Worse Angels

by Laird Barron

  ALSO BY LAIRD BARRON

  The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

  Occultation and Other Stories

  The Croning

  The Light Is the Darkness

  The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (Stories)

  Swift to Chase (Stories)

  Blood Standard

  Black Mountain

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Laird Barron

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9780593085004

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Jessica M.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Laird Barron

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: Valley of the Horses’ HeadsChapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part II: John Henry in the PitChapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Part III: Death of the Starry-Eyed KidChapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Part IV: Rah, Rah! Sis, Boom, Bah!Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Out of the window,

  I saw how the planets gathered

  Like the leaves themselves

  Turning in the wind.

  —WALLACE STEVENS

  The other was a softer voice,

  As soft as honey-dew:

  Quoth he, “The man hath penance done,

  And penance more will do.”

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  PART I

  VALLEY OF THE HORSES’ HEADS

  CHAPTER ONE

  A blood moon glowered over the Catskills as I climbed out of the hole. I glowered back, imagining claws and fangs and muscles bursting through my clothes the way it happened for Lon Chaney Jr. on moldy old Wolf Man posters. Nothing doing. I remained plain old Isaiah Coleridge, but that was probably bad enough. Werewolf movies were on my mind, for various reasons. Earlier that evening, I’d commented on the topic to my girl, Meg.

  Freudian as all get-out, she’d said. Good guy on the surface, woman-and-sheep-ravishing beast on the inside. Those faux romantic posters where the werewolf—in pants!—carries an unconscious gothic heroine in his arms? Not like that. He—it—dragged the woman by her hair. Blood drooled from where the roots tore free. Her shinbones gleamed in the moonlight . . .

  You’re ruining everything, I’d said. Why do horror movies always preface the main story with a curse that began years, if not decades or centuries, in the past? Does evil need to steep like a tea bag before it can manifest? Didn’t get an answer, but one of Meg’s enigmatic smiles, as if to say I needed to pay more attention.

  “Every rock in the state of New York is in this goddamned hole.” Lionel Robard tipped back his safari hat. He leaned on a pickax. It was chilly; steam rose from the sweat on his brow and his matted hair. Rawboned and sinewy, he was built for marathon bouts of hard labor. His Monte Carlo’s headlights were on so we could see what we were doing, like a pair of resurrection men in a graveyard after the world had gone to sleep. He needn’t have bothered, what with all that nickel-plated moonlight spilling through the mist and the trees.

  I wiped my face and popped the top of a beer.

  “The wages of sin are digging rocks when you go to bury your ill-gotten treasure.” I eyed the inky shadow of a man crouched near an Austrian pine. The longer I peered, the more closely the shadow-man resembled a stump.

  Last year, we’d snatched a bunch of money from the secret cache of a notorious murderer romantically dubbed the Croatoan, since deceased. North of one and a half million dollars. Held it and waited. First, to see who might creep in from the woodwork searching for the loot, and for us. Second, because the bills were minted in the 1960s and ’70s. Changing that filthy lucre into contemporary currency without tipping off the authorities, or other Wrong People, presented a challenge. Our best bet was to launder the trove via one of my underworld connections at a substantial cost and the risk of alerting the aforementioned Wrong People; in this case, the Albany mob.

  I kept other items from the Croatoan’s cache. Tools of murder, documents, and videocassettes, chiefly. These were buried too, although closer to home in my own backyard. I was tempted to destroy these evil mementos. Yet, what if I needed them one fine day? That possibility stayed my hand.

  Sinister home videos and killing knives weren’t the issue right then. One and a half mil was the issue. Lionel had proven a good sport so far. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, stay cool forever. Prudence and temperance weren’t his watchwords. The Marines taught him other skills, other bellicose virtues.

  Thus, here we were in the sneaking hours, burying the money once again (we’d originally stashed it near home and then decided a lonely plot in the hills was wiser) with an eye toward a more permanent solution and only the gods knew when that might be. I set aside a portion for a sample, should a sample become necessary. We sweated a hunter or hiker stumbling across our handiwork and leaving an empty pit for us to find later. Far-fetched, yet eminently reasonable to our minds—which spoke volumes about the state of those minds, I suppose.

  “I vote we quit pussyfooting around and cash in our chips,” Lionel said as we made ready to lower the sealed c
ontainers. “The German? He could handle this weight.”

  “The German isn’t safe. His partners were pinched in a sting. The Feds will have him under a magnifying glass.”

  “I hadn’t heard. Who then?”

