by Jeffrey Ford
I pulled out the gun and raised my arm to aim. The derringer swerved and dipped at the behest of the beauty, my fear, and the increasingly pungent odor of Greta Sykes. "What if I were to miss," I thought as I closed one eye for clearer vision. That thought exploded in my mind a moment before the gun went off, its report ricocheting off the blue walls of the cavern.
I came awake suddenly, sitting straight up. Across the room from me there was a neat hole in the center of Arden's mirror and a sleet storm of shattered glass on the floor in front of it. I shook my head in an attempt to clear it. The bright day outside my window revealed an end to the snowstorm. I threw the derringer on the floor and took out a cigarette. There was the sound of rustling a floor below, and then I heard Mantakis hurrying up the stairs. His pounding at the door thickened my headache and spiked my eyes.
"Your honor," he called, "did I hear a gun go off?"
"A little experiment, Mantakis," I said.
"An experiment?" he asked.
'To see if you were awake," I said.
"I am," he said.
"What is the time?"
"Your honor, it is nine-fifty."
"Draw me a bath and bring me a steaming bowl of that excrement that passes for sustenance here."
"The wife has made a cremat goulash that is a testament to her abilities," he said.
"My very fear, Mantakis."
I almost lost consciousness while adrift in the acrimonious waters of my bath. With the freezing temperature, the blowing snow, and the fact that I felt as if I really had traveled to Mount Gronus through the night, my mind reeled and my consciousness began to constrict in the manner of my other apertures. Just as I was going under, Mantakis appeared and swept a steeping bowl of goulash under my nose, which had the miraculous effect of smelling salts. I actually thanked him for that whiff of death and then ordered him to take it, and himself, away.
I sat, frozen, and searched every inch of my mind for the lost Physiognomy. I couldn't turn up a single digit, not even a fraction of a chin. "What do you do when the surface gives way and you fall in?" I said to the snowdrifts beyond the screen. Then the Master came to my thoughts, carried by a chilly gust of wind, and for a moment I wondered if perhaps he had not truly contacted me by somehow swimming through the beauty and into last night's hallucination. The memory of Greta Sykes standing before me led me to believe the entire incident was nothing more than a nightmare concocted from my own worst fears, but the Master was rich in magic, a primitive phenomenon I had no knowledge of. For all their grotesque weirdness these thoughts did not concern me as much as the prospect of facing the faces of Anamasobia empty-headed.
Mayor Bataldo was standing in a small snowdrift waiting for me outside the hotel. He was dressed in a long black coat, and atop his bulbous head was a ridiculous black hat with a broad brim. Seeing me, he flashed a grin so full of whimsy that I wanted, right then, to give him another beating.
"Beautiful day, your honor," he said.
"Contain yourself, Mayor, my patience is a brittle thing today," I told him.
The people of Anamasobia await you at the church," he said, his smile fading but never quite completely gone.
We started down the street, snow crunching beneath our boots, the town as still and silent as a graveyard. As we walked, the mayor reeled off the details of his preparations.
"I have assigned you a bodyguard, the most vicious of the miners, a fellow named Calloo. He will protect you in the event one of the citizens protests the protocol. Father Garland has set a screen up on the altar so that those who must disrobe will have some privacy. By the way, the father is beside himself with the idea of both nudity and science infiltrating his church on the same day."
"Keep him away from me," I said. "Whatever status he has in this town due to his religious station means nothing to me. I'll have him whipped like a mongrel if he interferes."
"Aria has suggested that you would like to see Morgan and his daughter, Alice, first, since they have generated some suspicion in the town."
"Very well," I said.
"Look, there are your specimens," said Bataldo, pointing ahead of us.
We were close enough to the church for me to appraise the haphazard line of oafish reprobates. When they noticed us approaching, they grew silent, and it did me some good to see a suggestion of nervousness and perhaps a tinge of fear come into nearly all the faces. Some of the bigger and more brutal looking of the miners showed no emotion at all. How could I really frighten them after their having spent such a large portion of their lives in darkness with the possibility of a cave-in or the invisible danger of poison gas always lurking? At least they did not openly show their contempt.
