Read Online Memoranda by Jeffrey Ford - Free Book Online

shred of Below’s thoughts. Instead, I uncovered a dozen palm-sized creatures that mixed the attributes of man and fish. The heads were bulbous and gilled. Although there were legs with feet, there were also tails. I stared far longer than I should have.
    It was slow going, and the discoveries were all wondrous but unsettling. I found gears made of bone, and bones grafted from metal. These lay in a patch of grass that grew out of the top of a table as if it were dirt instead of wood. Next to this was a collection of female heads of a lime complexion. They lay drenched in a clear viscous solution beneath the shattered remains of the huge jars in which they had once floated. There were racks of instruments, none which I could identify, and springs and gears scattered amidst the glass.
    Every few minutes a machine in the shape of a diminutive lighthouse at the center of the lab would begin to glow and project three-dimensional images of colorful, long-tailed birds flying through the air. Their different songs filled the lab. As abruptly as the device turned on it would suddenly go dark, and the sounds and images would fade. It was during one of the flights of the birds that I found a scrap of paper on the floor. On the shred of rumpled parchment, rendered in ink, were two objects: an hourglass and an eye, with an equal sign between them.
    â€œCome here, Cley,” Misrix called. I put the paper into my pocket and carefully made my way past an operating table rigged with wires and tubes, and around a chair made of metal. When I reached him, he was pulling a case out from beneath a worktable.
    â€œWhat do an hourglass and an eye have in common?” I asked him as he hefted the object up onto the table.
    â€œThe past has run through both of them?” said the demon, then flipped the latches on the sides of the case and opened it to reveal a blue-velvet lining and five vials of some liquid arranged in a star-shaped pattern, their corked tops almost touching at the center.
    â€œWhat is it?” I asked.
    â€œThis isn’t it,” he said, and shook his head. “I remember Father telling me that he called this mixture Holy Venom. What it does, I can only remember is not good.”
    â€œHave you seen any other cases like this one?” I asked.
    â€œNone that haven’t been broken into and the vials shattered.”
    â€œLet’s keep looking,” I said, but just then Misrix held his hand up, motioning for me to stay quiet. He leaned his head back as he had done earlier and sniffed at the air. I could see his ears actually twitch slightly as if tracking some vague sound.
    â€œThey are coming, Cley.”
    â€œWe haven’t had a chance to find anything.”
    â€œThere’s nothing to find. Everything is destroyed, and Father never committed his ideas to paper. We’ve got to leave now.”
    I looked around one more time to see if there was anything promising I had missed. The sight of the place in ruins saddened me, for I would have liked to have seen all of the products of the Master’s obtuse mind. It was the thought of the werewolves approaching that brought me to my senses. “It’s better off that all of this is destroyed,” I said.
    We made quietly and cautiously for the door. Misrix leaned over my shoulder, and whispered to me, “When we leave the building, don’t stop running.” He had us wait what seemed an incredibly long time before he broke into the daylight and took off down the street. I followed close behind, running away from the stench of the lab as fast as I could. I knew there was nothing more I could do to save my neighbors.
    If the werewolves were there, I didn’t see any and began to get suspicious as to whether Misrix had merely panicked again. I slowed down to a walk when we reached the boundary where the rubble began, mounds of treacherous wreckage sloping toward a distant ridge formed by the southern wall of the Ministry