by Jeffrey Ford
"When Father Garland gives his sermons do they represent the release of methane gas?" I asked.
She did not seem to understand that I was joking and answered in earnest, "Well, he does refer to sin as a cave-in of the soul."
As she went off down a dark corridor to search for Garland, I stood alone, staring at God. According to the portrait, the Almighty's physiognomy suggested he might be well suited for digging holes and little else. To start with, his face was dotted with all manner of fleshy wens. There were hairs protruding from the ears, and the eyes looked in two directions. I could not see his general physiognomy as being influenced by the animal kingdom, but there were certain breeds of dogs and an entire line of simians he might have influenced. He held an axe in one hand and a shovel in the other, and he flew upright, long blue hair streaming behind, through a narrow underground tunnel. He came at the viewer out of the dark with an expression that suggested there had been a recent cave-in in his overalls. Obviously, this was a scene from the Creation.
This was not my introduction to the odd religious practices of the territories. I had read of the existence of a church, out in the western reaches of the realm, built of corn husks. Their deity, Belius, takes the form of a man with a bull's head. These strange Gods scrupulously watch the miserable lives of the out-landers and sit in judgment over them. The illusory guiding the ignorant to some appointed heaven beyond life where their clothes fit and their spouses don't drool. On the other hand, in the City, there was Below, a man, and the Physiognomy, an exacting science, a combination of reality and objectivity capable of rendering a perfect justice.
I heard Aria and Garland approaching down the corridor behind the altar and was about to look away from the portrait when it struck me I had seen that face somewhere before. My mind raced to think, but already Aria was introducing me to the father. Making sure the thought was filed away for later, I turned and found before me an exceedingly small man with white hair. He held out a doll-size hand with tiny fingernails sharpened to points.
He showed us to his study, a small cave at the back of the church, and offered us a liquid derivation of cremat. We kindly settled for a glass of something he said he had brewed himself—an amber-colored liquid that smelled like lilac and tasted like dirt. I couldn't stop drinking it.
Garland's voice had a strange whistling sound behind it that was most irritating. Combining this with his freakish little face and his aphorisms—"When two become one, then three becomes none and zero is the beginning"—he was hopelessly less than adequate. Aria, on the other hand, stared at him with a certain reverence that bordered on the unseemly. I could see I would be forced to shatter her perception of this pretentious runt.
"Tell me, Father," I said, after we were settled in and he had said a short prayer, "why you should not be my primary suspect."
He nodded as though it were a fair question. "I already know the way to paradise," he said.
"What about the fruit?" I asked.
"Plump and sweating sugar every minute. I touched it, and it felt like flesh. Did I ever think of biting it? Even having only heard of it, did you not already think of biting it? Everyone here wanted it. But as long as we left it alone, the power of that combined desire kept us on the path of righteousness. Now we are heading for a blizzard of sin."
"Did anyone show a particular interest in it?"
"One or two," he said.
"Who took it?" I asked.
He slowly shook his head. "For all I know demons swept down one night from out of the wilderness and crept into the altar chamber while I was sleeping."
"I've heard a lot of talk recently about an Earthly Paradise. Can you tell me exactly what that is?"
Garland pinched his nose with the fingers of his left hand and then sank into a pose of deep thought. Aria leaned forward in her seat, waiting for him to speak.
"The Earthly Paradise, your honor, is the one small spot in this enormous world where nature has made no mistakes. It is God's last best work before he was buried alive. It is a place that accommodates all sin and all glory and turns them drop by drop into eternity."
"God was buried alive?" I asked.
"Every day we dig closer to him," he said.
"What will happen when we get there?"
"We will have reached the beginning."
"Of what?" I asked.
"The beginning of the end." He sighed when he was through and looked over to smile at Aria. She smiled back and he said, "Tell your mother thank you for that whipped tadberry pie."
"Yes, Father," she said.
"I hear from the mayor that your dog was recently taken by a demon," I said.
