Memoranda

29

When next I opened my eyes, I was strapped to the operating table in Below's lab. I could see through the entrance and places where the walls had broken down that it was morning, meaning I had spent the entire night under the influence of the new, more potent sheer beauty. There had been visions, hallucinations more intense than anything I had ever experienced. Of this, I was certain, but exactly what they were was unclear. I vaguely remembered conversing with Brisden about some philosophical point, and at another juncture I had danced with the monkey, Silencio. There were other scraps of images that also returned—a three-masted ship battling high seas, a bitten piece of the white fruit sporting half a green worm, an animated etching in liquid mercury of the Delicate pursuing us. The only part of it that I was sure of was that a radiant vision of Anotine had been with me through it all.

I was dazed and weak from the experience, but I longed to see her and worried about her condition. My promise had been that I would return quickly, and I felt each minute that had passed since I left her side to be another brick in a wall that would separate us forever. Looking to the left of me, I could see clearly the open entrance to the lab, my path to freedom, but try as I might I could not budge the straps that were tightened around my chest and legs. To the right were all Below's bizarre experiments, the tables holding clear jars of heads, jars of gilled fetuses, liquid rainbows, gears made of bone. Every now and then, at odd intervals, the diminutive lighthouse would begin to glow and the lab was filled with the darting figures of birds. These songs, in conjunction with the howling of the prisoners out back in their cages, combined to make a music that was driving me mad.

I tested my bonds again, this time crying out in order to add the force of my voice to my overall effort. When that didn't work, I simply began screaming, because I could think of nothing else to do. Thrashing my head back and forth wildly, I let loose with the sum total of my frustration.

I had nearly grown hoarse when Misrix appeared at the entrance. He stepped into the lab and passed by me, trying very hard not to make eye contact. I turned my head and followed his progress. Walking over to one of the tables, he lifted an object and started back. I couldn't help but smile when I saw that what he had retrieved was the memory book. This was my last chance.

"Misrix," I called to him. "Demon, I have a secret for you."

He averted his eyes from me as he made for the doorway.

"I can tell you the meaning of that white fruit you found in the ruins."

He stopped for a second, his back still facing me.

"I can tell you how it fits into the story of the city," I said. Of course, I had no idea what I was going to say, but I needed to get his attention.

He slowly came around to face me. "How do you know about the white fruit?" he asked.

"It's in your museum, is it not?"

He stepped closer, moving his wings, and their breeze washed over me.

"My father told you," he said.

I shook my head. "I simply know. That fruit is the key to the story you have been piecing together, and I know exactly where it fits in."

"Tell me," he said, using a claw of his free hand to push his spectacles back up the bridge of his thin nose.

"Loosen my straps, here. Let me get up and stretch my arms and legs, and I'll tell you" I said.

He laughed like a goat bleating. "My father would be very angry if I were to do that," he said. "He's waiting for me to bring him his book. I must go."

"No, you can't. He's going to turn me into one of those creatures," I said.

"He said you need to become one. He told me that was your reason for returning to the city, so that you could be made different."

"He lies," I said. "All I want is to be let go."

He shook his head and started to turn away.

"One more minute," I said.

He waited and looked back over his shoulder.

"You say your father will be angry if you help me. Just think of his disappointment when I tell him that you coupled with the wolf girl, Greta Sykes."

The barbed tip of his tail snapped the air an inch from my eyes. "That is not true," he said.

"You know it is true, and he will know it is true. Do you think there is anything that your father cannot know, any truth he cannot uncover if given a clue? Three pairs of spectacles will not make you seem any less a beast after he knows you have joined with the werewolf."

He stood there staring down at me.

"Did you have a cigarette afterward?" I asked.

He winced at this remark, and I laughed out loud.

I thought for a moment that he was going to ignore me, but then I realized he was moving away only to place the memory book down on the seat of the metallic chair. He came back to me and, with two precise swipes of his claws, severed the straps.

Sliding off the table, I reached down into my boot and retrieved the Lady Claw I had carried with me from the island. I handed it to him. "Give this to him," I said. "Tell him you found it next to the table. He will think I escaped on my own."

"Yes," he said, and I could see the concept of deception dawning in his expression.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and put my face up to his. "Now go, quickly," I shouted. "Hurry." He left the room and, once outside, took off running.

Lifting the book from where he had laid it on the chair, I opened the cover and found the loose pages filled with rows of symbols rendered in a perfectly black ink. I had no time to sort them out just then, I had to get away from the city. The minute that Below knew of my escape, he would be after me. There was no stumbling to my run now as I headed out the door and began to retrace the path that Greta had used to bring me to the lab. I thought only of Anotine, especially those quiet, unamazing moments when we simply talked and shared the present. It was this that I was desperate to get back to again.

My greatest concern was Greta. I expected her to come bounding out of some shadowed nook of debris at any moment. It was still morning, though, and I remembered Misrix having told me that the werewolves did not usually awaken till noon. This must have been the case, because I cleared the crumbling walls of the city with no incident. When I stepped out onto the fields of Harakun, I felt a great surge of energy, thinking, "I've done it. I have the book. I have the antidote." I ran like a demon.