  “Japanese liaison to the U.S. government might be our ticket. Former liaison. Sonny loves America and Elvis. Three years stateside near Graceland as a teen. I stayed with him in Tokyo when the Outfit sent me over on business. Elvis memorabilia out the wazoo.”

  “Rhinestone suit?”

  “Rhinestone suit.”

  “Isn’t he with the yakuza?” Lionel said.

  “Sonny provides equal opportunities to all criminal gangs. I have to be careful. He likes me, but we aren’t bosom buddies. He makes one call and we’re boned. These ex-diplomats aren’t loyal to anybody.”

  “Man, whatever gets us paid.”

  “The loot isn’t going to evaporate.”

  “We might.”

  Touché. My left hand trembled. In the dim, and not so dim, past I’d broken it, had muscles torn, the fingers dislocated. Healed, all healed, yet the nerves were weakening, the rubber bands of sinew and tendon losing their snap-back, and no matter how many racquet balls I crushed daily, or spade-loads of dirt I shoveled, the status quo slipped and my hand quivered when it grew tired and it grew tired ever more quickly.

  “Hold tight a bit longer. I’ll ask Meg for help.”

  “You ready to take it there?” he said. “You loop her in, this gets real.”

  “She’s a research genius. Be peachy to know what we’re dealing with.” Detective license in my wallet notwithstanding, my girlfriend was the brains in the relationship.

  “Kinda your job.”

  “I’m too busy getting punched in the face.”

  He hefted a stone and chucked it onto the pile.

  “Does the origin matter? Gotta figure it’s blood money, pure filth, the veritable root of evil. Get it laundered, problem solved. Who cares where it came from as long as we know where it’s going?”

  Any counter I threw at him would be weak.

  “Blood money tends to carry a curse. I don’t want to get bitten in the ass down the road.”

  “Brother, we were screwed the moment we walked into the madman’s lair.” He dropped his cigarette butt and commenced digging again. “Go read one of your books on mythology. Any of them. Curses get stronger with time. Dumping it for whatever we can get is the smart play.”

  “The smart play is to douse it in gasoline and strike a match.”

  He laughed as if I were making a joke.

  Increasingly, there were moments when I wished heartily that we were capable of making the smart play. Just once.

  * * *

  ■■■

  Nature has everything plotted to a gnat’s ass. Her vast blueprint overwhelms our ability to fully comprehend the true shape of reality. We glimpse points of intersection, we hear phantom notes on a cool autumn breeze, but seldom apprehend the greater symphony at play.

  The day after we relocated the money, I sparred a few rounds with the regulars at the Deadfall Gym in Kingston. The Deadfall didn’t help me improve my skills; it slowed their degradation. I’m strong and have fought enough to acquire an arsenal of nasty techniques. Fighting isn’t a static art; it mutates rapidly, endlessly, and for every offensive tactic, there’s a defense or a counter. I gave better than I got, and while sparring isn’t really combat, to put it bluntly, I’d slowed. Somebody drilled me with a flying knee, applied a guillotine choke, and cranked my neck; somebody else hooked me behind the ankle and flung me headfirst onto the mat. The crash rattled the gym’s metal garage door. Also got a complimentary dented nose in the bargain. Rub-some-dirt-on-it-and-walk-it-off type of damage.

  Food for thought, these sessions, coupled with the aforementioned weakness in my left arm. Proof positive my problems weren’t localized; they were systemic. I’d withstood copious measures of physical punishment in my days with the mob. The physical abuse quotient only got worse since I began sticking my nose into folks’ business as a detective. Hospital visits and medical bills accrued. MDs tsked and clucked over my collection of injuries and chronic ailments. They passed around X-rays and CAT scans with the enthusiasm of kids trading baseball cards. The upshot being, my bones and muscles ached in the morning; neither hand was quite so steady at the range, and I squinted to read fine print. I did my level best to outwit and out-grapple Father Time; in addition to sparring at the Deadfall, I religiously committed to physical and mental exercise, which included jogging, swimming, and weights. Daily I completed crossword puzzles and played chess matches against the computer and valiantly argued philosophy with Lionel and Meg. I read a book a week.

  Regardless, the slippage couldn’t be ignored, only endured.

