The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Good luck,” was all he said to me.

  I told him, “If we should meet again, you will have to kill me.”

  He nodded once, as if I were reporting on the weather.

  The dog would not come to me when I called to him, but stood at a distance and growled. I took this to be a good sign that I was very close to being a full-fledged demon again. Then, flapping my wings, I leaped into the air and left them.

  In the weeks that followed, there were moments when my knowledge of language completely disappeared. I saw, for the first time since my stay among men, things as they were without the label of a word pasted over them. Entire hours went by when I did not perceive the tiresome chatter that usually raged at the edges of my consciousness. When I hunted, I was swift and brutal, reveling in the taste of warm blood and sensing the energy my prey’s flesh gave to me. It was only when I met a band of demons that I came to realize my folly.

  There were six of them gathered round the base of a spreading shemel tree, bothering the thoroughly depleted carcass of a wild boar. I felt full of demon strength and courage, and I longed to join them. As I approached, I barked out a greeting that sounded completely authentic. Some of them barked back, undisturbed by my presence, and returned their gazes to the exposed rib cage of the boar. This encouraged me, and I drew closer. When I was no more than a few feet away from them, my heart bursting with excitement, I saw their noses begin to twitch. They made faces as if they were smelling something unpleasant. I stopped advancing, and they broke from their group and began slowly to surround me.

  You’ll have to forgive me, but what happened after that, I cannot and do not wish to recall. Suffice it to say that I barely escaped with my life. My brethren looked upon me as if I were an odious pile of dung, and that hurt more than the wounds from their claws. I carried and will always carry the stink of humanity. Here is one thing I learned: demons love the flesh and blood of humans, but at the same time are repulsed by their scent of culture and reason. Human is a bittersweet repast. For me, more bitter than sweet. I fled from the Beyond, fled as if there were some shame in what had happened. There was a measure of guilt attended to my failure that, once experienced, I could not let go of, and it served to push me further into humanity.

  Where else was I to go but back to the ruins of the Well-Built City? Here I have been ever since. My days are quiet and slow, my only companions the volumes from the extensive library that survived the city’s destruction. At one time there were werewolf creatures prowling the ruins, products of my father’s twisted Science, but I managed to exterminate them all one at a time by laying traps and utilizing some of his old explosives.

  Occasionally, men will come and crawl around in the ruins for a day or two, making believe they aren’t afraid of me, but the minute I get up the energy to leave my study and fly above them, they flee back to their villages at Latrobia or Wenau. They know I am here, for I fly over their homes from time to time to see how they are getting on. I’ve gotten quite lazy in recent years, perhaps half-hoping that one of them will get off a lucky shot and end my miserable existence.

  I am especially interested in the village at Wenau, for that was Cley’s home before he left for the Beyond. I have found small ways to assist them when I can in honor of my friend. They have done a great deal of building in recent years, so I fly there sometimes and tote heavy objects that it might take three or four of them to carry to the tops of their scaffolding. This is always at night when no one is watching. One evening, I rescued a little girl from drowning in the river. I laugh every time I imagine her telling her story to her parents about how the demon swooped down out of nowhere and carried her to safety. I told her to tell them that it was Cley who saved her.

  Now, I come to the point of all this. Some months ago, I was in the study, about to turn the page of a work concerning the grammar of constellations, when I felt, like a bubble bursting inside my skull, the sudden, unquenchable desire to discover Cley’s fate. I realized that through the years, I had always hoped for his return. He was the only one who had ever accepted my halfling nature as its own individual phenomenon instead of considering me either a monstrous human or an impotent demon.

  I became obsessed with thoughts of him, and I began to wonder what had happened to him in the wilderness. We had been apart many, many years. Although he often said he was headed for Paradise, his true mission was one of conscience—to locate and ask forgiveness of a woman he had once wickedly betrayed. He had not been a strong man in his earlier life, given to pride and cruelty and addiction, and these sins haunted him long after he had determined to make amends.

