by Laird Barron
“You may want to cover your ears, even with a suppressor this will be quite loud.” Her voice has that smoky quality that went out of production sometime in the 30s; it sounds as if she is arrogantly directing servants from atop a divan. Her accent itself is unplaceable but makes one think of countries where models don’t have to meet minimum weight requirements.
Kelsey doesn’t have time for a rejoinder. A trio of figures bound into the alleyway—the unmistakable profile of Kalashnikovs in their gloved hands—their faces obscured with latex porcine masks. There is no hesitation or exchange of words; no declaration of intent—Sophie pulls the trigger in short bursts. The air seems to vanish in a thrumming suction—vacating the alleyway and filling with the sharp report of the slim death-dealing device in Sophie’s hand braced against her shoulder. The first hog in takes several rounds to his chest, twists about his axis and falls to the ground convulsing as shell casings hit the filthy asphalt in stucco simpatico with Sophie’s murderous intention as she shoves Kelsey roughly behind a dumpster before crouching there herself.
The barely perceptible crunch of approaching boots carves through the ruptured screaming of the convulsing figure and the unmistakable thuk and ping of arms fire converging on the dumpster. Kelsey has become numb, drifting somewhere inside herself in the twilight of the alley. Cursing rapidly, Sophie ejects the spent magazine, shoves another in its place and adopts a feral crouch as the hogs close in.
She pulls the charging handle again—the snap seemingly causing hesitation amidst the approaching sounder. Sophie gently leans to the edge of her makeshift cover and unleashes a muted spurt of bullets; loosing the singing flower of velocity: a round blossoming with slashing petals in its wake as it penetrates the lead sow’s knee before a second round from the burst finds his face through the mask. His head snaps back decisively and he keels over. His remaining compatriot backpedals frantically emptying his magazine into the dumpster until a dry click announces its finale.
Sophie drops the delicate box, produces a slim, black, angular hatchet from her jacket and runs her fleeing adversary down. Her knee smashes his groin as he doubles over vomiting into his mask and sharp repeated strikes of the hatchet nearly sever the placid, expressionless, screaming sow head. Kelsey babbles, a burble of words about the police as Sophie takes the time to pin the first downed hog’s rifle to his chest with her knee and brings the oblivion of her hatchet into his forehead—tearing the mask with a sick and decisive thud that ends his frantic, scrabbling struggle amidst his pooling blood. Sophie’s face is rent with sensual abandon and flecked with viscera.
“Pyewacket,” she addresses Kelsey warmly, “this is no place for you.” She lights a cigarette—a warm glow amidst cooling bodies—how the air is not pierced with sirens Kelsey cannot fathom, easily a hundred rounds were exchanged biting away the edges of her hearing. “Listen to me, we stand on the precipice of apocalyptic dawn.”
Kelsey looks up at the white teeth sharply outlined against red lips further crimsoned with stray gore. “Me and mine? We seek to rupture the dead skin of a decaying empire and join the ecstatic void. To reject the endless ashen charnel fields of modernity and rejoice in the demolition of false idols.” Sophie’s pale features are flushed and feverish. “You’ve been asking around about me and my sisters along with poking the trotters of the decadent bourgeois hogs.” Kelsey cannot find words, her mouth a strange and sandpapery tumbler incapable of pouring out speech.
Sophie continues: “We are the future, rejecting the role of women as nurturer and protector by embracing the potential of woman as destroyer—to this end we celebrate promiscuity, arson, abortion, luxury and decay. The third face of the goddess is unveiled and beckons to you.” She pauses, affixing her gaze on Kelsey. “But you, my Little Magpie, let me tell you a story that is also a question: You see something sticking out of the soil and—curious sort that you are—you start pulling and it keeps coming... and coming... what do you do when you grab the thread that could unravel the world?”
Kelsey struggles to articulate her thoughts—scrambled as they are. “Don’t worry Pyewacket, you’ll be able to tell me all your thoughts—fate has drawn our plans into confluence; I’ll be seeing you soon…” There is a meaty crack like an axe finding the core of a tree as Sophie stoops to pull her hatchet from the riven forehead. “Meet me at The Red Room. I’ll see you in Budua.”
