The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Will you help me?” he asked.

  The old woman rocked the chair forward, and in one fluid motion, stood and rested the bottle on the table.

  “I may need something to sew with, a needle and strong thread, and they must be boiled so they are sterile,” he said.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “The wilderness,” he said. “Now hurry. I don’t think we have much time.”

  “I’m already gone,” she said, and passed through the open doorway.

  Cley watched her leave, and saw her sidle nervously past Wood out in the hallway. Then he turned back and lifted one of the candleholders off the nightstand. He brought it up close to the face of the woman in the bed. His patient was sweating and breathing heavily in between quiet moans. At times her mouth opened wide, and he was reminded of the captain’s pipe bowl. Her body was pitching back and forth. The face he saw gave him some trepidation about the delivery. Willa Olsen was not in the prime of youth—only a few years younger than Cley, himself. Advanced age was one of the factors, he remembered, that often gave rise to odd birth positions, anomalies, stillbirths.

  “Willa,” he called loudly to her. “My name is Cley. I have delivered a score of children, and I am going to deliver yours. You can help me by not moving so much. Regulate your breathing; you are wasting too much energy. It will make the pain worse. Above all, don’t push until I tell you to. Do you understand all of this?” he asked.

  For the first time, the woman in the bed opened her eyes and looked at him. Her breathing grew more regular, and she nodded.

  “I am going to have to uncover you, touch you. It is the only way I can help your baby. Do you understand?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Cley reached down and lifted the covers off the woman. Amazingly enough, she was fully clothed. He slipped the stone knife out of his boot, and with a smooth maneuver that harkened back to his scalpel work as Physiognomist, he slit through three layers of fabric, baring her body. Besides her swollen stomach, she was somewhat plump, with wide hips, and Cley took this to be a good sign.

  When the hunter put his hands on her stomach, she cried out and twisted in the bed.

  “I am just feeling to see if the child is in the proper position,” he said. “And it is. You have never given birth before, I suppose?”

  She shook her head.

  He breathed deeply and began to pry apart her knees.

  In all, the delivery had been routine. The old woman, Morgana, was snoring in the rocker, the empty bottle lying in her lap. The mother was resting peacefully, with the child asleep between her breasts. It was a boy. Cley tried to remember now if he was ahead on boys or girls, and decided the score was perfectly even.

  He sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, studying the features of the sleeping Willa Olsen. “This hour,” he thought, “might be the last free of strife that she will have for some time. Her husband dead, on her own with a new baby in the wilderness in a fort that is under deadly attack …”

  For a brief moment, he gave himself over to a casual Physiognomy, trying to predict from her sleeping visage if she had what it would take to survive. Her face was round and neither homely nor pretty, but plain in a way that could not be described. Her straight brown hair was chopped short, obviously in haste, as if it had been gathered into a tail and hacked with a knife blade. He tried to find some distinguishing feature, perhaps the nose or chin, that would give him a clue, but he ended by shaking his head.

  The hunter put the knife back in his boot and blew out the one candle that had burned nearly to its base. He knew his work was done, and what would happen now was up to the new mother and the will of the Beyond. He closed the door gently as he left. Then, stepping carefully so that his boots did not tap the floor, he headed back for his room, with Wood following close behind.

  Cley grew accustomed to life at Fort Vordor in the days that followed. Although the captain did not require him to perform any functions other than guard duty and hunting for game, he readily volunteered to help in all chores from keeping the weapons cleaned and oiled to peeling potatoes for dinner. There was a welcome monotony to the routine, and the work was by no means demanding. There was plenty of time to get to know the soldiers. The hunter had great respect for Curaswani, who knew how to balance authority and humanity, tempering both with a dry sense of humor. In the late afternoons, before dinner, he usually met the captain in his quarters for a drink of whiskey and a half-hour of conversation. The old man lent him one of his pipes, and they would toke up a minor squall in the small office.