I was about to head for the door of the church when the mayor took my arm and stopped me. "A moment, your honor," he said. Then he turned to the crowd and, waving his arms in the air, called out down the line, "All right, as we practiced. Ready, one, two, three ..."
The townspeople broke into a raggedly coordinated chorus of, "Good morning, your honor," yelling like a pack of schoolchildren greeting their teacher.
It took me by surprise, and all I could think to do was give a half bow in acknowledgment. This brought peals of laughter from them. Bataldo was beside himself with glee. My anger surged in me, and for a moment I almost lost sight of the situation. Had I actually taken out the loaded derringer and shot the mayor as I so wanted to at that moment, it might have jeopardized the entire case. Instead, I took a breath, turned away, and made for the entrance to the church. It did not help that I tripped on the first of those crooked steps, for that brought forth another torrent of hilarity at my expense.
I realized I was sweating profusely as I made my way over the unsteady bridge just inside the doors of the church. With the Physiognomy nowhere in sight, I knew my only recourse was to pretend. In short, to put on a mask of competency, behind which I could hide my emptiness. The shadowy nature of the church was a blessing that would aid me. My greatest problem would be Aria, who now came toward me beaming with beauty and an uncanny knowledge of that which had once defined my importance.
"Are you ready to do some work?" I asked sternly as I handed her my bag of instruments.
"I was up all night rereading my texts," she said. "I hope I will be of service."
She wore a plain gray dress and had her hair pulled back in what I took to be an attempt to appear more professional by appearing less feminine. Still, with all the problems circling in my head like a coven of crows, I was instantly overcome by her presence. I touched her shoulder lightly and for a moment was transported to the Earthly Paradise. Then I saw Father Garland appear from behind the wooden screen he had erected on the altar, and heaven turned instantly to hell.
He came toward me like the strident possum that he was, his sharpened teeth gleaming in the torchlight. Pushing his way in between Aria and me, he said, * The mayor has warned me not to interfere with your proceedings, and I have agreed to suffer this humiliation for the good of the town, but you, you will pay in the hereafter. There is a certain chamber in the mine of the afterlife set aside for the sacrilegious where the torments surpass the living pain of loneliness and loss of love."
"Yes," I said, "but does it surpass one unbearable moment of having to listen to you?"
"I noticed you did not stay to discuss your findings on the Traveler with me last night," he said, smiling sharply. "It was our deal, I recall, that you would apprise me of your results."
"Prehuman," said Aria, coming to my defense.
"That is correct," I said, "a creature preserved from before the ascendancy of man. Interesting for its novelty as a museum piece but physiognomically empty of revelation."
"I will pray for you," said Garland. He turned and walked to the first row of stone pews, kneeled down, and clasped his hands.
"Spare me," I said and accompanied Aria to the altar. Waiting for us there was the fellow the mayor had assigned to accost unruly subjects. It seemed Bataldo had gotten the right man
for the job, because Calloo, as he was called, was the size of the full-grown bear I had once seen in a traveling circus outside the walls of the Weil-Built City. He had a thick black beard and hair nearly as long as Aria's. I did not need the Physiognomy to see that his hands, his head, in short, every part of him was an affront to the common sense of nature. In addition to his strength and size, he exhibited few outward signs of human intelligence. When I gave him his orders, he relayed to me that he understood by means of grunts and nods. I sent him off to fetch the first of the subjects and then set out my instruments on the stone altar just as I had the night before.
If the eight year old girl, Alice, whom everyone suspected of having been fed the fruit by her father, had all the right answers, what I wanted to know was who was asking the questions. I sat before her naked form, making believe I was jotting down notes in my tiny book with the straight pin and ink. Along with the loss of my knowledge went this notation system, which now seemed to me an extravagance of the minuscule I could no longer grasp the genius of. Aria was doing a cranial reading as I questioned the girl.