He nodded sadly. "Poor Gustavus, probably rent to pieces by a pack of the filthy creatures."
"Can you describe it?" I asked.
"It was as Aria's grandfather said, like the way you always supposed a demon would look. It left a strange smell behind as I saw it flapping away."
"Did it have sharp nails?" I asked.
"What do you mean?"
"What do you think I mean?"
"I think you are equating me with the demon in some way because of my nails," he said, never losing his composure. "I keep them sharpened in order to pull out splinters like the one now lodged in my heart."
"I've got a pair of chrome tweezers you can use," I said. Then I turned to Aria and asked her to leave the room. "The father and I have personal business we must discuss."
When she was gone, I told Garland I would need his church in which to perform my investigations of the townspeople.
"You mean they will disrobe in my church?" he said, standing.
"That is the procedure," I said. "You will be on hand to keep the crowd orderly and silent."
"Impossible," he said and took a step toward me, thrusting out those two little hands as if he intended to use them.
"Easy, Father," I said. "I'd hate to have to enlighten you."
Then he grimaced, and I noticed his front teeth had also been sharpened. He was turning red in the face and shaking slightly. I put my hand in my coat pocket and around the handle of my scalpel.
"Grace is God's lantern." He grunted, and instantly he began to relax. He stood very calmly for a few moments.
I nodded. "You can see this is better," I said.
'Come with me, your honor. I have something here that will interest you," he said. He walked over to the wall behind his desk and gave it a gentle push. A door swung back behind which I could see a flight of stairs leading down. He stepped through and then began to descend. "Come, your honor," he called back weakly.
My first thought was that he meant to ambush me in some dark alleyway underground, but I followed, one hand on the railing and one in my pocket on the scalpel. I had decided that with the first pass of the instrument, I would take an eye, after which I would finish him with my boot. As I continued down the long stairway, the prospect of a challenge began to appeal to me.
I found Father Garland kneeling in a marble room, well lit by torches lining the walls. Before him sat a huge wooden chair, holding what looked like an enormous and badly abused cigar. But as I drew closer, I made out the distinct features of a long, thin man, with a long, thin head. His skin, though leatherized by time, had remained completely intact. It even appeared that there were eyeballs still behind the closed lids. There were webs between his fingers and one was pierced by a thin silver ring.
"What have we here," I asked, "the God of cremat?"
Garland rose and stood next to me. "This is the one they found in the mine with the fruit," he said. "Sometimes I think he is not dead at all but just waiting to return to paradise."
"How old is it?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I don't know, but even you must agree there is something unusual here."
"It isn't the unusual I doubt," I said.
"What then?" asked Garland. "The fruit, the Traveler—they are miracles, surely you can see."
"All I see is a dried-out cadaver with the cra
niometry of a vase, and all I hear coming from your mouth is superstitious twaddle. What am I supposed to gather from this?" I asked.
"I will turn my church over to you tomorrow, but tonight I would like you to do something for me."
"Perhaps," I said.
"I want you to read the Traveler's face."
I looked up to see if it would be worth it, and I noticed a few tantalizing features. The long forehead was misshapen but gracefully so. "It might be interesting," I said.
Garland offered his paw to me and I shook it.
Outside, I found Aria sitting on the bottom step of the church. She was staring out across the huge field that separated the end of town from the beginning of the wilderness. The wind was blowing the long grass, and dark clouds were gathering over the distant trees.
"The snow is coming," she said without turning around.