  Beneath this idyllic life, there ran, constantly, an undercurrent of fear. The Wraiths had not struck for a full month and everyone knew they were due. In the course of building a cradle for the new baby one morning, the hunter realized that he could be the next victim. “I must not lose sight of the fact that this is only a short stop in my journey,” he told himself.

  He took some time out of each day to leave the compound and search the nearby forest for game. Unlike the demon forest, this stand of woods seemed to retain its deer population through the winter. They were not the white variety, but tawny brown and larger than their cousins to the south. Dat, the one-eyed, scarred soldier, usually accompanied him and Wood on these hunting forays. For having one eye, Dat proved himself an excellent shot. Occasionally, on their way back to the fort, if they had been lucky and were returning early, they engaged in a marksmen’s competition, aiming at some twig or rock in the distance. The young man always won, and Cley laughed with the pleasure of his loss.

  The hunter inquired as to the health of the new child as often as he could. He worried that the mother might be too inexperienced, too distraught with recent events to help the baby thrive. Willa Olsen had not shown herself in the compound since the delivery, so Cley questioned Morgana. The old woman reported that the nursing was going well and that the mother was keeping her sanity and health together. Her only concern was that Willa had not named her son yet. Through her cursing, drinking bravado, he caught glimpses of the duenna’s concern for the mother and child and soldiers. She made the rounds daily, joking with the men. At night, from his guard post, Cley saw her stroll nonchalantly, with head down, across the compound to slip inside the captain’s quarters. She told the hunter that someday she would read his fortune.

  From the captain’s window, Cley could see the snow driving down. Curaswani threw another log into the fireplace behind his chair and returned to his seat.

  The hunter puffed at his pipe, and said, “I remember you telling me that there were five citizens left alive when you arrived, and that two have been killed since. Now I have met Morgana and Willa, but who is the third?”

  “You don’t miss a trick, Cley,” said the captain. He took a drink of his whiskey and began to relight his pipe. “A fellow named Brisden.”

  Cley sat forward. “Brisden is here?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said Curaswani. “He is in a jail cell in the cellar of the barracks across the way. A comfy little place for him next to the furnace. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” said the hunter.

  “Then you know he is a monumental pain in the ass. It seems that he is one of the main reasons that the Beshanti attacked our people. He was famous for roaming through the wilderness, getting to know the different tribes. Well, he incited them to overthrow their oppressors, namely the citizens of the western realm. The laggard lives to talk. Talk is his reality. At first, I thought of having him shot for sedition, but believe it or not, I didn’t want it on my conscience, though heaven knows I’d have been doing the entire world a favor. He is fed and kept, and that is the best I can do for him. We will return him to the realm in the spring, and he can stand trial.”

  “Do you know where he hails from?” asked Cley.

  “Well I prefer not to be indelicate, but he is not what I would call your best ambassador from the eastern realm. He wandered west years ago an
d ended in the capital city of Belius. I believe he was at one time a compatriot of Drachton Below, the Master of the Well-Built City.”

  “In a very roundabout, convoluted way, he saved my life once,” said Cley.

  “Well, that’s all the better, but as for me, I’d just as soon put a bullet in his head. He spins a dark reality with that tongue of his. His conversation is chaos and somehow those words of his insinuate themselves into the actuality of life and shatter lives. I predicted he would cause mayhem here in the Beyond when he first shipped out with the settlers. Truth is, the realm was happy to be rid of him.”

  “May I see him?” asked Cley.

  “No one sees him unless I accompany them. He is too wily. I’ll take you down there someday,” said Curaswani, and finished the rest of his drink.

  “The Wraiths have been quiet,” said the hunter, and made sure to rap on the wood of the tabletop.

  The captain knocked on the wood also. “They don’t come when it snows,” he said. “By the way, the Olsen woman has named her child. She has named it Wraith.” The captain raised his eyebrows.

  “Odd,” said the hunter.

  “Not so very” said Curaswani. “She is a little touched from her travails. Perhaps she believes that if she names it after the thing she fears, it will not harm the poor little fellow.”

