Worse Angels

by Laird Barron

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Jeffers Project portfolio was voluminous. Badja Adeyemi had pulled a double-fistful of strings to appropriate confidential corporate and government records. I emailed Ted for assistance. We plundered the database until she uncovered an innocuous folder containing the vital statistics of the Jeffers Colony: names and numbers of administrators (no roll of occupants, alas), and, fortuitously, contact information for Lenny Herzog, the caretaker Boss Man mentioned. I asked her to run a background check on Herzog and report asap.

  Next, I tried contacting Dr. Pruitt. The overeducated shithead obviously wanted me to encounter the Mares of Thrace. But why, unless he thought they had some connection to Sean’s death? He artfully dodged my calls and when I stopped by his apartment for a surprise visit, a neighbor informed me the good doctor had jetted off to Europe to spend the holidays with relatives. What timing!

  Supper at a greasy spoon, then a phone call to Meg and Devlin. The boy stressed over a class project due before winter vacation. He denied procrastinating on the assignment for several weeks and informed me I needed to get home pronto to help him put it together. I assured him that I could work miracles with construction paper and glue sticks. Meg got back on the line and said, better you than me, be home soon or else. It warmed my heart that she unconsciously referred to her place, and my being there, as home. I asked how the boy was doing and she sighed and said he hadn’t kicked anyone’s ass lately. She sounded relaxed, which meant I’d caught her at a good time—the second glass of wine.

  After she signed off, I clicked the boob tube for my evening dose. Five seconds later, Dr. Pruitt texted the vitals of the investigator who’d previously quit the case. Rod Griese out of an office in Buffalo. I passed this along to Red McLaren and requested that he huddle with Adeyemi’s lawyer and get to the bottom of Griese’s dossier, and what, if anything he’d discovered.

  News anchors recited a litany of absurdist tragedy with a familiar refrain—people were shooting one another by the gross; tensions among various countries continued to intensify amid saber-rattling; the world burned, but not to worry, water was rising fast. I cried uncle and went facedown for the count.

  * * *

  ■■■

  At Meg’s urging to “get in touch with your mother’s blood,” I’d reacquainted myself with the rich tapestry of Maori culture and mythology. In the U.S. of A., every youngster learns of Alexander, Thor, and Zeus. Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, and Oberon’s court. Kids here are steeped in the cult of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and The Catcher in the Rye. Having swallowed enough of that for this particular rotation of the grand cosmic wheel, I made it a practice to range farther afield. A humble beginning, yet it awakened a network of sleeping nerves with pinpricks of sublimated awareness.

  This renaissance didn’t occur in a vacuum. During childhood, I’d visited my Maori grandfather, Hone, in New Zealand and listened to his garrulous recounting of wartime exploits as we reposed in his weedy backyard beneath the stars. Mom had also imparted a bit of the ancient lore upon us Coleridge kids in the guise of bedtime stories; the CliffsNotes version of her heritage.

  Mom and her kin believed that souls wander at night. Dreams represent fragments of what the dreamer experiences while roving in astral form. She further held that when some people die, their souls twist and congeal and become inimical to the living. Whether these persons were good or evil in life is of no consequence; it is a matter of fortune and susceptibility. The vulnerable souls become their worst selves, condemned to haunt the earth and make trouble until they slip through a crack and plunge into the Underworld, where the Lord of the Dead waits to eat them.

  Such jolly thoughts of darkness and the uncanny haunted me in the wake of my conversation with Dr. Pruitt. It spelled troubled dreams. My soul got a second wind and a-wandering it went. Old gods Papa, Rangi, Tane, and Whiro beckoned.

  The dream began as a memory of my childhood. Mom sent me to fetch Dad; we were going to a barbecue at a friend’s house. Barbecues and house parties dominated that stretch of my parents’ social life. It was predictable as the tides and the phases of celestial bodies. He boozed with his male colleagues while Mom suffered small talk with the women in the kitchen. Sometimes there was an argument and public recriminations. Sometimes he or she would get a tad physical and voices would be raised. Stony expressions and frigid silence on the drive home. I could scarcely contain my enthusiasm.

  On this occasion, Dad laired in the garage, sliding a Green River knife across a whetstone.