  When he had been Physiognomist, First Class, of this very city whose remains are my home, he was sent to that town at the edge of the Beyond, Anamasobia. There, he met a woman, Arla Beaton, with whom he fell in love. She, on the other hand, could not love him because of the ugliness he harbored inside. He had a revelation that perhaps his science could improve her character. It was his belief that if the physical structure of the face was a map of the soul, he might change, with his scalpel, the girl’s attitude and personality by changing her face. The result was that he butchered her horribly, and she was forced to go about wearing a green veil to protect others from the sight of her.

  Cley grew to understand the hideous nature of his crime, and his entire life became a quest for that woman’s forgiveness. After the destruction of the Well-Built City, they both settled in the village of Wenau, not far from here. Her scars eventually healed through some miracle associated with the birth of her daughter. Cley became friendly with her husband, a strange native of the wilderness, and her children, but she always stayed aloof from him. When that family left Wenau to travel into the Beyond, back to the husband’s village, the woman left her green veil with Cley. This scrap of material had haunted him ever since, and he wondered if it was to be for him a reminder of his guilt or a sign of absolution. His salvation depended upon the answer to this riddle.

  Where I gave up, Cley continued undaunted. I had to know what had become of him. With that in mind, I made a journey to the Beyond, a five days’ flight from the ruins. There, at the boundary of the forest, I made my inquiry. If I had been required to delve more deeply into that nightmare land again, I would not have continued. I could not have endured another confrontation with the demons. This was unnecessary, though, for all I needed to do was gather some of the elements of the Beyond and return to my home.

  I brought back with me a portion of earth, a bouquet of ferns, a jar of water and one of air. Beginning with the ferns, I bit off the tips of a spray and chewed slowly, ferreting out the atoms of Cley’s story. Nothing happens in the Beyond that is not secretly known by the Beyond. It’s all there, always. What is required are the finely tuned senses of a demon, and through some sampling, one can piece together a tattered history of any creature.

  With that first taste of vegetation, I found a few morsels of the story. From there I continued, rubbing my hands in the earth, releasing the air under my nose, and sipping the water that had once flowed through the rivers and streams of the Beyond. I slowly digested the crumbs of the story, one by one, and when I had gathered a good portion of them, I sat for a few days, smoking stale cigarettes I discovered in the ruins or fresh ones I stole from the villages, and stitched the whole ragged thing together in my head. It was a slow, painstaking method of discovery, but I never flagged in my diligence, as if it were a second chance for me to find my own salvation.

  The story is in me now, and I am poised to record it for you, whoever you might be. Perhaps you are a soldier come to kill me and you find this manuscript in the course of your duties. Perhaps you are a traveler who happens upon these ruins in your own search for Paradise and will find, in my words, sustenance to continue your pilgrimage or proof that it is all folly. Perhaps these pages will never be found but will molder to dust in the ruins, and then Time itself will digest what I have written.

  I warn you that the writing will not be the s
mooth delineation of events as you see here, for the knowledge I have gathered lies behind my eyes like the remains of a ravaged animal. The skull still holds some hide and has all its teeth intact, but one eye is missing, and the other has become a jellied nest for flies. Scraps of hide, half a heart, the liver missing, ribs cracked and strewn, brain exposed and baked by the sun. I will coax this incomplete parcel of a tale to rise and run with the magic of sheer beauty, in the voice of the Beyond. Do not be concerned by gaping wounds in the narrative, for these are merely portals through which the years spiral and great distances breathe.

  It is true that in the time since I performed my research Cley might have died, but that is of little consequence to the story. Both men and demons are born and die. It is the journey between these two mundane certainties that is everything. Will we ever discover ourselves amidst the dangers, the wonders, the impossible depths of the wilderness, or will we wander lost and alone, without meaning, till death? I am uncertain as to which of these might describe Cley’s journey. What I offer is merely a fragmented record of the events as I find them. I am a halfling beast, neither here nor there, and cannot judge the outcome. Only you, who are human, can do that.

  winter cave

  Sheer beauty, violet elixir, medium of dreams …

  To think that I once dragged Cley from this drug’s clutches, haughtily crushing vials, and admonishing, with comic asides, against his desire to sleep his life away cocooned by its illusions. What I knew then was poison for him, I know now, in my desire to conjure him from the elements of the Beyond, is the sap that will drive his story from the root that lies buried in my mind, down my arm, across my wrist, through my fingers, out of the pen, and into the sunlight of clean, white paper.

