Bestiary! (36 page)

"My father went straight out of the dining-room, walking on air. He found the manageress in the passage and held out his hand to her.

" 'I am afraid I have burned my hand,' he said. 'Do you think you could tie it up?'

"The manageress said, 'But it is a very bad burn. There are blisters all over the back. Of course, I will bind it up at once.

"He explained that he had burned it on one of the spirit lamps at the sideboard. He could scarcely conceal his delight. One cannot burn oneself by being insane.

" 'I saw you talking to the Dr. Professor,' said the manageress, as she was putting on the bandage. 'He is a sympathetic gentleman, is he not?'

The relief about his sanity soon gave place to other troubles. The Troll had eaten its wife and given him a blister, but it had also made an unplesant remark about its supper that evening. It proposed to eat my father. Now very few people can have been in a position to decide what to do when a troll earmarks them for its next meal. To begin with, although it was a tangible troll in two ways, it had been invisible to the other diners. This put my father in a difficult position. He could not, for instance, ask for protection. He could scarcely go to the manageress and say, 'Professor Skal is an odd kind of werewolf, ate his wife last night, and proposes to eat me this evening.' He would have found himself in a loony-bin at once. Besides, he was too proud to do this, and still too confused. Whatever the proofs and blisters, he did not find it easy to believe in professors that turned into trolls. He had lived in the normal world all his life, and, at his age, it was difficult to start learning afresh. It would have been quite easy for a baby, who was still coordinating the world, to cope with the troll situation: for my father, not. He kept trying to fit it in somewhere, without disturbing the universe. He kept telling himself that it was nonsense: one did not get eaten by professors. It was like having a fever, and telling oneself that it was all right, really, only a delirium, only something that would pass.

"There was that feeling on the one side, the desperate assertion of all the truths that he had learned so far, the tussle to keep the world from drifting, the brave but intimidated refusal to give in or to make a fool of himself.

"On the other side there was stark terror. However much one struggled to be merely deluded, or hitched up momentarily in an odd packet of space-time, there was panic. There was the urge to go away as quickly as possible, to flee the dreadful Troll. Unfortunately the last train had left Abisko, and there was nowhere else to go.

"My father was not able to distinguish these trends of thought. For him they were at the time intricately muddled together. He was in a whirl. A proud man, and an agnostic, he stuck to his muddled guns alone. He was terribly afraid of the Troll, but he could not afford to admit its existence. All his mental processes remained hung up, whilst he talked on the terrace, in a state of suspended animation, with an American tourist who had come to Abisko to photograph the Midnight Sun.

"The American told my father that the Abisko railway was the northernmost electric railway in the world, that twelve trains passed through it every day traveling between Uppsala and Narvik, that the population of Abo was 12,000 in 1862, and that Gustavus Adolphus ascended the throne of Sweden in 1611. He also gave some facts about Greta Garbo.

"My father told the American that a dead baby was required for the mass of St. Secaire, that an elemental was a kind of mouth in space that sucked at you and tried to gulp you down, that homeopathic magic was practiced by the aborigines of Australia, and that a Lapland woman was careful at her confinement to have no knots or loops about her person, lest these should make the delivery difficult.

"The American, who had been looking at my father in a strange way for some time, took offense at this and walked away; so that there was nothing for it but to go to bed.

"My father walked upstairs on will-power alone. His faculties seemed to have shrunk and confused themselves. He had to help himself with the banister. He seemed to be navigating himself by wireless, from a spot about a foot above his forehead. The issues that were involved had ceased to have any meaning, but he went on doggedly up the stairs, moved forward by pride and contrariety. It was physical fear that alienated him from his body, the same fear that he had felt as a boy, walking down long corridors to be beaten. He walked firmly up the stairs.

"Oddly enough, he went to sleep at once. He had climbed all day and been awake all night and suffered emotional extremes. Like a condemned man, who was to be hanged in the morning, my father gave the whole business up and went to sleep.

