by Jeffrey Ford
Three days later, Belius left the doctor’s house. He was wearing one of the new outfits he had just gotten—a white shirt, black pants and a coat with a red and black plaid design. Both he and Grey were sitting in the doctor’s wagon, ready to pull out onto the road. Just as the doctor was lifting the whip to spur the horse into action, the front door of the boarding house opened and Nona came running out to them. In her arms, she carried the overcoat. When she reached the side of the wagon, she called up, “You almost forgot this.” Belius reached down and took it from her. He smiled and, to his surprise, Nona returned the true smile he had been looking for. The doctor laughed, but Belius noticed that the old man’s mirth was louder and lasted longer than ever before.
A week passed and, whereas Pezimote still had not come to call, Thip came every day like clockwork. With each feeding he grew bigger until now he stood a full three inches off the table. The wound on Belius’ arm was a festering sore. When the flea dipped into it, his enormous head was capable of draining a quarter of a pint of blood. The lurid transfusions were having a marked effect on both donor and recipient. Though Thip was fat and sluggish, his new height and girth could not be equaled by his dot of a brain which remained its original size.
He ranted and raved in spontaneous verse, the topic of which was always his conquest of the Wider World. He told Belius how his beautiful castle had become too small for him, how he had accidentally killed his devoted wife by trying to have sex with her, how he had eaten his pet tapeworms and been fired by Shebeb. His daughters had fled from the castle and refused to see him. Although he lamented the destruction of his previous life, he could not keep himself from Belius’ arm. It had become the reason for his waking in the morning.
The minotaur, on the other hand, grew weak and giddy from the loss of blood. The lack of oxygen to his system was starving his reason. He laughed at everything and couldn’t concentrate. All day, he would rush from one task to the next, accomplishing nothing. One minute he would be out in the garden, and, the next, he would be at his telescope, looking through the wrong end into the cracked mirror of his study. Whatever he did he found hilarious, but when the fits of fatigue would seize him and make him sit still, he would realize he was dying and that he was alone. Not one of his friends had come to him for days. It was at these times that he wished he hadn’t burned The Cosmology. “At least it would be something to hold,” he would say to himself before passing out.
The work on Soffea had gone exceptionally well. Her nearly completed form lay next to the riverbank waiting for the life force that would be supplied by a mosquito and a handful of bees. The golden condor had brought the human foot with toe nails painted as had been promised. The teak wood hooves had been secured in place, the open mouth shone with the iridescent splendor of pearls, and the leaf tongue from the blabbering trees was already at work mumbling and jumbling almost words. Even that part of Siftus that always sought after perfection was satisfied with the results of his own labor.
The one thing that troubled the mole was the fact that to this point nothing had been found to fill the empty eye sockets. Many of the creatures had brought reasonable facsimiles for his approval—pairs of small round jelly-fish, bird eggs with pupils painted on, and, probably the worst of all, two circular globs of amber with trilobites trapped in them. Upon sniffing these offerings for ‘rightness’, the mole could tell immediately that they wouldn’t convey emotion or take in and hold another’s glance. Vashti was getting fed up with his insistence that nothing would do. He knew in a way that she was right in thinking that something had to be settled on before Belius fell deeper into depression, but he also knew she didn’t look on the creation in the same way he did. To her it was a means to an end. To him it was an end in itself. “I don’t even care if she’s blind,” he told the owl, “as long as the eyes are everything that eyes should be.”
“Let’s just settle on one of the suggestions that’s been made. What about the globs of amber? You must admit they have a disarming quality, a certain charm about their strange color.”
“You mean disarming in the sense of losing an arm?” he asked.
“You’re impossible. Either come up with an alternative, or we’re going to have to use what we have. Soffea will walk tomorrow. You have till then, otherwise, her eyes will be amber.”
