Authors: Jeffrey Ford
It was in the middle of the following afternoon that Cley spotted, at a distance, a ship run aground on a sandbar. At first, he thought it was another enormous sea creature drowning in the cold air. Then he made out a scrap of tattered sail and the cracked spire that was the mainmast.
To get to it, he had to wade through an ankle-deep tidal pool of frigid water. Wood was reluctant to follow but did so after leaving the book cover on the beach. They walked out along the wide sandbar, the surf rolling in to their left. As they drew closer to the vessel, Cley spotted a gaping hole in the front end of the hull. The ship's stern still sat in the surf, and the whole structure moved slightly from side to side as larger waves broke against it.
“A ruined ship of the explorers from the western realm?” Cley wondered. He hoped to find useful items to scavenge within the wreck.
As they drew up next to it, he saw how large the vessel really was. The deck towered above him, but he could still gain access where the hull had been staved in. As he approached the splintered opening, Wood hung back and barked as if in warning.
Cley climbed through the hole and looked inside the long, dark expanse of the innards of the ship. Enough light was let in behind him so that he could make out barrels and tools lying all around as if the ship had been lifted by the hand of a giant and shaken madly before being smashed down on the sandbar. Toward the back of the ship, the deck had rotted away and the sunlight beamed in to illuminate the chaos. Cley could still hear Wood barking outside as he stepped through two inches of bilge. There was the pervasive smell of the sea, everything encrusted with salt and barnacles.
Just after he found the remains of a dead sailor, who obviously had had his chest crushed by a flying keg, the fractured rib cage now a home for tiny crabs, the hunter noticed something standing in the sunlight at the far end of the hold. He took a few more steps toward this large block and saw that it was clear, like a man-sized cube of crystal or ice, and then he realized that the ship did not hail from the western realm.
This ship, he now knew, had sailed from a port called Merithae. Embedded in the heart of the block of unmelting ice was the naked form of a beautiful, dark-haired woman. He placed his open palms against the boundary that was as warm as the touch of a lover's hand. The imprisoned woman stared out at him, and he sensed that she was still alive.
“Anotine,” he whispered, and the merest corner of her lip turned up. The past rushed back upon him and brought him to his knees in the stinking bilge. He did not leave the hold until the sun had set.
That night in the dunes, next to a crackling fire, the hunter held open the covers of the missing book and recounted for Wood the story of his time with Anotine in the imagination of Drachton Below. Although the wind blew cold, he did not feel its sting, for he was heated from within by the constant feverish schemes to release his dream woman from the unmelting ice. Nothing was resolved, because he had no tools with which to work. Then he considered that the ship itself might hold an ax, a cask of gunpowder, that could be employed in her release. This blizzard of thought gave way to his trying to understand what it must be like for her, unable to move but still alive and seeing only the shadowy hold of the wrecked ship for years upon years.
He took the spirit of this frustration into his sleep, and the force of it shattered the ice. Anotine stepped forth, and he held his hand out to her.
“I dreamt of you,” she said to him.
“I dreamt of you,” he said, and when he put his arms around her, he woke suddenly to a cold, gray day. There was a light snow blowing down from the north.
Although he and the dog had eaten nothing, Cley headed immediately back to the beach. When he came over the last dune, he cried out in an anguished tone that might, itself, have drilled through ice. The sandbar had disappeared beneath the waves, and the wrecked ship, lying low in the water, was being drawn by an inexplicable current toward the horizon.
The snow fell in large, wet flakes and began to gather on the forest floor. The sound of the ocean was ever present, the crash of the waves like a distant summer thunder coming to them from over the field of dunes. The hunter and dog were exhausted and hungry, not having eaten for two days. Through the curtain of blowing white, Cley saw ahead the outline of a buildingâa large, white fort with parapets and a tall wooden door. He walked up to the structure and, slinging his bow over his shoulder, began pounding on the oaken barrier with his fist while Wood barked repeatedly.
“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 wellâwhere 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 documentsâlabored 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. Below'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.