  It bubbles my veins, ripples the convolutions of my brain, and sets fire to the five chambers of my demon heart. Here, the first tendril of ink begins to sprout, curling inward and out, wrapping around nothing to define a spiraling plant that grows with the speed of light. It is everywhere at once, bearing heavy white fruit that splits open amidst the rushing wind of passing seasons, releasing a flock of screaming, blind birds. They fly upward with full determination to smash against the ceiling of the sky and vaporize into a thousand clouds that form one cloud. It rains, and the green land stretches, in mere moments, into a wilderness so immense that it is impossible even to conceive of crossing it.

  There, like a tiny insect on the head of a giant whose brow is the mightiest of mountain ranges, is Cley, where I left him, in a clearing of tall oaks. Beside him, that insignificant black dot, is Wood, the dog with one ear.

  Closer now and closer still until I can make out his broad-brimmed black hat, sporting three wild-turkey feathers, reminders of his first kill in the Beyond. Beneath it, his chestnut hair is long and twisted together in the back to form a crude braid tied at the end with a lanyard that was once a demon’s tendon. A full beard descends across his chest. Amidst this profluent tangle jut a nose and cheeks, the left scarred by the nick of a barbed tail. He stares northward with unnerving determination, as if he can already see, thousands of miles ahead of him, his destination.

  I have seen scarecrows in the fields surrounding Latrobia who are better dressed than this hunter. Old brown coat, removed from a skeleton back in the ruins of Anamasobia, like the hide of some weary, wrinkled beast. The flannel shirt, dark blue with a field of golden stars, he found in the intact dresser drawer of one Frod Geeble’s rooms, which lay behind the destruction of a tavern. A pair of overalls. The boots have been Cley’s all along, and in the left one is the stone knife he assured me cut with more grace and precision than a physiognomist’s scalpel. The rifle, luckiest find of all, is for him like a marriage partner. He sleeps with it, whispers to it, cares for it with a genuine devotion. When it comes time to kill, he kills with it, his shot growing truer and truer until he can drill a demon in midflight, dead center between the eyes, at a hundred yards. His backpack holds boxes of shells, but the Beyond is limitless.

  That dog, potential insanity on four legs, can be as calm as a dreamless sleeper until danger drops from the trees and then his placid, near-human smile wrinkles back into a snapping wound machine. The crafty beast learns to lunge for my brethren’s unprotected areas—wing membrane, soft belly, groin, or tail. I, myself, witnessed that hound tear off an attacking demon’s member, slip through its legs, and then shred a wing to tatters in his escape. He has an uncanny sense of certainty about him in all situations, as if in each he is like a dancer who has practiced that one dance all his days. Wood reads Cley like a book, understands his hand signals and the subtle shifting of his eyes. There is no question he will die for the hunter, and I am convinced he will go beyond death for him—a guardian angel the color of night, muscled and scarred and harder to subdue than a guilty conscience.

  The hunter whistled once, moving off into the autumn forest, and the dog followed three feet behind and to the left. In the barren branches above, a coven of crows sat in silent judgment while a small furry creature with the beak of a bird scurried away into the wind-shifted sea of orange leaves. From off to the south came the sound of something dying as they proceeded into the insatiable distance of the Beyond, their only compass a frayed and faded green veil.

