The Physiognomy

He shook his head. "I don't know, but even you must agree there is something unusual here."

"It isn't the unusual I doubt," I said.

"What then?" asked Garland. "The fruit, the Traveler—they are miracles, surely you can see."

"All I see is a dried-out cadaver with the craniometry of a vase, and all I hear coming from your mouth is superstitious twaddle. What am I supposed to gather from this?" I asked.

"I will turn my church over to you tomorrow, but tonight I would like you to do something for me."

"Perhaps," I said.

"I want you to read the Traveler's face."

I looked up to see if it would be worth it, and I noticed a few tantalizing features. The long forehead was misshapen but gracefully so. "It might be interesting," I said.

Garland offered his paw to me and I shook it.

Outside, I found Aria sitting on the bottom step of the church. She was staring out across the huge field that separated the end of town from the begi

"The snow is coming," she said without turning around.

That afternoon, I had Mantakis take a message to Bataldo stating that the populace should assemble outside the church the next morning at ten. Then Aria went to my study to make the preliminary readings on her grandfather's face while I took the beauty to bed. As I lay there waiting for the warmth to begin to creep, I thought two things. The first was that perhaps someone had taken Garland's dog so the church would be unguarded at night while the father slept. The second was that the physiognomy of the child the woman had begged me to read in the street the previous day seemed utterly familiar to me. Then Professor Flock appeared with a brief report from the sulphur mines. "Hot as can be," he said, puffing and grunting. Sweat dripped from his reddened face. From behind him, I heard shouting and the cracking of whips. "And my god, the smell, the very elimination of excrement." He moaned before disappearing. Soon after, I sank into an hallucination involving Aria and the demons that quickly burned the beauty's wick. When I awoke, two hours later, three inches of snow lay on the main street of Anamasobia and more was being driven down on fierce winds from Gronus.

Snow, almost nonexistent back in the Weil-Built City, was an inconvenient little miracle I could have lived without, but as I changed my shirt and freshened up, I felt invigorated by the thought that I would soon get a chance to do some real work. When I was ready, I grabbed my bag of instruments and my topcoat and went next door to the study to inform Aria that we were to return to the church. On my way across the landing, I called down to Mrs. Man-takis to bring us up some tea. She offered to also prepare di

I found Aria at my study desk, writing in a notebook of her own. She sat rigidly upright, but her hand moved furiously across the paper. In the minute I stood silently and watched her, she had filled an entire page and gone on to the next.

"Tea is coming," I said finally to alert her I was there.

"One minute," she said and continued writing.

I was slightly put out by her failure to officially acknowledge my presence, but there was something about the controlled desperation with which she wrote that prevented me from interrupting her. She was still writing when Mrs. Mantakis brought the tea.

She entered with a look in her eye that suggested she did not approve of my young female guest. "Did your honor enjoy the mayor's party?" she asked while setting the silver tray down on the table before me. She wore the most ridiculous bo

"Quite a gala," I said.

"Just after you left, they barbecued the fire bat and there was enough for everyone to have a little piece. You know, they say it makes you see better at night."

"Before or after you vomit?" I asked.

"Oh, your honor, its taste is quite special, like a spicy rabbit, or have you ever had curried pigeon?"

"You're through," I told her and pointed to the door.

She scurried out with her hands folded and her head bowed.

"A regrettable woman," I said to Aria as I lifted my teacup.

"I'm coming," she said.

Finally, she came and sat with me. The top button of her blouse had unfastened and her eyes were tired and beautiful. As she poured herself a cup of tea, I asked her if she would like to assist me in performing a reading that night.

I saw great promise in her when she did not ask who the subject was but simply replied, "Yes, your honor." She showed no sign of excitement or fear. She barely even blushed. When she sipped her tea she nodded vacantly at a spot an inch away from my eyes. It had taken me years to learn that technique.

"Now then, what did your grandfather reveal?" I asked, breaking her spell on me.

"He's a classic sub-four with traces of the avian," she said.

"Did you notice anything unusual, as I did, about the eye-crease-to-jaw measurements?" I asked.

"That was the most interesting part," she said. "It's only a hairsbreadth off the Grandeur Quotient."

"Yes, so close, yet so far."

"Holistically, he's a three," she said.

"Come, come, there is no place for nepotism in Physiognomy. I'll retire my calipers if he is any more than a two point seven. Anything else?" I asked.

"No," she said, "but as I rubbed my hands across his face, I had a memory of him telling me a piece of that story he had referred to as the 'Impossible Journey to the Earthly Paradise.' It is just a fragment, but I remembered it vividly. I wrote it down in my notebook."

"Give me a few particulars," I said.

She set down her tea and leaned back. "The miners had come to an abandoned city in the wilderness and stayed there for three nights after having done battle with a pack of demons. Grandfather had killed two of the creatures, one with his long knife and the other with his pistol. He had pulled their horns out with a pair of pliers in order to keep them as souvenirs.

"The city was near an inland sea and composed of huge mounds of earth riddled with tu

The night was frigid and the snow blew relentlessly against us as we made our way toward the church of Anamasobia. A flock of urchins was working on a snowman out in front of the mayor's office. If I didn't know any better I would have thought it was meant as an effigy of myself. Had Aria not been beside me and had I not been on an errand of official business, I'd have put my boot through it. "No matter," I thought, being in a good mood, "their congenital ignorance is sufficient punishment."

A few moments later, Aria called over the wind, "Did you see those boys were building a likeness of the Traveler? It has become a childhood tradition ever since he was discovered."

"Children," I said, "a race of bizarre deviants."

Then she said something and actually laughed aloud, but her words were swallowed by the wind.

I never thought I would be pleased to enter that Temple of the Off-Kilter, but not to have the snow driving into my face made the church almost acceptable. As Aria closed the big misshapen door behind us, I stood for a moment, listening to the immediate silence and behind it the wind howling as if at a great distance. Her hair was wet and the smell of it seemed to fill the dark foyer. My hand involuntarily came up to touch her face, but luckily she had already begun to move toward the bridge. We crossed over, myself a little unsteadily, reeling with her wet-forest scent. I'd have given a thousand belows to have been reading her that night instead of Garland's six-and-a-half-foot dried-dung manikin.