A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  “What was that?” I asked, unsure I’d heard correctly.

  “Elegast, an entity from the folklore of the Dutch Low Countries. A supernatural creature, like the field and forest in human form. Only the minister made that connection, though, whereas most of the local folks were convinced Evron was just touched in the head. Three years at the harvest and his look became more distant, his words fewer and fewer. When not working he’d sit perfectly still, eyes closed, and sniff at the wind. During the following winter, he was working on a hay wagon, changing one of the tin-covered wooden wheels, when the axle splintered and the cart fell and broke his left leg. That’s when the real trouble started.”

  “Because he couldn’t work?” I asked.

  “Exactly. They had to tie him down to keep him from tending to the horses and cows, or shoveling the snow off the path, or keeping a low fire going in the barn during the frozen nights. He struggled to get free. The local doctor prescribed laudanum and told him if he didn’t stay put and let the break mend, he’d never make it back out into the field. So they kept him in a stupor for months. Meanwhile, that winter of 1883, a stranger was spotted by more than a few folks, usually off at a distance, limping across the stubbled, misty fields, carrying a sickle and wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat. They swore it was Evron, but on the few occasions someone got close to this mysterious figure, it proved to be that of a wasted and grisly old man.

  “One day Evron’s father saw the old man moving across the distant landscape, and he saddled a horse and rode out to meet him. In his diary he reports, ‘I confronted the grim old fellow and told him he trod upon my field. He wore no coat, though the wind was bitter, but only the summer clothes of a day laborer. I asked what it was he was looking for. He yelled at me in a harsh voice, “Work. I want work.” I reminded him it was the dead of winter. He stalked away, dragging his bad leg. By then a fierce snow had begun to fall and in a moment I lost sight of him.’”

  “You’ve got an incredible memory,” I told her.

  “I’ve been waiting to tell somebody all of this for forty years,” she said. “I’ll jump ahead. I know I’ve kept you too long already.”

  “Take your time.”

  “To make a long story shorter, the minister’s wife was found one afternoon, not but a few days later, hacked to pieces in a church pew. Nobody had a doubt but that it was the stranger. A posse was formed and the men went out into the fields on horseback searching for him. At night they carried torches. Always they would glimpse him in the distance across the vast acreage of a barren field, but when they arrived at that spot, he’d be gone. Still, he struck twice more. A fifteen-year-old girl, who lived two miles down the road from the Simms’ place. Her body was found in a horse trough, neck cut so bad that when they lifted her out of her frozen blood, her head fell off. Then a farmer slashed to ribbons, his body still upright in the seat of his buckboard, leaving a long trail of red in his wake as the horses stepped smartly through the snow.

  “The younger boys called the killer Mower Manc after Evron’s field friend. Everyone saw the connection, but it was impossible to blame the killings on the boy who was in a perpetual daze at home, fastened to his bed. All through the rest of that winter and into the spring, they chased the illusive figure. Sometimes he’d disappear for months and then there’d be a sighting of him. Once the crops were put in and the corn and wheat came up at the end of the spring, it got still more difficult to track him. Someone would see him cross the dirt road and then he’d plunge into a cornfield and vanish.

  “Harvest time finally came, and Evron was allowed to return to the fields to mow. His leg was still tender, and there was a slight but noticeable limp, but the boy, sickle in hand, went out into the fields to cut wheat. His father, his mother, his sister, the doctor, and a neighboring farmer watched Evron walk into the wind-rippled amber expanse, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him. All they found was that sickle.” Beverly clasped her hands, set them in her lap, and sighed.

  “He ran away,” I said.

  “I suppose,” she said. “But all through the end of the 19th century, through the 20th, and into the 21st up to today, folks have continued to farm this land. Geologists call it the Ohio Till Plain, one of the most fertile spots in the country. In all that time, every so often someone peering from a second-floor window of a farm house spots a strange figure in a distant field moving through the corn. A shadow with a hat. A loping scarecrow with a sickle. People nowadays refer to this phantom simply as The Mower. If you live here long enough, Mr. Ford, and you get to know the farmers well enough, you’ll hear someone speak of it. It’s said that certain nights in deep winter, below the howl of the wind, you can hear him weeping for want of work. If you wake on a cold morning and find your garage door open when it wasn’t the night before, it means The Mower has taken refuge from the cold in there.”

