by Jeffrey Ford
“What about?” she asked.
“Wait and see,” I said.
She seemed more interested in making love, but I coerced her with more lies, telling her that it would enable the discovery of the present at a much sooner time than if she refused to listen.
“Very well,” she said, moving in close to me and resting her head on my arm.
I thought for a moment, staring at the face of the moon out the back window opening. She moved her nails in wide circles along my chest with the same graceful motion as in her experiment beneath the tree in the private garden. If I couldn’t think of something to tell quickly, I would not have been able to hold myself in check, although my entire plan depended upon it. Then, like a ghost, a wispy cloud moved slowly in front of the moon, and I had what I was desperately searching for.
“This is the story of The Woman and the Green Veil,” I began. “Once there was a very vain man with a position of great power …” I employed voluminous detail and slowly told the tale of my betrayal of Arla Beaton in the third person, as though the foolish hero were someone I had never met. Anotine’s hand stopped moving, and I could tell she was listening intently. I spoke in as soothing a voice as possible.
More than an hour passed in the telling, and by the time I reached the part where the Physiognomist butchers the young woman’s face in a foolish attempt to make her more virtuous, Anotine was, to my relief, fast asleep. I went on telling the rest of it, aloud, to myself, as if it were a confession of sorts.
The images came out of my memory in single file—Arla’s face covered by the veil because I had made it so ugly that to gaze upon it meant sudden death, my imprisonment on the island of Doralice, my return to the Well-Built City. I saw the false paradise, an enormous crystal egg, that Below had built underground to house Arla and Ea, the Traveler from the wilderness of the Beyond. Then the Master bit into the white fruit, the city was destroyed through explosions, and we managed to escape. Again, I witnessed the birth of Cyn, Arla’s daughter, whom I was forced to deliver one stormy night. Somehow, that birth had caused Arla’s face to heal to its original beauty. She left the veil with me when she and Ea and their children had gone off to the Beyond. This last detail, my uncertainty as to whether her leaving it was to remind me of my guilt or a sign of forgiveness, was where I ended the story. The experience of giving voice to every memory left me feeling perfectly calm.
I had never felt so exquisitely comfortable in all my life as while lying there, but I had to fight my inclination to doze off. With great care, I rolled Anotine back onto her side of the bed and then slowly swung my feet around to sit up. After waiting some time to see if she was deeply asleep, I stood and went over to the brown rug. There, I sat down cross-legged as I had somewhere read the pagan holy men of the territory do to meditate. I concentrated and conjured a lit Hundred-To-One; then I turned my attention to materializing something else that the mnemonic world could not as yet provide.
In my mind’s eye, I pictured a Lady Claw scalpel, the kind the old physiognomists, like Kurst Scheffler and Muldabar Reiling, had once used. These instruments were supposedly more difficult to handle than the modern, double-headed type, but it had been said that they could cut bone as if it were pudding. The instrument glinted in the light of my thoughts, and I saw it from every angle. Even the fine, three-finger inscription on the handle did not escape me.
My self-induced trance lasted for as long as my story had, and when I finally opened my eyes, I stood and walked down the hallway to that mysterious dark closet. It had come to me in my meditation that the instrument would be in there on one of the shelves.
Once inside, I discovered that it was perfectly black. I felt along the inner wall of the room, letting touch be my guide. Before too long I found where the shelves began and started tentatively feeling around. These shelves reminded me of Misrix’s Museum of the Ruins, and I thought of the pride with which he had shown me his display. My fingers came in contact with fur, ceramic, linen, and glass, and then with lumps of a soft unformed gel, which I guessed might be the element of things waiting to become.
I was beginning to think that my theory about the closet and the materialization of objects might have been all wrong, when I slid my hand across the dusty surface of a shelf and felt a sting on the tip of my index finger. Even a retired physiognomist knows the feel of a scalpel, though it be the slightest caress. I knew the nick had drawn blood, and I smiled as I closed my fist around the handle. As I lifted it, I was startled by the sound of heavy breathing behind me.
“Cley,” said a voice that I was sure was not Anotine’s.
“Misrix?” I asked, rapidly placing the speaker.
“Yes,” he said with a hiss.
“How long have you been in here?” I asked, careful to keep my voice to a whisper.
“I’m not here,” said the demon. “I’m only speaking to you. I could not enter the mnemonic world again. It was hard enough to get my voice to travel over.”
“How long have we been connected in reality?” I asked.
“Almost an hour.”
“An hour …” I found the discrepancy in time impossible.
“You’ve got to hurry,” he told me. “The chances of retrieving you grow slimmer by the minute.”
“My plan is mad,” I told him.
“I can see what you are thinking.”
“Absurdity seems to be the order of the day, though,” I said, hoping he might try to talk me out of it.
A minute passed, and I thought he was gone. I prepared to leave.
“Cley,” he said, frightening me again, “you are going to use the woman, aren’t you?”
“For her own good,” I said.
A wheezing laughter broke out around me everywhere, echoing in the small room. As it diminished, I could hear him very faintly call, “I’ll be watching.”
