The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Who is there?” asked a voice from above. A man’s face appeared over the top of the white wall.

  “I am from the realm,” shouted Cley.

  “Who are you?” asked the voice.

  “A hunter in the Beyond.”

  devil’s dog

  Since I have already twice interrupted this record of Cley’s travels through the Beyond, I see no reason not to continue the practice, especially in light of the portentous changes that are occurring in my own life. I am more certain than ever that my investigation as to the hunter’s fate is intrinsically bound to my own recent growth. In the same manner in which the sun draws upward the stem of a flower, I have been drawn from my own insular seedpod of the ruins toward the warm glow of community. I have been to Wenau to visit my friends, and, here, I will tell you about it while I wait for the needle of my compass, sheer beauty, to stop spinning and point the way back to the Beyond.

  I could do no writing since my last installment, in which Cley meets the foliate Vasthasha, for I was so filled with nervous tension from the thought of taking Feskin up on his invitation to go to the schoolhouse in Wenau. During those days, I did not even bother to lift the pen, but spent the first two or three deciding if I should disregard the obvious issue of my vulnerability, both physical and emotional, and extend myself those last few increments that might result in my becoming completely human.

  Of course, I was going. I knew it from the moment he had asked. But I had to weigh it in my mind, worry about it, lose sleep over it, in order to draw the last delicious drop out of the decision. Once this foolishness had been thoroughly squeezed dry, I remembered what the young man had told me about the importance of clothing. I intermittently laughed and shook my head in confusion over the idea that the citizens would be more likely to accept what they saw as the symbolic representation of evil as long as it wore trousers.

  “The demon must be clothed,” I said aloud, finally breaking the spell of inaction. With that, I went in search of the perfect outfit.

  In living alone for many years amidst the aftermath of a monumental disaster, I have come to know the corpses quite well—where they reside, what postures they ended their lives in, what they are wearing. Among this static community of the skeletal, I knew of one quite large fellow, well dressed, who met his fate with feet trapped by fallen debris and a bullet to the rear end. He stood upright at the ravaged entrance to the Ministry of the Territory. I had always marveled at his undiminished dignity, even in the face of a conspicuous lack of flesh. His monocle still rested between cheekbone and brow, and he was decked out in a charcoal gray with pale pink pin-striped suit and vest. The stately black top hat with pale pink band was a crowning monument to his fashion sense.

  Through past research, I had come to know that this large person was none other than Pennit Dresk, the father of the young girl who, in Cley’s own “Case of the Unseeing Eye,” was convicted of producing subversive stick figure drawings and sentenced to having her eyes removed. Other documents made it clear that Dresk had become part of the conspiracy to topple Drachton Below’s beneficent rule. My wardrobe had a fitting lineage.

  I scrubbed the outfit thoroughly, then read a book about sewing. Threading the needle with clawed hands was more difficult an exercise than having a camel pass through its eye. The opening for my tail was not so much a problem, for all I had to do was widen the bullet hole and sew around it. The jacket and vest, in order to fit comfortably around my wings, took real planning. I was more an architect than a seamstress in this matter. I forgot about the shoes. Wing tips and hooves are an impossible union. The white shirt was too much to conjure. “They will have to do with demon hair instead of linen in this case,” I thought. The hat nestled smartly between my horns. I put a twig of leaves from the tree that bears the fruit of Paradise in my buttonhole, checked a mirror eight times, and was ready.

  After circling at a considerable altitude for over an hour, I landed at dusk in the street outside the front entrance of the schoolhouse. The lanky schoolmaster, Feskin, was waiting to greet me. He wore only shirt and pants, and I instantly worried that I had overdressed for the occasion. I moved toward him in as dashing a manner as possible.

  “You look incredible,” he said, and laughed.

  At first his mirth stung me, but I quickly overcame my embarrassment and laughed, too. “We always dress formally in the evening at the ruins,” I said.

