by Laird Barron
His weight shifted and I convulsed and threw him off me. I torqued sideways, my face near his own festering mass of ossified fibers and gaping sores, my left shoulder pinning him against the wall. I plunged the blade repeatedly into his chest. Rapid-fire as a prison yard execution. In vain, he attempted to blow his damnable whistle. Bloody froth wheezed from his mouth; a pitiful sob that amounted to nothing. I stabbed until my sleeve was drenched to the elbow. I stabbed until my knuckles broke through his rib cage. Finally, my arm went numb and my lungs convulsed and called it quits.
Afterward, I went on my hands and knees and collapsed at a safe distance. Fending off a gangrenous, decrepit old man wasn’t a high-water mark among my exploits. Didn’t stop me from congratulating myself on living to fight again.
Footsteps clicked and drew near. Delia Labrador stepped from the shadows and paused directly beneath a lamp. Mistress of the dramatic entrance, illuminated as a Queen of Ice. She hefted my revolver. Jekyll and Hyde flanked her.
“I had a change of heart,” she said. Which probably meant she’d always planned to show up after the fact. “Where’s Lionel?”
“Aw, I thought you were worried about me.” I had difficulty speaking. Dizziness and nausea came at me in ever larger and meaner waves.
She went to the Croatoan and leaned over him. They exchanged murmurs. She straightened and gripped the revolver with both hands the way it’s taught in the law enforcement academy of your choice. She aimed the barrel at his head and fired twice. The reports were muted, as if traveling a great distance underwater. What would Lionel make of this surprising facet of our dear Ms. Labrador? He’d be terrified and aroused, if I knew my buddy.
When she walked back and placed the gun on my lap, I asked what her uncle said as his last words.
“He said to tell you ‘She snuffed the cat.’ That’s it.”
Like the gunshots, her words traveled slowly, and it was full dark by the time they arrived.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Of course, there was a hospital stint.
The doc showed me an X-ray of a hairline fracture toward the rear of my skull, somewhere in the neighborhood of a month old. This aligned with my struggle at the trailer when Mr. Skinhead knocked my head on the floor. Subsequent swelling had likely contributed to my recent bouts of disorientation, nausea, and migraines. He asked if I’d experienced hallucinations or related symptoms. His concern stemmed from the fact that I’d suffered a brain bleed within the previous twenty-four hours. Additionally, several older lesions were in the process of healing. The prognosis was optimistic, albeit he would’ve greatly desired to understand the cause.
I told him he wouldn’t believe the cause. Then I went under for a long stretch.
On the sixth or seventh day, my system recovered a little and I lay in bed, staring out the window at a fenced courtyard lawn and the distant outline of the Catskills. Lionel had dropped in earlier to say that I’d definitely winged Royal. He’d tracked the blood trail into the woods until he lost it on account of darkness. He wagered from the staggering amount of blood, Royal’s corpse wound up at the bottom of a ravine. A hunter or hiker would trip over the bones.
Sure.
Someone scoured the mess at the hospice. Delia had informed him there’d be no corpses, no official report, and no scandal. Jekyll and Hyde located a car belonging to Curtis’s men hidden elsewhere on the property. Lionel made the executive decision to relay an extremely abbreviated account of the incident to Curtis—he excluded any reference to the Croatoan, money, or Zircon. He simply reported that we’d managed to corner Royal and inflict life-threatening injuries upon him before the man escaped. Curtis wasn’t happy. Nonetheless, I’d fulfilled my end of the bargain. He consented to pay up and wipe my slate. Although, for now was strongly implied.
Lionel inquired what to do with the tapes and other evidence. I instructed him to hide everything in a secure location as leverage in case Zircon or the Labradors tried to get cute down the line. Jonathan Labrador cared for his brother; conversely, he was surely relieved the chapter had closed.
I put a finger to my lips, indicating the possibility of surveillance, and then sketched a note explaining how Black Dog had tracked me to Providence and told him not to give any specific details on the off-chance someone had bugged the hospital room. He was to contact a friend of a friend in Albany who ran a surveillance-gadget shop. This friend would hook us up with black market toys to sweep for bugs, detect phone taps, and so forth. As for the money we’d buried? A problem for another day when I could plan long-range stratagems.
In other news, Burt Plantagenet called to say our contract was terminated. He’d gone over to console Aubrey and discovered her in the arms of Elvira Trask. Drunk and tearful, Aubrey confessed that she and Elvira were secretly in love and intended to leave their respective partners. Sorry, Walter. Aubrey knew Burt kept a wad of cash for rainy days and cooked up a scheme to acquire it via a fake extortion plot. Neither she nor Elvira—or, most notably, Elvira’s boys—counted on homicidally violent me to ruin the scheme.