  Cley nodded. “What about my medal of honor?” he asked.

  “Honorary,” said the captain. “Get ready, here it comes,” he said, and lifted the bottle to top off the hunter’s drink.

  Two nights later, Cley woke in his room to the sound of Wood growling, and a moment later, he heard a terrible scream from out in the compound.

  By the time he got his boots on and was out in the dark, frigid cold, he found Weems kneeling next to a body lying on the ground. In the lamplight, he saw the red stain blossoming in the hard-packed snow. Another soldier stood over the scene, shivering, but obviously not from the cold. The captain stood a few feet off dressed in long johns and boots, brandishing his sword and pistol, his head bowed. Steam issued from each of the soldiers’ mouths and literally poured out of the corpse, which, from its huge size, the hunter only then could tell was Knuckle.

  Cley knocked on the door down the hall from his room. Under his arm, he carried the cradle he had crudely constructed from the planks of a crate that had once held canisters of cooking oil. It was a baby-sized box with hand-carved rockers attached to the bottom.

  The door opened, and there was Willa Olsen, holding the squirming Wraith. “Yes?” she whispered, appearing both nervous and shy.

  “I’ve made something for the child,” said Cley, and held up the cradle for her to see.

  “A coffin?” she asked.

  “A cradle,” he said, undeterred, “so that you can rock him to sleep at night.”

  She did not smile, but she nodded and opened the door for him to enter. Stepping back, almost against the wall, she motioned with her free hand for Cley to set the thing down on the floor next to the bed. He did, then rose to face her. She was wearing a kerchief around her head and a dark blue dress.

  He put his arms out, and asked, “May I hold him?”

  She hesitated, visibly shaken by his presence.

  “I do charge for my services,” he said. “I require one chance to hold the child.” He tried to make his most sympathetic face but feared it was not going to convince.

  Reluctantly, she took a step forward and handed him the baby. Cley took the bundled infant in his arms and looked into the small face. He was a handsome imp, with dark eyes and a shock of black hair. A waving hand came up and got tangled for a moment in the hunter’s beard. Cley thought of Knuckle being lowered into the earth two days earlier and hugged the child to his chest. The mother reached out and took Wraith away from him.

  “Thank you,” said Cley, and turned to leave.

  “Wait, Mr. Cley,” she said. “I want to buy your dog.”

  “Wood?” he asked, surprised that she had spoken.

  “Yes, I have money,” she said.

  “I cannot sell him, madam,” he told her. “But why?”

  “Because he will smell the ghosts coming for my boy,” she said.

  Cley had a memory flash of Wood growling just before the death cry of Knuckle. Without speaking, he left the room and ran down the hallway to the stairs.

  From sundown until the break of dawn, Cley and Wood patrolled the compound, waiting for the next invisible assassin to scale the wall. Instead of the rifle, the hunter carried two loaded pistols. Mrs. Olsen’s theory that the dog might be able to sense the Wraiths even though they were camouflaged had caused the captain to order a second plate of food at mealtimes for him. Wood had become the hope of the fort, and had a disposition that was well suited for it. He gladly accepted all of the attention and extra tidbits of food, but never felt the stress of the others’ expectations.

  On this night, Cley crouched in the darkness, Wood beside him, staring out across the compound. He was thinking of Morgana at dinnertime, telling the men’s fortunes with the use of a deck of playing cards. Her facade of intense seriousness had all of the youths convinced of the prophecies she made. Each of the young soldiers had wonderful adventures and lives of passionate love predicted for them. When they had insisted that Cley have his fortune read, he reluctantly agreed so as not to break the spell the old woman had woven. Morgana dealt the cards, and upon seeing them, had quickly whisked them off the table, claiming she had grown too tired to retain her concentration on the future.

  Cley laughed to himself quietly at the absurdity of the show the old woman had put on.

  “What was it she saw for us?” he asked Wood, and looked down to see that the dog was gone.