"Alice," I said, "did you eat the white fruit?"
"Eat the white fruit," she said, staring at me with an expression that made Calloo look like a savant.
"Alice," I said, "have you changed recently in your thinking?"
"Stinking," she said.
I shook my head in exasperation.
"Have you seen the fruit?" I asked.
"Clean the suit," she said.
"Am I missing something here?" I asked Aria.
She shook her head and came over to whisper to me that the girl was a retrograde two on the intelligence scale and that the measurements showed her to be pure of heart.
"Next," I yelled.
It turned out that her father was no less brilliant than she. He had an inordinately large penis, which obviously revealed the curse of his ignorance. Aria showed great diligence in measuring this organ, but I cut her off in the middle of her work, saying, "There's nothing there. Next!"
With our lead suspects cleared by Aria's computations and my necessarily more intuitive approach, we began to go to work on the rest of the town. So far, my plan to make it seem as if I was using this opportunity to mentor my assistant had worked well. "And what did you find?" I would ask her with each instrument she applied. She handled the chrome tools with great adeptness, calling out numbers for me to record in my book. I was, of course, going to allow her to catch the thief for me. Occasionally, her confidence would falter, and she would look to me with a question in her eyes. Then I would say, "Go on, continue. I am watching. I will let you know when you have made an error." With these words of encouragement, she would smile, as if thanking me for my generosity, and I began to think that the whole affair might work out better than I had imagined.
They filed in one by one, a never-ending nightmare of the repulsive and displeasing. With my new blindness, picking a thief out of this populace was like trying to identify a scoundrel in a room full of lawyers. Their nakedness was very unsettling. All that flesh and their blatant sex staring me in the face made my stomach queasy. When Aria ordered the mayor's wife to bend over, I lit a cigarette, hoping the smoke would obscure from me her dilapidated mysteries.
Then, on our twentieth subject, a man named Frod Geeble, the owner of the tavern, Aria stopped in her application of the calibrated navel standard and said to me, "You'd better double-check me here."
I gave her a nervous look, and she squinted as if for an instant she saw through to my unknowing. Quickly, I put down my notebook and approached the subject. She held out the instrument to me; although I could recall the name of it, I had no idea how it worked. Instead of accepting the standard from her, I bent over and put my left eye up to the fat man's navel, looking in as if peering through the end of a telescope. Unable to think of what else to do, I stuck my index finger into the flesh ditch. Frod Geeble belched.
"Interesting," I said.
"What number do you come out with?" she asked.
"That was my question for you," I said.
"I feel uncertain after having discerned evidence of depravity in the abundance of eyebrow hair," she said.
"Forget your uncertainty," I said.
"But I read last night, in your work The Blemished Corpulence and Other Physiognomical Theories that the physiognomist should never operate out of uncertainty."
In order to circumvent her discovery of me, I stood up and looked Frod Geeble in the eyes, asking myself, Could this man have stolen the sacred fruit? It struck me then that this was the only method of judging another human being that the uninitiated had. The slovenly nature of such a method of discovery made me shudder at the utter darkness so many lived in. Still, I had a feeling he hadn't done it.
"He has brown eyes," I said. "This negates your concern."
"Very well," she said. "He is innocent."
"Free drinks at the tavern for your honor," said Frod Geeble as he dressed.
Calloo was on his way out to fetch the next subject when I called him back. "Bring me the mayor this time," I said.
The hulking miner broke into a broad grin at this suggestion and, for the first time, spoke intelligibly. "Pleasure, your honor."
I had to smile myself.
The mayor held his hands cupped over his privates as he stepped forward for inspection. Aria showed no timidity but went at him with all of my devices just as she had the others. When she was done calling out her findings to me, and I had gone through the charade of jotting them down with the pin, I asked her to step aside. She moved back. The mayor, though no physiognomist himself, took one look at me and very astutely read the malicious intent in my gaze. The folds of loose flesh on his chest and stomach as well as his bottom lip began to quiver.