Outside of that, all was peaceful.
We agreed to not mention Anvil Mountain or its alleged trove of magical shrooms ever again. Not for love or money would we set foot on those slopes—Zircon could do as they pleased. We forged this pact loudly, again for the benefit of eavesdroppers. I meant every syllable.
Lionel squeezed my arm and said a hot date beckoned—he meant to save my life or die trying. I thanked him for his service and missed him the minute he walked out the door.
Over the last month of madcap adventures in the name of clearing my marker with Curtis, I’d likely acquired corporate enemies in Black Dog and Zircon. I’d also made another foe, Nic Royal, who, like Schrödinger’s cat, would represent an unknown variable until his corpse surfaced or he returned from the “dead” to exact vengeance. Possibly worst of all, I’d seen and learned of things I could’ve happily gone a lifetime without encountering.
Which side of the win/loss column should I mark? Considering that I yet drew breath and had “subtracted” a monster from the equation, I knew what Gene K would’ve said.
Halloween came and went without me to squire Devlin on his trick-or-treat rampage. Meg and the boy visited my bedside prior to the main event. Loopy from drugs and exhaustion, I settled for holding their hands, rather than witty conversation. Meg assured me that Minerva had kept them terrific company; she pined in my absence, lamenting our morning jogs.
The calendar rolled over into the early days of November.
* * *
—
I BROODED ABOUT what we might’ve discovered within Anvil Mountain had we mustered the guts to explore its depths. When I closed my eyes and drifted on the current of the latest dose of feel-good medicine, my astral self warped there instantly. I shrank to a gnat in God’s ear.
No number of guns or amount of training or meanness could stand against real evil grown mammoth over time. Conspiracies crushed men and swept the obliterated remains into a starless abyss. In my fantasy, we brought the untraceable guns. Dad—God alone knows why—Lionel, and me.
We trekked along an overgrown path in the heart of a dark forest. The trail led us to a cave in the foothills where the Black Mountain proper heaved up through stands of pine into a peak like an old, wicked shard of flint. The cave mouth opened before us, its rim overhung with drippings of moss. Prevailing breezes and the bright musk of the evergreens masked the fetidness until we actually crossed over. A cold, damp breeze plastered my hair. We descended and descended and came at last to the Garden of Night.
Struck dumb with awe, we may as well have been prehistoric hunters in the cave of a man-eating tiger or bear, pitiful torches raised to repel the darkness. Our lights played across a tableau of carnage that had unfolded for eons. Broken shapes peeped through amber and flowstone, suggestive of the cryptozoic and the pea soup fog that cloaks all we huma
ns don’t readily comprehend.
It was the contemporary embellishments that arrested me and chilled my marrow. The Croatoan had dedicated an altar to murder here in the dripping recesses of the earth. Pickets of severed heads on stakes crisscrossed the uneven floor and adorned rock terraces. Several were fresh enough to draw flies; others were stripped down to yellow skulls. Still others lay embedded within curtains of quartz and flowstone; fossils of an ancient massacre. There would be countless layers beneath these, the earliest predating man. Dad shone his light upon petroglyphs chipped into limestone and contemporary scrawls of gibberish graffiti.
Lionel broke the silence.
Satan’s Trophy Room.
That’s as far as I got. That’s as far as I’d go.
* * *
—
THE BONES IN MY SKULL reknit. I felt restored, if not completely renewed. The experience had dislodged something deep within me. That “something” now tumbled like a splintered bullet through the void that lurks within us all. It manifested as a brief, sharp pang, a stray, violent memory, a cold breath on the nape of my neck. What did it mean? What would become of me? What becomes of anyone?
I took Meg and Devlin roller-skating at the Wooden Wheel on family night. Devlin zipped around gleefully. He wasn’t any more coordinated than we adults, but kids have the advantage of bouncing when they fall. He and I wore our matching WONDER WOMAN T-shirts. Mine was a skootch tight in the shoulders, so I flexed shamelessly for Meg and whoever among the congregation of hot cougar moms might appreciate the show.
Days were fine; nights were passable. It didn’t get bad until I slept.
* * *
—
IN DREAMS I RETURN TO ALASKA and that frozen plateau where Gene and I stalked the caribou hunters so many years ago. Gene stands in the fire. He rants at the dead and dying stars. Red flames engulf his legs, then all of him, and he laughs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laird Barron was born in Alaska, where he raised huskies and worked in the construction and fishing industries for much of his youth. He is the author of several short-story collections and two novels, and his work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. A multiple Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Award nominee, he is also a three-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Barron lives in Kingston, New York.
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