“All right, all right,” he said and stormed away along the riverbank, swinging his cane at low hanging branches. He had not slept in days so it was a great effort for him to try to organize his thoughts. “Eyes,” he said to himself, but his mind kept returning to an image of his stone bed. He cursed and quibbled with himself for a half mile before, in his near-blindness, he walked into the trunk of a tree and fell onto his back. The snout-first collision jarred everything in his head, allowing an obvious solution to his dilemma to rise to the fore. “That’s it,” he said and drew the new idea from his mind into his mouth where it was mixed with a wad of spittle. He shot this morsel onto the ground and put his still aching snout to it. The second he smelled its makeup, he knew it was the only answer. He clawed the air once in victory and then, losing no time, set off for Shebeb’s cave.
It was a rare few minutes in Shebeb’s life when he had no patients to administer to. When Siftus came upon him, he was in the grove of blabbering trees, collecting the long stringy moss from their branches. The trees were high-strung that day, and their usual palaver sounded more like a song of whippoorwills than speech.
“Shebeb,” said the mole, “how are you?”
The ape nodded and continued his gathering.
“The female minotaur is almost ready to walk,” said Siftus.
“Almost,” said Shebeb with a grunt.
“I could tell from your speech the other night that you don’t believe it will even be able to twitch an ear.”
“That pile of mud will not move of its own volition for a million years. Of that, I’m positive.”
“You’re wrong,” said the mole, taking out a cigarette. He propped his cane against the tree and lit up.
The ape shook his head and then covered his mouth for just a moment with the palm of his hand.
“Would you care to bet?”
“I don’t bet,” said Shebeb, “there’s nothing I want to win.”
“There’s got to be something,” said Siftus.
“Nothing,” said the ape.
“Let’s say we have a bet and I lose, I will donate my body to you after I’m dead. What about that? Wouldn’t you like to get your hairy fingers on a mole corpse?”
“It would be helpful in my studies,” said the ape.
He stopped gathering moss now and looked down as if to size up Siftus’ carcass.
The mole blew a cloud of smoke upward to obscure the look on Shebeb’s face. “Let’s make a bet then. You have sole possession of my body, after I’m dead, of course, if Soffea doesn’t walk by herself.”
Shebeb scratched thoughtfully at his backside for a moment and then agreed to the deal with one quick nod.
“Don’t you want to know what I want if I win?” asked Siftus.
“No.”
“You’re that sure of yourself?”
“I think that what you want to do, help Belius, is a good thing, but the way you’re going about it is all wrong. You’re deluding yourself and, in the process, leading everyone to a grave disappointment. Life can’t be created by slapping together whatever is at hand. You’ll see tomorrow when your statue lays there, a mound of wet clay with things stuck to it.”
“All I hope,” said the mole, “is that you’ll honor your word when the time comes.”
Shebeb turned away and headed for his cave.
Taking a long drag of his cigarette, Siftus considered the possibility that he might have been all wrong. If he was, it meant that when he died his body would not be buried deep in the beautiful, loving earth, but, instead, would be scattered about the ape’s cave and slowly, over a period of years, picked away to nothing by sharp instruments. He shudd
ered at the thought of his poor snout forever forced to smell the wicked odors of Shebeb’s elixirs. His doubt lasted only a few seconds. Right where he’d stood conversing with the physician, he bent over and quickly dug his way below the surface of the earth. In the past few days he’d spent too much time in the open air, beneath the oppressive yellow sky. Halfway back to his burrow, he stopped to rest and just breathe in the smells of the underground. “Ah, dirt!” he said aloud, frightening an earthworm. He went no further for the time being but closed his eyes and slept.
While Siftus lay asleep underground, the raccoon brothers, although hoping for the best for Belius’ sake, offered odds of acorns and measures of honey, ten to one, that the contrived form would remain on the ground until the rains finally washed it away. They found many a willing bettor, especially among those creatures who had forsaken snatches of fur from their own hides in order that the female minotaur might have a luxuriant mane.
