The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  Standing in silence, Cley wondered how long they had lain, undisturbed in this secret place. “What lives did they live?” he asked himself, and felt the breeze of centuries passing, years turning to dust. Then, in an eyeblink his reverie became fear, and he was frantic to escape the underground for daylight.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Wood, noticing another smaller tunnel at the end of the burial chamber. The current of warm air flowed from it, passing around him. Before leaving, he knelt and worked to remove the woman’s beads over her skull. As he tried to free them, her hair fell across the back of his hand, and the touch sent a wave of revulsion coursing through him. He pulled away with the necklace in his hand, and the sudden motion severed the fragile neck. The jaw came unhinged and dropped open. Her brittle ribs cracked, sounding to him like whispered gasps of pain. With the prize tightly clutched in his left hand and the candle in his right, he fled forward into the next natural corridor.

  Wood grabbed Cley by his right pant leg just in time to prevent him from falling headlong into an almost perfectly round hole in the middle of the dark path. The toes of the hunter’s boots were already out over the abyss. A blast of warm air rose from far below and lifted Cley’s hair. He took a step back. Miraculously, the candle remained lit. This was the source of the tropical current that had kept their own cave temperate through the worst of the winter.

  Both Wood and Cley vaulted the opening in the rock floor with ease. The passage continued on, twisting and turning and widening until it eventually broke clear into a cave with a tall, broad entrance that looked out on the day. From where they stood at the back of the chamber, it was as if they were in the rear of a theater, watching a play about a blizzard.

  They slept that night back in the tunnel near the conduit of warm air. When he awoke the following day, Cley was mightily hungry and knew the dog must be, too. They left the tunnel, and upon entering the cave that opened on the opposite side of the hill from their home, they saw a glorious sun shining out over a vast plain. The sight of that flatland stretching out toward the north showed Cley the way to travel once the winter was over.

  Out on the plain there were no trees, and it seemed a certainty that the demons would not hunt there. Escaping this threat would allow him and the dog to make headway north without constantly having to fight for their lives. He decided then that as soon as the days began to lengthen, they would resume their journey before the demons woke from hibernation. There weren’t enough bullets left to survive another season against them, and he sensed that somewhere in the cold, dark time of winter he had lost his will for slaughter.

  Two hours later, after traversing the circumference of the hill in hip-deep snow, at times clinging to tree trunks against the wicked pitch of the incline, they stood outside the entrance of their own cave. Luckily the sun was bright and offered enough warmth for Cley to have survived the arduous journey without his cloak or mittens. Then began the grim task of digging out the opening while hunger twisted their guts. Every few minutes, the hunter had to stop to blow on his frozen fists, but eventually they managed to clear enough snow so that the sun could shine directly onto the ice that had formed over the entrance.

  Next, they set about gathering branches that had cracked under the weight of the ice and fallen to the ground. With these, he built a small fire as close to the obstruction as possible. As they waited for the fire to do its work, Cley warmed his hands over it and set one of his boots smoldering, trying to do the same with his feet.

  Sometime later, a well-placed kick shattered the remaining inches of glazed snow. Reentering their cave filled Cley with a sense of peace and comfort. He and Wood greedily devoured the few cooked rabbit parts they had stored, and then Cley went to work on one of the raw, rotting sweet potatoes. The fire was moved inside the entrance and they settled down to rest for a spell before preparing to hunt. The dog insisted on a few words from the book, and Cley acquiesced in a weary voice.

  The white deer returned to the forest. In many places the fallen snow melted and revealed the welcome face of the earth. Flocks of crows again perched in the treetops, and an owl took up residence somewhere close by the cave, haunting the nights with its call.

  On a hunting expedition to the eastern pond, Cley heard the ice cracking in long, wavering echoes. The sound was a signal to him that he and the dog should soon begin their journey across the plain. Although he rejoiced at the fact that the sun now shone brightly in the afternoons, pushing back the night a few minutes each day, he wondered how long it would be before the demons came forth to hunt, driven by a season-long hunger. As he traipsed across the thawing ground, tracking a deer, he began to make plans.