  * * *

  ■■■

  Homeward bound, downtown rush hour, I waited at a red light. A couple of frat bros in the oncoming lane jumped out of a Saab to harangue a guy in a rattletrap Chevy. The frat bros jeered abuse and pounded on the Chevy’s door; its driver slowly emerged. He required some time because there was a lot of him to unfold from the cab. Six-six and two-fifty, easy. He wore grungy work clothes and an orange safety vest. His hairy arms dangled near his knees. I didn’t get a clear look at his expression and didn’t need to. His posture spoke volumes. Reminded me of the deceptive laziness of a grizzly several heartbeats before it decides to charge.

  Obviously, the punks had never seen an angry bear or heard death call them by name. The bright orange vest was a pretty clear metaphor. DANGER. KEEP OUT. BEWARE OF DOG. MINEFIELD. They weren’t reading the signs of impending doom.

  More yelling ensued, coupled with threats of a beating. When this didn’t resolve the matter, one of the bros decided to raise the stakes. He poked the construction worker’s chest. The big guy palmed the kid’s face and slammed him into the pavement. The other bro wisely beat feet toward his own car. My light turned green and I didn’t catch the end of the melodrama. Or perhaps that was the end. The dude pronated in the intersection was bound for somewhere on a stretcher.

  Once I’d gotten home and sipped a tall whiskey, I considered the implications. It’s no evolutionary mistake that men default to stupidity and aggression. No accident that they overestimate their capabilities, recklessly court danger, and are reliably delusional regarding the hazards involved. Nature greases the gears of progress with blood. I’m a believer in omens and auguries, except by different names—pattern recognition and quantum entanglement. Reality is a frequency, time is a ring, and gravity bleeds through a membrane that cocoons this universe from its neighbors; cells gently colliding within an infinite superstructure.

  Which is to say, I’d scaled a mountain summit and instead of finding a wise man in a cave, Death looked me in the eye and winked. Guru Death compelled me to consider my allotted span in less than romantic terms—the phases of an animal’s life cycle. Maybe that’s the reason I’d recently obsessed over werewolf movies. The popular legend of the lycanthrope featured a surcease of mortal weakness. Werewolves shrugged off disease and lead. They shunned personal responsibility, and that might’ve represented their most attractive quality. Loping through a night forest, howling in bloodlust, and doing what comes naturally without remorse.

  * * *

  ■■■

  Since my ouster from Alaska, home was a cabin on a sprawling farm-slash-commune near the rural outskirts of New Paltz. I enjoyed the abiding quiet of Hawk Mountain Farm at night, after the tourists who came for the sweat lodge or the meditation circles or the folksy seminars drifted away and the animals were dreaming in the barn. I yearned for the scent of green bark after a hard rain and the rush of wind in the trees. Darkness was truly dark on the edge of the forest—a security lamp hanging from the barn center beam and the porch light of the main house up the hill floated in a void. On those occasions when a storm kn
ocked out the power, we were instantly transported to an epoch of peasants who took shelter behind barred doors, praying for sunrise when all the beasts withdrew into the forest.

  I savored it because I knew change was inevitable. Much sooner than later, Meg would demand a gesture of commitment and that gesture would entail wholesale changes by yours truly. She and her son, Devlin, wanted me to move in. Or I assumed they did. They loved me and my faithful hound, Minerva. We’d edged around the subject and watched it grow into the proverbial elephant in the room. Even I couldn’t feign obliviousness forever.

  Lionel inhabited a shack not far from mine through the woods. He acted as farm roustabout for Virgil and Jade Walker, the elderly New Age hippie gurus who owned the property and dazzled clients from around the globe with their peppy mysticism. Evenings, he bunkered with a case of cheap beer, or, if feeling sociable, went hell-raising in town. In the manner of the ancient Greeks confronted with an epic dilemma, I knocked on his door to seek his wise, albeit booze-soaked counsel. I explained my worries—physical and spiritual.

  He shrugged and said my chickens were coming home to roost. Quote, unquote. I grumbled about the enigma of cornpone aphorisms.

  “Consult the foolproof Getting Old Checklist,” he said. “Has your dick stopped responding to commands? Do you moan when leaning over to fetch a beer from the fridge? Cluck-cluck-cluck, amigo.”

  “The goths and the decadents had it one hundred percent correct,” I said. We sat on the porch, watching snowflakes gather in the dusk. A storm was coming; a storm was always coming.

  “Which ones?” He sipped a beer and patted my dog, who sat between us, panting contentedly. She was blanketed in pine needles and dead leaves from romping after rabbits in the nearby woods.

  “Poe, Baudelaire, Camus. The usual suspects.”

  “They think we should spend that dough too?”

  “They think a man is going to suffer no matter which way he jumps.”