The ants of the tower did not take bets, but, being the communal group that they were, initiated a joint meditation of all their brethren, melding together their combined psychic powers in the attempt to produce a modest spark of good faith. A feather fell from Vashti’s left wing and floated down from where she perched on a tree near the riverbank, overlooking the unknowing form. It twirled in the air and finally came to rest on the sculpted navel of Soffea. As she watched it land, covering the bodily center of the being yet to be, she saw instantly that if everything worked out and she were to introduce the creation to Belius the next day, it had better have some clothes. She was thankful that she now had a project with which to take up the dreadful time of waiting. She left the believers to the non-believers and went in search of Bonita to see what the cat could come up with by way of material in the storage room of Belius’ tower.
Nothing of importance, be it on land or sea, ever escaped the notice of Nosthemus. In one small closet of the vast mansion that was his brain he registered the suspense that had been generated by the possible birth of Soffea and saw it as a prime opportunity to make a prophecy. He swam out from the bay of the coral reef into deep water. Two miles off shore, he sucked in enough oxygen for a bull elephant to breathe recklessly for a lifetime and dove down and down beyond where the sun light shone, beyond the realm of eatable fish, into the shivering darkness at the bottom of the Wider World. As he thrust himself toward his destination with powerful strokes of his tail, he anticipated the impact a correct prophecy of such importance would have on the creatures of the surface. For one, he knew it would add to his own grand status as the baffling mystic. He would have only five minutes to expend on questioning the giant worm that lived in the light and heat of the molten fissure. It was from this ancient first-of-creatures that he got all his prophecies, though no living thing for miles above was aware of it.
The fiery gorge that was like the sun to Floridusk ran for miles across the basin of the ocean: a canyon river that meandered among the enormous mountain range that lay three hundred fathoms down and was like a gaping crack in the skull of the Wider World. The molten lava that bubbled up from the very center of things contained the essence of the planet’s dreams and thoughts. It was from the light thrown off by this liquid blaze that Floridusk assumed the knowledge of what was to happen. The giant worm was a creature, but, in its creation, was blessed with the property of photosynthesis. Its special chlorophyll produced oxygen for it to breathe in its cells the way a plant on the surface would. It drew nutrients from the rich volcanic muck it wallowed in. Once, the worm had told Nosthemus that it believed it had been born from a nightmare the Wider World had once dreamt.
After an hour of swimming through pitch dark, Nosthemus could barely make out a thin line of orange unraveling below him. The closer he drew to it, the more the molten light illuminated the barren landscape. Finally, exhausted, the whale could clearly see the peaks of the undersea mountains looming in the distance. Flying in amongst these crags, he continued to descend. The freezing cold diminished, and the heavy water pressing against his slippery skin began to glow with warmth. He spotted the huge round head of Floridusk and swam up close to announce himself.
“Worm!” he shouted at the full moon of a face that could have incorporated within its circumference a hundred of him.
The pale body of the behemoth quit its digestive undulation and rumbling. Thick, mile long lips parted to show teeth and give the effect of a condescending sneer. Floridusk opened one lid to reveal a jelly eye with lavender cornea and iris the color of old snow. The other eye remained closed. This ancient of the depths had the ability to be both asleep and awake at the same time. Earlier that week the sunken corpse of a great white shark had gotten tangled in the sparse hairs of the worm’s beard. To scratch the itch that the decaying flotsam caused, he pivoted his head to rub his chin against the bottom of the ocean. This movement created a strong current, making it difficult for Nosthemus to remain in the same spot. “Be still, parasite,” Floridusk bellowed in a great release of bubbles, “it’s difficult enough to focus on you when you aren’t squirming around.”
“My apologies,” said Nosthemus.
“What is it this time?”
“Just one thing. Will she be born tomorrow?” The whale did not have to elaborate, knowing that Floridusk must already know why he was there.