  There were a few things that distressed him about their coming trek across the open country. One was that the store of matches had been seriously depleted. He had one-quarter of one box left, which, optimistically, he surmised might last little more than two weeks. The other concern was shelter. Out on the grasslands there would be no caves or trees to offer a temporary haven against the elements.

  He remembered that in the adventure novels of his boyhood, he had read of ways to start a fire without matches—rubbing sticks together or drawing a spark by knocking a flint against a rock. The thought of actually accomplishing either of these seemed to him more impossible than the daring exploits of those books’ heroes. Still, he knew there was nothing else but to begin work on learning one of these skills. As far as the lack of shelter was concerned, he decided to take many deerskins and from them create a small tent that would at least keep the wind and rain at bay. It had to be something he could roll up and carry, but that would add extra pounds to his already heavy pack. Then the thought came to him that perhaps Wood might pull it behind him.

  Cley’s accuracy with the bow had become so good through the winter that he could fell a deer with just one arrow. He worked quickly, skinning his prey on the spot, and in this manner was able to take two or three skins a day. At night, he and Wood ate venison steaks and livers and began to regain much of the strength they had lost through the harsh heart of the winter. After dinner now they passed on the book, for the nights were filled with industry—treating the insides of the pelts and readying them to be sewn together. He calculated that he would need at least fifteen skins to make a tent large enough to cover both of them.

  Killing a deer and carving it up was second nature for the hunter, and he enjoyed the work—at last a definite project other than merely surviving. It took his mind away, and he no longer sat morosely holding the green veil and staring into the past. When the tent was three-quarters sewn together, he realized he had not yet tackled the job of making fire without matches. The idea of rubbing sticks together to draw a flame seemed preposterous, so he instead opted for the technique that called for the banging of rocks.

  Following the stream at the bottom of the hill, he and the dog set off one morning, searching along its bank for promising specimens. Every now and then he would stop, lift two rocks, smash them together as hard as he could, and study the results. By midday, he had broken nearly thirty rocks and smashed each of his fingers at least once without having produced a single spark. Wood grew tired of this fruitless pursuit and went off into a stand of shemel trees after a geeble.

  “What idiot invented this technique?” Cley wondered, but drawing on the persistence that had kept him alive through worse trials, he continued. He knelt again by the stream’s edge and brought up a large, black, heart-shaped stone. He was searching for another against which to smash this one when he heard a strange noise. It was something familiar but nothing he had heard in a long time. He stopped and listened more intently. All he heard was the sound of the tree branches scraping together in the breeze and the rushing of the water.

  Minutes later, he reached out to take up another stone and heard again, from off in the forest, the distinct sound of someone weeping. He was used to the weird noises of the Beyond, but this particular one made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Listening
closely, he was sure he heard a woman sobbing. Getting up, he called for Wood. The sound of his own voice dispelled the crying, and he stood perfectly still for a long time, listening.

  “Hello?” he finally called but there was only the breeze.

  “Who is there?” he yelled, and with this, Wood came charging out of a thicket of trees. He realized, upon seeing the familiar figure of the dog, how momentarily frightened he had been. Listening intently awhile longer, he finally decided it was nothing more than the call of a bird or the rushing of the stream over an obstruction.

  In order to put the incident decisively out of his mind, he banged together the two rocks he held. A spark leaped out of the collision and landed in his beard. Moments later, a thin wisp of smoke curled away from his face, and a moment after that, he was on his knees again dipping his beard forward into the ice-cold stream. Wood nipped him on the rear end as he knelt with water dripping off his face.

  On his way back to the cave, Cley looked up from his thoughts to see where the dog had gone. In the distance, a figure stood amidst the trees where the stream turned left toward the hill. He blinked and looked again. Whatever had been there was now gone. Pocketing the two rocks, he took out his knife and began running as quietly as possible. He was positive that what he had seen was not a demon because there was no sign of wings or tail. It appeared to be a person, standing still, gazing down into the moving water. When he reached the spot, he spun slowly in a circle, staring sharply into the trees.

