The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Misrix,” said Emilia, pointing to me and looking back at the others.

  They nodded and smiled.

  I nodded but did not smile, knowing how ghastly it might look to them to see my fangs. “I am so pleased that you all have come,” I said. When I uttered these words, I intended them as a pleasantry, but in the midst of speaking, I suddenly understood the depth to which I meant them. There were tears in my eyes. I removed my spectacles and brushed them away. It was this unguarded show of emotion that I believe convinced them more than any stolen lines of literature that I was to be trusted. Then, the rifles were lowered and one by one, they stepped forward and offered me their hands. This time, I shook each one.

  One middle-aged woman wearing a flowered scarf over her hair introduced herself to me as Emilia’s mother. She took my huge hand in both of hers and thanked me for saving her daughter from the river. I told her it was my pleasure to count Emilia as my friend, and she gave way to tears that, I could tell, had to do with many other things besides my rescue of her daughter.

  The official leader of the group was a tall, bright-looking young man named Feskin. He wore a pair of spectacles like my own, and I liked him immediately. I learned that he was a schoolteacher back in Wenau and had carefully studied the manuscripts that Cley had left behind, and gathered, over the years, a good deal of history concerning the ruins and the culture of the Well-Built City. He had been the first one to extend the theory that I might be more civilized than given credit for. Through the logic of his argument and because of Emilia swearing I had saved her from the river, the others were not unwilling to believe that the lurid stories told about me had been false.

  Mr. Feskin inquired as to how I spent my days, and I told him of the books I had read. He seemed mightily impressed and, right there, we had a discussion about Brisden’s Geography of the Soul, a classic from the early days of the realm that had had a most limited print run of three copies. While the others listened, we waxed somewhat erudite, and although it was boorish, I wanted desperately for them to know that I was learned.

  I gave them all a tour of the ruins, with Emilia at my side. She was very proud of herself for being able to point out details of the remaining architecture I had discussed with her on her last visit. When I stopped among the ruins of the Ministry of Science for them to see the preserved remains of the monkey who had been taught to write the line “I am not a monkey,” a woman came up to me and asked what my diet consisted of. When I told her plant meat and fruit, she then seemed confident enough to ask if she could touch my wings. I said it would be fine. She ran her hand over the membrane. Upon seeing this, the others stepped up and touched me in different places. The children wanted to feel the sharpness of the barb at the end of my tail, and I warned them not to prick their fingers since it contained a poison. One young woman reached up on her toes and, closing her hand around my left horn, stroked it up and down repeatedly. For a moment I considered returning her touch, but then thought better of it.

  In the Museum of the Ruins, they each had many questions to ask about the history of the City. They marveled at the core of the fruit of Paradise, and I allowed each to hold it and smell its aroma. I attested to its ability to produce miracles and told them that there was a specimen of that tree growing within the confines of the ruins.

  “You are a miracle,” said Feskin, placing one of his long, thin hands on my shoulder. “More human than many of those who would damn you back in Wenau.”

  He would have continued with my praises, but an older woman had just found among the shelves the head of a doll she remembered owning when she was a girl, living in the Well-Built City. I told her to take it with her, but she shook her head.

  “It belongs here,” she said.

  In the way she said it, I wondered how many of them still thought the same of me.

  We walked in a group out to the broken wall through which they could return to their wagons and horses. One by one, they thanked me for the tour and asked if there was anything they could bring me or that I might need. I told them I couldn’t think of anything. As the others departed the ruins, Feskin and Emilia stayed behind.

  “I want you to come and visit us at Wenau,” he said to me.

  “That would be wonderful, but I doubt the entire village would want that,” I said.

  “Give me some time to speak to them. A week is all I need. Come to the schoolhouse in a week. It is the building …”

  “I know the building,” I told him. “Where the old market used to be, by the bell.”

  He nodded. “Come in the evening, an hour after sunset. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  I agreed to it.

  “One other thing, Misrix,” he said. “A rather delicate matter, so don’t take offense. This may sound presumptuous, but you must do something to clothe yourself if you want to move freely among the people of Wenau.”

  He was looking down at my loins as he finished speaking, and I could not help but laugh.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  Emilia, to her credit, looked at Feskin as if she had no idea as to what he was alluding. When the schoolteacher left, she remained with me for a few minutes.

  “I brought you something,” she said, and reached into her pocket. Out came a long, thin object wrapped in brown paper.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Her mother called to her to come and she said good-bye to me and ran through the opening in the wall. “It’s candy,” she called back.

  For three days, I did nothing but bask in the glow of meeting the people of Wenau. At night I would fly over the village and look down at the lights burning in the dark and wonder which of my new acquaintances was sitting by each flame, reading or sewing or rocking a child to sleep. I did not eat the stick of candy that Emilia had given me. I did not even dare to unwrap it, but I would run its length under my nose. It smelled sweetly of orange, and its aroma was more lovely to me than that of the fruit of Paradise. This afternoon I was doing just this, when I saw in my mind’s eye an image of Cley, kneeling next to a pool of clear water. Then I knew it was time again to write.

