Black Mountain

by Laird Barron

  Don’t bust my balls.

  Wouldn’t dream of it. Vengeance is yours, my friend. I’m done. We’re done.

  Curtis stared with an expression of wonderment.

  Wake the fuck up. This news changes everything. I don’t care about settlin’ the score. I care about the goddamned money. Y’know, those fabulous sums the Croatoan socked away for retirement. Millions. It’s always been about the money. Before I shot the prick, I tortured him six ways from Sunday and got zip.

  Huh? I think you omitted the torture part from your story.

  Did I? Could be I told you what was necessary and left it at that.

  What now?

  Now I stake out this shithole and catch Royal when he pays a visit.

  Be careful. He could already be inside. Plan to torture him too?

  Yeah. Maybe the cocksucker has an idea where the Croatoan hid his loot.

  Ah, those universal constants, I said. Greed and treachery.

  Save your judgment. I slew a terror. A terror! Buried it alive. What was his is mine. No sense letting a fortune rot, eh?

  Buried alive, you say. How is it he’s returned from the grave?

  He sighed and dropped his cigarette butt.

  It was a cold night. You got no clue. Frozen dirt and one lousy shovel. I did the best I could, considerin’ the circumstances.

  I’m sure you did. We’re good? Our slate is clean?

  Yeah. It’s clean. You and your partner need to get gone.

  He nodded to his men. One of them drove the sedan down the road. Curtis and the rest of his crew trooped into the house. The front door flew shut behind them.

  I snapped back to reality. My reality, at any rate.

  The sun finished its plunge behind the mountains; an ice pick stabbing to the hilt into the dark.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  I exited the Monte Carlo. My shoes crunched dead leaves and gravel. I fetched the shotgun from the backseat and tucked it under my arm. Admittedly, not a gesture compatible with the protocols of polite society. I doubted members of polite society operated this shady facility.

  A rising breeze whistled around my ears. It had an edge. I straightened my jacket and listened to the sighing grass and the creak of limbs in the woods behind the house. Ten, perhaps fifteen minutes along pastoral roads to a busy highway and yet, at the moment, we were as isolated as if we’d parachuted into the Brooks Range in Alaska.

  I strode toward the entrance. Lionel’s disapproving gaze burned a hole between my shoulders. He couldn’t know I’d come to a crossroads while riding with Delia Labrador—obey the righteous prescriptions of my new straight-and-narrow code and spill everything to Agent Bellow; turn over the tapes, weapons, and cash. Or resort to my old familiar patterns and fulfill Curtis’s wishes—which entailed keeping the loot and whacking Ephraim Labrador or turning him over to the mob. Dad knew I’d never escape. My brain concurred; the message hadn’t reached my heart.

  Gloom cloaked the interior of the old building. Brown wooden walls, threadbare carpets, and blocky thrift store furniture circa a golden era skin-deep beauty pageant America shot through with cancer and institutional malaise like the painting of Dorian Gray. Passages let into cramped recesses. Angles were skewed, proportions off by a few inches. Lilac air fresheners weakly diffused odors of musk and mildew. And it was hot.

  No one manned the reception desk.

  To the right, pots clattered behind a set of swinging doors. Bacon and eggs were on the griddle, judging by the scents wafting forth to mix with the less pleasant odors permeating the area. Left, cable news muttered from a flat-screen TV mounted in the commons. There were several card tables, metal folding chairs, and a treadmill. Three big full-color Ronald Reagan campaign posters circa 1979 were tacked on a wall near the TV. Everything—style, color, era—was mismatched. The setup could’ve been a derelict bingo parlor.

  A burly man in a tight yellowish hospital coat, khakis, and tennis shoes reposed on a couch, idly clicking his remote. He settled upon a hard-core porn video.

  “Excellent choice, sir,” I said.

  “Visiting hours are posted.” The orderly appraised me with a microglance, then intently scrutinized the on-screen action. My shotgun failed to impress. “Come back when we’re open for business.”

  “I apologize for the inconvenience. This is important. We won’t be five minutes.”

