A Natural History of Hell: Stories by Jeffrey Ford Read Free Book Online

as the shrouded faces behind window curtains looked on, the beast who’d torn away the blankets tore away Gersha’s face in one piece and left it on the snow like a mask in the moonlight.
    Through the care of Struth, the Mrs. survived the amputation but contracted an unheard-of disease which caused her to vomit billowing clouds of dirt. She was shunned for fear of infection and died soon after the doctor killed himself. After the mastiffs’ visit, the topic of giving Alfrod Seems a piece of their mind was never raised by the villagers in any tone louder than a whisper.
    Year followed year, and when the snow fell the angel made his visits, taking one and sometimes leaving one. When asked by the trembling baker, whose wife never returned, where she was, Seems smiled and told him, “It didn’t work out.” The baker only barely thought of murder and found the sharp tip of the angel’s ivory cane resting against his throat. The women who were returned were always pregnant with miniature Alfrods. The copies who survived birth were taken each time by the mastiffs; the ones who didn’t remained within till the end of their mothers’ days. Those servants who returned were all in some way physically deformed—extra appendages, third eyes, animal traits—and spoke a language of moans and grunts that meant nothing.
    Pella Thilem, who had served the angel and returned with fur and snout, was unusual. Most of the servants who came back to the village passed away soon after. Pella lived on, and in her later years she regained, to a very limited degree, her human language. In her own way, she told the villagers what had happened at the angel’s den. “Like a glory,” she said. “Lights and ice. Trees fingers. Dogs. Work at fire. Angel hand. Face. Scream every day. A fountain.”
    Some passed off Pella’s words as nonsense, and others studied them carefully, letting the imagination unfold the possibilities of their message. Theories about the origin and nature of Alfrod Seems abounded. He was thought to be a demon, but there were those who believed he actually was an angel sent by a jealous God. Alfrod Seems, himself, claimed to have been grown in a pale woman’s garden, pulled up by the roots, and left to play in the forest at night.
    One thing that was true about the angel, he was good to his word, for even though disasters befell neighboring villages, they never troubled the land of his servants. When the river flooded, the water should have swamped the fields, but it miraculously stopped at the edge of the village and built up to six feet high, not one drop of it falling past the invisible boundary. It was said you could walk along beside it, a blue wall, and watch the fish swimming.
    After the highwayman, Jado, robbed the village merchants on their way to market, he was found hanging in a tree at the crossroad, naked and skewered like a sausage, ass to mouth, on a long oak branch. And the plague came only for a day, blown off by a magical breeze. No one died from it, whereas only two miles away at Cleneth, the bodies were stacked three high and burning.
    Whatever solace was gained from Alfrod’s protection, it was lost in the dog days, the height of the summer heat, when the mastiffs went mad and roved the wheat fields and cornfields in search of prey, rushing through the tunnels of green shade. Farmers went missing. Sometimes a scrap of clothing and a shattered bone would be found, once a half a skull, but most often nothing, as if they’d never lived. From the safety of a tree, one could watch the beasts moving through the wheat, a furious rippling, heading directly for an unsuspecting man whistling at his work. He was there and never there in the blink of an eye.
    On the fifth of his yearly visits, the angel told the people that on his next he expected a feast in his honor at which he and they would all sit down and celebrate him. “Make it lavish,” he said. They didn’t know what lavish meant, but after