Kelsey took her inarticulate response to the targets of her investigation personally. That night she crushed another bottle of burning, fragrant plum brandy she bought on the street—strains of tarragon scrabbling to break through from the withered herbs in the bottle. There was a semi-occupied squat where wild-eyed boys with tattoos of themselves standing over piles of dead cops and judges explained in halting English how the revolution rolled into town like a whirlwind. How powerful they felt throwing the fire-blossoming Molotov cocktails: fashizm—eto voina; a hand me down phrase from another war. The Wehrmacht never died, they explained, despite the inglorious splattering of the brains of the operation on a Berlin bunker wall. The CIA they said, Gladio, took Nazi intelligence officers on board to stop the leftward momentum of the post-war landscape; strangling their parents’ dreams of a revolution in its crib. They wouldn’t talk about the women with maggot tattoos, babbling about five vještica burned in Zagreb inevitably coming back for revenge.
They showed Kelsey how they dealt with the fascists on the way to the train—a lone drunk with a golden sow backpatch amidst the inverted crosses and spidery lines of band names. She emptied her pepper spray into his eyes after catching his attention and felt something brutal waking up while she laughed as the men took turns kicking his keening form in the ribs. She took the final round kicking the prone figure until he coughed up blood and the skeletal punks pulled her away and determined her to be a crazy fucking veštica through brandy sodden garbled English.
And so, she made her way to the luxury of Budua—a vacationing spot dripping with opulence and calcified wealth. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the old world was behind her, even when she found the tooth in her pocket, torn from the mouth of a bonafide fascist, she remained nonplussed, focused, relentless.
10 Days Ago
Sophie meets her as she disembarks the last ride she’s hitched—disturbingly aware of her movements. Casually hands her a plastic plate of kačamak—busies her with gulping swallows of paprika-fragrant cornmeal—as they walk the mostly comprehensible grid overseen by military fortifications exchanging rapid fire questioning; Sophie aloof, Kelsey undaunted. The Victory Over the Sun is some significant kilometers away over the horizon, but Kelsey is closing in on the march across Europe—the old money hemmed on all sides by brawling youthful screams and white lettering on solid black leather and canvas. Sophie promises this will not be a diversion but a chance to better understand the contours of the thread she is pulling at. An exclusive party of The Brotherhood of the Black, Corpulent Sow, a chance for unguarded proximity and access disguised among the crowd. They simply need to get cleaned up and dress the part, Sophie assures her absently. Their mission is protected by the relaxed arrogance of pigs sure of their element. The intentional urban planning gives way as they hike to the chaotic sprawl of the Eastern Budua field.
Their safehouse is dour, dismal, spartan concrete broken only by the staggering variety of armaments of Soviet manufacture, bladed weapons and fine clothing. The shower reminds Kelsey of the night she spent in lockup in France, but the spent grime whirling down the drain transforms her into something presentable.
The duo efficiently dress themselves before making their way into the teeming black clad throngs, spider-webbed with white scrawls. Passing through the constant ebb and flow of figures bedecked in leather, spikes, patches, tattoos intermingled with the more traditional crowd with the rarified dignity of opulent ghosts.
In a dingy alley, the proper set of knocks on an unremarkable, rust-splattered metal door—marred further with the occasional gouge of small arms fire—opens into
some strange and subterranean realm. The pair are whisked down broad stairs of dour pitted concrete into vermillion marble and gold opulence. The transformation like some fairytale transmutation of straw into gold as they move into a foyer punctuated by sculptures of bodies rent in sensual abandon copulating with the brusque forms of barbaric porcine figures. A confusing tableau crisscrossed with hanging carmine banners and the flowing lines of fashion. The entire space is awash in a press of the beau monde in chic and timeless looks clinking, effervescent champagne amidst the plaintive sounds of the Gespenster Sonata—not a single démodé look to be found amongst the casual drapery of excessive wealth and the insincere smiles of bleach-perfected, bone-white teeth. Sophie and Kelsey melt into the environment of perverse splendor.
