by Jeffrey Ford
Killing a deer and carving it up was second nature for the hunter, and he enjoyed the work—at last a definite project other than merely surviving. It took his mind away, and he no longer sat morosely holding the green veil and staring into the past. When the tent was three-quarters sewn together, he realized he had not yet tackled the job of making fire without matches. The idea of rubbing sticks together to draw a flame seemed preposterous, so he instead opted for the technique that called for the banging of rocks.
Following the stream at the bottom of the hill, he and the dog set off one morning, searching along its bank for promising specimens. Every now and then he would stop, lift two rocks, smash them together as hard as he could, and study the results. By midday, he had broken nearly thirty rocks and smashed each of his fingers at least once without having produced a single spark. Wood grew tired of this fruitless pursuit and went off into a stand of shemel trees after a geeble.
“What idiot invented this technique?” Cley wondered, but drawing on the persistence that had kept him alive through worse trials, he continued. He knelt again by the stream’s edge and brought up a large, black, heart-shaped stone. He was searching for another against which to smash this one when he heard a strange noise. It was something familiar but nothing he had heard in a long time. He stopped and listened more intently. All he heard was the sound of the tree branches scraping together in the breeze and the rushing of the water.
Minutes later, he reached out to take up another stone and heard again, from off in the forest, the distinct sound of someone weeping. He was used to the weird noises of the Beyond, but this particular one made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Listening closely, he was sure he heard a woman sobbing. Getting up, he called for Wood. The sound of his own voice dispelled the crying, and he stood perfectly still for a long time, listening.
“Hello?” he finally called but there was only the breeze.
“Who is there?” he yelled, and with this, Wood came charging out of a thicket of trees. He realized, upon seeing the familiar figure of the dog, how momentarily frightened he had been. Listening intently awhile longer, he finally decided it was nothing more than the call of a bird or the rushing of the stream over an obstruction.
In order to put the incident decisively out of his mind, he banged together the two rocks he held. A spark leaped out of the collision and landed in his beard. Moments later, a thin wisp of smoke curled away from his face, and a moment after that, he was on his knees again dipping his beard forward into the ice-cold stream. Wood nipped him on the rear end as he knelt with water dripping off his face.
On his way back to the cave, Cley looked up from his thoughts to see where the dog had gone. In the distance, a figure stood amidst the trees where the stream turned left toward the hill. He blinked and looked again. Whatever had been there was now gone. Pocketing the two rocks, he took out his knife and began running as quietly as possible. He was positive that what he had seen was not a demon because there was no sign of wings or tail. It appeared to be a person, standing still, gazing down into the moving water. When he reached the spot, he spun slowly in a circle, staring sharply into the trees.
“Show yourself,” he called out. He listened for the sound of breaking twigs or rustling in the underbrush. “A bear?” he wondered. Something inside told him to run, and he did, all the way back to the cave, Wood following at his heels.
He insisted upon using the rocks to start a fire. Because of this, they did not eat until the moon had risen in the star-filled sky. As he prepared his blanket to lie down, he heard the owl suddenly call from outside the cave. Although the bird came now almost every night, on this particular visit its cry set Cley’s heart to pounding. The dog looked over at him and then toward the mouth of the cave, sensing his master’s anxiety. For the first time since early winter, the hunter loaded a shell into the rifle’s chamber. He kept the weapon across his knees as he read to Wood, and slept that night in a sitting position, his finger wrapped lightly around its trigger.
On the day that Cley took the last deer needed to complete the tent, he wandered back toward the cave past a stand of gray, barren trees he had passed at least a hundred times throughout the winter. On this trip, though, he noticed something he had never seen before. In among the trunks he spied an unusual object sticking up out of the ground. He moved cautiously over to it, and there he found, of all things, a pickax, its handle half-buried in the ground. Dangling from a strap off one of the points was an old helmet, tiny holes eaten through the rust.