  Is it sharp? I said to show interest; a cub desperate to bond with his grizzled sire.

  He delicately tapped the blade’s edge. Yeah, buddy. Sharp enough to split an atom. By the way, and this information will come in handy sooner or later, you happen to get the drop on a fellow, remember there’s a major artery in the anus. One poke and a twist, and that’s all she wrote.

  I thanked him and said I’d remember. He was a prophet when it came to the bad stuff.

  I used to say, bury me in a cave or in a ziggurat. The knife shicked back and forth across the whetstone. Bury me with a two-headed dog who will be my servant in the afterlife. Welcome, my son, to the afterlife. This purple and black wasteland is purgatory. The white light in the window dimmed and clotted. Beat it, kid. I’m getting this ready for a friend. He dismissed me, enraptured by the knife and what it could do for him.

  Tom Mandibole materialized from a patch of gloom near the furnace. Smooth and plastic-faced, clad in his ivory jumpsuit and smiling carnivorously. He and Dad regarded one another like gunfighters ready to skin their shooting irons. Dad said something in a foreign language and held the big knife loosely in his lead hand, tip in line with the dandy’s heart. Mandibole answered with the atonal snarl of circuits scrambling. They rushed to meet in the center of the garage. Dad, charging like a bull; Mandibole, mincing and prancing with the grace of a tarantula.

  Rather than reporting to Mom, I chose a different path. A wooden security door led to the yard. In life the door was pale white, but in this place wood had blackened as if by flames. An elderly Sean Pruitt, dressed in a Valley High School letter jacket, stood at the threshold with the posture of a doorman. He’d plastered pancake makeup and eyeshadow to create a façade of youth. He didn’t open the door, but gestured for me to step into a void. Brushing past him, I marked the crimson and bronze colors and the heavy stitching of his jacket, the diabolic horsehead skull that symbolized I knew not what. He wore a class ring forged of iron and set with a ruby in the jaws of the horse skull. The metal ring had broken to form a notch with jagged teeth. Sean Pruitt made a fist. Blood dripped steadily between his fingers onto his tennis shoe.

  I passed over. A symphonic gong intoned over the heat of a low, crackling fire. A choir of sirens sang a lingering note of lust and mourning. The song led me into manhood and the second, worse, chapter of the dream.

  * * *

  ■■■

  Centuries before European colonists decreed it New Zealand, New Zealand was named Aotearoa by Polynesian settlers. I strode across a grassy plain, marching inland. The sky was the dark green of pre-industrial reality, and obsidian where it bled into the vacuum. Red light glowed on my flank. Dust and smoke towered above a wilderness consumed by an inferno. Moa birds darted around me, talons churning the earth as they fled for their lives. Farther off, tribal hunters shouted and clashed metal upon metal, driving their quarry onward.

  A million flies whined and that whine resolved to a terrible voice roaring my name. It sounded a lot like Badja Adeyemi on an infernal bullhorn. The voice drew my astral self over a despoiled expanse of burnt stumps, toward a forbidding peak, and into the lambent pink eye socket of a titan’s skull. I entered the banquet hall of an old-timey stone longhouse. Fire pits, heads on spears, animal skins tossed like throw rugs, and violent murals daubed in red and yellow ochre.

  Whiro, dread god of the underworld, reclined at t
he end of a banquet table. He wore a black suit and a spiked Rolex. His features roiled; a thundercloud constantly reshaping itself. My grandfather’s eyes; Dad’s hawkish nose; the Croatoan’s barbed grin. He inspected platters heaped with human limbs, ears, and eyeballs. Music filtered in from a nearby oubliette; damned souls shrieking.

  Welcome to the black kaleidoscope. You can see it all from here. Whiro daintily selected a severed thumb and popped it into his mouth. He chewed. Dexter Smith, mobster CPA. You commended his soul to my banquet in 1998. He snapped a radius to expose its marrow. Nigel Cooper, money launderer, also in ’98. Too bad—the punk could’ve helped you unload that cursed treasure you’re sitting on. He slurped from a clay bowl. Your blood, Isaiah, is sweeter than the rest. I love your style, kiddo. You make me proud. Truly, don’t go changing.