  “Very good,” he said, smiling. He shook my hand and motioned for me to come inside the already lighted schoolhouse.

  I went up the steps, my hooves clunking against the wood. He stepped aside, allowing me to enter first. When I did, I was met with a shout that nearly blew my top hat off. I immediately crouched in attack mode with my claws out, my horns lowered, the hair on the ridge of my back rising. It was in this posture that I met my supporters in Wenau. Slowly, I realized that the shout had been their collective voice, yelling the word “Surprise!” I rose up to my full height and then I saw them, gathered around in front of the small desks and blackboard. On the board was written, in large chalk letters, “Welcome, Misrix!”

  Quite a surprise it was, too. Feskin took a huge risk in startling me, for I might have just begun slashing the air in self-defense. This proved to me his faith in my humanity. Men and women and children were crowded into the building. There was a table full of food and drink. My neighbors came forth to greet me, and, closing my wings in tightly, I instantly became one with the crowd. I again met some who had come to the ruins, and it was a great pleasure to relive old memories, even though they were not so old and there were not many of them.

  Of course, Emilia was there, and she jealously stole me away from a conversation I was having with a man whose brother was part of the expedition that had gone to retrieve Cley from what they considered his self-exile in the Beyond. She took me by the hand and showed me her desk. I told her how much I enjoyed the gift of the orange candy, and said it was the sweetest thing I had ever tasted. She laughed at this, very pleased, and the sight of her innocence and joy was staggering to me. Then she told me that she had another gift for me, and she led me over to the wall, where papers were hung in a row. It soon became clear that these were samples of the students’ work. We walked along the row of documents—labored testaments of cryptic penmanship illustrated with drawings. She stopped in front of one written in a beautiful looping style. On the cover was a portrait of me. The title of this piece was “My friend, the Demon.”

  I read the pages as carefully as I could through tear-filled eyes. More than once I had to take off my spectacles and brush them against the exposed hair of my chest. I need not go into detail here, but it was a history of our meeting, a testimony to my good character, and an affirmation of our bond.

  “Why are you crying?” she asked.

  “I am a mawkish old demon, for sure,” I said, and laughed for the first time in a new way.

  Someone began calling for order, trying to draw everyone’s attention to the front of the classroom. Before turning away, I handed Emilia the small, carved wooden dog that had sat for years on a shelf in my Museum of the Ruins.

  “Here’s a pet for you,” I told her. “Take good care of it.”

  “What’s its name?” she asked.

  “Wood,” I said.

  She got half the joke and smiled.

  It was Feskin who was calling for everyone to pay attention. He motioned for me to come to the front of the classroom and take a seat. I did as was requested. Then began an explanation, I suppose for my benefit, as to how and why this group of brave souls had decided to make the proverbial leap of faith and invite a demon into their midst.

  I learned that night that after Cley and I had originally struck out for the Beyond, the town of Wenau almost came apart by reason of introduction of the drug, sheer beauty. The citizenry who were able to keep their wits about them had a hellish task of restoring order. Many died as a result of the effects of the drug and many more were left mentally depleted. B
elow’s newer, stronger strain of the narcotic was taken by some without any caution or knowledge of its ultimately debilitating properties. Cley was seen as a deserter and a scourge because of the chaos he had wrought.

  For a long time, his name was a curse among the survivors of Wenau. They never took into consideration how many more would have died had he not put a halt to the sleeping disease with which Below had infected them. The complexity of that thought lay beyond their grief. Then Feskin found the two manuscripts that Cley had produced, sitting in a back room of the schoolhouse under a stack of old books deigned too mature in their content for the children to read. He sat down one day in the middle of a snowstorm, having let the children go home early, and began reading. As he told it, he read through the night and finished the two manuscripts by morning. It became clear to him then that Cley was really a hero, and that I, the local scourge, was something of a hero myself

  It took the schoolteacher a number of years to convince a goodly amount of people of his discovery. Once the idea began to catch on, some of the older inhabitants, whose children had been delivered by the healer, or who had personal dealings with him, came forth to admit that what Feskin was saying was probably true.