He lifted the headpiece to see if affixed to the front there was a device to hold a candle. When he found what he was looking for, he knew he had discovered one of the graves of the explorers who had struck out years earlier from Anamasobia. It had been told to him by Arla Beaton that they had been dressed in their mining gear, on a quest to discover the Earthly Paradise. He remembered the story—sixteen of them, and the only one to return was Arla’s grandfather. Cley could not help but smile at the ridiculous equipment they had brought, as if they had intended to excavate miracles from the Beyond. The wilderness had wasted no time in turning their tools into grave markers. Still, the hunter felt a sense of camaraderie with the fallen miner and knelt before the crude memorial. He tried to think of something to say, but remained silent. A minute later, he took up his pelt and whistled for Wood.
On a clear patch of frozen ground, he scratched out with his knife a crude design for the tent carrier he imagined. It had to be light with thin runners since it wouldn’t be pulled over snow but instead the grass of the plain. He determined that the perfect branches for the device would be those of the carnivorous tree that devoured sparrows and starlings, since they were long, straight, and pliant enough to shape.
It was one thing to draw on the ground with a knife and quite another to hack the limbs off a tree with a volition to eat flesh. The one he chose to attack was not strong enough to lift him and stuff him down into the opening at the top of its trunk, but it tried to. He could hear the tree’s digestive juices bubbling within as he hacked at its limbs. The grasping twigs at the ends of the constantly moving branches kept pulling at him, and it hurt madly when they wrapped around his hair and beard. All the time Cley worked, Wood paced nervously a few feet away, barking at the giant with which his friend appeared locked in combat. Occasionally the dog charged in and tried to bite the many-armed enemy but was unsure as to where to sink his teeth.
After much struggle, the required branches wriggled on the ground like a brood of snakes. From their cut ends oozed a dark green sap.
“That’s the damnedest thing,” said Cley, waiting for their life to drain away.
He began construction and decided that the limbs of the hungry tree were the right choice for the job. They were sturdy, but could be bent to make the frame and runners. Using dried strips of deer hide, he tied the joints fast, then bowed one long stalk into a perfect loop to fashion the harness that would fit around Wood’s chest. The work took him the better part of the day, and he enjoyed the complexity of the task.
It was early evening when he finished, and pleased with his creation, he took the time to double-tie all the joints. During this process, he looked up to find where the sun was in its descent and saw a woman, dressed in skins, standing in front of him. The fact that there was someone there, watching him, was startling enough, but it was her otherworldly presence that made him reel backward onto the ground. Her form was slightly transparent, wavering like a heat mirage, though the air was still cold. Her eye sockets were perfectly empty and dark as any tunnel through the underground. She appeared a magic-lantern projection from another time—her hair blowing behind her in a phantom wind, her flesh shrunken against her cheekbones and pulled tight in a thin scrim across her forehead.
“What?” he yelled, his entire body trembling.
When she put her arms out toward him, as if pleading, he knew instantly who she was. Reaching into the cloak by his neck, he pulled out the beaded necklace he had
worn since the day he discovered her grave. Slowly, as in a dream, she dropped to her knees and began digging at the thawing earth. From everywhere, came the sound of her sobbing. Cley got to his feet and backed away. She reached toward him again, then motioned back to the ground.
He had never thought to see what was in the pouch because it had always felt empty, but now he understood that it contained something that was important to her. Nervously, he lifted the beads to get at it. Pulling apart the gut drawstring, he turned it over onto his palm. Out rolled a small, green seed half the width of a thumbnail and tapered at either end. Fine roots like hairs grew from each of the tips. He looked back to her, holding it forward, but she had vanished, leaving behind only the diminishing sound of her sorrow.
Cley shuddered as he lifted his knife off the ground where it lay next to the sled. He knelt and dug a shallow hole in the earth. Very carefully, he dropped the seed in and gently covered it over, tamping the cold dirt with his palms. As soon as he was finished, he leaped to his feet and gathered his mittens and rifle. Grabbing the sled by its harness, he whistled for Wood and set out quickly for home.