  Charnel rot wafted from the pit. My gut churned.

  What do you want? I feared I already knew.

  We’re peas in a pod, Isaiah. The whine of the flies increasingly tinged his voice. Flesh of my flesh. A finger-puppet acting out my whims on earth. Your man-at-arms is a savvy fellow. Whip smart. He says you’re dead. Dead man walking, perhaps. Angels and devils circle you like vultures. The vultures as well, soon.

  I reached for a weapon, like scratching an itch. No luck—I wore boxers and was empty-handed. Ash smeared my body. Ash clogged my nose and throat. Cherry-bright flakes of ash floated into the longhouse. The moas cried on the wind as they burned.

  Whiro’s laughter snarled in my right ear, then the left, then both at once.

  O, to become an old man bent double by guilt.

  Achilles, my loyal hound, crept from the wings and crouched near the black god’s feet. The dog’s regal skull was caked in blood and cleft by the impact of a long fall onto rocks. He’d died as a consequence of my negligence, my arrogance. My good boy showed his broken fangs and drooled. Lose the love of friends and family, alas, alack. Lose the love of your dog, you’ve lost everything.

  The floor crumbled; I plummeted through cotton clouds toward a lake. The lake was a shimmering opal. A shadow at the bottom of the lake solidified into my mother, large as a goddess. Half a lifetime ago, Dad brained her and claimed self-defense. Kill or be killed, he’d said. I couldn’t be certain of the truth. Both were capable of violence. They’d made me, hadn’t they?

  The symphonic gong chimed and chimed.

  Mom regarded my meteoric descent. Her lips parted into a soundless shriek that boiled the water and engulfed me in a wave of abject rage. The shock wave stripped my flesh to bone, powdered the bone, and I dissolved into the waking world; the world of the unreal and the impermanent.

  * * *

  ■■■

  Another day of knocking on office doors and putting the lean on friends, colleagues, and old, tenuous acquaintances of Sean Pruitt. Ted texted the address of Lenny Herzog, custodian to the Jeffers Colony. A relatively short drive, but located in a sketchy rural neighborhood. I tabled that interview and headed home in the midafternoon, grateful for a long weekend, even if it meant glue, scissors, and, God love me, glitter, in service of an elementary school project. That evening, I rubbed Meg’s feet and stared at whatever movie played on TV without registering the meaning of the images.

  Somewhere along the line, I shook off the stupor and actually processed that it was a news report about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the thousands upon thousands of man-hours of investigation that unraveled certain aspects of the mysterious tragedy while deepening others.

  Despite the incompetence and the lies of a corrupt Malaysian government, some semblance of the truth emerged. Forensic detectives, psychologists, intelligence operatives, and armchair detectives played a communal role in piecing together the puzzle. We can imagine that the senior pilot depressurized the plane and killed every passenger and colleague. We cannot imagine why he perpetrated this unspeakable act. Upon going silent, MH370 continued at cruising altitude for over six hours before “presumably” crashing into the Indian Ocean. Ah, but those six long hours she was a ghost plane, for all intents and purposes . . .

  I’ve seen and committed my share of dark deeds. I can’t decide whether it’s a comfort that the enormity of some actions remains inconceivable, even to a guy who made a career of evil. There’s always something worse, something beyond the scope of our experience. This was one.

  At the credits, Meg switched to the true-crime channel, where a police detective monotoned the particulars of a case that was proven by science, and twelve inconvenienced citizens, to be a gruesome crime of vengeance. An adolescent boy emptied a handgun magazine into his stepdad’s head as retaliation for real or imagined abuse.

  She didn’t cut a glance at me. I felt the weight of her regard anyway, hot as a branding iron. I’m sure this was firmly categorized as “inconceivable” in her mind alongside the ghost flight. I dared not admit that, yes, the plane crash was a tragedy perpetrated by an evil person, but, baby, I kind of see the kid’s point of view.

  PART II

  JOHN HENRY IN THE PIT

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I returned to Horseheads on Sunday night and hit the bunk at a reasonable hour, vowing to get plodding bright and early. Hotel Roan was quite pleased to book me into the very same room I’d recently inhabited. I’ve always been a generous tipper—graft and wanton largesse are the Outfit way—and with a pocketful of Adeyemi’s dough, I was practically Daddy Warbucks.