  Funds were eventually raised and an expedition mounted to bring Cley back to his rightful home. As Feskin said, “It was the least we could do, considering how we had for so long spurned his very name.” A young fellow named Horace Watt, whose father had been a personal friend of Cley’s, led the expedition. They had already been gone three months and were expected back in two years’ time.

  When I heard that part of the tale, I had to hold up my hand and stop them. I could not speak at first, understanding how my words might dash their hopes, but finally I found my voice out of a sense of honesty.

  “My good people,” I said, “I would love to give you encouragement for your plan, but you must understand that the Beyond is a tremendous expanse. It is a place of continents. Even if they should escape all of its myriad dangers, which I pray they do, how would they possibly hope to find him?”

  “Bloodhounds,” said a woman from the back row of desks. “They took with them the best bloodhounds ever born and a few of Cley’s items from his home. If he is there, those dogs will find him.”

  At hearing her words, I wanted to laugh, but seeing the seriousness of all of my friends’ faces, I nodded as if such absurdity sounded reasonable.

  “Have no fear, Misrix,” said Feskin. “Cley will be back among us in no time.”

  “Very well,” I said.

  Someone in the crowd said, “Let’s eat,” and the meeting was adjourned.

  I gorged myself on pastries and produce, and drank more than I should have of the rum punch. My third stomach had begun to gurgle when one corpulent old man shoved a slice of bloody beef in my face and told me the cow had come from his farm. I almost lost my balance from dizziness. I told him that I never touched red meat.

  “Well, in your case, I won’t take that as an insult, if you know what I mean,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder.

  I spoke to him of the weather instead and found him to be a fine gentleman.

  The hours I spent there were the most glorious of my life until our attention was drawn to some commotion in the street. Feskin was immediately at the window.

  “It’s Lengil,” said the schoolteacher.

  “Who is that?” I asked the young lady to my right.

  “He is an agitator against your visit. He and a few others do not trust you and want to see you dead,” she said.

  “They are mostly the religious who are unable to extend their love beyond the mirror,” said Feskin over his shoulder. “You are to them what they see in their books. I tried to explain it to them, but they will not listen.”

  I moved next to the schoolteacher and looked out the window. There was a mob of fifteen or so men carrying rifles and torches.

  “Send out the devil’s dog,” a voice called from the street.

  Those around me appeared nervous.

  Feskin turned again to us, and said, “Who will keep them busy until I can get Misrix out the back entrance?”

  No one made a move to help, and I did not blame them. Then Emilia pushed her way through the crowd and made for the door. Her mother grabbed after her, but she was already going through the entrance onto the porch.

  “Here is the devil’s dog,” I heard her yell at them, and somehow I knew that she was holding up the carving I had given her.

  The schoolteacher was moving me out of the room through a back hallway, but I could hear the men saying things to her in sheepish voices and Emilia yelling back her replies without fear.

  As we came to the end of a dark passage, Feskin said, “You will have to give me a little more time to work on your behalf. We are making real progress, though. We thank you for coming.”

  He opened a door at the end of the hall. It led to a field where I had in my previous reconnaissance flights seen the children playing their games in the afternoon.

  “A wonderful time,” I told him.

  “We will come and see you soon,” he said.

  Then I was off, mounting into the clear sky. I circled around to the front of the building at a great height in order to see that Emilia was unharmed. She was still standing her ground, giving the zealots a tongue-lashing. I could not help myself, but unzipped the infernal trousers and extracted my member from this useless second skin of cloth, making a mighty piss of rum punch down on the angry mob. Their torch flames sizzled and turned to smoke in the downpour. Leaving in my wake a fart like a clap of thunder, a message from their angry God, I took wing and sped off through the night sky, feeling for all the world like a mischievous child myself.

