Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

Stearns had made me want to walk the city’s streets with the riffraff of Europe and the Southern states, all these newcomers coaxing their voices to speak a common tongue. Wharton had acquired the pinelands for them. Stearns had had them in mind when he thought to transfer the whole shambled concatenation of woodboards and bricks, all of it always liable to collapse, east to the pines once he acquired the land and proved it empty of beasts like me. I would have liked to have seen my funeral procession: a lifeless rendition in some glass casket, the expressions of all those drawn to witness the empty shell of what once had been a phenomenal creature.

If the pines were my Eden, I wandered the city once expelled from paradise. I walked in my wedding dress, which made me seem less like a hideous beast composed of thirteen animal elements and more like a healthy young man trying to maintain an even affect, disregarding comments from all angles. So conspicuous I was in the dress, I might as well have displayed my horns and wings. The dress was not my Eve. I imagined someone else might be out there not quite as disembodied, whose physical form I could see and touch and who didn’t transform my unconventional shape into something more common when I slipped her on.

Jeers meant little to me, far less than gritty slush beneath my feet. The dress worked miracles, totally transformative wonders, yes, sure, but it was neither warm nor a socially acceptable garment for a man. In human form, I was susceptible to the cold, having only a vestige of anything one might call fur. In shop windows, in the odd expanse of mirrored glass outside a merchant’s, I saw soft hair atop my head, somewhat overlong in front, almost to my eyes. I recognized those eyes, sensed the familiar mechanizations of my internal organs, but all else seemed to belong to someone else.

I was impervious to everything assaultive around me, that is, until I came upon a freckled man in a green velvet suit, like some overgrown elf, his orange sideburns ablaze.

“The Leeds Devil,” he said. “Alive on stage. See it for a dime.”

I stopped and stared at him.

“You in the dress, blushing bride to be, any desire to see a monster more ferocious than the marriage you’re bound to endure?”

Staring at him still, not reacting, he continued: “Oh pretty young wifey, come see a diversion more exciting than any likely on your honeymoon.”

I winked at him. “Let me in for free,” I said.

“Why’s that, lassie?”

“Because I ask you,” I said.

“A lovely young lady who believes she deserves all she wants, as always.”

“Because I am the Leeds Devil,” I said, and now I stared at him deeply, my face drained of expression.

I stepped closer as I said it. The unexpected aggression left the barker speechless for a moment until he muttered something like “All the better the more freaks inside” as I entered the darkness to glimpse myself.

On stage, no longer a torment, now the prize possession of an Arch Street theater, this poor stable renovated and outfitted with benches, a platform, a makeshift curtain stitched from strips of common fabric. The walls were black, maybe charred or painted to resemble something more rustic and decrepit than it was. A few torches lit the room. I was comparatively clean, in permanently bleached white wedding dress, preternaturally shaven, a bright horizon after an interminable night.

“In need of a groom, dearie?” said a man who followed me in from the shadows. He was ogreish and aged, rumpled, covered in dermatologic lichen.

“All set,” I said.

He didn’t persist, but as I settled into the third of ten rows, center stage, it seemed that everyone who entered commented as though I were the show itself.

The barker emerged, quieting a crowd that seethed as though promised boiled meat after years of scavenged roughage.

My association with some of the area’s wealthiest men made all those around seem all the more different. Other than their scent and unclean fingernails—so distant from godliness, per the saying, they seemed insectile, like the obsidian shells of cockroaches, liable to scatter with the slightest movement—what differentiated the crowd was their apparent unpredictability. Wharton, Stearns, Braddock, Vermeule, even Larner before his latter years: wealth engendered self-possession, self-control, a steadiness restraining flailing movements. I do not refer only to grace, composure, posture, but everyone who had paid a dime to see some impersonation of me seemed constantly on the move, blurred, likely to twist with unexpected violence in any direction, or stand and flail, possessed of urges that released within them a moment of bliss when they gave into them.

I sat as still as I could, trying to convince my neighbors that I was a wax figure the theater displayed as complimentary amusement. My fellow theatergoers seemed engaged in a struggle with their patience, physically present in the room in a way I never could be. We were less a crowd than a coven gathered to attend a fire sermon of some notorious half-human, half-goat warlock. Presence at such an event screwed one’s features toward the animalistic, everything sharpened and exaggerated and shadowed until cheeks streaked with coal and the irises of everyone’s eyes contracted into serpentine slits. Whatever sun had once existed within the crowd was now eclipsed. This ragged theater elevated and exaggerated basest elements in each occupant. I’m sure each in attendance was born perfectly cherubic.

The churning, unpredictable scrum of impatience seemed set to overcome the curtain and become the show itself. The crowd was now the Leeds Devil, waiting for an up-close sight of a captured beast, heart-rending simulacra of the new Adam, and yet the oversized elfish barker did not phrase his introduction in such terms. The past he mentioned more than the future. Satan he referred to often. Adam not once. Something else he said struck me and rallied the crowd’s fervor: this was the last show, the final rising curtain for this beast. The significance of this statement was understood at once. Neighbors jostled me, nudged me, streaked my garment with their filth. One even presented his cracked, unwholesome palm, seemingly indicating that I should slap my hand to his in a gesture of complicit appreciation of what we might soon witness.

The barker stepped on stage, pitchfork in hand, tiptoeing as though hunting rare game. He turned to us and held an outstretched finger to his lips, a gesture others replicated with shushes. He extended the points of the pitchfork low to the ground, as though to prick with it the curly tail of a piglet. He pretended to scan the horizon, a pantomime of the hunt. Hecklers suggested he might improve his view if the curtain were raised.

“Silence!” shouted the barker. This entrance into the room’s sonic territory struck us so forcefully that even the scariest in the audience (my suitor, for example) giggled in response. “This hunt is no matter for fools. Your voices scare off the beast, the one and only Leeds Devil that has invaded our city and its outskirts and caused so many lovely young ladies to fall into our arms in fear.”

He now cradled his pitchfork like a beloved. He mooned over its spears.

“Yes, my darling,” he said, addressing the pitchfork in his arms, “a most unpleasant week. Every movement, every sound, a sign of impending doom.”

He spun the pitchfork out so it assumed the form of a dancing partner. He held it upright in his outstretched hand. “But now you are safe for we have captured the beast. We risked our lives, coming close to losing many a limb. My associate here, in fact, lost half his arm to the jaws of the beast. Forever damn its insatiable demand for human flesh!”

A dwarfish fellow waddled on stage to gasps as he rolled up a sleeve to reveal a stump where elbow should have continued to forearm and hand. The little fellow waved with his good hand and wiggled the stump as though its ghost were visible, and then he turned offstage as quickly as he had appeared, a prop no less than the pitchfork.