When they arrived at the cave, he did not bother to remove his cloak but went directly to the back, to the shaft that led down into the burial chamber, and threw the necklace in as far as he could. Even after an hour had passed, he still sat against the rock wall, staring out at the sky.
Before the sun rose, he made an inventory of his belongings and placed them neatly in his pack. Since the temperature had risen in recent days, he rolled up the cat cloak, the mittens and leggings, and stuffed them also into the pack. He was pleased to be able once again to wear only his overalls, shirt, jacket, and the black hat adorned with wild-turkey feathers. Once he was fitted out for the journey, he slung the bow over his shoulder and took up the rifle. Before leaving the cave, he looked back into it once with a perverse sense of nostalgia.
He had rigged the tent to the sled the night before, and now all that was needed was to get Wood into the harness. It took some doing to convince the dog that dragging the weight was a good idea. For this purpose, he had saved a few strips of venison from the previous night’s dinner, and with these he was able to coax his companion into the job of mule. Cley felt a measure of pride when the rig slid over the ground with ease.
They started around to the other side of the hill, and had not gone fifty yards, when they found a demon blocking their path. It lay facedown on the ground, unmoving, its wings folded in as if it was either asleep or dead. Cley stopped and brought the rifle up in front of him. He was wary of the beast, knowing the demons were not beneath a form of simple trickery. Wood was beside himself in the harness. Unable to attack, he growled in warning and frustration.
Cley advanced slowly, keeping a strict aim on the head of the creature. A wing lifted slightly, and without a second passing, the hunter fired, missing the base of the skull and instead chipping off the tip of the right horn. Then he realized that the movement of the wing had been caused by the wind. He walked over and, using his foot, flipped the body onto its back. The face the demon wore was so horrific, Cley almost fired again out of fright. Its eyes protruded as if momentarily frozen in the act of exploding, and its bulging tongue draped down across its chest. He knelt and touched the carcass. It was still quite warm, and he figured it had probably been killed within the past half-hour. Now he noticed the necklace of shell beads wrapped tightly around its throat, cutting deeply into the windpipe.
They navigated the hillside with minor difficulty and reached the plain by late morning. Out on the huge expanse, they moved quickly, half-fleeing the forest of demons, half-rushing toward the promise of the future. A sweet breeze blew in from the east, and beneath their feet were the first signs of green, sprouting out of the mud.
“i know you.”
Although I dare not neglect Cley’s impossible journey, something miraculous has happened in my own insular world that has transformed the tenor of my existence. While I wait for the sheer beauty to begin to percolate and guide me back to the Beyond, I will record these recent events that have had the same effect on me that a new pair of stronger, cleaner spectacles might.
Two days past, after having stayed up all night in the thrall of the drug’s dictation of Cley’s months in the demon forest, I was completely exhausted. Although demons’ lives are long in comparison with the normal span of a human’s, I admit I am now getting on in years. The aftermath of the beauty has more of a deleterious effect on me than it once did. When younger, I could take the needle, experience its influence, and after a few hours be done with it until next I needed a touch of existential levity. Now, it dries me out, droops my lids, sags my wings, and leaves me feeling as if I could learn my wild brethren’s practice of hibernation. The one thing it has never been able to do is trap me in addiction—I think.
I came away from this writing desk late into the following morning. Thoughts of Cley’s cave, the black dog’s wound, and those off-putting empty eye sockets of the ghost woman still swirled through my mind. The packs of cigarettes (stale ones this time from among the ruins), I’m sure, only added to my pitiful condition. Instead of going off to my room to sleep, I decided to step outside and take some fresh air to disperse those nightmarish images.
