by Jeffrey Ford
Feskin came soon after to visit me in my cell. The gunmen had gone to lunch and only the heavy, tired guard remained down the hall. We whispered our communications in case he might be listening. The schoolteacher sat on the bed precisely where my vision of Below had.
“What have you got in that manuscript of yours that is going to offset Frabone’s evidence?” he asked.
“Proof that Cley lived for many years after I left the Beyond, and might still be alive today,” I told him.
“Is the writing not subjective?” asked Feskin.
I explained to him how I came upon Cley’s story by sampling the elements of the wilderness. When I was done with a synopsis of the hunter’s tribulations, Feskin’s hands were shaking.
“You know,” he said, “after lunch, Frabone is going to call Horace Watt to testify. He comes before them with a body. Is your story going to be that convincing?” he asked, getting to his feet.
“I will demonstrate my abilities to the court,” I said.
“I half wish now that I had never told you to come to town,” he said.
I walked up to him and put my hands lightly on his shoulders. “You are a good man,” I said.
Horace Watt, looking every bit the fearless explorer his reputation suggested, stepped forward, towering over Frabone. He was a young man, perhaps not quite as old as Feskin, but wider in the shoulders than he by two. He had long blond hair that went untended in a wild, matted tangle. The wilderness was still in his eyes, and yet he was as calm as Frabone was annoying.
“We traveled to the Beyond,” said Watt. “There were eleven of us when we crossed the boundary. We returned from the wilderness with seven live men and one partial corpse. The demons, looking like this one here,” he said pointing at me, “devoured, like mindless dogs, four of my friends. We shot and killed scores of them, but there were always more, and they hunted relentlessly. With us we had two bloodhounds, who in the first week of our stay led us to a cave where we discovered what I believe to be Cley’s remains. It took us two weeks to fight our way back out. Once the Beyond has you, it does not want you to leave.”
“About the body,” said Frabone. “What did you find?”
“It had been ravaged and partially eaten. Greatly decomposed, but the bite marks on the bones, the holes in the sternum where it was gored by a pair of horns, were consistent with the wounds my men suffered at the hands of the creatures. We also found the diary, a pair of boots that have been identified as Cley’s, and a black, broad-brimmed hat with three wild-turkey feathers in the band.”
I could do no more than listen in silence to the entire tale. Although seemingly told true by the young Watt, it was to me as if he was talking about someone else, some vicious criminal who also piqued my own sense of terror. When he was through speaking, I wept at the unjustly persuasive character of his testimony. If I was ever going to forsake humanity and let loose the demon inside me, it would have been precisely there. Instead, I breathed deeply, buried my urge to strike back, and went quietly to my cell when the proceedings were over.
All that night, I could think of only one thing. Say, for argument’s sake only, that I had done this thing to Cley. Would it not be the ultimate irony that in losing myself so completely to the Beyond, shedding so completely my human nature, that I committed an act that would eventually, conclusively prove my humanity? As Below had said, “Do they arrest beasts?” The trial, as ugly as the accusations are, is to be my salvation.
The day of my defense came after a sleepless night. Feskin arrived early, filling me in on his strategy.
“All of their evidence,” he told me in my cell, “is real, but the logic that is applied is skewed. They cannot prove beyond a doubt that it was not some other demon who finished off Cley. Even if you were stalking him, another could have beaten you to the kill. The presence of the stone knife in your museum means little. An accusation based on the dubious memories of the elderly.”
“The diary?” I asked.
“There is no place in it where he states that you killed him. How could there be?” he asked.
I had other questions, but before I could voice them the guard and the gunmen appeared outside my cell. We again made the short journey to the courtroom, but this time I was not so self-assured. I could feel my heart racing, and I did not look at the faces in the gallery of citizens.
Feskin did his utmost to sew a seed of doubt into Spencer’s mind. He told the constable all of what he had told me, but in a much more elaborate and well-argued presentation. The only answer he got to all of his questions was that there was no definitive proof of my guilt. The sole setback occurred when he inquired of Watt about the bloodhounds. He wondered how these dogs could trace a trail after the passage of so many years. The explorer told him, matter-of-factly, that the dogs were raised from a line that had originated in the Well-Built City. “They can track a grain of pepper across a continent after twenty years,” said Watt.
When Feskin tried to broach the subject of having Semla Hood arrested for theft, Spencer dismissed the idea by saying, “We have traveled that road, and I am not going down it again.” This brought a squall of whispers from the crowd, but the constable squashed them by slamming his open hand upon the desk and calling for silence.
During lunch, I convinced Feskin to call me as a witness for myself. He told me it was dangerous but that he would honor my wish. When we returned to the court, I carried with me these pages and did not look at the floor. I went forth from my cell with my head held high and a great determination to reveal the truth as I believed it to be.
After the room had quieted down, I was called to come before the constable. Feskin simply said, “And now, Misrix, the accused, would like to address you all.” After introducing me, I noticed that he returned to his seat in the front row and sat very still, with his eyes closed.