  The taste of that candy now mingles with the intoxicating warmth of the beauty. What was once an iceball behind my eyes is now a ripe orange, dripping its sweetness into my bloodstream. I see the Beyond, and the late-summer sun hanging in the sky. There is the hunter, alone with only the black dog for companionship. I begin to write, knowing I have fared better than he with the natives of my own respective wilderness.

  empty book of the soul

  It was dark, unmercifully hot, and he could feel a flat surface pressing upon his face. The first clear thought that came to him was that the Silent Ones had buried him alive. In reaction to the fear of suffocation, he tried to sit up. When he did, the hard leather cover of the book, now empty of all of its pages, slid from his face down into his lap, and the bright sun suddenly blinded him.

  Although he was relieved that he had not been entombed, he was sweating profusely, and his head ached. There was an infernal itching at the center of his forehead, and he scratched it. He sat quietly with his eyes closed for a few minutes and worked to compose himself and regulate his erratic heartbeat. Slowly, he opened his lids against the harsh light and saw Wood lying in front of him, tongue drooping down, panting wildly.

  Beyond Wood, there was a landscape composed of nothing but pink sand. He turned to the right and left, and saw everywhere tall dunes without so much as a single weed growing among them. To his left, there lay on the ground a bulging waterskin. To his right were heaped his bow and quiver of arrows, his striking stones to make fire, his hat and knife. His pack was missing.

  “At the bottom of the waterfall with the rifle, no doubt,” he thought. Staring straight ahead at the horizon where reality rippled in the intense heat, it slowly dawned on him that he had been abandoned in the middle of a desert.

  “So much for my friends, the Silent Ones, and so much for their silence,” he thought as he rec
alled the chorus of derisive laughter—the last sound to grace his hearing before the drug had done its work.

  “Pa-ni-ta,” he said in a whisper, repeating the queen’s message. “It most likely means ‘Fools will burn.’”

  Then, at once, the weight of what had happened descended upon him, and he felt all the bitterness of betrayal. A mournful sound came, unexpectedly, from deep within. His body heaved, and he cried without tears. He was alone, left to perish by the very people he thought would teach him to survive in the Beyond. Grabbing the corner of the empty book of the soul, he tossed it away onto the sand. The dog stood with great effort, as if the heat had in some way increased gravity, and moved slowly up next to the hunter.

  “I can’t go on,” Cley told his companion. “We are more lost than ever and not an inch closer to our destination.” He had no desire to stand and decided simply to sit where he was, letting the sun bake him into unconsciousness and then death. As he reached for the waterskin in order to allow Wood to drink, he heard the distinct sound of a birdcall from behind him. At first he believed the heat had cooked his mind, but then he heard the sound again, and, from a different location, another bird answered the first.

  Curiosity finally won out over his depression, and he slowly, unsteadily, stood and turned to see what type of heat-generated illusion was croaking at his ill fate. He was dizzy from getting up, and the sight his eyes fixed upon made him dizzier still. There, lying a hundred yards away, was a huge oasis, a veritable city of lush vegetation, like a green jewel set in the burning pink sand. He cleared his eyes with his hands, unsure if what he was seeing wasn’t a mirage. After blinking repeatedly, turning around and then back three times, the swaying trees, the fan-leafed ferns, the bright red and purple blossoms, static explosions of color amidst the undergrowth, were still there. A bird, a flying rainbow, with an exceedingly long tail and wings that rolled like waves, lit into the sky and disappeared among the trees.

  This forest was like none other that he had encountered. All of the vegetation, from the boughs of almond-shaped leaves to the tangled riot of brush beneath, was a resilient green. It was as if the force of the desert’s heat had compressed the very possibility of life into a circular area of two hundred acres. “Another island of sorts,” thought Cley as he pushed the ferns and thick, dangling vines aside with his elbows. Above, the ceiling of lush growth was teeming with birds while all around him was the whir and buzz of insect life. He wondered what other creatures might dwell in such a magical place and kept the bow, arrow in place, at the ready in front of him.

  As he brushed past a certain branch, its many leaves came to life in a storm of butterflies. The backs of their wings were dull, but now they revealed the powder blue shade of the fronts. They swarmed upward, all together, twisting and looping, sharing one mind, and when Wood barked at their sudden flight, the sound dispersed them, and they were like a shattered pane of clear summer sky. Cley watched as they joined together again on a single branch, turning back into the drab leaves they had begun as.

  A shiny black hard-shelled insect, as big as a rat, with twitching antennae and vicious-looking mandibles, scuttled up the partitioned trunk of a tree that bent toward the ground beneath the weight of its prickly, yellow fruit.

  In a clearing, the floor of which was made up of pink sand that reminded Cley of coral dust swirling through the ruins of the Well-Built City, they discovered a half-dozen man-sized mounds of varying heights. Moving between them, around them, and into them were red ants engaged in a hundred single-file parades. At the peak of one anthill, a cluster of workers struggled to fit the eyeball of some unfortunate creature down an opening they could not seem to grasp was too small.

