by Jeffrey Ford
Since many of those who came for the tour were interested in Cley and his role in the downfall of the city, I took pains to include a visit to his office. Although the building that housed his living quarters was now in too dangerous a state of disrepair, the front having been torn completely away and the staircase leading up to his rooms having been obliterated, I would offer to fly anyone who wanted to see it up to the height of the rooms and let them gaze in upon where their hero had spent his domestic hours.
One evening, I gathered all of the remaining intact blue spire statues, which had once been living miners in Anamasobia and were brought to the city by Below, together in one room in the remaining quadrant of the Ministry of Education. They made a powerful display, at the site of which I had an opportunity to wax philosophical on the dehumanizing tendency of a state-run economy. I fatuously enjoyed my own speech, but I believe the tourists preferred the spectacle of intricate beard stubble turned to stone. I could hardly blame them.
Every tour ended at my own Museum of the Ruins. This had become the highlight of the visit, and many would ask me anxiously at the beginning if they would get a chance to see it. How could I refuse to show them? They walked among the shelves and gaped in awe, for through that collection one could really get a sense of both the social complexity and technological prowess of the once mighty metropolis.
The only time that the hordes of visitors diminished instead of grew was last Thursday when it rained hard. On that day, I had only a small party show up. In fact, it was but two people; an old woman and her son, a large hulking fellow with dim affect. They had made the trip from Wenau in a wagon. When I greeted them at the walls of the ruins, the woman nodded curtly but did not offer her hand in greeting. The young man never changed his expression throughout the entire visit, but presented the same bland, bowl-of-cremat face, no matter what wonder I revealed to him and his mother. The woman, on the other hand, made many different faces, all seemingly disapproving. I did my best to be gregarious at every turn, but her nose remained constantly wrinkled back as if she were smelling something noxious. As I remember, she did a good deal of head shaking, as if saying a silent “No” to everything I told her. Dressed completely in black and wearing a black hat and gloves, she had become, for me, by the end of the tour, like a sick shadow of guilt I could not escape.
I did not bother taking her into the underground, and since she seemed repulsed by the remains of the monkey who had written “I am not a monkey” five hundred times, I also passed on a viewing of the wolf-girl’s corpse. Finally, we arrived at the Museum of the Ruins, and I gladly left her and her dullard son to look around on their own while I went off to make myself a cup of shudder.
I did not stay away long, and when I returned to escort them back to the wall, I found that they were gone. The rain had increased, but I took the initiative to fly over the ruins. I spotted them in their wagon, moving as if fleeing across the fields of Harakun. “Strange,” I thought, and then, “Good riddance.” She was one neighbor I felt I could certainly live without.
It was not until that afternoon, when I returned to the room housing my museum, that I smelled the absence of an object from one of the displays. The woman had taken something, I was sure of it, but although I made a cursory inspection of the shelves, I could not ascertain what it was. Thievery was an aspect of the human condition I had never pondered too deeply. Its implications gave me much food for thought. I, myself, had stolen cigarettes from the villages, and that fact prevented me from becoming too self-righteous over the incident.
The following day, the sun was once more bright, the sky blue, and the number of visitors was again what it had been. Then, as the days that led into this week passed, the numbers of people began to diminish, and then trickled down to nothing. I wondered if I had done something offensive, searching my memory for a situation that could have been construed as lacking in taste. I decided that it must have been Greta Sykes’s remains that put the tourists off. “Maybe I recounted the tale of dispatching her with too much relish,” I said to myself. “Perhaps, in my eyes, as I spoke about her, they could somehow see that I had once made love to her.”
Two days passed without even a visit from Emilia, who had come twice in as many weeks. I was a wreck, admonishing myself for my crudeness. I then wondered if the fly to my pants had been unbuttoned at one of the tours, and I kept walking around in solitude, checking the buttons every minute or so. Putting my hand to my mouth, I tried to smell my own breath. I stared into the mirror for hours on end, searching for the clue to my undoing in my own physiognomy.
Luckily, Feskin showed up on the third day and ended my miserable self-torture. He roused me from a nap on that makeshift coral chair at the pinnacle of a pile of rubble. I woke to the sound of his voice calling me and flew down to greet him.
“Misrix,” he said, and put out his hand in as friendly a manner as ever.
I was happy to have him there and told him so. “I was beginning to think that I had offended your people in some way to make them stop coming to see me.”
“There is a problem,” he said, pushing his spectacles up his nose. I unthinkingly did the same.
“No,” I said.
“Yes, but I think we can use it to our advantage,” he told me.
“Was it Greta Sykes?” I asked. “The fly of my trousers?”
He laughed. “Not exactly.”
“What then? I must know,” I said.
“Well, do you remember a woman coming to visit you a few days back? I believe it was on the day that it rained,” he said.
“Less than pleasant,” I said, and shook my head as she had done.
“You don’t have to convince me,” he said. “She is Semla Hood. It was to her that Cley left his second manuscript about your adventures in Below’s mind. She knew Cley well, and her husband Roan was a close friend of his in Wenau. Her husband was one of the casualties of the beauty. He had been cured of the sleeping disease with it, and then when the supplies of it ran out, his addiction had caused him to take his life because he could not conceive of an existence without it.”