  I returned to my ruins, but instead of the broken stalk that was the Top of the City, I now see before me a white fort in a clearing of a forest, lying very close to the shore of the inland ocean. The snow is falling, and there is one lone man accompanied by a black dog. He is pounding on a huge oaken door, pleading to be admitted to the company of his own kind.

  the walls of this fort

  The small, whitewashed room had a single window that let in the dim light of the gray afternoon. On one side of a scarred table, atop which rested a long, green bottle holding a lit candle, sat Cley, the black dog at his feet on the plank floor. Across from him sat Captain Curaswani, a heavyset man with a great white beard and mane of white hair. He was dressed in a rumpled yellow uniform, complete with black buttons and epaulets at the shoulders. Between each of his statements he drew on a pipe, the thin stem of which was nearly as long as his forearm. The bowl of the instrument had been fashioned to resemble the face of a woman, staring up at the ceiling, her mouth a wide, screaming aperture from which puffs of a bluish smoke occasionally issued.

  “So,” said the captain, “you are in search of Wenau? I have never heard of it.”

  “It’s toward the north,” said Cley.

  “To be sure,” said the captain. “There are worlds upon worlds toward the north. I suppose you would like to winter here with us?”

  “If I may,” said the hunter. “I will do my fair share of the work. You see, I’ve spent a winter out there in the wilderness, and, without the happenstance of some very lucky occurrences, I know I would have died. As it was, I found a cave with a draft of the earth’s heat coming up from below. Still, we almost starved.”

  “You and the dog?” asked the captain.

  “Wood is his name,” said Cley.

  “He seems like a fine fellow,” said the captain, who smiled, smoke leaking out at the corners of his lips. “Of course, you may stay, but I have to tell you two things. At the fort, I am in charge. You must be willing to take orders from me.”

  Cley nodded in acceptance of this rule.

  “The other is that with the state of things as they are, you may be safer out in the wilderness. I just arrived here, myself, this past autumn. I was dispatched with a group of fifteen soldiers to protect the small cont
ingent of citizens of the western realm, who had come a few years ago to farm and trap and make a monetary gain from the resources of the Beyond.”

  Before continuing, Curaswani shook his head and sighed. “It seems that in the relatively brief span they have been here, they have managed, in the time-honored tradition of western realm arrogance and stupidity, to completely incense the local population. By the time I and my men arrived at the fort, there were only five individuals left out of sixty-five. Those who were out on the land retreated here for safety, and, one by one, over the course of the past year, they have been brutally butchered.”

  “Who is it you have made an enemy of?” asked Cley.

  “The Beshanti, who, when our settlers initially arrived, were a peaceful group. Then our people started grabbing land they shouldn’t have, killing game they shouldn’t have. Look, Cley, as a military man, I don’t mind fighting wars that are unavoidable, but I have an aversion to having my men killed over petty acts of greed.”

  “Can’t you retreat back to your ship and go home?” asked Cley.

  “When we were sent, we had no knowledge as to how bad the situation was. We were merely coming to try to restore order. The ship won’t be back until the spring. We’re trapped here, and already in the past month, two citizens and one soldier have been diced up within the very confines of the walls of this fort.” The captain set his smoldering pipe down on the table and rubbed his eyes.

  “Within the walls?” asked the hunter.

  Curaswani laughed. “Not exactly cozy, eh?”

  “How?” asked Cley.

  “From what I can ascertain from the settlers, the Beshanti have a group of warriors that can somehow physically blend in with their surroundings. You know the lizard, the chameleon? Well, these fellows have the same attribute. The settlers have named them Wraiths after the old tales of angry ghosts. They are reportedly flesh and blood, but I’ve yet to actually see one. I have, though, seen their work. Two days ago, Private Ornist Heighth had his throat cut and his stomach split open so that his vitals lay in a steaming heap on the ground. It happened in front of two other men. They said a patch of wall came to life, wielding a nine-inch blade. Once the knife was dropped, they could no longer make out any aspect of the attacker.”