Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

“Stearns?” I said. “Do you know him?”

“Daley, his associate, is a regular patron. He questioned your bet.”

Daley, henchman of Stearns, second in command, enjoyed himself in a city he wished to conquer. Young and old at once. His cheeks and eyes, his hair and build, suggested an incomplete possession of maturity but there was weight to him, jowls, a sagging lower lip, a slumpedness to how he sat that had doubled his age. Now some emanation of him occupied the space between us.

“How well do you know him?”

“They know me better than I know them. They treat me like a cousin with whom familial propriety doesn’t always apply.”

“If you have a child, then you have a husband?”

“Had a husband, but long ago, he went missing… It was on a hunt across the river. His friends claim to have encountered the Leeds Devil.”

“The same that infested the city this past week?”

“It is not so simple,” she said.

“How so?”

“Rampant fakery, of course. Plus, I’ve overheard and intercepted so many words and glances, exaggerated surprise about the appearances and overacted worry for everyone’s safety, each of them either mocking the general sentiment or congratulating themselves for playing some role in it. So often they forget their servers are sober.”

“Might you ever sell your knowledge?”

“Drink loosens lips but what so often emerges is spew.”

I might have to repay her hospitality with a visit from Braddock and Vermeule or one of their friends. “Did you know Wharton?”

“I served him once or twice, but he stopped coming once we harbored enemies.”

“So you know his plans?”

“I should ask: whose side are you on?”

“My own,” I said.

“The same,” she said.

I tried to steer the conversation more personally and ask about her parents, her child (son), her sister, her hopes, dreams, desires. No matter how well she responded to my interest I would have to reciprocate when she felt obligated to learn more about me. I would need to either respond with truth or fiction, and then I would need to arrange the fiction as it arose, wary of inconsistencies and suspicious of her suspecting me again. Expecting the inevitability of difficulty, I rolled on my side and said, “There is something you should know.”

“Yes?” She mirrored my posture, head propped on hand.

“The Leeds Devil did not kill your husband. He has not killed anyone—not for many years, at least—though recently he came very close to ending Stearns’s life.”

“How can you know this? Or even that it exists?”

“I know he flew over the city and some may have seen him but he was only investigating the costumed beasts meant to devalue his home.”

“And you know all this how?”

“Because I am him, of course.”

“The Leeds Devil?”

“The one and only.”

She would ignore my shape in favor of heart and soul. I would protect her sister and son and live the rest of my time as a man.

I had anticipated neither the volume nor the duration of her laugh. It was a joke, she thought, a commonplace play for her affections, like every interaction at the tavern. I felt not quite gutted. Conflicted perhaps? My words entered her body and transformed her into someone momentarily possessed with good cheer. She reflected my attraction for her and gave me a playful little slap to the head, as though to say you devil you!

I was the Leeds Devil, none other, and yet… I tunneled through passages in the hills of the future, weaving my way, rooting out her reactions and my reactions to those reactions, but then I forgot to attend to the fact of belief.

“I have questioned my own existence, as well,” I said. “Whether I am only a legend as some have said, whether any of this exists—”

“At most you’re a fugitive from a home for the deranged.”

“You really must understand that—”

What a strange sensation when someone covers your soft human mouth with their soft human mouth and sucks at your lips, opening them, probing tongue to tongue, exchanging breath, holding you closer. My eyes were open and my body stiffened as though the spell would break and I would come to my senses if I moved, still asleep at the tavern, dreaming of a first kiss between Eve and her Adam. I looked forward to the future of man: shorter wings and thicker legs, no tail or not much of one, face much flatter than mine, but the same eyes, the same heart.

LET HER HELP ME remove the dress. Her face rivaled the first I had ever seen. It took a lot not to end her horror. She beat me with a broom as I failed to clothe myself in the dress and jacket and shoes. Her sister and son entered and looked on as I burst outside, every brick wishing me harm.

I stored the dress and whatever clothes I might need, and tried to stay away from humanity. Livestock became less common over the years. But pets flourished. Mistakes were made. I wished them no harm, especially kittens and puppies, each so difficult to work up the gusto to devour, despite their scrumptious, tender flesh. Yet often enough when I encountered a lost pet in the woods… I am not proud of myself.

The dreams of Wharton or Stearns were never realized. Maybe December had dissuaded her husband at every turn. For a time, I spied on her as she strolled with her children along the grounds, but she no longer seemed like the same person I had watched so often when young. Most of her life, she stayed on that estate. She did not, as far as I know, hang herself by the wrists or in any other way prematurely end her life. She had said she was the Leeds Devil. Such a statement may have freed her from her family’s curse. When she touched my fingertip, whatever life I had lived with her ended then.

Water works along the Schuylkill River established in 1815, deemed at first a wonder of the world, faltered and were overhauled and improved a hundred years later. Fresh resources flowed through the city. Society progressed at a slow and natural pace. More forces were at work than Stearns and Wharton’s. Those who Stearns had wanted to relocate to the pines fought for the country overseas, returned victorious, and lived wherever they wanted. Even Stearns yielded to the ambitions of the world to conclude dispute in bloodbath and ruin. All those arguments and strategies and power plays… and then most of the pines were sold to the state to preserve as a national forest while the federal government acquired the north end for the military base, Fort Dix.

The spread of the human virus across the surface of the earth was not in danger of being slowed by anything other than an impulse to self-destruct. As the century proceeded and human beings flirted with extinction at their own hands, I imitated Christ and Socrates, practiced humility, did what I could to fulfill Franklin’s thirteenth commandment. By which I mean I did nothing at all. Any footprint or hoof print or claw or tooth mark would be unbecoming of the entity I wished to become. An angel? Something almost nonexistent, but earthly, breathing, with the blood in my wrists and desire in my loins restrained.

Humans underwent cataclysms of energy come adolescence. Perhaps I was on a longer timescale than usual, only recently entering an awkward hormonal era? I liked that thought: in Leeds Devil years, I was only thirteen, the equivalent of more than two hundred rotations of the earth around the sun. If I lived to be seventy in Leeds Devil years, my life would not end until roughly 2800 or later—let’s say 3000—long enough for anyone. There would be time enough to breed. Plus who knew how humans would mutate or customize themselves to adapt to environmental change? It was possible that breeding would no longer involve a sexual act by the time I was twenty five in Leeds Devil years. It would be more like shopping, based on best possible genetic union. In which case, if sex were only atavistic urge and intimate pleasure, I might be in luck if ever I encountered a woman who didn’t mind if I forever wore a white wedding dress to bed.