“But I did nothing to her,” I told him.
“That doesn’t matter,” said Feskin. “She does not trust anything that has any relationship at all to the ruins or Below. And I’m afraid she automatically puts you in that category. Anyway, when she came to visit here, it was not with the best of intentions. She wanted to find some piece of evidence to in some way damn you. I think she was hoping you might eat her son or maybe bite her on the forehead.”
“My appetite does not run to dust or mold,” I said.
Feskin laughed. “What she brought back from the ruins, an item she had taken from your museum, was a stone knife that she claims was Cley’s. She said that it was given to him by Ea, the traveler, and that Cley would not part with it unless he was dead. With this flimsy circumstantial evidence, she believes that you, yourself, have murdered Cley.”
I was not, at first, able to grasp the enormity of what the schoolteacher was telling me. Then, as it slowly dawned on me, I shouted, “Absurd! Cley and I were the best of friends.”
“Listen, I know this is true. I read his account of how you saved him from the sheer beauty, but this is what she is saying, planting new seeds of doubt in everyone’s mind. She has taken the knife to the constable and said she wants a full investigation. Do you remember the circumstances in which you found the artifact or what its history is?” asked Feskin.
“I don’t even remember it being in the museum. I must have picked it up somewhere among the ruins and tossed it mindlessly onto one of the shelves,” I said.
“She said she knows it was Cley’s because it has on the handle an insignia of a coiled snake,” he said.
“Now I will lose the trust of all of the new friends I have made,” I said, and could feel tears welling in my eyes.
“I don’t think so,” said Feskin. “The constable is not about to launch an investigation based on one piece of evidence,
but I do think you should come to Wenau and answer the charges of your detractors. I truly believe that if you were to do this, of your own volition, it would be proof of your honesty. I will represent you in your meeting with the constable. He is not an unreasonable fellow. You will be cleared, and it might be just the trick to convince the rest of the community who have not met you that you have a good heart and the best of intentions.”
I did not think twice about his plan, knowing that if I did not take some action, I would soon return to my lonely life haunting the ruins. I could not let this hag take away my bid for humanity. “Yes,” I said. “I will come to Wenau.”
“Excellent,” he said. “I will make arrangements for a place for you to stay. I will expect you at the schoolhouse two days from now in the evening, at the same time you last arrived.”
I chatted then with Feskin for a while about how we might present my side of the story. He told me to try to remember where the knife had come from. Then I walked with him to the edge of the ruins, but hung back when he left so as not to disturb his horse.
Since then I have been searching my memory for a clue as to the origin of the primitive blade. I think I found it one day in the wreckage of the Ministry of the Territory. Yes, I believe I might remember vividly the morning I came upon it, sticking out of the coral wall as if someone had been using it to hang his coat on.
In my thoughts, I now pull that knife from the wall, pink granules of coral drifting to the floor like flakes of the snow flurry falling outside the window of warped glass. A baby is crying in a back room, a woman is singing softly, a fire is crackling in the fireplace, a black dog is curled up on the rug, and a man is sitting in a chair with a loaded pistol in his lap, waiting for the first sign of spring.
a ghost story
A month had passed since the fall of Fort Vordor, which marked the end of the incursion of the western realm into the Beyond. Although there had been light snow twice in this time, there had been much more rain. The hard-packed shell of white that had covered the landscape was now slowly vanishing. It was obvious that the weather was getting warmer and that spring was very close.
Cley and Willa and Wraith and the black dog had taken refuge in what had once been the Olsens’ log house. It sat fifteen miles east of the fort in a stand of birches at the edge of a lake. The dwelling was small but had two rooms, a fireplace, and the glass of both of its windows was still intact. The very existence of the place was, to the hunter, a miracle since on their journey to it they had passed at least three other similar structures that had been burned to the ground by the Beshanti.
Life at the edge of the lake was like a ghost story without a ghost—the rain-sodden hours, the lingering grief of the death of Curaswani and the others, the unnerving silence of Willa Olsen, and the sudden, piercing cries of the baby. Cley spent his days in the birch forest, hunting and reflecting on the tumult of events that had brought him to this place. Wood, although content to be out on the hunt when he must, had become Wraith’s second guardian and spent all of his time while indoors standing sentry at the entrance to that second room, where the child slept.
It was evening, and Cley cooked some fresh-killed deer meat on the flames of the fireplace. As the house had been untouched, so were the barrels of supplies, and in them the hunter had discovered dry rice, flour, and a few potatoes with which he augmented the venison, partridge, wild goose, or rabbit he felled each day. Willa accepted her meal from him with a quiet “Thank you,” in return. They sat in silence at the small table in the corner and ate together. When the hunter inquired as to the child’s health, the mother simply nodded. For the most part, she did not look up. This gave Cley ample opportunity to study her. He noticed that there was always a slight trembling in her hands. She had been greatly abused by life, but still she showed signs of a certain strength in her determination to care for Wraith. If not for the child, Cley believed she would open the door and walk straight into the lake.