I brought the Lady Claw out into the bedroom and laid it on the table alongside the signal gun that the doctor had left with me. Seeing the gun, I thought it might be better to have a weapon more truly suited for self-defense. Until very early in the morning, I meditated upon the derringer I had at one time carried, but no matter how precisely I saw it or desired it, it never appeared in the closet. I realized in dejection that there were probably limits to the complexity of the objects that could be materialized. As the dawn began to show itself out beyond the field and wood, I crept back to bed.
17
After a late breakfast the next morning, as the sun climbed a final step toward noon, we returned, at my insistence, to the bed. With Anotine sighing, “Now,” and myself wrapped in ecstatic concentration, like a child in a final round of split the muggen, together we discovered the present, a gift from the future and the past.
This event was meant to be the initiation of my plan, but when I rolled onto my back and was breathing heavily in unison with her, I forgot all about disturbing Below’s mnemonic world. If anything, I wanted it to remain as it was forever. What I had found in her was not the fulfillment of lust, but the origin of love. All of those questions of reality and illusion had disintegrated more completely than the edge of the island.
“Did you feel the moment?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said, “it exploded inside me. I was transported to another place.” She reached out and put her hand around my wilting member. “Cley, you’re a genius. Who would have thought.”
Her comment about having gone to another place reminded me of Bataldo’s revelation that sexual union was a temporary fusion of memories. I pondered this notion, and found that it coincided with the feeling that I had finally, after all my errant wandering in thought and deed, come home to myself. There was nothing left but to tell her I loved her, and that is precisely when the Fetch arrived.
It slowly drifted backward in through the window opening above us, its hair alive, its expression a startling mask of ecstatic rage. Anotine sat up to take its gaze as the green light streamed toward her eyes.
I rolled out of t
he bed in a fit of jealousy and made my way to the table across the room. There, I lifted the signal gun and turned to aim, determined not to share our intimacy with the creature. As I was about to pull the trigger, I realized that I might hit Anotine. Lowering the gun, I walked cautiously up behind the Fetch, steeled myself as if on the verge of thrusting my hand into a fire, and reached out to grab a shock of serpentine hair.
The instant I closed my grip, it began to scream. The unnatural sound of its cry roused me to action, and I pivoted on my heels, swinging the disembodied head face first into the wall. There was a sickening crunch, and I thought I had broken its nose. Behind me I heard Anotine cry, “Cley, what are you doing?” as I let go of my victim. The Fetch wavered in midair, then dipped toward the ground but managed to stay aloft. As it turned to lunge at me, its shrieking mouth wide with pointed cat teeth, I lifted the gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
It all seemed to happen at once—a pop, a cloud of smoke, and a sizzling explosion of red light. The force of the blast slammed the Fetch into the wall as I was thrown back a few steps in the opposite direction. I saw it hang there for a moment, like some strange decoration, before it slid to the floor and onto its face. With great care, I approached it, waiting to see if it was feigning death. The limpness of the singed hair convinced me it was safe to touch. Using the end of the gun, I flipped it over to reveal a blackened, tattered visage of melted green flesh.
I turned to look at Anotine and found her sitting straight up, her face pale, her mouth open wide. “Quickly,” I said, “get dressed. The plan has begun.” Only then did I remember that I had intended to kill the Fetch all along.
By the time the others had arrived, we were both clothed and had dragged the lifeless head into Anotine’s laboratory. They entered by way of the bedroom, and I heard the doctor call to us.
“In here,” I yelled.
They came down the hallway with Nunnly in the lead and Brisden bringing up the rear.
As they entered the lab, Nunnly said to me, “Brisden and I have been thinking this over, Cley, and we believe …” He never finished his statement, though, because at that moment I stepped away from the table I stood in front of, allowing them to get a look at what I was working on. Nunnly took a step back. The doctor immediately brought his hand to his beard, and Brisden said, “Fa,” closed his eyes, and turned his face away.
“There’s no going back,” said Anotine, casting a sick glance at the mutilated remains on the table.
“I should say not,” said Nunnly, now stepping closer to study it.
“You know what this means, Cley,” said the doctor.
I nodded.
“The Delicate,” said Brisden.
“It’s the only way we can get inside the tower,” I said.
“Do you think we’ll be invited after this?” asked Nunnly.
“That’s the part I’m unclear about,” I said. “All I know is that the doors have to open for us to get inside.”
The doctor stepped closer and peered down at the head. “How did you stop it?” he asked.
“The signal gun you left the other night was a better weapon than I imagined,” I said.
“What is that in your hand?” asked Nunnly, pointing to the Lady Claw.
“An instrument for cutting through flesh and bone. It’s called a scalpel.”
“Do you think it’s necessary to dice the little beast up?” asked Brisden, grimacing at the sight of it, as he moved alongside the others.
“I want to get inside the head,” I told them. “I need to determine what it is that allowed the Fetch to see into each of your minds.”
“Cley thinks there might be something there that will help him to discover the antidote,” said Anotine.
“Stand back a little,” I said. With this, I lifted the scalpel and began to cut away at the long strands of hair. My facility with the tool came back to me all at once, and I found a kind of pleasure in wielding it again. The Physiognomy also tried to pry its way back into my consciousness along with my appreciation of the grace of the instrument. It was all I could do to suppress the tenets of that crackpot philosophy, which slithered in mind-speech and flashing images through my thoughts.
