds, I watched them approach in wagons and on horseback. The girl was there, and there were no fewer than twenty others, men and women and children. Some of the men carried rifles, but they walked away from their mounts without fear, and Emilia was leading them. I swept down to my coral seat atop the pile of rubble and anxiously waited.
They came in a close group, creeping across the plaza below as had Emilia and the boys. I had to admire the girl as she led them, out in front of burly fellows carrying weapons. She spotted me again and pointed for the others to see. They did not run, but many of them looked as though they would have liked to. For a moment, it entered my mind that this was a dangerous situation. I was sure that Emilia could be trusted, but I wasn’t sure that one of the others might not, at the last second, balk at the undeniable “otherness” of my form and drill me through the heart. The girl told me, herself, how much negative propaganda had been leveled against me, how my species was for them a religious symbol of evil portent, a living nightmare.
I dispersed these cautions with the flapping of my wings and went down to meet them. Of course, when I landed, they backed up a few steps, and one or two of the men brought up their guns as a precaution. I held out one of my hands and said, “Peace be with you,” a line I had stolen from one of the thousands of volumes I had devoured in my seclusion.