As soon as dinner was finished, and Cley and she had cleaned off the table and put things where they belonged, she returned to the other room. The hunter stoked the fire and sat in the chair that had once belonged to her husband. He smoked a cigarette from the pack that had been given to him by Weems and stared at the flames, watching for scenes and faces and portents of the future in their frantic dance. Then, he heard from the back room, the mother talking in a high, sweet voice that drew murmurs of delight from the infant. The demon killer, the tattooed slayer of invisible Wraiths, smiled at the sound and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. Wood lay curled up at the entrance to the other room and lifted his head from dreams every time the baby cooed. It was only in this brief hour before sleep that ghosts were banished and the future and past were forgotten. When the cigarette had been smoked into oblivion, Cley lifted himself out of the chair and lay down on the floor.
The sun had barely begun to cast its reflection on the waters of the lake. Cley stood in the quiet house at the window, staring out along the tree line, watching two Beshanti warriors surreptitiously moving through the shadows from tree to tree. He had a mind to send Wood out to chase them away as he had done on numerous occasions.
One night, after he had sat in the chair, staring into the fireplace longer than usual, Cley was lying on the floor, trying to decide whether he should return to the fort and see if anyone had been spared.
Just as he decided that he could not bear to discover Curaswani slaughtered, the door to the other room opened on creaking hinges. He looked up and saw, in the light of the dying embers, Willa Olsen moving around the central room. Her eyes were closed, and she trod softly and slowly in her thin cotton nightgown. She whispered in her sleep, the name Christof. Finally, she leaned down over the back of the chair the hunter had recently vacated and planted a kiss in midair. Then she returned to the bedroom, and he heard no more from her till the morning when the baby woke, crying.
Cley smelled the scent of the ocean on the breeze one bright afternoon while hunting a mile north of the house. He thought to himself how much easier his life would be if he were to just keep heading in that direction, making progress toward Arla Beaton and the true Wenau. Willa and the child were to him like Vasthasha’s taproots, holding him firmly in one place. He daydreamed of the freedom he had once known and cursed in his loneliness. In his mind, he saw the green veil soaring above the Beyond.
The hunter discovered a fishing rod and tackle in a corner of the main room of the house. On a clear afternoon, he and Wood went down to the lake to try their luck. Chunks of venison were used as bait. In the first hour, Cley managed to hook himself once in the pants and once on his thumb. The line tangled and snarled every few minutes, and it took at least as long to unravel the maze of knots.
Finally, with great patience, he was able to cast and keep things in order. The wooden bobber, carved into the form of a small boat with a tiny fisherman in it, floated on the surface. Below, in the clear water, Cley could see large, dark forms moving close to the bottom.
Hours passed, and there was not so much as a nibble. The day was peaceful, and the lake was so still its reflection was a perfect opposite of the world above. Cley was roused from his torpor by the sight and sound of a large fish leaping into the air out past where his line descended. Scales caught the sunlight in a ripple of iridescence before it splashed back beneath the surface.
“Over here,” Cley yelled.
Wood was bored beyond reckoning and headed back to the house.
“Deserter,” the hunter called after him.
More time passed, then, suddenly, Cley felt a tug at the line. He reeled in, but the reel was old and rotted and the handle broke off. Filled with excitement, though, he took the line in his hands and began pulling his catch ashore. From the monumental struggle, he knew that whatever was on the hook must be very large. The line ran back through his grasp and cut his calluses until his palms began to bleed.
Cursing and struggling, he started to make headway. His nemesis, it seemed, had giv
en in. With each tug a huge, black creature emerged more clearly from below. Dragged onto the shore, its slick skin glistened in the sun. The hunter approached and was met with a horrific sight. It was a blob of a fish, with large, unlidded human eyes, antennae that reached three feet from its head, and a big-lipped mouth so wide it could swallow a whole crow at once.
“Harrow’s hindquarters,” said Cley, staring down on the monstrosity.
The creature opened its mouth, spit out the hook, and made a loud noise like an old man in respiratory distress, its gasping interspersed with explosive farting sounds.
“All this work for this flatulent pig of Hell,” thought Cley, as he stepped forward and kicked the thing back into the lake. Then he looked down and saw the condition of his hands and the bloodstains on his yellow coat. He pitched the fishing pole out into the water and stormed away toward the house.
“Where’s my gun,” he said as he came through the door. But he was brought up short by the sight of Willa, naked to the waist, sitting in his chair by the fire, nursing Wraith. She gazed calmly at him. He looked from her breasts up into her face.
“How was the fishing, Mr. Cley?” she asked in a quiet voice.
A moment of silence passed, then he said, “Excuse me, madam. Oh, yes, the fishing … It was something less than a triumph.” He turned quickly away and found his gun. When he looked back to call for Wood to follow, he saw what he believed to be a subtle smile on Willa Olsen’s lips.
He knew the Beshanti were stalking him as he stalked a deer through thick underbrush on the opposite side of the lake. Wood looked over to see if Cley wanted him to charge back into the birches and chase them away. Instead, the hunter ran as fast as he could, weaving in and out of the straight, thin trunks of the trees. The black dog stayed even with him, as if knowing which way his companion would turn before he actually did.