I wasted no time but launched directly into my explanation as to how I came by the knowledge that Cley lived long past my time in the Beyond. I detailed my trip to the wilderness and my gathering those things I would need to decipher the story. When I related the part about my sampling the elements and finding information concerning Cley’s life in them, the gallery broke out in howls of laughter.
“But it’s true,” I said, my voice lost amid the storm of jeers.
Spencer quieted the room, then turned to me. “I also find this hard to believe,” he said. “Is there any way that you can prove this special ability of yours?”
“I can enter your memory by simply placing my hand on your head,” I told him. There came more tittering from the crowd.
“Prove it,” he said.
His command made me lose my nerve. In my head were spinning all of the horrible masks of derision in the gallery.
“Tell me something about me only I could know,” said Spencer.
As I stepped over to him and reached out my hand to cover his head, one of the gunmen stepped forward and raised his rifle to aim at my chest.
“It’s all right,” said the constable, and the man backed away.
There was sweat on my hand and my thoughts were unfocused. My nervousness was making it impossible for me to initiate what I have come to call “the dreaming wind.” Instead, I was visited again by those flashes of a disemboweled Cley lying beneath me. I shook my head and tried to catch some minor stirring of the breeze that would carry my mind into Spencer’s memory. Many moments passed. In my mind’s eye, I saw Anotine in the block of ice, Wood howling by the lake, Misnotishul’s tortured corpse.
“Well?” said Spencer, looking impatient to have my clawed hand off his head.
Just then I caught a spark of what I believed to be a fragment of his memory. I was certain I had something and stepped away from the constable. “Your wife,” I said, turning toward the audience so as better to see their reaction to my revelation, “is a woman with dark hair and green eyes. Her name is Lilith Marnes.”
There was total silence.
I began to smile, and then Spence
r said, “I have never been married.”
I spun around to face him, and a wave of shouts broke against my back. The constable slammed his hand repeatedly on the desk.
“Now,” he said, not unfriendly, “what else have you for us?”
“These are the writings,” I said wearily, “of my insights into the Beyond.”
“Inadmissible,” he said.
I was in shock. Feskin had to come and fetch me. As he ushered me back to my cell, he turned, and told Spencer, “We are finished for the day.”
All was a blur to me as we passed through the throng of people crowding out of their seats. I felt I was drowning in a sea of voices, shouting, “Murderer!” and far fewer proclaiming, “Free the demon!” Somewhere in the crush of people, Emilia appeared. I leaned down to hear what she was saying, but I couldn’t make out a word of it. She reached her hand up to mine and pressed a scrap of paper into it. I closed my fist around her message, and then she was whisked away in the swiftly moving human current.
Feskin did not accompany me inside the cell this time. “Don’t worry, Misrix,” he said. “Things may work out without your having to read your tale of Cley. We have to trust Spencer.”
“I was ready to read,” I said to him from what seemed a great distance.
“I know,” he said. Then he shook his head and walked away down the hall.
It was only later tonight that I read Emilia’s message. Written in her neat hand were the words: There is something I know that might help you.
Now, through the filter of the drug, I see all of this clearly in perspective. I was truly a man earlier today, shaken by language and logic, and this pleases me. Tomorrow, should I be found guilty, even that will please me. There is no trail emanating from the corners of this cell that defies Time and Distance. I leave myself no alternative but to carry on with dignity.
square of paradise
Cley’s hair and beard were streaked with gray and the look of determination with which he had begun his journey had softened considerably. He lifted himself from the high-backed chair before the fireplace and crossed the room for his hat and bow.
Leaving the house, he went down to the edge of the lake, where Willa was picking onion grass for salad. She watched him approach and straightened, brushing the back of her hand across her forehead.
Cley drew close and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going hunting,” he said.
“Get a rabbit if you can,” she said.
He nodded.
“Do you need Wraith to go with you today?” she asked.
“No, I’ll go alone today,” he said.
“He’ll be disappointed,” she said.
“I’ll explain it to him,” said Cley.
“Be back before sundown,” she said, and bent over to pick some more of the bright green spirals.
The hunter passed the house. Fifty yards away, there was a huge pen made of long, thin tree trunks. Inside it moved eight “oxen,” as Cley called the behemoths that came out of the forest every year at the end of autumn to eat the golden grass of the meadow. The cows gave milk and the meat of one was worth ten hunting trips.
As he neared the pen, he saw Wraith wielding a pitchfork fashioned from branches. The boy dug into the pile of meadow grass and shoveled the load over the side of the pen where four of the oxen had gathered to eat.
Wraith, for all of the troubles of his early years, had grown up tall for his age and was very thin, with blond hair. “Only six more years and he’ll be a man,” thought Cley, and shook his head.
The hunter watched as the boy lifted another pile of hay over the side of the pen. There was a slight rippling of muscle down the slender left arm and a distant look in his eyes. For some reason, this one glance at the boy filled Cley with great satisfaction.
“I’m going hunting,” he said.
“I’ll go,” said Wraith, dropping the rake.
“Not today,” said Cley.
“Why not?” asked the boy.
“I’m going far, and you have too much to do.”
“All right,” said Wraith. He walked over and hugged Cley. The hunter wrapped his arm tightly around the boy.