"I know," he said, giving a nervous laugh, "you have never seen such a resplendent specimen."
"On the contrary," I said, "very piglike."
"I am not a thief," he said, losing his sense of humor.
"Undoubtedly, but I do see a small character flaw that I may be able to adjust," I said. I got up and went over to where my coat hung on the back of a chair and retrieved the scalpel from its pocket. With the instrument in hand, I walked up in front of the mayor, waving the blade inches from his eyes. "I detect an asinine sense of humor that may be your undoing if we cannot correct it early enough."
"Perhaps I can simply work at being more serious," he spluttered.
"Now, now, Mayor, this won't hurt a bit. I'm just trying to see where to make the appropriate cut. Perhaps lower down, near the seat of your intelligence," I said, and stepped back in order to run the dull side of the blade across his testicles.
"Aria, please," he said over my shoulder.
Then I remembered that she was there, watching. I wanted badly to vent the entirety of my frustration on him, but the stronger urge to not let Aria see my anger stole my initial impulse to cut into him like a cake.
After I had dismissed him and he was dressed and gone, Aria said to me, "I saw through you."
"Whatever are you talking about?" I said.
"You were trying to get him to confess," she said.
"I was?"
"You did notice the aberrant nature of his posterior, did you not?" she asked.
"Be specific," I said, as if I were quizzing her on her determination.
"The patch of hair he had growing on his left buttock. I believe it is called the Centaur Quality? Unremitting proof of the potential for thievery."
"Very good," I said. "I have already put him in the suspect category."
We saw half the town by nightfall, and I was as far from resolving the case as when I had started. For all I knew, the Traveler had awakened and stolen the fruit. Aria had come up with a short list of possible criminals, but none of them seemed as if anything miraculous had befallen them. Perhaps they were hoarding the fruit till the case was over. I paid Calloo a few belows for his work and just barely caught myself from thanking him. My near sl
ip came, most likely, from the fact that I was so thankful the day was over. I packed my bag, put on my coat, and watched longingly as Aria let her hair down.
"Meet me at the hotel in an hour," I said to her.
She nodded and left the church. Her abrupt departure made me wonder if she was on to me. I needed to consider if I could safely put my trust in her. But what I needed more than anything was the beauty. I could not remember when I had gone so long without it. My hands were shaking slightly, and I was beginning to feel my skull itch, a sure sign that I was overdue for a violet fix. Garland was still kneeling there praying as I left. I slammed the front door behind me as hard as I could, hoping his wooden Gronus would topple down upon him. Instead, I tripped again on the bottom step and landed facedown in the snow.
Mrs. Mantakis was behind the desk at the hotel when I entered, counting belows and chittering furiously to herself like a weasel caught in a leg trap. I wiped the snow off my feet onto the welcome mat and approached her. Even when I was standing before her, she paid no attention to me but went on with her monologue: "If he thinks I'm going to stand out in the cold all day waiting and then be told to come back tomorrow so that he can lay his greedy eyes on my—" I cleared my throat, and she looked up suddenly.
"Your honor," she said, "so good to see you. You must have had a long, hard day. What can I do for you?" She swept the money off the counter and smiled insipidly to cover her rancor.
"Today was wearisome," I said, "but tomorrow will be twice that, seeing as I will have to spend time studying you and your husband."
"Why will that be difficult?" she asked. "My mother used to say I have fine attributes." Her smile turned into a sneer with the wrinkling of her nose, the widening of her nostrils.
"I didn't know your mother was a veterinarian," I said.
She held her tongue, as well she should have, knowing I was tired.
'Send two bottles of wine up to my office. Also, dinner for two, and it had better not be any form of cremat. I don't care if you have to fry that dim-witted husband of yours. Then get to bed early; there will be a long wait in the snow again tomorrow."