  He immediately looked up and, in that second, heard barking. Drawing the two pistols from his belt, he moved cautiously out of the shadows and spotted Wood across the way, near the outhouse in the southeastern corner. He began to run.

  “Weems, light,” he yelled, and the young man lifted the lantern he held and dashed away from his post outside the captain’s quarters.

  Wood was lunging and barking at nothing, growling as if fighting a demon. Weems got to the dog before Cley, holding the lantern high as he went for his gun. The light spread across the front of the outhouse and, like some illusion in a magic show, Cley saw a knife blade suspended in midair.

  “Down,” said Cley to both the dog and the soldier. Wood backed off, Weems crouched, and, on a dead run, the hunter fired both pistols at once. One bullet chipped the outhouse door and one exploded into a spurt of blood. The very air appeared to be bleeding and the wound moved along the wall dripping red in its wake. Cley dropped the guns and reached for his knife, but as his own blade flashed in the light, Weems fired his pistol and there was a ghostly cry. Something weighty fell and made an impression in the crusted snow. The bleeding wound blossomed in the frozen white, spreading out from one static point.

  In minutes, the compound was full of soldiers. The captain burst from his quarters in his usual nightly attire followed by Morgana, who was wearing only Curaswani’s field coat.

  “One Wraith less,” said Weems, wiping his brow with his coat sleeve.

  “The dog?” asked Curaswani.

  Cley nodded.

  The captain got down on his knees and put his arms around Wood. A shout went up from the men. Morgana had gone to the kitchen and returned with two handfuls of flour. She sifted the fine powder over the growing bloodstain and slowly, beneath this handmade snowfall, the shape of a body began to materialize.

  In the next week, two more Wraiths were sniffed out by the dog and disposed of—one by Cley’s pistols and another by a remarkable rifle shot from Dat, across the entire compound, from his perch on the eastern catwalk. All men on guard duty were now issued a pocketful of flour for each night’s watch.

  “In light of recent events, I was hard put to ignore your request,” said the captain, as he led Cley down the stairs to the cellar beneath the barracks.

/>   Underground, the ceiling was low and the expanse, stone walls and floor of packed dirt, ran the exact length and breadth of the structure above. Short torches burned in holders on each of the walls, and the area at the bottom of the steps was crowded with barrels of supplies. The dark, earthy smell reminded Cley of his cave in the demon forest. Curaswani led him through a winding path that ran amidst the supply crates and barrels to a far corner, in which sat a furnace. Crackling sounds of burning wood issued from behind its metal doors. Through the grate on the door to the contraption the hunter saw the red-hot sections of log that heated the barracks above.

  “This furnace is a wonder,” said the captain. “I stoke it myself once a morning, and through its special design it need not be filled until the next morning. An example of the technology of the western realm.”

  Cley remembered having one like it in his childhood home. He did not tell Curaswani that his wonder was a primitive heat waster compared to the spire furnaces of the Well-Built City.

  “And here,” said the captain, turning to the left and sweeping out his arm to reveal a jail cell previously blocked from sight by his girth, “is the supreme hemorrhoid, the taskmaster of language itself, the insipid Mr. Brisden.”

  The shadows were thick inside the cage, which had three sides made of bars and one the stone of the foundation. Cley could see someone sitting there, like a massive lump of laundry in a plain, high-backed chair. A sound emanated from inside the cell, a steady mumbling, like a child saying prayers quickly in order to be done with them. The captain reached back behind himself and pulled one of the torches out of its holder on the wall.

  “Here you go, Cley. You’ve got to get the full show,” he said, and held the light up to the bars.

  Now Brisden became clear. The hunter could tell it was the same man he had encountered in Drachton Below’s memory. He was not so heavy as he was before, and there was a stubbled growth on his chin and cheeks, but the small, deep-set eyes and the voice, the ceaseless voice, were remarkably the same. His thinning hair was wild and the once white suit he wore, ripped and torn at the elbows, the knees, the collar, looked like it had not been washed in years.