Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

Leeds’s words fed those blue-white, all-too-open eyes, and once Jukes thanked him excessively for the information, oh how Leeds regretted it. The tavern soon burned with so much talk about the Leeds Devil that it seemed Nathaniel might soon find himself at the center of renewed interest in the hunting of witches.

Jukes ran with the news. He knew no division between history and fiction. “It’s true, true, all true,” he said. It became a chant, an incantation. Those in the tavern retold his stories to charge otherwise dull evenings with the imminence of slaughter. Peace and quiet were like a layer of ice—these tales pressed down until a boot cracked through. A week after his first visit to Leeds, Umbria seemed to shimmer. Any minute, Leeds’s skin might turn scalier than old man’s sclerosis. Was it not possible that beneath hat and coat were horns and tail?

Leeds meanwhile proceeded as though he’d never said a word to Jukes. He did not act—had never acted—like a beast. He had always been reticent and hard-working, preferring The Crier to a society of open words. But ever since his children had left and his wife had died, some said he had not been the same and perhaps this heralded a shift of shape. Something was not right with him, anyone could tell, and yet he withheld that peculiarity, gracefully, stoically, very much unlike Branley Jukes.

Jukes wore his sleeves long. He liked to tie a noose around his wrists and hang from the rafters. It pleased him to see the faces of his children when they found him. He savored the sight. When Branley was six, his own father properly hanged himself. Hanging from the wrists gave a sense of what the noose had done to his father’s neck. His children untied him. Blood-black bruises wound around his wrists like the handcuffs of an obscure sentinel.

He had not hung himself by the wrists for weeks before he met us on the path to Umbria. But now he believed we were the ones who needed to hang from rafters until the evil in us dripped out and returned to its source in the sand.

He had not hung himself since his focus turned to rooting me out, capturing me, killing me, and bringing about eternal paradise—the end of disease, misery, shame, poverty, death. But now Jukes tossed the rope over the strongest beam. He fished wrists through the loop and pulled it tight with his teeth. He stepped from the chair. Sinews stressed. Cruel thoughts magnified complaints beyond anything sane. All frustrations took the form of that threatening growler. Pain in his wrists scorched territories within him and a corresponding X marked the beast’s location in Umbria. Discovered hanging and helped down, Branley soothed his wrists in cloth soaked in fat and hurried to that spot. He peered through the window of a home to see Nathaniel Leeds leaning into a book, inhaling its essence.

“The book,” he said, “if I get it I will get the beast, if not, no eternal paradise, no ever will we never die.”

Pine needles carpeted the woods a soft orange. Anyone could creep around and not be heard, even a tavern-born troglodyte like Merkins, a former teacher who wore a beard that reached his cavernous navel. He did not value his remaining days too highly, but he did look forward to many more drinks before he reached the afterworld, and so he consented to Jukes’ demand for company. They waited until night. The trees revealed black limbs. Leeds’s house was isolated from others, and so they did not fear being seen. They stood at the window.

They saw Leeds remove the Genuine Leeds Almanack from a glass case and a wrapping of silk. By candlelight, he read closely, attentively, hunched over, and then he leaned back. Eyes closed, he held his breath and exhaled before he returned to the pages.

“Might he ever tire of it?” Jukes said.

“Must be a splendorous work,” slurred Merkins.

“The book of the beast,” said Jukes.

“A righteous man would savor another book, would he not?”

“Accursed histories. The way he sighs he sees his future there,” said Jukes. “Leeds the same as the old man I saw, shifts shapes, costumed now as a man.”

“We should neither break into his home nor assert ungranted authority,” said Merkins.

“We act in best interests and rightful causes,” said Jukes.

“Only Sheriff Hopkins has that power.”

Only Jukes had seen that claw, only he had heard Leeds’s story, only he had made connections, only he had brought the beast to life, only he would track it down. He would not submit to an authority other than his own awful obsession—fantasy would not bow to official realities—the law worked for pay instead of the fulfillment of undeniable instinct.

Jukes knocked on the front door. Leeds opened it as though wary it might fall from lack of use. He let them in. A two-room cottage in which one old man had made himself comfortable through many winters. He had lined the windowsills with evergreen boughs and lit oil lanterns so the room glowed. A cone of cinnamon smoked on a silver tray.

“Mr. Jukes,” Leeds said, “a pleasure to host you.”

“The book,” he said. “We come for you to read it.”

“The almanac?”

“Merkins comes with me, do not worry, a respectable man, most respectable.”

“An honor, sir,” said Merkins. “Most agreeable home you have.”

“Why tonight, of all nights?”

“Brisk and blustery, perfect for deviltries.”

“Not so devilish,” said Leeds. “I read from it nightly and never tire.”

I watched through the window as Leeds read Japhet’s account of my birth. He read like a performer. So familiar with its rhythm and texture, his visitors for a time seemed enchanted. Midway through the reading, however, Jukes and Merkins shared a look.

“The game’s the fresh meat, isn’t that right?” said Jukes.

“I don’t understand,” said Leeds.

“The game’s the fresh meat, do you believe it?”

“I understand your words but not their intent,” said Leeds.

“He doesn’t understand,” Jukes said to Merkins. “A mark.”

“Of what?” said Leeds.

“You know nothing of fresh meat?”

“Is this some riddle?”

“The game’s the fresh meat, I say.”

Leeds pronounced the opaque phrase, rounding out the words instead of slurring them, saying each slowly and clearly as though proper enunciation might break the code.

“The game is the fresh meat!” shouted Jukes.

“I neither understand this phrase nor why I let this madman into my home.”

“Can you imagine me a madman, Merkins, when Leeds’s so mad he’s no inkling of what it means when we say fresh meat’s the game. Do you see him with such a bitty bearded face, cruel fingers, horns hidden, saying I’m lunaticked… when I acknowledge the game is fresh meat, and yet he denies it. Do you think if my fathers or his father or someone even farther down the line of fathers left a record to say why it was they did what they did, do you think I might invite someone to my home to hear me read from it? The game, you see, is the fresh meat.”

Branley shot his sleeves so they fell about the elbows. Leeds saw the bruises on his guest’s wrists. He seemed almost to understand this talk of fresh meat.

“First,” said Leeds, “I did not invite you to listen to my relatives’ story. Second, I knew your father. He was not an unkind man, though few understood him, for, like you, he was not easy to understand. He was a man whose sensitivities, whose tenderness, gave way to regular violence. I did not know you discovered his—”

“You tormented him so he roped the roof, you churned the oceans that took my grandfathers, made my mother run into wildfire, my grandmother swallow mercury, it was you, the beast, the fresh meat, the game. It was you, the quarry, the hunted, the target. Let’s sees your horned hands. The beast himself here, those horned fingers, let’s hear again that growl.”