by Jeffrey Ford
The raccoon brothers, Obadai and Mez, upon sensing the approaching rain had decided to stay in their hollow tree for the night, not bothering to raid the garden. They spent the first few hours of the storm drinking the intoxicating sap of rotting fruit and trading insults. Eventually they sufficiently infuriated each other and began wrestling. When the match was over, and Obadai, the bigger of the two, had his brother’s snout pressed down into the dirt, the thought of a nice ripe tomato came to each of them at the same instant.
“What do you think?” asked Mez. “Should we chance it?”
“Why not?” his brother answered and kicked him once in the back of the head before letting him up.
They left the hollow tree and went out into the rain. Giddy from the fruit wine and the fear of being attacked, they laughed as they ran blindly through the woods, bumping into each other and stumbling in ruts. Having made the same raid every night for as long as they could remember, light was not needed to find the tomato patch. Once there, they made their way in amidst the plants and sniffed closely for the largest, unblighted fruit they could find.
“Here it is,” cried Mez to his brother who was working another row, “a genius of a tomato. You’ve got to see it. If I weren’t going to eat it, I’d marry it.” His sinewy black fingers could barely fit around the prize. Just as he was about to yank it from the stem, he heard his brother right next to him.
“Wait, don’t do it. There’s something going on here,” said Obadai.
“Something going on, like you want to steal my dinner,” his brother answered.
“No, no, come here, I’m serious.”
Mez could sense his brother’s fright and became frightened himself. Moving up close, they made their way cautiously through the garden toward the tower. As they broke into the clearing of the path that ran down the center of the planted rows, Obadai grabbed his brother by the scruff of the neck and pointed his head toward where the scarecrow had stood. In the light issuing from the open door of the tower, they saw that Belius’ coat was missing, leaving the figure just a wooden cross, devoid of personality.
“This is bad,” said Mez. “Something’s wrong.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Now the wind blew cold against them and they felt its sting. The rain beating on the earth made all manner of odd sounds, causing them constantly to start and turn around in expectation of an attack. They didn’t run, but inched their way back toward the hollow tree. Just inside the cover of the woods, they heard a noise that no amount of falling rain could have produced. It was a prolonged moaning, both high and low, and the suffering that was at the heart of it they imagined to have teeth. The weird sound entered them through their ears and worked as an instant antidote to the fruit wine. Without speaking, they moved forward an inch at a time, so close to one another they seemed to be one creature. The sound grew louder as if they were walking into it.
Creeping up behind an oak tree, they peered around its trunk into the clearing their place sat on the other side of. It was too dark to see what it was, but they could hear that the thing was only a few feet from them. Lightning walked the sky and, in that bright spark, they saw Belius, kneeling down on all fours, naked, ripping a clump of grass out of the muddy ground with his teeth. Just before the dark turned on again, he lifted his head, his maw chewing away at dirt and grass and stones, and they saw his eyes, each as huge and deeply hollow as their home.
“Get Vashti,” said Mez to his brother. “Belius has lost his mind.”
Not worrying any longer about the darkness or the storm, Obadai took off for the center of the woods, for the giant ashe where the owl nested.
Instead of staying on the ground, easy prey to whatever night demon happened along, Mez climbed the tree in front of him and nestled down upon a thick, low branch right next to the trunk. He wrapped his full tail around himself to offer some protection against the high wind and rain.
Each time the lightning would strike and give a clear view of Belius below, swaying and madly chewing, Mez would cover the black mask of his face so as not to see the ugly condition of his friend. He waited for an hour for Obadai to return with help, but, when none was forthcoming, he decided to take matters into his own hands. “This can’t go on all night,” he said to himself. Gathering a handful of acorns, he inched his way along the limb which jutted out over the clearing until he was directly above Belius. His plan was to pop him between the horns with the tiny seed-nuts and wake him from his unnatural trance.