“Tell me one thing, my swimming insignificance, do you think it really matters whether she walks or talks or cures your friend? Do you think that if this were to happen, you would not still die and float down here to the bottom and rot and turn to muck and be assimilated by me? Do you think the Wider World would shed a tear for such a niggling tragedy or lose a moment of night?”
Nosthemus was used to being belittled by the worm. He had quickly learned to simply go along with the pomposity, groveling as much as possible without whining. “No,” he answered, “I suppose it wouldn’t matter one way or the other in the larger scheme of things.”
“Not matter? Well, you’re wrong. Everything matters to this celestial head. I have taken in the light of this matter from the molten glow. I know what will happen. The dream of it bubbled up from the gorge years and years past.”
“And what was the outcome? What did the Wider World dream about this?” Nosthemus grew anxious, feeling the tightening up of his innards that always came as his oxygen was running low.
“I’m afraid the dream was explicit in that I was not to tell you when you came to ask. This is a gift for you and your friends from the planet. The thought is that the suspense of having to wait will make all of your lives more rewarding.”
The whale knew there was no sense in arguing. “Thank you for recognizing me, worm. I will return.”
“That’s a prophecy you can take heed of,” said Floridusk.
Mustering all his strength, Nosthemus whipped his tail and sent himself shooting up through the incredible pressure of the depths. He hurried, knowing he had stayed down too long. The journey to the surface would take hours. The fiery river receded below him and with it the light. He shot past the tallest peak of the mountain range and entered the zone of complete black. It was in this most lonely part of the return trip that Nosthemus felt himself being chased upward by a giant presence. He swam as hard as he could, but it was inevitable that whatever it was would overtake him.
“What unknown monster of the lightless realm can this be?” he thought as he pushed himself along, using up vital oxygen in his haste. Fear overwhelmed him just as his pursuer did, and he screamed, releasing all his air in a cascade of bubbles. The thing enveloped him, and he thought, at first, that he was being swallowed whole. Then, to his surprise, he found that he could breathe. He took in a great supply of oxygen. As the precious gas eased the incredible aching of his lungs, he heard the earthquake voice of Floridusk echo in his mind. “I knew you wouldn’t make it to the surface if I didn’t help you with this bubble. I let it frighten you for your charade as a soothsayer in the upper regions. But I admire your foolishness. For this, I will tell you something th
at will come as prescient news to your friends. The autumn wind will blow tonight and shake the blossoms from the trees.”
The newborn night was still as a cliff face, and, because the blue sun was only minutes below the horizon, a rich lime shadow submerged the forest. Belius wanted to be quiet, but the laughter forced its way in fitful bursts up from his throat and out his nostrils. “What’s so funny?” he asked himself and then spun around quickly as if expecting an answer from someone behind him. There was nothing there. The oak trees stood tall and quiet, supporting the sky. Grass, and dead leaves, chips of fallen bark and deep deposits of brittle pine needles gave off their scents. A lone cricket pulsed out a code that when deciphered told the story of a certain star it had witnessed the extinction of one night in its youth. Belius stopped his sneaking about and listened to the message. Although he was not quick enough to translate the song word for word, its overall effect gave him the mood and as easily as the snorts of laughter came, so did his tears. Slowly, he picked up the rhythm and began to dance in small circles, his arms raised in the air. He sang along and wept. Eventually the cricket became annoyed with what it took to be a mockery of its story and hopped away. The silence returned and with it the minotaur’s purpose. He had come down from the tower to hunt the invisible creature that had stolen his overcoat.
So little red blood now ran through Belius’ mind and body that his synapses had no energy with which to fire and all his thoughts were a result of the fermentation of his brain. The digitalis he had smoked before leaving his study gave a veneer of assurance to his dementia. He stumbled gracefully amongst the trees with a liquid certainty that his mission was of the utmost importance. “I’ll have my coat,” he cursed in a rough whisper to a tree stump he momentarily mistook for Shebeb.