That afternoon, I had Mantakis take a message to Bataldo stating that the populace should assemble outside the church the next morning at ten. Then Aria went to my study to make the preliminary readings on her grandfather's face while I took the beauty to bed. As I lay there waiting for the warmth to begin to creep, I thought two things. The first was that perhaps someone had taken Garland's dog so the church would be unguarded at night while the father slept. The second was that the physiognomy of the child the woman had begged me to read in the street the previous day seemed utterly familiar to me. Then Professor Flock appeared with a brief report from the sulphur mines. "Hot as can be," he said, puffing and grunting. Sweat dripped from his reddened face. From behind him, I heard shouting and the cracking of whips. "And my god, the smell, the very elimination of excrement." He moaned before disappearing. Soon after, I sank into an hallucination involving Aria and the demons that quickly burned the beauty's wick. When I awoke, two hours later, three inches of snow lay on the main street of Anamasobia and more was being driven down on fierce winds from Gronus.
Snow, almost nonexistent back in the Weil-Built City, was an inconvenient little miracle I could have lived without, but as I changed my shirt and freshened up, I felt invigorated by the thought that I would soon get a chance to do some real work. When I was ready, I grabbed my bag of instruments and my topcoat and went next door to the study to inform Aria that we were to return to the church. On my way across the landing, I called down to Mrs. Man-takis to bring us up some tea. She offered to also prepare dinner, but I declined, since a full stomach was likely to put me in too generous a mood.
I found Aria at my study desk, writing in a notebook of her own. She sat rigidly upright, but her hand moved furiously across the paper. In the minute I stood silently and watched her, she had filled an entire page and gone on to the next.
"Tea is coming," I said finally to alert her I was there.
"One minute," she said and continued writing.
I was slightly put out by her failure to officially acknowledge my presence, but there was something about the controlled desperation with which she wrote that prevented me from interrupting her. She was still writing when Mrs. Mantakis brought the tea.
She entered with a look in her eye that suggested she did not approve of my young female guest. "Did your honor enjoy the mayor's party?" she asked while setting the silver tray down on the table before me. She wore the most ridiculous bonnet and a white apron with ruffles and angel appliques.
"Quite a gala," I said.
"Just after you left, they barbecued the fire bat and there was enough for everyone to have a little piece. You know, they say it makes you see better at night."
"Before or after you vomit?" I asked.
"Oh, your honor, its taste is quite special, like a spicy rabbit, or have you ever had curried pigeon?"
"You're through," I told her and pointed to the door.
She scurried out with her hands folded and her head bowed.
"A regrettable woman," I said to Aria as I lifted my teacup.
"I'm coming," she said.
Finally, she came and sat with me. The top button of her blouse had unfastened and her eyes were tired and beautiful. As she poured herself a cup of tea, I asked her if she would like to assist me in performing a reading that night.
I saw great promise in her when she did not ask who the subject was but simply replied, "Yes, your honor." She showed no sign of excitement or fear. She barely even blushed. When she sipped her tea she nodded vacantly at a spot an inch away from my eyes. It had taken me years to learn that technique.
"Now then, what did your grandfather reveal?" I asked, breaking her spell on me.
"He's a classic sub-four with traces of the avian," she said.
"Did you notice anything unusual, as I did, about the eye-crease-to-jaw measurements?" I asked.
"That was the most interesting part," she said. "It's only a hairsbreadth off the Grandeur Quotient."
"Yes, so close, yet so far."
"Holistically, he's a three," she said.
"Come, come, there is no place for nepotism in Physiognomy. I'll retire my calipers if he is any more than a two point seven. Anything else?" I asked.
"No," she said, "but as I rubbed my hands across his face, I had a memory of him telling me a piece of that story he had referred to as the 'Impossible Journey to the Earthly Paradise.' It is just a fragment, but I remembered it vividly. I wrote it down in my notebook."
"Give me a few particulars," I said.
She set down her tea and leaned back. "The miners had come to an abandoned city in the wilderness and stayed there for three nights after having done battle with a pack of demons. Grandfather had killed two of the creatures, one with his long knife and the other with his pistol. He had pulled their horns out with a pair of pliers in order to keep them as souvenirs.
