Read Online The Beyond by Jeffrey Ford - Free Book Online

the tour after two hours in my room, where I house the Museum of the Ruins, my own natural history installation of those objects I believe to hold an integral part of the essence of the Well-Built City. We strolled up and down the rows, and I showed her the head of the mechanical gladiator, the old shudder cups, etc. When we came to the back row, I took down the core of the fruit of Paradise that Cley, himself, had eaten, and let her smell it.
    â€œI see a beautiful garden surrounded by ice,” she said as I held the core up to her nose. For some reason, the look on her face almost made me weep.
    From the museum, we went down the hall to the library, and I showed her the volumes and my writing desk with the pen in its holder and the pages from my previous night’s work neatly piled.
    â€œWhat are you writing?” she asked.
    â€œAbout Cley,” I said. “I’m trying to find him with words.”
    â€œPeople who believed Cley’s writings in Wenau gathered money and sent an expedition a few months ago to the Beyond to also find him,” she said.
    â€œA mistake,” I told her. “I wish them well, but I’m afraid what they will find there is death.”
    â€œThey took a lot of guns,” she said.
    I could not help but laugh.
    She was unfazed by my reaction. “Cley has become a hero for them,” she said.
    â€œI wish them well,” I repeated.
    Then she pointed to my desk, at the jeweled box I keep in the corner of it. It is fixed with red stones and fake gold—just a trinket, but something that I have always liked since finding it underground by the site of the false paradise.
    â€œWhat is that for?” she asked.
    â€œNothing,” was the real answer, and I was going to give it to her, but at the last moment, I had an idea. After our tour through the ruins, she knew most everything about them, but I thought as long as there was some element of mystery here, she might return again.
    â€œThat box holds a powerful secret,” I told her, knowing by her obvious intelligence that she would be susceptible to wonder. “I’m not ready to show it to anyone,” I said. “I would have to know that person very well indeed.”
    I thought she would ask me to open it for her, but she didn’t. All she said was, “I understand; I have a box like that at home, myself.”
    â€œAnd at home, they do not mind that you and your brother have run off to the ruins?” I asked.
    She looked away from me, down one of the long aisles of the library, as she spoke. “We were supposed to be going to Latrobia to visit relatives. I made the boys follow me to the ruins by telling them they were cowards if they didn’t come.”
    â€œHow were you traveling?” I asked.
    â€œOn horseback. We had two horses—Caine and I on one and Remmel on the other. I know they have probably taken them and gone back to Wenau to tell my mother that I have become lunch for the demon,” she said.
    â€œCome quickly,” I said. “We will easily beat them to the village.”
    As it turned out, I flew her home. I cannot recount the details of that journey because as I now fly in my memory, I do not pass over the fields of Harakun, but instead, move at the speed of thought over the flat land of the Beyond. The beauty has me in its arms, and I am empty-handed, searching for Cley. Below, the wilderness is shaking off the spell of winter.

the hunter is hunted
    Wildflowers sprouted, and the grass came up so quickly that the hunter could swear he heard it growing in the stillness of the night. Every day was deep blue, warm sun, and a soft breeze blowing from the north. In the late afternoons, the light shone down in golden shafts through billowing white clouds. The plain appeared endless in all directions, perfectly flat and treeless. An ancient glacier had, in its retreat, deposited smooth, oblong boulders here and there, and Cley thought of them