  “Get bent until visiting hours.” He pointedly increased the volume. When he raised his arm, his sleeve pulled down, revealing the contours of a skull-and-crossbones prison tat. So, the Labradors had stocked this terrarium with disposable individuals who feared no man and answered solely to envelopes of cash. Another former brotherin-arms.

  I made a fist. Lionel smiled. I sighed and unclenched.

  “Brady Labrador. This is my, uh, cousin Sven.”

  “Oh.” The man flinched, but he didn’t set aside the remote or look away from the screen. “Sunset Suite. Go through that archway. Down the hall, straight ahead to the last door.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “You know what?” Lionel drew his pistol and clubbed the guy with its butt. Two savage blows to the crown of his head and night night. “If these convicts have any complaints, they can take it up with management. They won’t.” He proceeded briskly into the kitchen. Bemused, I watched him go. He was right—Jonathan Labrador would slap an extra Benjamin in this stooge’s pay envelope and consider the matter resolved. The person in the kitchen uttered a challenge. Something crashed. Ten seconds later, Lionel stepped out and nodded the all-clear.

  We followed the orderly’s directions. There were doors along the way. We didn’t meet anyone or hear any sounds of human habitation within the sealed rooms. Dusty ceiling lamps gave off poor light. The hall seemed to telescope and my head swam with nausea.

  A door at the far end of the hall was bisected red and black in thick, haphazard brushstrokes I’d seen somewhere else. Where the other doors were numbered, this one had a placard that actually read SUNSET SUITE. It swung inward with a faint protest of warped hinges.

  I entered a stiflingly hot room. Ready for anything and nothing remotely like what I found waiting.

  An iron brazier, lifted directly from a monk’s cell in a Himalayan monastery, fumed with pungent cherry blossom incense. The stink of green rot pervaded, regardless. Thick, black floor-to-ceiling drapes were drawn. A mirror ball provided a circle of illumination that glowed and reflected from chipped tiles. The room was otherwise devoid of furniture. It emitted a weird energy, as if the house custodian had moments ago hastily mopped up a pentagram.

  A figure lay upon a reed mat in the center of the room. It resembled a mummified corpse; fragile and gray as a bundle of twigs and partially covered by a red blanket. Morris Oestryke; Ephraim Labrador; the Croatoan. He’d wasted beyond the ken of mere mortals and yet lived. Cysts and boils suppurated on his exposed arms and torso; his lips peeled wide in a permanent grin or snarl. This was the Devil in his ultimate form.

  Nic Royal knelt at the Croatoan’s side in the posture of a petitioner. He’d worn dark clothing, suitable for sneaking around in the woods. A stocking snugged above his eyes; like a bank robber in the final stages of preparation. I didn’t immediately see a weapon, which meant nothing.

  We moved several feet apart to best cover Royal in a cross fire. I racked the slide of the Mossberg.

  “Hear that, Nic? That’s Saint Pete’s secretary typing your death certificate.”

  Royal watched us dispassionately. He slipped the stocking downward, squashing his features into grotesque proportions. It darkened to match his clothes. The stocking wasn’t nylon; equally sheer, though. I guessed I was observing firsthand a piece of special military equipment. Shape-forming fibers that elite forces are rumored to carry in their bags of esoteric tricks.

  “An infamous murderer once characterized his exist
ence as a ‘violent distance between realities.’ How would you characterize yours?” His voice distorted slightly. The mirror ball brightened and dimmed with his words. It rotated, beaming rays of alternating white and black.

  I ignored the shadows crawling toward me on the walls and the floor, and flying across the ceiling. In my adolescence, Dad took us kids to a carnival where I gaped in awe at a magician’s magic lantern. Now I was trapped inside one.

  Coincidence had nothing to do with this tableau—Royal had known we, or someone else with bad intentions, would eventually converge upon this unholy sanctuary. Today, tomorrow, a hundred years from that moment; time and distance are illusory. He must have also accepted the reality that he couldn’t prevail. The demolition and heat death of the universe are ever in motion; the ouroboros swallows itself whole and takes us along for the ride.

  “Hands on your head. Fingers interlaced.” Lionel possibly had some notion about capturing our man alive and depositing him with Curtis; as if the captain were the local magistrate offering a bounty. I didn’t see it going that way; not even close.