  When it screamed at him, drawing his attention, Cley took aim and fired an arrow at what at first appeared to be a disembodied female head hanging by its hair from a thick vine that had grown horizontally between two trees. The shot hit its mark, and when the hunter and the dog inspected their prey, it became clear that it was a bat, whose strange markings, when upside down, wings folded, looked for all the world like a human face with wide eyes and a mouth full of sharp teeth. Although the arrows were precious, he did not retrieve this one. The false visage reminded him too much of another from a false world.

  They passed through a thicket of plants with stems that reached four feet above the top of the hunter’s hat. Drooping down were prodigious white blossoms, the width of which he measured against his outstretched arms and found his reach inadequate by a few inches on either side. The petals overlapped and spiraled toward the center of the blossom, where a black circle oozed a clear viscous fluid. Every so often a droplet of this sap fell, and, in its descent, hardened into a small pebble before hitting the sand. These floral diamonds did not last for long, though. Before a minute could pass, they evaporated into a thin trail of white smoke that carried the scent of citrus.

  Cley washed his face in the pond. Kneeling on a bed of moss, he leaned out over the still water and cupped some into his hand to drink. He told Wood it tasted clean, and the dog joined him. When Cley was finished drinking, he removed his hat and brought up another draught of water to splash on his head. The coolness of it quelled the headache he had had since waking in the desert.

  As he hunched over the pond, letting the water drip from his face, he peered down at his own reflection. He had not seen himself for a very long time, since well before his hair had grown long enough to tie back and the beard had grown in. The man below, looking up, momentarily startled him. Now he knew the person that the Silent Ones knew, and he wondered if his frightful aspect had made them ill at ease. He looked every bit a man of the wilderness.

  Bringing his hand up, he touched the scar on his cheek where the demon had drawn blood with its barbed tail. It was while inspecting this feature of his face that he saw another. Upon noticing it, he could not believe he had not spotted it sooner. In the center of his forehead, directly above his eyes, there was a design. He leaned closer to the water and now could make out clearly the image of a thin blue snake coiled eight times around a central point that was its head. The final loop came halfway around the spiral, and the end of the tail bent, pointing due north.

  Just before nightfall, they reached the opposite end of the oasis and stared out on more pink dunes rolling off toward the setting sun. It was as he had expected it would be. Still feeling the wound of his betrayal by the Silent Ones, he did not have the will to continue north. He decided to stay in this new forest for a few days of rest before starting his journey across the sands.

  They left the edge of the desert and returned a quarter of a mile into the green island to a clearing Cley had noticed earlier. It was difficult finding firewood, because everything was so alive and full of sap. Eventually they came upon a lone tree that had died of some disease, and the hunter hacked its branches off easily with the stone knife. By the time he managed to get a spark to leap from the stones and set the kindling going, night had come, and the area around their camp was made fantastic by the intermittent blinking of fireflies.

  In addition to the flying squirrel Cley roasted for Wood, he had collected a variety of the different types of fruit that grew plentifully in every quadrant of the oasis. Some of them he had already tried, and although a few specimens were bitter to the point of being inedible, many more proved to be sweet and full of juicy pulp.

  As the dog ate the charred strips of squirrel and Cley worked away at one last white plum, a refreshing breeze began to blow through the forest. Yellow moths circled the fire, a few giving their lives to be one with the flames.

  “What do you say?” the hunter asked the dog. “Is this the Earthly Paradise?”

  Wood looked at him. He rose and began moving around the area as if searching for something.

  Cley laughed. “We left it in the desert,” he said, yawning.

  The dog whined and finally came to rest by his side.

  “There were no more pages. They were all devoured by our hosts,” he told h
is companion.

  Wood continued to complain.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” he said, and pretended he was opening a large book.

  The dog closed his eyes and rested his head on his front paws as Cley began speaking.

  “Once there was a man, who woke one day to find a blue snake tattooed on his forehead. He wondered where it had come from and why it was there. ‘What can this mean?’ he asked his friend, the dog, but the dog had never heard of such foolishness, and wasn’t about to start. The blue snake twirled around itself in a spiral whose center was its head. At first the man wondered if it was there, between his eyes, to help him focus. Then he wondered if this snake was supposed to be the snake, Kiftash, in The Legend of the Alluring Woman of Constance and Her Last Wish, or just meant to represent a circle without end. Some snakes, as you know, are poisonous, and yet sometimes this poison can be made into a medicine to cure the sick. Perhaps this was a snake that rattled its tail or danced to music or, being blue, was discovered curled up in a rock in the heart of Mount Gronus. Snakes have always been treacherous fellows, but …”

  Cley stopped speaking and listened to the crackling of the dying fire. One lone moth still circled the flame. Wood lifted his head, then returned to sleep. The night wind moved among the trees and carried the scent of blossoms. Something was creeping through the underbrush, and Cley thought to himself, “I need my knife,” but in the process of acting on that thought, he forgot about it, and his eyelids closed.

  Perhaps a butterfly, a falling leaf, a blossom on the breeze brushed against the hunter’s right cheek, and he brought his hand up to swat it away. In his slowly rousing consciousness his last thought from the night before fired like a spark in his mind. He sat up quickly, reaching for his knife, and opened his eyes on a new day.