  “Show yourself,” he called out. He listened for the sound of breaking twigs or rustling in the underbrush. “A bear?” he wondered. Something inside told him to run, and he did, all the way back to the cave, Wood following at his heels.

  He insisted upon using the rocks to start a fire. Because of this, they did not eat until the moon had risen in the star-filled sky. As he prepared his blanket to lie down, he heard the owl suddenly call from outside the cave. Although the bird came now almost every night, on this particular visit its cry set Cley’s heart to pounding. The dog looked over at him and then toward the mouth of the cave, sensing his master’s anxiety. For the first time since early winter, the hunter loaded a shell into the rifle’s chamber. He kept the weapon across his knees as he read to Wood, and slept that night in a sitting position, his finger wrapped lightly around its trigger.

  On the day that Cley took the last deer needed to complete the tent, he wandered back toward the cave past a stand of gray, barren trees he had passed at least a hundred times throughout the winter. On this trip, though, he noticed something he had never seen before. In among the trunks he spied an unusual object sticking up out of the ground. He moved cautiously over to it, and there he found, of all things, a pickax, its handle half-buried in the ground. Dangling from a strap off one of the points was an old helmet, tiny holes eaten through the rust.

  He lifted the headpiece to see if affixed to the front there was a device to hold a candle. When he found what he was looking for, he knew he had discovered one of the graves of the explorers who had struck out years earlier from Anamasobia. It had been told to him by Arla Beaton that they had been dressed in their mining gear, on a quest to discover the Earthly Paradise. He remembered the story—sixteen of them, and the only one to return was Arla’s grandfather. Cley could not help but smile at the ridiculous equipment they had brought, as if they had intended to excavate miracles from the Beyond. The wilderness had wasted no time in turning their tools into grave markers. Still, the hunter felt a sense of camaraderie with the fallen miner and knelt before the crude memorial. He tried to think of something to say, but remained silent. A minute later, he took up his pelt and whistled for Wood.

  On a clear patch of frozen ground, he scratched out with his knife a crude design for the tent carrier he imagined. It had to be light with thin runners since it wouldn’t be pulled over snow but instead the grass of the plain. He determined that the perfect branches for the device would be those of the carnivorous tree that devoured sparrows and starlings, since they were long, straight, and pliant enough to shape.

  It was one thing to draw on the ground with a knife and quite another to hack the limbs off a tree with a volition to eat flesh. The one he chose to attack was not strong enough to lift him and stuff him down into the opening at the top of its trunk, but it tried to. He could hear the tree’s digestive juices bubbling within as he hacked at its limbs. The grasping twigs at the ends of the constantly moving branches kept pulling at him, and it hurt madly when they wrapped around his hair and beard. All the time Cley worked, Wood paced nervously a few feet away, barking at the giant with which his friend appeared locked in combat. Occasionally the dog charged in and tried to bite the many-armed enemy but was unsure as to where to sink his teeth.

  After much struggle, the required branches wriggled on the ground like a brood of snakes. From their cut ends oozed a dark green sap.

  “That’s the damnedest thing,” said Cley, waiting for their life to drain away.

  He began construction and decided that the limbs of the hungry tree were the right choice for the job. They were sturdy, but could be bent to make the frame and runners. Using dried strips of deer hide, he tied the joints fast, then bowed one long stalk into a perfect loop to fashion the harness that would fit around Wood’s chest. The work took him the better part of the day, and he enjoyed the complexity of the task.