  The contents of Cley’s pack as they were dictated to me by the Beyond: 1 ball of twine; 4 candles; 2 boxes of matches; 8 boxes of shells (1 dozen bullets per box); 1 metal pot; 1 small fry pan; 1 knife and 1 fork; thread and needle; a sack of medicinal herbs; a book, found among the charred remains of Anamasobia (the cover and first few pages of which have been singed black, obliterating its title and author); 3 pair of socks; 4 pair of underwear; 1 blanket.

  The days were a waking nightmare of demon slaughter, for they came for him from everywhere, at any moment, swooping out of trees, charging along the ground on all fours with wings flapping. He felled them with the gun, and, when not quick enough with this, he reached for the stone knife, smashing it through fur, muscle, and breastbone to burst their hearts. Wild blood soaked into his clothes, and he learned to detect their scent on the breeze. Claws ripped his jacket, scarred the flesh of his chest and neck and face, and when he met them in hand-to-hand combat, he screamed in a fearsome voice as if he too had become some creature of the wilderness.

  The spirit that fired his intuition so that his shots were clean and allowed him to move with thoughtless elegance when wielding the knife was a strong desire he did not fully understand and could not name. It forced him to overcome great odds and demanded with an unswerving righteousness that he survive.

  Cley hid beneath a willow and aimed at a white deer drinking from a stream. Cracking branches, the prey bolted, a moment of confusion, and a demon dropped from above onto the hunter’s back. The rifle flew from his hands as he smelled the rancid breath and deep body stink now riding him, searching for a place to sink its fangs. He supported the weight of his attacker long enough to flip the beast over his head. It landed on its wings as he reached for his knife. The demon whipped at his forearm with barbed tail, and the sting weakened his grip. The knife fell and stabbed the earth. The dog was there, seizing in his jaws the demon’s tail. The creature bellowed, arched backward in agony, and this moment was all the hunter needed. He retrieved the fallen blade and, with a brutal slice, half severed the creature’s head from its body.

  From that point on, no matter how many he killed in an ambush, no matter how long the process took, he decapitated each and every one. The thought of it makes me nauseous, but I see him cracking their horns from their foreheads and piercing their eyes with the points of their own weaponry. “Even these foul creatures can know fear,” he told the dog, who sat at a distance, baffled by the curious ritual.

  He had learned that demons do not hunt at night. At twilight he built a fire next to a stream. Placing six or seven large stones in the flames, he would leave them until they glowed like coals. Before turning in, he would fish them from the fire with a stick and bury them in a shallow pit the length o
f his body. Their heat would radiate upward and keep him warm for much of the night.

  Dinner was venison along with the greens he had gathered in his daily journey. Vegetation grew scarcer by the day as autumn dozed toward winter. He shared the meat in equal parts with the dog.

  When the stars were shining in the great blackness above, he took the book without a name from his pack. Then he lay down by the fire, the dog next to him, and strained his sight, reading aloud in a whisper. The curious subject matter of the large volume made little sense. It dealt with the nature of the soul, but the writing was highly symbolic and the sentences spiraled in their meaning until their meaning left them like the life of a demon with a knife in its heart.

  The flames subsided and he made his bed with the stones. Lying always faceup—it was his belief that one should never turn one’s back on the Beyond—he searched the universe for shooting stars. Falling branches, bat squeals, ghostly birdcalls like a woman with her hair on fire, snarls and bellows of pain were the lullaby of the wilderness. The wind wafted across his face. A star fell somewhere hundreds of miles to the north, perhaps crashing down into Paradise, and then he was there in his dreams, watching it burn.

  There were trees so wide around the trunk and so insanely tall that they were more massive than towers that had once stood in the Well-Built City. The roots of these giants jutted out of the ground high enough to allow Cley passage beneath them without his bending over. Bark of a smaller species was a light fur that felt to the touch like human flesh. Another tree used its branches like hands with which to grab small birds and stuff them down into its wooden gullet. A thin blue variety rippled in the breeze; a thicket of streamers with no seemingly solid structure to keep them vertical. Most disturbing to Cley was when the wind passed through these undulating stalks—a haunting sound of laughter that expressed joy more perfectly than any word or music ever had.