Sophie wears a fulvous, strapless dress with minimal embellishments; amber pieces stuccoed with ephemeron which accents the coloration bound with an ostentatious clasp of skulls locked together which covers the florid maggots lapping at each other with sebaceous, inky tendrils. Kelsey, for her part, feels morbidly plain in her xanthous bouffant with obsidian detailing. Despite the obvious cost of their garments neither stands out amidst the jetset. Idly sipping champagne in a crystal flute, Sophie converses with Kelsey.
“You’re about to see the inner motions of a very exclusive aristocratic cult—very exclusive,” her tone shifts to a slightly sharper register, “stop looking around; their Brotherhood is not interested in the faces in front of power but the chthonic levers from which to oil it in filth and darkness.”
“It isn’t like anything about this has been communicated directly,” Kelsey rejoins.
“You’ve got some fire, Pyewacket;” Sophie observes coolly, “but you still are waking up. This isn’t something explained by detailing a series of pieces to you. This is something grasped and intuited by seeing the pieces. Watch the idle venality and orgiastic sodomy of the babirussa and his squealers.”
Kelsey takes a lethargic glance across her surroundings; the guests seem uncertain, their laughter forced and their motion stilted but their faces alight with avaritia. “This is recruitment, they’re unaware of what this is other than a path to reign over others. They’re hungry but they aren’t sure what they are in for.”
“Very good, Pyewacket! Yes, these glassy-eyed creatures think power is something granted rather than something wrested from a universe of acrimonious strife. See how their eyes are dim and glossy? How their jaws flap without substance? This is the soft underbelly of the world gilded with the demulcent unguents of insulation, privilege and wealth.” Sophie and Kelsey lean against one of the statues, taking in the conflux of wealth wrapping around the occasional adamantine sentinel—no weapons are evidenced on their person but a coiled alertness sets them apart from the swirling crowd. Sophie continues, “Have you ever wondered why it is women that are the most terrible bringers of vengeance—the furies, Nemesis, Keres—and yet their domestication is predicated on breaking their will as if they are a horse and mummifying them in stultifying uselessness. Did you know the color of this dress is mummy yellow, a yellow rich in material and color—the nobility of a fallen kingdom feeding the arts—that is what my sisters and I seek to do: to consume the dead world aristocracy and break free. Because we never left the valley of the dolls, the mystique never dissipated; we are still hungry enough we will suck nourishment from any bones we can scavenge. And that alone is freedom.”
Kelsey clicks her tongue, noting the golden sow-masked figure draped in carmine robes appearing from behind curtains. The louche stroll of the scarlet-draped figure strikes her as startlingly familiar as it takes the podium and the murmuring of the crowd begins to ebb. Proclamations of the greatness of the crowd are met with self-satisfied roars amidst frippery and finery. Sophie continues in a razored whisper, “I’m sure you object, but for all the liberation heaped upon you, who holds your leash? I see your strings, my pretty marionette; you didn’t chase this on your own accord but to regain what was taken from you; who gave them the power to take from you?”
Promises to purify Europe, to acquire power and wealth, to purge degeneracy and the moral laxity of the poor and a return of absolutism explodes from the podium to rapturous, deafening applause.
“No one gives power, one has power or is powerless,” Kelsey whispers above the din.
“Magpie, I understand your trepidation, but I must take my leave of you; you can only see and choose. I’m sure we will meet again; something awaits you. The question is how far you will step off the path…” and in a haze of bergamot and an elegant click of turning heels she vanishes.