  Beverly got up and took her papers and old diaries and daguerreotypes to the filing cabinet and put them away. I carried the false face and the sickle. She took the mask from me and stored it, but when I handed her the tool, she said, “No, you keep that.”

  After all she’d told me, I wasn’t sure I wanted it, but eventually my sense of politeness kicked in and I thanked her. She walked with me to my car, and before I got in, we shook hands. “You’re the last one,” she said before I drove off. When I got home, I immediately looked around for a place to stow the sickle. Crazy as it was, I shoved it down into the big freezer in the garage underneath the layers of frozen vegetables from the garden. I figured I’d freeze the creep out of it.

  The Word Doll Museum and old Doctor Geary stuck with me for a week or so, and I’d sit out under the apple trees and stare off into the corn to see if I could spot a shadowy figure passing amid the rows. Nothing. Just as it started to get too cold to sit out there, and Farmer Frank had the combine out harvesting corn, I got an idea for a story about a religious painter who’s sent out by a prelate on a journey to find and paint a true portrait of the devil. It was a relatively long piece and it consumed my imagination. By the time I finished a first draft the fields were barren, and I was forced to move inside. The revisions on that story turned out to be extensive, and I didn’t finish it until the middle of winter.

  The very night I was finally satisfied that the piece was ready to send out, the coldest night of the year, I had a dream of Mower Manc. In it I got out of bed and went to the window. It was night and the light in the room was off. There was a full moon, though, and I saw, out in the barren field past the orchard and the garden, a figure moving through the snow, curved blade glinting as it swung like the pendulum of an old clock. Across that distance, I heard the weeping clear as a bell, and its anguish woke me.

  When I went out to get my cigarettes the next morning, I came around that bend and saw that the gray barn and home of the Word Doll Museum had at some point since the day before collapsed into a smoldering pile of rubble. Orange flames still darted from the charred wreckage and smoke rolled across the yard and fields like a storm cloud come down to earth. I thought instantly of Beverly’s habit of flicking her cigarette ash on the floor of the place and just as quickly of Evron’s penchant for lighting fires. Then I saw her, on the snow-covered lawn in front of the house, cane nowhere in sight, in a long blue nightgown and dirty pink slippers, white hair lurid in the wind. There was a cop car in the driveway, and the officer stood next to her with a pen and pad as if waiting to take down her statement. She was just staring into the distance, though, her grief-stricken expression pale and distorted like the False Face mask, and as I passed I realized that what I was seeing was the end of it—a doll maker, all out of words.

  The Angel Seems

  In late autumn, after the harvest had been brought in and the first real snow had fallen, he came from the forest on a stag-bone sled drawn by enormous twin mastiffs. He was slight and trim, with white hair and beard, and he wore a snug bla
ck suit with slits in the back of the jacket for his wings to fit through. They were small, violet, and made of scales instead of feathers. It was a wonder how they could lift him, but a number of folk had spotted the angel Seems across the field, flying above the tree tops, wings fluttering like a moth’s.

  On his first journey to the village, he glided in on his sled, requested that the people gather, and then announced that his name was Alfrod Seems and that he was an angel. “I’m here to prepare you for the coming of God,” he shouted, lifting his ivory walking stick into the air, and, convinced by his wings, they listened. He promised to protect the villagers from their enemies, their crops from blight or drought, and their homes from storms and floods and fires. They cheered. There was, though, one stipulation, and it was that each year he be allowed to pick from among the people a servant to help him in his sacred duties at his den in the forest.