It was a clear summer day, and I welcomed the sun as an antidote to the frigid landscape of the Beyond. The ruins appeared as they now so infrequently do to me, namely, as truly wondrous as they are—more exotic than when the city was whole and vibrant. I flew up to perch on one of the more prominent piles of rubble. From my research I knew that it had once housed the Ministry of Justice. I often sit in this spot, where two slabs of coral have settled at right angles, creating a comfortable throne that allows my wings to hang over the back. Resting my arms on my knees and my head upon my arms, I stared sleepily out across the static mayhem that is my kingdom.
As I was making a mental note to fly to Latrobia that evening to filch some fresh cigarettes from the back room of the blind mask-maker who lives on the outskirts of town, I heard the sound of a human voice. There were no particular words I could discern, but I distinctly heard it, someone trying too hard to whisper. My initial reaction was anger. The last thing I needed in my present exhaustion was to be playing hide-and-seek with a troop of idiot treasure hunters. I saw it all in an instant—greedy, gun-toting fools eager to make off with Below’s broken-down wonders. It would be easier to kill them than to scare them, but my all-too-human nature would not allow me that option.
Instead of leaping to action and crawling on all fours through the rubble in order to sneak up on them, the aftereffects of the beauty insisted that I sit still and wait for them to pass below my perch. While I waited, I could hear their voices grow more distinct. I sniffed at the air, and it brought me news of one female and either two or three males. I was pleased it wasn’t the invading army I keep expecting. In my dotage I have become, in some ways, as paranoid as my father was. Minutes crawled by, and with each my anger grew until my tail was dancing and I half-considered the consequences of merely damaging one of them.
Then they appeared from around the corner of the blasted Ministry of War and began crossing the intact plaza, which lay fifty yards beneath me. My mind seized, my anger instantly deflated. There were three of them—children. My first thought was to sit stone still as not to frighten them. My second thought was, “What irresponsible parent allows his children to go exploring among dangerous ruins where it is a known fact that a demon resides?”
They were neither very young nor very old, if that tells you anything of their age. The tallest was a boy with long brown hair, wearing a red shirt. He carried a sharpened stick in his hands with the same tenacity with which I had pictured Cley holding his rifle. I could tell by the way his gaze constantly roamed and he moved along in a partial crouch that he was scared. In fact I could smell his fear and that of the other, smaller boy with the peaked cap. The girl appeared second oldest to the boy with the stick, and she moved w
ithout care, leading the others onward. Her hair was long and blond, and she was thin, her arms gracefully swinging at her sides. The instant I saw her, I knew it was not the first time.
I could feel my anxiety rising. It was one thing to play rough with treasure hunters, but what does one do with children? I didn’t realize until that moment how much more I would have preferred the invading army. Just then the girl looked up, and I could see her catch sight of me.
“There he is,” she shouted, pointing up the mound of debris at me.
Her companions ran, screaming, and it was the last I would see of them. She not only stood her ground, but she smiled and waved to me. I tried to pretend I was a gargoyle made of stone, but she moved closer to the bottom of my hill.
“I know you,” she yelled. “Do you remember how you saved me from the river?”
And so it was, that girl from Wenau I had pulled out of the river some years ago. “No good deed goes unpunished,” I thought. My gargoyle disguise was too flimsy even for my addled sensibilities. I lifted a hand and waved to her.
“I know you,” I said.
She began straightaway to climb the blocks of coral to where I sat, and, afraid she would fall and hurt herself, I called down to her to stay put, that I would come to her. Since she was the first person to have come to the ruins actually to visit me, I decided to do my best.
Shaking off my fatigue, I slowly stood, sucking in my paunch and thrusting out my chest. Regal was the look I wanted, so I let my wings spread completely on either side before I flapped them and leaped into the sky. Not until I was on the descent did I see what effect my show was having, but when I saw her face she appeared mightily pleased with me.
I landed with a spectacular but unnecessary fluttering that lifted the coral dust off the plaza and sent her hair up over her head. The last thing that I expected was that she would point at me and laugh. At first I was wounded by her reaction, but the sound of her joy was infectious, and I could barely restrain myself from joining her.