The crowd is funneling past the curtains and further down along some passage—the walls are misted moist, peppered with the serene smiles of skulls. Sloping downward flickering with ensconced torchlight, occasionally beset by passages meandering off somewhere in the dark. Kelsey—gamely hanging slightly back—notes two guards with the jovial porcine masks and ominous tusks holding lethal streamlined boxes like those in the video have taken up the rear. The ambling seems endless—but how far beneath the city could this go, she speculates while icy claws of fear and images of tragic, sodden dead women in elegant dresses, sacrifices to the narcissistic genius of powerful men, emerge unbidden. “This must be documented, this is the work, the work is dangerous, I will not fear, the path to truth is beset by danger—the more dangerous the truth the more valuable”—her personal mantra—echoes within her head.
Her reverie is stifled by the realization the group is flowing in to fill some antechamber just up ahead in the press of bodies—the wealthy, like power, abhor a vacuum spreading out to fill the space, dissipating from mob to grotesquely florid ostentatious wealth individually personified. The burble of the pidgin patois of wealth—French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, some Portuguese; but above all the din reigns the clipped lubricant of gilt and exchange: English, alienatingly familiar. She can hear the heavy breathing of the guards shortly behind her, imagines their hot ragged breath smacking against her ice-cold neck, their gloved hands roughly seizing her, the glassy uncomprehending stare of their serene masks—the rattle as they empty a magazine into her guts, blossoming shrapnel tearing her apart. These feelings of exposure are comorbid with the trepidation she feels regarding exactly what is to be revealed here amidst the baroque gloom.
Behind her is the sharp scuffle of feet. So brief that she has no time to react before a hand clamps down upon her shoulder with disturbing familiarity. “Why is it that we consider it remarkable to pose the question, ‘Why does everything exist?’ Yet it is implausible to ask the far more natural question: ‘Why must the living die?’” The voice is a measured counterbalance to the rococo environ—less the lavish chatter of the rich than the benevolent Socratic method of a bemused professor. A purely clinical detachment commingled with paternalistic warmth.
“Why should one speculate about the efficiency of wax wings when the earth itself is beyond our grasp—a gossamer pipe dream may beguile but it will never yield an immediate result,” Kelsey counterpoints, assuming this to be some sort of test. Her pithy rejoinder is met with a bemused chuckle. She spins around to observe an alarmingly spry and youthful figure of clearly advanced age.
Age swells beneath the skin, her mother taught her, the moment the surface goes slack all the decay bubbles up. The Romanesque features punctuated with argent silvery hair and the unnaturally youthful vigor of her interlocutor, his crisp linen lab coat only marred by a claret blush at the impeccably folded edge of his coat. The air of a military scientist—a sort of theoretical modern warrior-poet; usually doughy-soft topped with a head full of hideous experimentation or chiseled from an uncreative granite stock, incapable of the cerebral engagement of their science-minded kin. Crumpled against each wall are the rearguard—viscera coating their fronts, rendering them a sticky coal black. One’s head is bent back divulging the deep incision of an unanticipated second smile—the precise line parting flesh from adipose marbling and oozing gore. Were it not for the gore c
oating their fronts it would look like they had suddenly collapsed into disjointed repose.
“There was no waste here, they are low individuals almost indistinguishable from the teeming masses,” he curtly offers as offhand explanation; “they were to bag you and bring you down as, indelicately, diversion for their distasteful revel.” There is no emotion, the pronouncements are issued with the clinical detachment with which one would speak of the weather to a stranger. “The many-faced, termagant hellion and you were made the moment you entered the building—ensnared by the honied web of a decadent arachnid dwelling in the miasmic darkness.” He expansively gestures for emphasis, the din of the crowd has taken a distinctively frenzied and sinister cast in the near distance—for what reason Kelsey could only speculate. “She left you to fend for yourself because that is all she and her sisters know: teaching low cunning and bloodthirsty ferocity wallowing on the charnel house floor claiming to be free—but you are not like them. You are a penitent, a litterateur, you are trying to find your way out of the maze; not declare yourself free within it—or perhaps I am mistaken?”
“How can one chase a thread without following it where it leads, how can I learn without observation, danger is an inevitable consequence,” Kelsey manages, attempting to match his clipped, grandiose tone. “That which is unobserved must be noted, that which is not noted would otherwise be lost.”