"The city was near an inland sea and composed of huge mounds of earth riddled with tunnels. On the first night they stayed there, they witnessed strange red lights in the sky. On the second night one of the men reported seeing the ghost of a woman, wearing a veil, walking through the crude streets. On the third night, Mayor Bataldo's uncle, Joseph, was killed in his sleep by something that left a hundred pairs of puncture wounds. Whatever it was that had killed him followed them out into the wilderness for many days till they crossed a river and lost it."
The night was frigid and the snow blew relentlessly against us as we made our way toward the church of Anamasobia. A flock of urchins was working on a snowman out in front of the mayor's office. If I didn't know any better I would have thought it was meant as an effigy of myself. Had Aria not been beside me and had I not been on an errand of official business, I'd have put my boot through it. "No matter," I thought, being in a good mood, "their congenital ignorance is sufficient punishment."
A few moments later, Aria called over the wind, "Did you see those boys were building a likeness of the Traveler? It has become a childhood tradition ever since he was discovered."
"Children," I said, "a race of bizarre deviants."
Then she said something and actually laughed aloud, but her words were swallowed by the wind.
I never thought I would be pleased to enter that Temple of the Off-Kilter, but not to have the snow driving into my face made the church almost acceptable. As Aria closed the big misshapen door behind us, I stood for a moment, listening to the immediate silence and behind it the wind howling as if at a great distance. Her hair was wet and the smell of it seemed to fill the dark foyer. My hand involuntarily came up to touch her face, but luckily she had already begun to move toward the bridge. We crossed over, myself a little unsteadily, reeling with her wet-forest scent. I'd have given a thousand belows to have been reading her that night instead of Garland's six-and-a-half-foot dried-dung manikin.
The father was there, waiting for us, and somehow he had moved the Traveler to the flattened boulder that was the altar.
"Your honor," he said and bowed, his disposition apparently having lightened since that afternoon.
I waved halfheartedly to acknowledge him.
"Ar
ia, my dear," he said, and she went over to him and kissed him on the forehead. As she did, I noticed him rest his pointy little hand lightly on her hip.
"How did you get him in here?" I asked, wanting to shorten their coziness.
"The Traveler is light," he said, "almost as if he were made of paper or dried corn stalks. Of course, I had to drag his feet, but I barely lost my breath bringing him up the stairs."
The thought of Garland losing his breath seemed a near impossibility.
I stepped up to the altar and rested my bag of instruments down next to the subject's head. Aria followed and helped me off with my topcoat. As she removed her own, I began laying the tools out in the order in which I would need them.
"Can I be of assistance?" Garland eagerly asked.
"Yes," I said, not looking up from my work, "you can leave us now."
"I thought I might watch. I'm keenly interested," he said.
"You may go," I told him without raising my voice.
He sulked over to the corridor that led to his office, but before he finally left, he offered an aphoristic blessing: "May God be everywhere you are about to look and absent where you already have."
"Thank you, Father," Aria said.
I turned to look at him and quietly laughed in his face before he disappeared down the corridor.
"Hand me that cranial radius," I said to her, pointing to the first instrument, a chrome hoop with representative screws at the four points of the compass; and, with this, we began.
In order to perform the reading, I had to overcome my initial revulsion at touching the brown shiny beetle-back skin of the Traveler. One of the first things we learned at the academy was that dark pigmentation of the flesh is a sure sign of diminished intelligence and moral fiber. In addition, the consistency of it, like a thin yet slightly pliant eggshell, put a fear in me that my sharp instruments might leave a crack in the subject's head. I put on my leather gloves and then set to work with the radius.
The slender nature of the cranium made Mantakis's thin head seem almost robust, but at the same time there was something so concise and elegant about this expression of Nature that the computations, when I figured them in my workbook—a tiny leather-bound volume in which I recorded all my findings in secret code with a needle dipped in ink—at once pointed to both a severe paucity of rational thought and a certain sublime divinity. The numbers seemed to be playing tricks on me, but I let them stand since I had never read anything before quite like the Traveler. Is he human? I wrote at the bottom of the page.