Memoranda (33 page)

I warn you that the writing will not be the smooth 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 of 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.

The forest was teeming with herds of white deer, and even an errant shot had a chance of felling one. Flesh from this animal was sweet and very filling. Cley discovered that its liver, when stuffed with wild onions and slowly roasted, was the finest thing he had ever tasted.

Adders with rodent faces. Wildcats, the color of roses, emitted the scent of cinnamon. Small-tusked wolves covered with scales instead of fur. The wilderness was a beautiful repository of bad dreams that often rendered monsters.

Cley had lost track of how many demons he had slain, how many wounds he had dressed, how many deer livers he had devoured. He was startled from his gruesome work on the corpse of an enemy by a tiny fleck of white that moved before his eyes. Looking up, past the barren branches overhead, he watched the snow falling. “Winter,” he said to Wood, and with that one word, he felt the cold on his hands, the chill of the wind at his back. His breath came as steam, and he wondered how long he had ignored the signs of autumn's death, so caught up, himself, in killing.

The icy presence of the new season now made itself doubly known in payment for the hunter's previous disregard. The frigid wind stole the feeling from his hands, and he prayed he would not have to fire the rifle in defense against an attack. It seemed as if ice had seeped inside him and was forming crystals in his bones. His mind yawned with daydreams of the fireplace back at his home in Wenau.

The only shred of hope the winter brought was the disappearance of the demons. For two days following the first light snow, they were strangely absent. He wondered if they were hibernating.

He and the dog gathered dry branches with which to build a fire. They heaped them up in front of the mouth of a cave, and then he rummaged through his pack for a box of matches. Cupping his hands and using his body as a shield, he managed to ignite the barest tip of a stick. Once the tongue of flame took hold, the fire's hunger overcame the winter's best attempts to extinguish it. Smoke swirled upward as he carefully placed the box of matches back in his pack.

He fashioned a torch from a large branch and stuck its end in the fire till it burned brightly. Taking the stone knife from his boot, he edged forward into the opening in the hill. The thought of discovering hibernating demons in the closed, dark place made him shudder and begin to sweat.

It was warm inside. He called out, “Hello,” in order to judge the size of the vault by the echo it produced. The sound blossomed out and returned with news of considerable space. As if his voice had lit the chamber, upon the word's return, his vision cut through the dark. A perfectly empty rock room with a ceiling tall enough for standing. Continuing forward, he found, after twenty feet, that the opening narrowed in height and width as he proceeded into the hill. Following the shaft to where it turned sharply downward into blackness, he was satisfied that the cave was free of beasts. He turned and looked out through the mouth. There, in the gray light of day, sat Wood, head cocked to one side, staring at the hole that had devoured his companion.

Cley carried his pack inside and moved the location of the fire to just inside the cave's entrance. He wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down on the hard floor. The dog followed him but whined and sniffed every inch of rock. To ease Wood's uncertainty about being within the earth, Cley took the book from his pack and read a few pages out loud. As the words streamed forth, the dog stopped pacing and curled up beside his master.

Snow fell, and the wind whistled through the forest, whipping the face of the hill. The demons were asleep, and the cold could not sting him in the shelter of the rock womb. His bones began to thaw. Now that he did not have to kill, all he could think about was the killing he had done. In the wind he heard the savage war cry he had used when rushing toward demons with only his knife.