  Royal slowly gained his feet. He raised his hands to shoulder height, away from his body. He gently weaved his head to and fro, grooving to nonexistent music. With predators, everything is indicative of a threat, overt or subtle. He wanted to lull us, to acclimate us to his movements. I applied a few ounces of pressure to the trigger.

  “The balls on astronauts,” he said. “Absolute clanking steel balls. Test pilots and the men who dove the first submarines into the deep. Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, brother. Fear and attraction in the face of the tremendous mystery. We’re surrounded by majesties and horrors.”

  The lights whirled faster and the shadows blurred and snatched at my eyes.

  “Any second, we could fracture this thin shell and fall into an abyss.” His right hand chopped downward and the knife practically teleported from his hand and clanged against Lionel’s pistol. Lionel sent a round high and off target. Royal stepped back with easy grace and melted through the drapes as though sinking into a black pool.

  I squeezed the trigger in the frozen instant that his arms and torso were still visible. The hammer clicked. His torso sank into the blackness of the drapes, and then his arms went. One heartbeat, and another. The shotgun barrel ignited with a thundering boom and the shock wave traveled backward along the stock and into my shoulder, the black drapes hanging in tatters, and I ejected the shell and gave it hell again, and time sped up, caught up, and I almost vomited because the mirror ball strobed hot jagged strokes of fiery light past my eyes and into my brain. I chambered another round.

  Lionel rushed forward in frame-by-frame stop-motion. He tore aside the shredded curtains. Behind the curtains, a set of French doors hung ajar, and past the framed threshold lay a starless void. Three herky-jerky cartoon iterations of my friend vaulted into the darkness—white limned in black, black limned in white, and a split of both—daisy-chained together, gone.

  Forever and a minute to reach the doors. Blood spattered the frame and splotched two wooden steps and the beginning of a stone pathway. The light reached no farther.

  I breathed in crisp sweetness. My knees buckled or the world tilted, and I slid away from the portal on slick tiles, back into the chamber of rot and ruin, and took a knee beside the Croatoan. I’d whiffed the green stench before; in my hotel room at the West Kill Lodge and in my office. The mirror ball stopped; a small eclipse with white fires trailing at its rim.

  The Croatoan sat upright with horrible alacrity, blanket gathered around his waist. His teeth clenched upon a glossy disc that protruded slightly past his lips. In those abbreviated moments when I should’ve clapped my hands over my ears, jumped up, and ran, I futilely tried to place the object; closest I came was an elk caller. Clabbered saliva bubbled at the corners of his mouth and oozed over the device. His cheeks expanded and he whistled shrilly.

  During one of my not-infrequent periods spent convalescing from some injury or other, I’d caught a program on musical instruments of ancient cultures. The Aztec death whistle is one that made an impression. An archaeologist had trilled the whistle, which emitted a note like a human scream. Though filtered by television, the resulting wails evoked within me a brief taste of primal horror. The Croatoan’s toy keened in a manner reminiscent of the death whistle, but far worse in its rawness and immediacy.

  A spike of ice shattered my consciousness.

  * * *

  —

  SWEET OBLIVION didn’t last long. Five or six seconds, tops.

  My subconscious fastened onto Meg, a brilliant point of light suspended against a backdrop of infinite blackness. I flew toward her at tremendous velocity. My thoughts were an open wound, stitching together at eight times on the fast-forward button.

  Oh, Meg. Sultry, bluesy. Smoldering lust, fearsome, anger—these are your colors. You love Homer, Odysseus, and mean old Hercules. These are your colors. Barefoot dancer to Led Zeppelin and Johnny Cash. These are your colors. You’re too good, too smart, too much for the likes of me. Pure soul.

  She held out her hand and I lunged the last million miles or so and opened my eyes. I lay sprawled at the foot of the Croatoan’s mat. My body was leaden and unresponsive, my cheek pressed hard to the floor. I’d lost the Mossberg.

  The Croatoan forcibly straightened his bent and twisted legs. Right, now left. His bones and joints and sinews cracked loudly. Forget atrophy, forget immobility, forget dementia and decrepitude. His corroded nails were long from neglect. He dug them under his chin and rolled what I’d taken as flesh upward. Another mask, the same material as Royal’s, welded to his face. It cost him to remove the mask; black blood welled from the pores and rawness beneath.