"He was woken at midnight exactly. He heard the American on the terrace below his window, explaining excitedly that there had been a cloud on the last two nights at 11:58, thus making it impossible to photograph the Midnight Sun. He heard the camera click.

"There seemed to be a sudden storm of hail and wind. It roared at his windowsill, and the window curtains lifted themselves taut, pointing horizontally into the room. The shriek and rattle of the tempest framed the window in a crescendo of growing sound, an increasing blizzard directed toward himself. A blue paw came over the sill.

"My father turned over and hid his head in the pillow. He could feel the doomed head dawning at the window and the eyes fixing themselves upon the small of his back. He could feel the places physically, about four inches apart. They itched. Or else the rest of his body itched, except those places. He could feel the creature growing into the room, glowing like ice, and giving off a storm. His mosquito curtains rose in its afflatus, uncovering him, leaving him defenseless. He was in such an ecstasy of terror that he almost enjoyed it. He was like a bather plunging for the first tine into freezing water and unable to articulate. He was trying to yell, but all he could do was to throw a series of hooting noises from his paralyzed lungs. He became a part of the blizzard. The bedclothes were gone. He felt the Troll put out its hands.

"My father was an agnostic, but, like most idle men, he was not above having a bee in his bonnet. His favorite bee was the psychology of the Catholic Church. He was ready to talk for hours about psychoanalysis and the confession. His greatest discovery had been the rosary.

"The rosary, my father used to say, was intended solely as a factual occupation which calmed the lower centers of the mind. The automatic telling of the beads liberated the higher centers to meditate upon the mysteries. They were a sedative, like knitting or counting sheep. There was no better cure for insomnia than a rosary. For several years he had given up deep breathing or regular counting. When he was sleepless he lay on his back and told his beads, and there was a small rosary in the pocket of his pyjama coat.

"The Troll put out its hands, to take him around the waist. He became completely paralyzed, as if he had been winded. The Troll put its hands upon the beads.

"They met, the occult forces, in a clash above my father's heart. There was an explosion, he said, a quick creation of power. Positive and negative. A flash, a beam. Something like the splutter with which the antenna of a tram meets its overhead wires again, when it is being changed about.

"The Troll made a high squealing noise, like a crab being boiled, and began rapidly to dwindle in size. It dropped my father and turned about, and ran wailing, as if it had been terribly burned, for one window. Its color waned as its size decreased. It was one of those air-toys now, that expire with a piercing whistle. It scrambled over the windowsill, scarcely larger than a little child, and sagging visibly.

"My father leaped out of bed and followed it to the window. He saw it drop on the terrace like a toad, gather itself together, stumble off, staggering and whistling like a bat, down the valley of the Abiskojokk.

"My father fainted.

"In the morning the manageress said, 'There has been such a terrible tragedy. The poor Dr. Professor was found this morning in the lake. The worry about his wife had certainly unhinged his mind.'

"A subscription for the wreath was started by the American, to which my father subscribed five shillings; and the body was shipped off next morning, on one of the twelve trains that travel between Uppsala and Narvik every day."

THE GRIFFIN

The griffin (or gryphon) is one of the oldest of mythological beasts, and 3000-year-old golden statues of it have been found in the royal tombs of Crete. The griffin has the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle; it's often described as having talons large enough to be made into drinking cups. Originally characterized as so incomparably fierce that, according to Pliny, it was the creature chosen to guard the goldmines of the gods, the griffin has, curiously, become progressively milder in temperament with the ensuing centuries. By the Middle Ages, the griffin was commonly thought of as a symbol of Christ, and had become one of the most popular beasts in heraldry. Today, this once most-ferocious of all creatures appears frequently in children's books, where it is almost always a benign, and sometimes even a comic, figure.

In the story that follows, we learn that a griffin, as well as being a symbol, can also be a Sign and a Portent . . . A. E. Sandeling has published fiction in
Story magazine.

Return of the Griffins

by

A. E. Sandeling

GUNAR VRIES, EMISSARY to the United Nations Conference in New York from the European Democracy of S,
sat on the edge of his bed in his hotel room, removing his shoes and socks.

