The Beyond (32 page)

The guard down the hallway is snoring like a warthog, and I have just administered my remaining dose of the beauty. What a respite it will be after such frantic goings-on. Before I leave myself behind here in my cell and go to find Cley in the wilderness, I will take a few minutes to record for you the events that have transpired in the court of Constable Spencer.

Feskin had assured them that I would not need to be handcuffed, and they accepted his promise. Still, they sent no fewer than ten men with rifles to chaperone me down the short hallway into the court. My usual lethargic guard came the morning following my pitiful first day of incarceration and turned his big key in the lock of my cell. Stepping free of the confines of the barred cubicle reminded me of Cley being reborn into the wilderness. When I stretched my wings, all of the ten guns came up in alarm. Had they fired, I think they most likely would have shot each other.

Feskin was to act as my attorney, and he had begged me to wear my outfit, so I did. I felt I was looking rather good as I strode down the aisle between the two rows of benches facing the constable. I wondered which of the people of the gallery I passed were among the crowd outside my window through the night, calling for my immediate execution. I turned and smiled to one and all. Emilia and her mother were seated in the back. The girl waved to me and I to her.

The prosecutor was a true believer, if you know what I mean—a rancorous rail of a fellow named Jasweth Frabone, a name I can't believe any mother would have given her son. He wore a brown suit that shimmered in its cheapness. His hair was failing mightily, though a few wispy strands were overtaxed in an attempt to suggest otherwise. It was obvious that he was too righteous even to eat. Yellow nails, yellow teeth, and skin the color of toadstools. When the constable called him forward to make some preliminary remarks, he bombastically lambasted me personally with religious quotation. I, in turn, corrected his botched recitation of a line from Saint Ilfus, and both Spencer and Feskin told me to keep quiet. So I did.

As was the law in the court at Wenau, the prosecution was given the first day in which to lay out its case, and on the following day the defense had the opportunity to rebut the charges. On the morning of the third day, a decision would be rendered by the constable. Frabone began by first introducing Semla Hood and again getting her story about the stone knife. The old woman had a self-satisfied smile on her face as she stood in front of the room, holding the weapon up for all to see. While she was speaking, Feskin leaned over to me and whispered that he planned to demand her arrest for theft. I had to laugh. Spencer admonished me with a glance, and I heard whispers roll through the sea of onlookers.

Semla Hood was followed by her compatriots, the three wise men, dullards all, who in turn gave their meandering testimonies. The court was in a doze by the time they were done. But when Frabone next brought forth the small red-covered book that was supposedly Cley's diary, I could feel the tension begin to build. He also produced a page from one of Cley's famous manuscripts and laid it beside the book on Spencer's desk.

“Notice,” said the prosecutor, “the overall similarity of writing styles.”

Spencer looked and looked and then nodded. “Can you be more specific?” he asked.

“Certainly,” said Frabone, and launched into a painstaking comparison of i dots and the tails of y's. “The M in Misrix, most fittingly, Your Honor, has these points like the horns of a demon,” he said and, as Spencer bent forward, the prosecutor glared back at me in a show of arrogance. In response to him, I lifted my tail and curled the end into a perfect likeness of a question mark. I heard laughter come from the gallery of citizens behind me.

“If you would, Constable, please read this passage, here,” said the prosecutor, pointing to the open diary.

“As you wish,” said Spencer. He cleared his throat and then proceeded to recite in his gruff voice: “‘The black dog has been missing now for two days, and I fear the demon has devoured him. I woke last night and found the creature standing over me with a ravenous look in his yellow eyes. Saliva dripped from his lips, and I am quite sure that if I had not come to in time and quickly pulled my knife, he would have dined on me also. As it is, I think it will be only a matter of days before he does me in. The Beyond has a powerful hold on him, and he has told me on more than one occasion that he longs to be one with it. I have suggested that we split up, but he assures me that I will come to no harm. Through the course of the days, though, I see him sizing me up the way I might the caribou steaks I have longed for since entering this damnable Hell.'”

“Very good, Your Honor,” said Frabone, when the constable paused. “And there are two more entries in which Cley's suspicions turn to certainties and he says his good-byes to the world … If I may, I will read the longer of the two.” As the prosecutor took the diary from the desk, Spencer nodded. Frabone began reading and took a step toward me.

“‘I have been hiding from Misrix in this cave for the past week. Wood has never returned. I write only to relieve my anxiety. As I sit, knife in hand, always waiting for the sound of his hooves on the rocks outside, the sweep of his wings from above, I wonder if I ever really returned from Below's memory. Last night I dreamt of Anotine and Arla and another woman on the streets of Anamasobia. The past is flooding in, brimming with suggestion but utterly pointless. To be consumed by the wilderness, is that not what I wanted all along?'”

The prosecutor snapped the diary shut in front of my face, then turned on his heels and walked back to Spencer. “Now that you have heard these, you must want to know the last,” said Frabone.

“Well?” said the constable.

The prosecutor paged slowly through the book toward the end. When he arrived, he shook his head sadly. “Cley's last written words, his last communication to us was, ‘I don't understand.'”

There was a moment of silence before Frabone said, “I don't understand. I don't understand why we are trying a creature. This is better settled out of doors, somewhere off in the woods outside the town. This is an insult to Justice itself.”

“Conserve your energy, Jasweth,” said Spencer, then called a recess for lunch.

I was taken back to my cell, and the guard asked me what I would have to eat. Eventually I ordered my usual meal of vegetables and fruit, but before I gave my real order, I said, “How about Frabone
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with a baked apple in every orifice?” The ten gunmen laughed heartily.

It was only while sitting in my cell that the morning's performance by the prosecutor began to irritate me. All lies, as if he were talking about some other reality. I admonished myself by thinking, “You were there with Cley, you know what has happened to him. Don't let their trumpery confuse you.”

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
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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.