Grasping the limb with both feet and one hand, he leaned down and waited for the lightning. With the next flash of white, he aimed quickly and fired. There was no way of his seeing if he had hit the mark because the dark returned within a second. The instant the light went out, he heard a roar from below, and, the next thing he knew, something jarred the trunk of the tree he was in. He wrapped his arms tightly around the branch as the oak trembled again and again with what he saw, in subsequent bursts of light, to be Belius ramming its base with his horns.
When he had sufficiently battered the tree that Mez was in, he moved on to the next one that helped to define the clearing and gave it a dozen whacks with his hard points. From there, he traveled the circle of the clearing, blindly goring the base of each tree and recoiling to strike the next. The rain did not come quickly enough to wash away the froth forming on his mouth. Jets of steam poured from his nostrils, and water glistened on the scratches that the rough bark had cut on his human chest and leg.
By the time Obadai returned with help, the storm had moved on, leaving the sky perfectly clear and the air fresh and cool. Dawn was showing a light yellow in the clearing. Belius lay flat out on his back, unconscious, having knocked himself out, and, although his mind knew nothing, his mouth still chewed mechanically at the cud he had ripped from the earth. Shebeb, dressed in his fez for protection against the rain, stood over the minotaur’s body, shaking his big head. Vashti had flown down to perch on Belius’ right horn, and the raccoon brothers stood with one arm around the others’ shoulders, staring on in disbelief and waiting for the two wiser creatures to make a decision.
“Let’s get him to the tower,” said Vashti.
“Yes,” said the ape, who leaned over and, with great effort, picked Belius up in his arms. “I guarantee he did not follow my advice,” Shebeb added as they headed for the tower.
“He’s not himself,” said Vashti, flying low overhead. “Or should I say, he’s too much himself. In either case, it’s not your fault Shebeb, you did your best. Don’t worry though, I, myself, have a plan to cure him and the medicine I prescribe doesn’t grow on bushes.”
As the entourage made its way to the edge of the woods, the yellow day increasingly gathered in the sky. The atmosphere began to fizz and the storm was all but forgotten save for the wet grass and dripping leaves. The raccoon brothers brought up the rear. Even though a pall of seriousness weighed heavily on account of Belius’ condition, they tried to trip each other as they went. Watching the whole procession through a distant thicket of sticker bushes was a misty figure, like a human storm cloud, wrapped in a tattered overcoat.
After Belius’ friends dressed him in his green silk pajamas with the rock sewn in behind the neck and put him to bed, he remained in a deep sleep for two full days. During this time he had a nightmare in which his father was teaching him how to tie a special kind of knot. Although the farmer’s hands moved slowly, Belius could not follow the sequence. The tying of it consisted of a thousand loop-de-loops, a hundred hitches, and one part of it resembled a noose.
“I can’t get it, father,” said Belius, poking ineffectually at it with his hooves.
His father grabbed it from him and, with one quick pull of a loop, had the entire mess undone and again in the form of a length of cord. For what seemed like the tenth time, the minotaur watched as the farmer’s crooked fingers flew to their task and were done almost before they started.
“Look Belius,” his father said, “you don’t have to
be able to tie it. All you have to be able to do is undo it. It’s a cinch. If you can figure it out, your hooves will turn into human hands.”
Again the farmer tossed him the tangle of cord. Belius worked at it with such intensity that he could feel the veins popping out from his neck and sweat running down his back. “I can’t,” he finally shouted in frustration. “Tell me the secret.” He looked up from the stubborn knot and saw that his father had vanished.
Days later, when he came out of sleep and opened his eyes, he was standing two feet from the bed with his head lowered, his horns readied for the attack. That morning he began a habit of dissolution and despondency. The only efforts he made were to take the stairs into the basement for fresh bottles of dandelion wine and to stoke the bowl of his pipe. He sat in his chair in the study, doing nothing but tipping a wine bottle to his lips and smoking himself into fits of hallucination. During this time, he didn’t even put himself to bed at night but stayed in the study, unaware of the hour. His chair became his entire universe, and he was loath to leave it for trips to the bathroom or cellar. Dust collected on the volumes of his library. The garden was overrun with weeds.