  * * *

  ■■■

  The decision of the dreary gray morning: Buttonhole Lenny Herzog or go patrolling the byways of town searching for knuckleheads? Herzog could keep for another day.

  Ted called as I sat in the hotel restaurant sipping a second cup of coffee; Buffalo detective Rod Griese waited on the line. Ted patched him through and we chatted. Griese put the T in terse. Stated upfront this was a courtesy, nothing more because there wasn’t anything to tell. He’d obeyed Adeyemi’s strict instructions to avoid the Pruitts unless he discovered anything contrary to the police report, which, due to the infancy of his investigation, he had not. No sense riling Mom or Dad, et cetera, et cetera.

  Griese worked on the case for two weeks, mostly by phone. Phase two mirrored my own activities; he visited Horseheads and interviewed several people. The second night, while unwinding at a bar, he scuffled with a guy over a spilled drink. No biggie, or so he assumed. Later, he was crossing the street when a car with its lights off blindsided him. Busted both legs. The driver made a clean getaway. End of detective career, end of story. His new gig as a realtor was boring and safe. Griese said good luck and goodbye.

  Onward then.

  Boss Man’s list of Mares of Thrace members comprised three locations, rather than names. A bakery, a beauty parlor, and an electronics warehouse. The bakery was a burned shell. Somebody left an oven on and poof. Nobody at the warehouse knew anything except that the security guy came in much later. Finally, I asked around at the corner beauty parlor. Forty bucks and a convivial manner secured intelligence on the retired beautician, Nancy. The guy on duty warned me that Nancy was flakier than Grandma’s pie crust. I declined the offer of a manicure.

  Nancy the Beautician lived in a public housing community not far from a park with a small pond at its center. A spiffy paved walkway encircled the pond. Couples in winter gear strolled, some pushing baby carriages, some walking their dogs. Many of the dogs were decked out in classy sweaters. Hardier people power-walked the circle. Others had the superior idea—they loitered on benches, watching the water, or tossing crumbs to the marauding gangs of pigeons. Nancy the Beautician sat at the end of one such bench while the pigeons strutted around her ankles, fruitlessly appealing for a handout. She was a petite woman, silvery wisps of hair plucked from beneath her shawl by the chilly breeze. Somewhere between a matron and a grandmother. She wore a wool coat. I’d last seen her in a cheerleader uniform in the company of a smarmy middle-aged up
perclassman. Her mien wasn’t a pallid flat-affect mask today. Her cheeks were rosy and she smiled at me with human warmth rather than the reflexive jaw movements of a predatory animal.

  “Hi, Nancy,” I said.

  “Darn it. You found me.” She didn’t register any familiarity, nor was she alarmed by the approach of a large, dark man. “Your hair is lovely. So thick and lustrous. It isn’t even graying. White people have to sacrifice their firstborn to get hair like yours! You’ll keep it until you’re very, very old.”

  “Uh, how kind—”

  “But your hands! Your scarified hands! My goodness, those poor ham hocks are positively nicked to bits.”

  “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh. Ma’am, I’m a detective. Perhaps you could answer a couple of questions.”

  “A real detective. Like Angela Lansbury and Tom Selleck. Where’s your fedora? Where’s your greatcoat? You don’t even have a mustache. May I see your ID, please?”

  I passed her my identification.

  “Did you know a young man named Sean Pruitt?” I said while she squinted at my card.

  “Know him? I coveted him.” She relinquished my card. “Sean was a cutie pie.”

  “Was he your client?”

  “Heavens, no. He worked with Frederick. Frederick may have had a thing for him too.”

  “The Mares of Thrace. Would you tell me what that is, exactly?”

  “The Mares? Horses are sweaty, dreadful beasts. Lost my granddaughter to one. Kicked her in the head. Maddened because they eat flesh. Especially the mares.”

  “You’re probably right. What of Sean? Was he a member?”

  “Wish I could tell you, Mr. Detective. Would any respectable club have that boy? He wasn’t one-hundred-percent right in the noggin. Saddest boy in town. Clubs want happy people. Not sad sacks.”