The Beyond Read Free Page B

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