Free The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford Page B

the end of time. I’m not giving medals for stupid questions this week. You’d better get to it,” he said, speaking out of the smiling side of his mouth.
    I pulled out the gun and raised my arm to aim. The derringer swerved and dipped at the behest of the beauty, my fear, and the increasingly pungent odor of Greta Sykes. “What if I were to miss,” I thought as I closed one eye for clearer vision. That thought exploded in my mind a moment before the gun went off, its report ricocheting off the blue walls of the cavern.
    I came awake suddenly, sitting straight up. Across the room from me there was a neat hole in the center of Arden’s mirror and a sleet storm of shattered glass on the floor in front of it. I shook my head in an attempt to clear it. The bright day outside my window revealed an end to the snowstorm. I threw the derringer on the floor and took out a cigarette. There was the sound of rustling a floor below, and then I heard Mantakis hurrying up the stairs. His pounding at the door thickened my headache and spiked my eyes.
    â€œYour honor,” he called, “did I hear a gun go off?”
    â€œA little experiment, Mantakis,” I said.
    â€œAn experiment?” he asked.
    â€œTo see if you were awake,” I said.
    â€œI am,” he said.
    â€œWhat is the time?”
    â€œYour honor, it is nine-fifty.”
    â€œDraw me a bath and bring me a steaming bowl of that excrement that passes for sustenance here.”
    â€œThe wife has made a cremat goulash that is a testament to her abilities,” he said.
    â€œMy very fear, Mantakis.”
    I almost lost consciousness while adrift in the acrimonious waters of my bath. With the freezing temperature, the blowing snow, and the fact that I felt as if I really had traveled to Mount Gronus through the night, my mind reeled and my consciousness began to constrict in the manner of my other apertures. Just as I was going under, Mantakis appeared and swept a steeping bowl of goulash under my nose, which had the miraculous effect of smelling salts. I actually thanked him for that whiff of death and then ordered him to take it, and himself, away.
    I sat, frozen, and searched every inch of my mind for the lost Physiognomy. I couldn’t turn up a single digit, not even a fraction of a chin. “What do you do when the surface gives way and you fall in?” I said to the snowdrifts beyond the screen. Then the Master came to my thoughts, carried by a chilly gust of wind, and for a moment I wondered if perhaps he had not truly contacted me by somehow swimming through the beauty and into last night’s hallucination. The memory of Greta Sykes standing before me led me to believe the entire incident was nothing more than a nightmare concocted from my own worst fears, but the Master was rich in magic, a primitive phenomenon I had no knowledge of. For all their grotesque weirdness, these thoughts did not concern me as much as the prospect of facing the faces of Anamasobia empty-headed.

8
    Mayor Bataldo was standing in a small snowdrift waiting for me outside the hotel. He was dressed in a long black coat, and atop his bulbous head was a ridiculous black hat with a broad brim. Seeing me, he flashed a grin so full of whimsy that I wanted, right then, to give him another beating.
    â€œBeautiful day, your honor,” he said.
    â€œContain yourself, Mayor, my patience is a brittle thing today,” I told him.
    â€œThe people of Anamasobia await you at the church,” he said, his smile fading but never quite completely gone.
    We started down the street, snow crunching beneath our boots, the town as still and silent as a graveyard. As we walked, the mayor reeled off the details of his preparations.
    â€œI have assigned you a bodyguard, the most vicious of the miners, a fellow named Calloo. He will protect you in the event one of the citizens protests the protocol. Father Garland has set a screen up on the altar so that