I covered half the distance to the tree line where I had entered the fields the previous day before I began to lose my stamina. A sharp pain had developed in my left knee, causing me to gallop awkwardly like Quismal inspired by fear. Still I kept going, heaving for air. "How many times am I going to have to dash across these damn fields," I thought to myself as the sun began to work its harsh process on me again.

Then, nearly three-quarters of the way to the cover of the trees, I turned my ankle in a hole and fell forward. The book slipped from my grasp, twirling upward as I went down. In its ascent, it opened, releasing the symbol-laden pages like a pod bursting, its white seeds flying everywhere. I gathered myself up and stood, stunned for a moment amidst the snow squall of falling paper.

Having no time to feel thwarted, I immediately set to gathering the pages together. I thought, "If I can just find that one that has the eye, the hourglass, and the circle on it, I can leave the others behind." They all appeared the same, though, as I chased them down and added them to my stack. When I turned to gather those that had fallen behind me, my sight was attracted to something in the sky. At first I thought it was a bird, but then saw that it was far too large for that. The wingspan was enormous and it was closing fast, swooping low over the fields. "Misrix," I said, and frantically began searching again for the page.

I lifted three more sheets of parchment, and then, approaching a fourth, I saw it, an eye looking back at me from the top of a column of symbols. Falling to my knees, I reached for it, but the action of the demon's wings as he landed, blew it away from me.

"Damn you" I said, standing, seriously preparing to fight him. "I warned you I would tell your father about the wolf girl."

Misrix laughed. "Cley," he said, "you're mistaken. It is me from your own time. I finally broke through into the memory world. I am here to take you back."

"No," I cried. "I'm not going back. I'm not finished here."

"We can't wait. My father's condition has grown worse, and the memory world, all of it, is disintegrating."

"I must see Anotine. I promised her I would return."

"You can't. Cley, she is just a thought. You are risking both our lives by delaying for nothing more than a spark, a breath of air."

"Don't say that about her," I said. I could see what I had to do then. I walked forward as if I was resigned to going. When I drew within a foot of the demon, I balled my right hand into a fist and putting all of my strength behind it, punched him squarely in the jaw. He reeled backward and fell over onto the ground. The second he went down, I scrabbled over to where the page had blown and retrieved it. Without checking to see what condition Misrix was in, I again made for the tree line.

I heard his wings above me before he landed on my back. His arm came around my throat from behind, and he tried to subdue me by preventing me from breathing. Stopping short in my stride, I ducked forward and he flew over me, but at the last second, grabbed my shirt and pulled me down on top of him. We wrestled fiercely, turning one over the other across the ground. Finally, his superior strength won out and he sat atop me, his left hand clutching my throat.

"I can't let you stay," he said, and then brought his right hand down with great force, smashing me across the face with the back of it. As I lost consciousness, I felt myself losing Anotine, and I knew exactly what it was like to die.

We were flying low through the night sky of Misrix's mind, over the forests of the Beyond.

"I lost track of you when the island disappeared," he said. "I had to search innumerable memories in order to find you. It took hours. I thought you would both perish."

I felt very weak and completely blank.

"The antidote, did you find it?" he asked, soaring upward into the night sky.

"It's the beauty," I said. "What else? Sheer beauty."

He reached the pinnacle of his ascent, then began the downward rush into our own reality. Somewhere in the descent, I passed into a deep sleep that was mercifully dreamless.

I opened my eyes, and found myself sitting in the chair in the room that contained Below's bed. My feet were up on the bench, and I was in the same position as when Misrix had placed his hand upon my head and initiated the dreaming wind. Looking to my left, I saw the demon, hunched over his father's body, administering a dose of the beauty to the vein in the old man's neck.

My muscles were cramped from having sat in the same position for so long, and I needed Misrix to help me to my feet.

"It took four hours," he said, as he wrapped his arm and wing around me for support.

We moved slowly toward the door. The pain in my knee I had gotten from running across the fields in the memory world had followed me back across time and space and now throbbed. Leaving the room, Misrix turned back and closed the door behind us.

Once I was sitting at the table in the room I had eaten in earlier, puffing on a Hundred-To-One, a cup of shudder sitting in front of me, the demon sat down. I still felt drained, both physically and emotionally.

"I feel dead," I said, letting out a trail of smoke.

"You look it too," said Misrix. "You spent too much time in the mnemonic reality. Your coming out was like an infant leaving the womb."

"I'm empty," I said.

"Cley, I wasn't going to tell you this, but I found the cure for the sleeping disease before you did. In an earlier memory of my father's, I stumbled upon him just as he discovered that the beauty would reverse its damage. I had to come and get you, though. You've got to live your life. If there was any way I could have brought the woman out, I would have. Can you forgive me?"

"I find it truly insane," I said, "that I have searched for love my entire life, and finally, when I found it, it was in the mind of a man who I considered to be a symbol of pure evil."

"But do you forgive me?" he asked.

"There's nothing to forgive. You are the only one of the three of us who operated out of truth. Your father and I were deceitful, he toward the world, and I with myself. You were right about something else also," I said, and took a sip of shudder.

"What?" asked the demon.

"It turned out to be a love story."