He had declined to be present that evening at a party given in his honor by a wealthy expatriate, telephoning his regrets. In his stead he had sent his aide, a handsome young man who, besides being secretary and translator, was also a composer of symphonies; instructing him to confine himself to seduction and to the piano. As for Gunar Vries, he had had his supper sent up and after the tray was removed had locked his door and set himself to his writing his daily personal letter to his president, in which he imparted observations too detailed to be made over the phone, and letters to the members of his family, his wife Alice and his son Theodore at the Technological University. When he had signed his name for the third time, the night was late.

He was removing his second sock when the bed moved. He grasped the blankets to keep from being thrown, believing that an earthquake had struck. But the bottles did not slide from the dresser, no particles of ceiling fell, the chandelier did not sway. Only the bed moved. Then through his lifted knees he saw emerging from beneath the bed the head of an eagle, but three times the size of an eagle's head, and stretching out for a grip of the rug, an eagle's claw. Then followed a lion's body. So the lion had an eagle's head. Or the eagle had a lion's body.

When the creature emerged completely, Gunar saw that it had also two wings, great eagle wings, that now it stretched one at a time across the floor. The wing roots crackled, and the feathers swept across the rug with a swishing, rushing sound. The creature slouched to the center of the room, its forelegs lifting stiffly, like a bird's leg, but in coordination with its hindlegs, that moved in the indolently potent manner of a lion.

Still heavy with sleep, the monster fell over on its side and, gently lifting its wing, turned its head under and with closed beak nuzzled along the feathery pocket, in this way nudging itself to wakefulness and woe again. Then, lifting its head, swinging it around and up, the creature looked straight at Gunar Vries. The eagle part took prominence —the curved beak, hard as stone, the thick encasing of golden feathers over its head, touched with red at the breast and extending down its forelegs to the very toes. Lion ears protruded through the feathers but were laid sleekly back. Its eyes burned ruby bright in the semidarkness.

"Change of climate," it explained, "makes me sleepy."

Before he had entered politics, more than twenty years ago, Gunar Vries had been professor of ancient Greek civilization at the University of Alia, capital of His past enabled him to recognize the creature. "Griffin?" he asked. "Is that your name?" He had several cats on his farm and a trained falcon, and spoke always with tenderness and respect to them, as now he spoke to this great creature.

"Yes," replied the griffin, "and of the pure strain. If you're wondering about the Sphinx and her woman's face, one of us became enamored of a virgin of your species; though I can't see what he saw in her."

The griffin spoke its own language, like no other in the world, and yet a concoction of them all, with archaic Greek like a warrior's chariot rumbling and shining through. It was like everything unspoken that a word cannot be put to and that is comprehended more readily than that spoken among men of different languages.

"You've been away several years," said Gunar, covering his bare feet again with shoes and socks. "What did you do in that time?"

"Took ourselves to the mountains of India," replied the griffin. "Sat in the sun, on the thresholds of our caves, or caught the Arimaspi, one-eyed men who seek gold in the mountains, ate them in a shrugging fashion, already gorged with our prowess. I might ask the same question of you. What didn't you do? By Apollo! Procreated not individuals but nations. Took the lid off a water kettle, and what steams out but ships and cities. Times have changed."

The creature's breath began to fill the room, an overlay warm breath, smelling of raw meat, the rich, dark, stinging smell of blood clots and liver.

Gunar Vries had his trousers on and his gray hunting shirt that he wore evenings by himself, but he was cold. He turned the radiator higher. "I presume," he said, standing with his back to the heat, "that you wandered down alone?"

"Only one of the vanguard," replied the creature, preening its breast.

Now Gunar Vries was fully aware of the monster's significance. They were in their time sacred to Apollo, whose chariot they drew, and as Apollo was the prophetical deity whose oracle when consulted delivered itself in enigmas, the word griffin, too, meant enigma. And because he was fully aware of this, he preferred not to seem aware.