“Tomorrow,” said Wraith, taking a step back.
“Tomorrow,” said Cley, as he turned and headed for the tree line.
It was late spring, and the day was mild. The forest was brimming with life. Birds and squirrels moved through the new foliage, and the scent of deer was everywhere.
On his way into the heart of the forest Cley stopped at a small clearing circled by shemel trees. A tall pile of brown stones sat in the middle of it. The hunter approached the marker and stood quietly. He thought about the black dog, remembering its brutal death in the jaws of the Sirimon.
They had taken Wraith along and gone out hunting in the forest. It was early autumn in the sixth year of their stay at Pierce’s cabin. Cley was preoccupied, aiming at a deer off in the distance, when the pink column of monster rose up from behind some bracken. If Wood had not leaped, the Sirimon would have taken Wraith. By the time the hunter felled the great serpent, with one perfect shot (the last of the rifle bullets) to the head, Wood was lifeless. It had been the boy’s idea to bury him with the cover of the empty book.
For years after the tragedy, Cley had wondered if this had been his repayment for saving the Beyond. The body scribe, who came back to visit from time to time, had suggested one summer night that perhaps something else would have happened if the dog had not been killed by the serpent.
“Like what?” asked Cley.
“The boy,” whispered the old artisan.
Now the anger was behind him, and he was left with only a longing to see his hunting companion again. Sometimes, when he was deep in the forest, he heard a very distant sound like barking. The first time he heard it, he tracked it for five miles before he realized that it never grew any closer. On other occasions he might feel something brush lightly against his leg. When he was alone in some unknown tract of the wilderness, he still found himself whistling to call the dog to his side.
For the past few nights, he had been dreaming of hunting a strange creature through the forest. Wood was with him, and they traveled through an unfamiliar landscape, tracking the thing that always, at the last minute, eluded them. When the hunter woke, he tried to remember what the animal had been, but the image was jumbled in his mind, a winged whirl of feather, fur, beak, and claw in myriad colors. The sounds that came from it were sometimes high-pitched squeals, sometimes the huffing of a pig, and once it rumbled in a human bass voice from behind the undergrowth, “I don’t understand.”
The dreams were so vivid that Cley had come to believe that he would actually find this creature out in the real forest of his waking days. There was something portentous about it, and it was for this reason that he left Wraith safely behind. He had the sense that if he were able to succeed in felling the enigmatic prey, many things would become clear to him.
So the day passed as Cley hunted the dream creature, listening carefully for its cry and peering long and hard at any rustling of leaves. In the afternoon, he missed twice trying to get a rabbit for Willa. As he had told her from time to time, “My shot is not worth a word from Brisden anymore.” He fetched the arrows and continued on his way.
As the sun descended, he realized he must turn back to the house. He now had two rabbits strung over his shoulder, so the day had not been a total loss. Traveling down the gently sloping side of a hill, between the trunks of birches, he noticed that at the bottom there was a tall bush whose branches were swaying. There was something within, behind the leaves.
Cley stood still, and at the same moment the bush stopped moving. The hunter raised his bow and nocked an arrow. Cautiously, he advanced, waiting for the thing to dart out in either direction. When he was five paces away, he pulled the bowstring back, aiming for the spot where the commotion had been. An instant before he decided to release the arrow, something rushed from the back of the bush in a blur of color and
disappeared behind trees a hundred yards away.
The hunter could not believe how fast the creature moved. He could have sworn it made a sound as it fled, a quiet screech that still echoed in his memory. Cley started after it, moving slowly toward the stand of trees. He tried to remember if he was really hunting the creature or dreaming he was hunting it. He had a vague sense that he had done this before, more than once.
All was silent within the trees. The creature had not moved. As he approached with great stealth, Cley expected the thing to either fly or run. Even after having seen it, he had no idea how it traveled. Now he wished he had the boy with him to help flush it out. He lost his concentration for a moment and pictured himself presenting the carcass of the exotic creature to Wraith.
“It takes many, many years of hunting to be able to fell a beast like this,” he said in his daydream.
“Why?” asked the boy.
“You have to learn to understand the wilderness,” he said.
He was pulled back into the here and now by a low croaking coming from the thicket. Cley focused again, and worrying that he might have been distracted too long, charged. As he plunged into the trees, something flew above him in the opposite direction.
Only a crow.
Cley felt as though he was sinking into his own chest, and then laughed.
Night was close by, the moon already shining. The hunter looked back over his shoulder at the thicket. He squinted and peered into where light failed and shadows brewed. For the first time in years, he felt lost.
On his way back to the house, with night a heartbeat away, Cley noticed a movement, like a wing flapping, off to his left. He raised the bow and quickly released. The arrow struck the side of a fallen tree. As he went to fetch it, he cursed. When he drew close, he saw the wing again slowly lifting. The sight of it surprised him and he reared back, afraid it was the dream creature poised to strike.
When the wing deflated, he saw it was not a wing at all. He walked over to the fallen tree and lifted the green veil off the end of a broken branch. Muttering to himself, he stuffed the scrap of material into his pocket.