Once he tried to lift his writing quill off the desk, but the nearer his hoof moved to it, the more the range of his sight diminished into a black tunnel, so that he believed if he were to touch it, he would go blind. He grew very weak and thin and his mind was filled to brimming with a noisome clamor of nothing. Occasionally, he tried to concentrate on this battle of ghosts in his head, but concentration became something that he could never remember having had the ability for. For the entire duration of his breakdown, whether he be dozing off or just staring, his mouth continued to chew on a nonexistent cud.
His friends came to visit him, but he gave no response to their questions. Vashti made an attempt to feed him some broth, but he would not hold it in his mouth. When she inserted the spoon, he would chew on it and the weak soup would dribble down his chin and chest and stain his pajama top. The other creatures agreed that there should be someone there to sit with him most of the time for fear that he might try to do harm to himself.
Pezimote was chosen to watch over the invalid minotaur, being the one who knew him best and the most likely to get him speaking again. The tortoise’s disposition was not well suited for the job. He had never been much for fetching food for anyone except himself. He swam to the tower every morning to wait on Belius. For the first few days he was very attentive. He sat across from his patient and spoke to him for hours about anything that came into his head until he thought he would go mad himself. He made enormous breakfasts and lunches, brunches, dinners, snacks, suppers, but usually ended up eating both his own and Belius’ share as well.
Days passed and there was no change in the minotaur. His hours were all chewing with a few feeble moos mixed in. When he wasn’t cooking, Pezimote played gin rummy with Bonita. If the cat won, the tortoise would have to scratch her back with Belius’ sharp letter opener. There was never a question as to what the tortoise would get if he took the hand because he never did.
The days of card playing lasted no longer than the first few of conscientious care. Near the end of the second week, Pezimote would start the day with a bottle of dandelion wine and then move on to successive bowls of digitalis. He would sit across from Belius and interchangeably pass the bottle and then the pipe.
It was on the fourteenth day of his vigil that he caught himself, after having consumed the better part of three quarts of wine, making a chewing motion with his beak. “That does it,” he said in a rage, throwing the half empty bottle out the window. “This is insane. I am wasting my days here, watching you crawl deeper and deeper into yourself. I can’t go to meet my nubile at night, because now I sleep like a log, so tired from all my chores and the drinking and smoking. Chelonia is complaining that I’m never home. Look, Belius, the world is passing us by out there.” He pointed to the window. “Last night there was a meteor shower and you missed it. Think of how it would have looked through your telescope. And just yesterday, Nosthemus predicted that in our own lifetimes, a creature would come from the lesser world and cause a great ruckus, but you weren’t there to write down his words. Now we’ll all forget, and, when it happens, no one who is born after today will believe, when it happens, that the whale really did predict it.”
Belius kept chewing, and Pezimote walked up to where he was sitting to look into the dark pupil of his right eye. “Wake up, damn you,” he yelled. Belius stared straight through the tortoise. “Enough!” said Pezimote. He wheeled halfway round and then came back, smacking the minotaur as hard as he could on the snout with his thick stump. Belius’ head jerked back and hit the chair. He stopped chewing. Pezimote saw a glimmer of recognition in his friend’s eye and hit him again. “Where? What? Where?” Belius mumbled. When the tortoise heard him speak, he did not assess the situation but proceeded without a thought. With a nasty snap of his beak, he bit down on the minotaur’s human, left nipple, choosing that site because it looked like it would hurt more than any other.