  It seemed like a fair trade until it came time for the angel to make his first choice. When he arrived, they stared in disbelief, as if they’d never seen him before outside of a dream, and yet they knew full well what they’d promised. He strode the snow-filled streets and saw a woman by the name of Elshin Marsh carrying a load of laundry from the river. He approached her, bowed, and grasped her forearm. Upon realizing who it was that had stopped her, she froze. “You must put down your load here and this minute come with me to my den.” Elshin screamed, and, since she was close to home, her husband heard her.

  He came running, carrying an old chair leg. Elshin tried to flee, but Seems held her fast. Mr. Marsh rushed the angel, holding up the crude club. Fast as a snake striking, Seems lifted his hand and, with his fingers curled but for the first two, aimed for the man’s eyes. A moment later, Marsh was on his knees, crying blood into his hands.

  When Elshin was returned to the village the following year, her husband was dead and a set of antlers grew from the temples of her forehead. She’d lost the power of speech and only grunted. In her possession was a thin glass tube that contained a yellow liquor, which the angel had promised could bestow a very minor miracle upon the drinker.

  Months later, it was discovered she was pregnant. The village was in an uproar, frantic with outrage and fear. After seeing what Seems had done to Elshin and her husband, though, they wondered what else he was capable of. The leader of the village council proposed that they tell the angel they no longer desired his protection. Because no one knew where Seems lived, they were forced to wait until he appeared, which no one minded.

  When the poor woman went into labor, she drank from the glass tube and wished for death. Elshin Marsh gave birth not to a baby but a manikin—a miniature Alfrod Seems with white hair and beard and fluttering violet wings. The poor mother’s heart stopped during the delivery, and not an hour after the strange homunculus came into the world, there was heard from across the fields, from somewhere deep in the forest, the baying of the angel’s mastiffs. They came, galloping out of the trees, dashing through the fields. Their call was piercing, and people hid beneath their covers with their hands over their ears. The dogs’ approach seemed both an instant and a year, but they came to the door of healer Struth’s home, where Elshin lay dead upon the table and the little Alfrod Seems was just learning to stand.

  Hearing the beasts panting outside his home, the healer went for a pistol he kept in his desk, but before he could open the drawer, the dogs smashed into the room, boards and splinters flying. One of the monsters held him at bay, growling, while the other caught the miniature Seems and devoured it. Struth would later take his own life. He’d told more than one that the screams of the miniature angel as the creature’s fangs turned it to gore never left his head. That night, the mastiffs made one more stop.

  The leader of the village council, Matten Gersha, was in bed with his wife, cowering beneath the covers, when the dogs let themselves into his home. One tore the blankets off the frightened couple. The other took off Mrs. Gersha’s left foot at the ankle and swallowed it without chewing. Then they pulled the leader of the council out into the street, and as the shrouded faces behind window curtains looked on, the beast who’d torn away the blankets tore away Gersha’s face in one piece and left it on the snow like a mask in the moonlight.

  Through the care of Struth, the Mrs. survived the amputation but contracted an unheard-of disease which caused her to vomit billowing clouds of dirt. She was shunned for fear of infection and died soon after the doctor killed himself. After the mastiffs’ visit, the topic of giving Alfrod Seems a piece of their mind was never raised by the villagers in any tone louder than a whisper.

  Year followed year, and when the snow fell the angel made his visits, taking one and sometimes leaving one. When asked by the trembling baker, whose wife never returned, where she was, Seems smiled and told him, “It didn’t work out.” The baker only barely thought of murder and found the sharp tip of the angel’s ivory cane resting against his throat. The women who were returned were always pregnant with miniature Alfrods. The copies who survived birth were taken each time by the mastiffs; the ones who didn’t remained within till the end of their mothers’ days. Those servants who returned were all in some way physically deformed—extra appendages, third eyes, animal traits—and spoke a language of moans and grunts that meant nothing.

  Pella Thilem, who had served the angel and returned with fur and snout, was unusual. Most of the servants who came back to the village passed away soon after. Pella lived on, and in her later years she regained, to a very limited degree, her human language. In her own way, she told the villagers what had happened at the angel’s den. “Like a glory,” she said. “Lights and ice. Trees fingers. Dogs. Work at fire. Angel hand. Face. Scream every day. A fountain.”