  Wait, wait, wait, he said, singsong cruel; or perhaps his words originated within my imagination. I’ll be with you soon. Gene’s voice, somehow.

  I may be a fool, but I’m no damned fool. I twitched my fingers, my hands. My legs jerked and kicked feebly, willed to life, and it hurt, pinpricks and darning needles, the way muscles do after you’ve slept on them wrong. I began to crawl past him and out the way we’d entered the room a thousand years ago.

  Wait, wait, now in my grandfather’s pleading voice. The mirror ball dimmed. The Croatoan’s silhouette wavered and darkened at its center like a black hole. I’ve wanted to kill you for years. Mr. Apollo.

  He shucked the stocking and cast aside the sodden lump. I looked away, valiantly tamping down a scream.

  In the future where I murder you in ninety seconds or so, I will find forty-seven dollars and an Alaska driver’s license in your wallet. The ID is three years old and tucked under your New York State card. Dad’s voice, perhaps Dad’s not-so-secret desire.

  He may have been correct about the contents of my wallet, or not. Half the time, I don’t recall what I’ve stashed in there. I kicked, clawed, swam through the doorway. The hall lights blinked and I heard him coming, nails clattering, moist flesh scudding on tile. He too crawled, hand over hand. Faster, though.

  I stared through a fish-eye lens. The hall stretched and expanded into the moonlit wilds of the Catskills—

  Water roars down off the black mountain. The black river sweeps you aside as it pours through rock. A bottomless pit where the bones and prehistoric souls dwell in frigid stench. Sheol of the troglodytes. Even Satan and Whiro want nothing to do with this miserable abscess—

  My hearing came and went, crackling intermittently like a fried speaker. I struggled with the revolver, drew it from the holster, attempted to lurch to my knees, and failed.

  The Croatoan grasped my ankle and calf and sank his talons into the meat. He slowly laddered his way atop me. I bucked and tried to roll, desperate to bring the .357 into play. Anvil Mountain may as well have sat upon my back.

  Isaiah Coleridge, the man who didn’t know his place. Gene again. The pet savage. A tribal with a slick haircut and thousan
d-dollar suit who speaks English real good. Mr. Apollo liked parading his tame beast around on a leash.

  He plucked the useless gun from my fist and sent it skating. A loop of hemp, perhaps the mat’s drawstring, made a slipknot around my neck. I managed to insert a couple of fingers before the cord tightened, which merely forestalled the inevitable.

  His stench suffocated me. My thoughts burned to ash and the ashes scattered. Oh, I’d definitely had it. There’s no comeback for an expertly applied strangulation. I couldn’t summon the hideous red light of primordial fury, or tap into my reservoir of enormous strength.

  Film and literature usually get garroting wrong. It’s a pet peeve of mine. My dad jeered whenever war flicks screwed up the details, and this is in the same category of annoyance having throttled a few guys. Right way to do it is with wire or cord braided into a pair of handles. I prefer large-grained wood. You don’t strangle the victim facing in the same direction. Why not? Because unless you’re my size, your arms don’t possess enough power to ensure a quick, certain kill. Proper execution: cross the handles in an X and snap-pivot so you and the target are back to back, ass to ass, and drop your weight like you’re performing a judo throw. Gravity will do the dirty work. Piano wire slices right through the carotid, the windpipe, and his fingers if he sticks them in there before the snare draws tight. I’m a piano-wire guy, although I’ve used a knitted scarf, jump rope, and neckties in a pinch. I’ve resorted to my bare hands, although that’s the caveman method.

  The Croatoan made a sloppy effort, but it was working for the sonofabitch anyway. Black stars danced in my peripheral vision. The one tiny saving grace? He was enthusiastic, but not physically powerful. I had a few extra moments to calm myself and struggle with a purpose. Instinct took over. My free arm—the right one—didn’t want to die. It remembered the jawbone knife on my hip. My right hand concurred and it gripped the knife and yanked it free. My arm lifted and swept over and behind in a scything gesture. The knife sliced cord, and flesh and small bones.