Belius’ scream flew out the window with the velocity of an arrow shot from a bow. It traveled the wind that swept over the tree tops of the woods, then dove down through a thicket of elms and slipped into the opening to Siftus’ burrow. It passed his stone bed and the peg on which he hung his snake skin vest and continued down the series of tunnels, ricocheting back and forth off the close walls, to the expanse, where it smashed into the mole’s elbow, jarring his paw which held his drawing stick, causing him to, in one fluid motion, add a pair of human female breasts to his dirt drawing when all the time he had been planning to depict an udder on the lower abdomen.
Being the artist he was, he scrutinized the mistake to see if it was something worthwhile, as he had found slips of the stick or chisel to sometimes be in the past. He backed away from the finished picture, the hundredth he had done that day, possibly the millionth he had done since beginning the project, and sniffed the lines to judge their symmetry, their feeling of ‘rightness’. The aroma of the new drawing appealed to him greatly. He rolled a cigarette and smoked, every now and then taking another whiff of his creation. Although he had never seen or smelled a pair of human female breasts before in his life, he thought the configuration of the drawing to be ingenious.
“Why not?” he said, feeling a little crazy himself with all the sleepless hours of toil on the design of the creature. “This will be my signature,” he thought. He stood and smoked, leaning against one of his sculptures, basking in the feeling of accomplishment. “I will call her … Soffea … yes,” he said to the darkness, the name coming to him suddenly. He repeated it many times until his cigarette burned down and singed his paw.
That evening, just after sunset, all of Belius’ friends made their way through the woods toward Vashti’s ashe tree. Two dozen sparrows had combed the land at the owl’s behest, carrying invitations to a council that had as its only purpose to gather resources with which to effect the cure of the minotaur.
Vashti sat on the lowest branch of her enormous home, watching the gathering grow beneath her. What was yet more incredible than a bird below ground was that Siftus, a dirt eater, sat next to her on the branch. He tried to hide his fear of heights so that it would seem only natural that a member of his race should be at home in the sky, but, when he rolled a cigarette while already having one lit in his mouth, Vashti could not help but pay him back for his leading her deep below the earth the day she went to see him.
“Cave-in,” she said in a whisper.
“Touché,” answered Siftus, now with two cigarettes in his mouth, his body in a subtle but constant motion to find the position of ultimate safety on the never-thick-enough branch.
Below them the clearing filled with every manner of creature that slithered or crawled or flew or swung through the tree tops on vines. Inconvenienced by a mere million years of evolution which had robbed him of legs, Nosthemus the whale sent word with Pezimote that he would be psychically present
and would transfer the proceedings to other interested members of the sea. The raccoon brothers arrived early, passing the time before things got started by chewing on big wads of tree gum and then throwing them on the ground for others to step in. Shebeb had shown, although he had earlier told Vashti that Belius’ problems should be handled by a trained physician. Chelonia came with her husband.
The ants from the tower sent a contingent atop the backs of dragon flies. Bats hung upside down from surrounding trees like wet leather gloves set out to dry. The beaver clan was there in force, from Weeber, the elder, to his great grandson.
The Sphinx, hearing through the unbroken web of living things that there was to be a meeting to help her friend and fellow writer, sent, from half a world away, her swiftest emissary, a giant golden condor, to represent her. The powerful wings of this creature carried him across the ocean in no time. He gladly recounted stories from the exotic West and made a big hit with those present when, at Vashti’s request, he lifted Siftus into the tree.
When it seemed as if the crowd could grow no larger, Vashti screeched above the racket of squeaks and barks and chirps and glugs in order to bring everyone to attention. “Here, here,” she called out, and, slowly, the gathering quieted down. Of course, once it was perfectly silent, Mez had to fake a monstrous sneeze, which made Hilry, the old anaconda, literally jump out of her skin. The owl turned her piercing yellow eyes on the raccoon brothers, and they immediately took seats on the ground. “Now, thank you for leaving off your hunting or sleeping tonight to come to this meeting. I would not have called you here had it not been a matter of the gravest importance. Our good friend, Belius, is sick. Not a creature here would deny that he would try to help us if we were in the same condition.”