  Some passed off Pella’s words as nonsense, and others studied them carefully, letting the imagination unfold the possibilities of their message. Theories about the origin and nature of Alfrod Seems abounded. He was thought to be a demon, but there were those who believed he actually was an angel sent by a jealous God. Alfrod Seems, himself, claimed to have been grown in a pale woman’s garden, pulled up by the roots, and left to play in the forest at night.

  One thing that was true about the angel, he was good to his word, for even though disasters befell neighboring villages, they never troubled the land of his servants. When the river flooded, the water should have swamped the fields, but it miraculously stopped at the edge of the village and built up to six feet high, not one drop of it falling past the invisible boundary. It was said you could walk along beside it, a blue wall, and watch the fish swimming.

  After the highwayman, Jado, robbed the village merchants on their way to market, he was found hanging in a tree at the crossroad, naked and skewered like a sausage, ass to mouth, on a long oak branch. And the plague came only for a day, blown off by a magical breeze. No one died from it, whereas only two miles away at Cleneth, the bodies were stacked three high and burning.

  Whatever solace was gained from Alfrod’s protection, it was lost in the dog days, the height of the summer heat, when the mastiffs went mad and roved the wheat fields and cornfields in search of prey, rushing through the tunnels of green shade. Farmers went missing. Sometimes a scrap of clothing and a shattered bone would be found, once a half a skull, but most often nothing, as if they’d never lived. From the safety of a tree, one could watch the beasts moving through the wheat, a furious rippling, heading directly for an unsuspecting man whistling at his work. He was there and never there in the blink of an eye.

  On the fifth of his yearly visits, the angel told the people that on his next he expected a feast in his honor at which he and they would all sit down and celebrate him. “Make it lavish,” he said. They didn’t know what lavish meant, but after gathering the harvest that sixth year, they set about creating a banquet for Alfrod Seems that they hoped he would find satisfactory. Even the baker, whose wife never returned, gave in and joined the effort.

&nb
sp; When a distant curl of red smoke was sighted above the treetops of the forest, his signal to them that he was coming, the village readied itself. Pine garland fringed windows and doorways, and every dark space had a candle burning in it. In the village square there were two enormous black cauldrons, simmering mucine and glifero, spices from the Far Islands. The feast was laid on long tables in the street as there was no building that could contain it. When his sleigh came to a halt, all were seated but for the new leader of the council, who went to serve as escort to the angel.

  In the back of the sled sat a figure wrapped in black. The council leader barely recognized her as Anamita Beruk, who’d left the previous year. Set into her forehead was a window with a glass pane. Through it he could see the stars. The woman was haggard, her complexion a pale gray. Pitiful whimpers escaped her, and the angel nodded and said to the council leader, “She’s had a little too much of the Holy Ghost. You know how it is.”

  “What shall I do with her?” asked the leader.

  Seems shrugged. “I’d drop her in an old well.”

  The angel smiled and nodded at the sight of the table and all gathered at it. He sat at the head and gazed up and down each side. No one returned his look for fear he might be deciding on his next servant. Then he clapped his hands, making some jump in their seats, and said, “Eat and talk.” He lifted the top loaf from a basket next to his arm and added, “Let me hear laughter.” There was a round of pathetic laughter, but it pleased him greatly. He broke the loaf in two and took a bite.

  A moment later, he was on his feet, leaning over the table, choking. Something brown fell from his mouth onto his plate. The angel spit profusely and seized up the wine goblet of the frightened woman next to him. “Shit in the bread?” he screamed. The baker was lifted by invisible means out of his seat and floated down the length of the table in a sitting position toward Alford Seems. The angel lifted his walking stick and, with a distinct crack, thrust it through the baker’s forehead. The poor man remained floating above the table. People pushed away from the blood that rained down. Seems twisted the end of the cane, as if tuning the man’s skull, and the baker let out a scream that split the sky.