I had shaved nearly the entire head when I stopped for a moment and looked up to see the others staring with expressions of astonishment at my work.
Brisden broke from his trance, and said, “Things have certainly grown more complex in the past few minutes.”
“They’re going to get absolutely intricate,” I said, and went back to playing the barber.
I made the cut along the middle of the bald cranium with confidence, and the tight skin parted to release a viscous yellow fluid. It seeped out of the opening, pooled on the table, and dripped to the floor in minute wet explosions as steady as the ticking of a clock. Laying the scalpel down, I worked the fingers of both hands into the crease I had made and pulled back the flaps of flesh on either side to reveal the skull.
“There’s nothing shy about Cley,” Nunnly said.
“Doctor, how long would you estimate we have before the Delicate comes seeking revenge?” I asked.
“All we can go by is what happened to Professor Claudio. With this in mind, I believe we have a day.” He turned to Anotine, and asked, “Was it the next day that it came after him?”
She nodded, and added, “But that is the only instance; a poor estimate based on one piece of evidence.”
“I suppose we will have to trust to it,” I said. “Now let’s see what the Fetch is made of.”
I tapped the scalpel against the yellow cap that lay exposed and was surprised to find that it was not hard like bone. There was a certain pliancy to it as if it were crafted from a kind of sturdy rubber. The Lady Claw dug into the substance with little resistance, and when I pulled the instrument in a circular motion to create a portal, it sailed smoothly along as though I were cutting nothing tougher than the callused flesh of a sailor’s hand.
When this was finished, I used the thin edge of the scalpel as a lever and pried open the plug, which encompassed an area a little larger than the size of my fist. As soon as this piece was removed an acrid stench rose out of the cavity and filled the lab.
I was nearly overcome by the aroma, which smelled sharply of chemicals and shit. It was necessary to take a step back and let it dissipate before continuing. The others, having never experienced the scent of the latter, groaned audibly. Anotine’s nostrils flared, she gagged, and I could see a ripple of fear run through her. Nunnly reached for his handkerchief. Brisden and the doctor stepped briskly over to the open window and took in draughts of fresh air.
When the odor had lessened, I asked Anotine to light one of the candles and bring it over so that I could look into the dark hole I had opened. As she prepared this, the others returned and gathered around me. She brought the candle, and I leaned down, holding it as close to the Fetch as possible so that its glow would illuminate the cavity.
At first glance there appeared to be nothing but space and the inner walls of the skull. “Harrow’s hindquarters,” I thought, “the damn thing is empty.” I looked again, and then I saw a small shiny protuberance glint in the light from the flame. Giving Brisden the candle, I reached with my opposite hand inside the head. Up near the front, just behind where the eyes were positioned in the face, I felt a small sac filled with fluid. Further tactile investigation told me it was connected by two stalks to an area of smooth flesh. I grabbed these cartilaginous tubes tightly with my fingers and yanked on them. They came free with an audible snap, and I drew the entire assemblage of tissue out into the daylight.
Holding the organ in the palm of my hand, I looked down at it, amazed that this little bag of green liquid could have animated the Fetch.
“Not much of a prize for all that work,” said Brisden.
“Is there nothing else?” asked the doctor.
“Just this,” I said.
“I don’t understand how the thing worked,” said Nunnly. “S
urely that can’t be enough of an organic engine to power a flying head.”
“Unless that gas that was released was the source of its energy,” said the doctor.
“And what would that be?” asked Nunnly.
“Dreams, perhaps,” said the doctor.
“Noxious ones at that,” said Brisden.
“Another delivery,” said Anotine, referring to what I had told her about my midwifing duties. She smiled at me as though proud of my accomplishment.
“For that, I’m going to have my essence sucked out through my ear?” asked Brisden, pointing with his pinky finger.
“It may be more valuable than you think,” I said. Now that the initial puzzlement had worn off, I realized that it might just be what I had been looking for. The fact that it had been attached to the back of the eyes led me to believe that it had something to do with the Fetch’s ability to probe the inhabitants and objects of the mnemonic world. Of course, it was all so much dangerous conjecture, but I wondered if perhaps it was the key to releasing Below’s secret knowledge from those symbolic forms in which it was hidden.
“Anotine, do you have a beaker, something I can pour the contents of this into?” I asked.
She turned away and began searching the other tables.
Nunnly laughed. “Time for cocktails?” he asked.
“Precisely,” I said.
The others remained silent as I cut the small bag of green with the scalpel and drained it into the bottom of the flask Anotine had found. When the organ was empty, I threw the withered sac back into the open skull. Lifting the container, I swirled it around, the inch of liquid at the bottom circling in a miniature wave.
Now came the moment of reckoning. If I were to ingest it, I considered that there were at least three possibilities of what might happen. The first was that it would do nothing, perhaps make me ill. The second was that it would poison me, and I would die both in Below’s mind and also back in my reality, where Misrix waited for me. The last was that I would be privy to the knowledge Below had stored on the island.