  It was early evening when he finished, and pleased with his creation, he took the time to double-tie all the joints. During this process, he looked up to find where the sun was in its descent and saw a woman, dressed in skins, standing in front of him. The fact that there was someone there, watching him, was startling enough, but it was her otherworldly presence that made him reel backward onto the ground. Her form was slightly transparent, wavering like a heat mirage, though the air was still cold. Her eye sockets were perfectly empty and dark as any tunnel through the underground. She appeared a magic-lantern projection from another time—her hair blowing behind her in a phantom wind, her flesh shrunken against her cheekbones and pulled tight in a thin scrim across her forehead.

  “What?” he yelled, his entire body trembling.

  When she put her arms out toward him, as if pleading, he knew instantly who she was. Reaching into the cloak by his neck, he pulled out the beaded necklace he had worn since the day he discovered her grave. Slowly, as in a dream, she dropped to her knees and began digging at the thawing earth. From everywhere, came the sound of her sobbing. Cley got to his feet and backed away. She reached toward him again, then motioned back to the ground.

  He had never thought to see what was in the pouch because it had always felt empty, but now he understood that it contained something that was important to her. Nervously, he lifted the beads to get at it. Pulling apart the gut drawstring, he turned it over onto his palm. Out rolled a small, green seed half the width of a thumbnail and tapered at either end. Fine roots like hairs grew from each of the tips. He looked back to her, holding it forward, but she had vanished, leaving behind only the diminishing sound of her sorrow.

  Cley shuddered as he lifted his knife off the ground where it lay next to the sled. He knelt and dug a shallow hole in the earth. Very carefully, he dropped the seed in and gently covered it over, tamping the cold dirt with his palms. As soon as he was finished, he leaped to his feet and gathered his mittens and rifle. Grabbing the sled by its harness, he whistled for Wood and set out quickly for home.

  When they arrived at the cave, he did not bother to remove his cloak but went directly to the back, to the shaft that led down into the burial chamber, and threw the necklace in as far as he could. Even after an hour had passed, he still sat against the rock wall, staring out at the sky.

  Before the sun rose, he made an inventory of his belongings and placed them neatly in his pack. Since the temperature had risen in recent days, he rolled up the cat cloak, the mittens and leggings, and stuffed them also into the pack. He was pleased to be able once again to wear only his overalls, sh
irt, jacket, and the black hat adorned with wild-turkey feathers. Once he was fitted out for the journey, he slung the bow over his shoulder and took up the rifle. Before leaving the cave, he looked back into it once with a perverse sense of nostalgia.

  He had rigged the tent to the sled the night before, and now all that was needed was to get Wood into the harness. It took some doing to convince the dog that dragging the weight was a good idea. For this purpose, he had saved a few strips of venison from the previous night’s dinner, and with these he was able to coax his companion into the job of mule. Cley felt a measure of pride when the rig slid over the ground with ease.

  They started around to the other side of the hill, and had not gone fifty yards, when they found a demon blocking their path. It lay facedown on the ground, unmoving, its wings folded in as if it was either asleep or dead. Cley stopped and brought the rifle up in front of him. He was wary of the beast, knowing the demons were not beneath a form of simple trickery. Wood was beside himself in the harness. Unable to attack, he growled in warning and frustration.

  Cley advanced slowly, keeping a strict aim on the head of the creature. A wing lifted slightly, and without a second passing, the hunter fired, missing the base of the skull and instead chipping off the tip of the right horn. Then he realized that the movement of the wing had been caused by the wind. He walked over and, using his foot, flipped the body onto its back. The face the demon wore was so horrific, Cley almost fired again out of fright. Its eyes protruded as if momentarily frozen in the act of exploding, and its bulging tongue draped down across its chest. He knelt and touched the carcass. It was still quite warm, and he figured it had probably been killed within the past half-hour. Now he noticed the necklace of shell beads wrapped tightly around its throat, cutting deeply into the windpipe.

  They navigated the hillside with minor difficulty and reached the plain by late morning. Out on the huge expanse, they moved quickly, half-fleeing the forest of demons, half-rushing toward the promise of the future. A sweet breeze blew in from the east, and beneath their feet were the first signs of green, sprouting out of the mud.