by Laird Barron
Poe “Oh.” It has remained inert until this moment. “No. No.”
The blonde peels the glove from her right hand. Her hand hasn’t seen the sun in a while. It belongs to an older, emaciated person. Still smiling (the painted sneer of a manikin), she reaches under the table and you freeze with a premonition of impending awfulness—she’s going to whip out a gun or a bomb or some other lethal device. If only you’d brought one of your own; if only Norse or Sloan were here. Either of them would be ready for an action scene. Mace would’ve, as the group’s wise Odysseus figure, plotted an escape route and a plan to burn the lounge to cinders in her wake.
Instead of a submachine gun or a grenade, the blonde retrieves a dummy clad in a lumpy silver spacesuit and balances it on the edge of the table. The dummy’s face is white and mottled as boiled flesh, lacking ears, eyes, and nose. Of course the dummy is faceless; without a helmet, one unguarded glance at the sun burned it away. Its mouth makes a tiny sphincter about the size of a woman’s fingertip. Its left arm rises and gauntleted fingers waggle a greeting.
Poe: “The Eater of Dolls.” The puppet speaks with awe.
You: “What the hell is going on?” Surely it would be nice to ask someone other than a puppet. The waitress moves among the tables, she and her patrons apparently oblivious to the Moulin Rouge hot chicks and the world’s most hideous dummy.
Poe: “As You Know Bob. What in the name of the Dark have they done? Bob used to be a marionette. Bob was my friend.”
Bob: “Edgar. Edgar. Edgar. Edgar. Edgar. I’m still your friend. Edgar.” Bob’s sucker mouth dilates. Its voice is husky and feminine and carries intimately—or, as must be the case, the blonde’s delivery is theater-caliber. “I’ve searched and searched for you. I’m your friend, Edgar. I’m.” As the dummy speaks, its soft material bulges and darkens where the eyes should be. Yes, darkens like blood seeping through cloth.
Poe: “Oh no oh no oh no.” Again with the jagged laugh.
Bob: “Oh yes, Edgar. Together. You and me. Me.”
You’re impressed. The dummy’s voice is in your ear, yet the blonde’s lips don’t twitch. She’s a master of ventriloquism.
The waitress’s head snaps around. She lurches to a halt near your booth. Her expression is going through changes.
Waitress: “Yes, a master of ventriloquism. Yes.” Her voice too is husky and feminine and soothing. “Dee Dee Gamma. Leave. Leave the puppet. Leave.”
Bob: “I want Poe, only Poe.” Its voice harmonizes with the waitress’s. “You may leave unharmed if you leave at once. Thank you, Mizz Gamma. Thank.”
Patrons continue their routines. A trucker tries the door handle several times before he unravels its mystery. Three burly dudes who’ve traded raucous insults for the past twenty minutes lapse into meditative silence. Two of them are poised, cups raised midway. The third drools through a grin, enchanted by some vison.
You intuit what they’re experiencing. The pressure in your head changes. Your nipples stiffen. Warmth suffuses your belly. The harsh dimness of the lounge softens as your mind softens. Your tumor responds to the siren call. That insensate malignancy wants to enter the blonde.
Poe: “—in your mind, Ann!” The puppet’s voice cuts through the drone of your colliding thoughts.
It is enough to snap you back to earth. Around the room, glasses and cups shatter. Cutlery and fragments of porcelain levitate and drift in counterclockwise spirals. The floor trembles. A low rumble begins in the earth.
You rise and snatch Poe and stride toward the entrance. Bob and his two bimbos are between you and the door. The blonde manipulates the dummy, or maybe the other way around. The brunette rises to block the way. She’s as pretty as a rabid fox. You palmed the atomizer in your left hand. She’s wearing sunglasses, but her nostrils flare when you jam the nozzle in her face. She sits again, with alacrity. Good girl.
Ten steps gets you inside your car and the doors locked. As the key turns, you sense a malevolent presence traveling through the wires. You exert your will. The engine fires on the first try.
You: “Ed, what do I win if I get you back to civilization?” You drive across a concrete divider and smash through a ditch onto the road. Your mother raced Baja in the late ’70s. She taught you how to handle a car.
Poe: “A tattoo of a shrike somewhere inconspicuous and the satisfaction of a job well done.”
Ninety degree left, and you sideswipe a street sign. The passenger window cracks. Needle pegs eighty-five.
You: “Satisfaction, huh? Well, I always meant to get a tat before I died.”
Poe: “Your girls think I know details about the enemy. They’re wrong. Bob can’t be stopped. Bob’s master can’t be stopped. I can’t save any of you. I’m sorry, Annabel. I’m sorry it’s going to eat us.”
You: “The dummy isn’t going to eat us.”
Poe: “Bob isn’t a dummy. Bob is a shell that contains awfulness.”
You locate the last burner phone and dial Lochinvar. Ring, ring, ring. You attempt to project your mind’s eye three thousand miles east where your comrades doubtless gather at the Nest. Two problems—first, serious meditative concentration is difficult under these circumstances; second, poisonous psychic vapors roil around the car. You own personal acid rain cloud, courtesy of the dummy and its girls.
Full tank of gas, mountains on every side. You’re traveling through a valley, perhaps the original Valley of Death the Good Book made famous. Inside an hour this surface road will intersect a major highway and from there it’s three hundred and twenty miles to Anchorage. At the moment, those times and distances feel as if you’re in a space capsule plotting a course for Alpha Centauri. Long, long way and the landscape creeps by too slowly.
You make it another seventeen miles.
Kiss of the Psychopomp
Every light and dial on the dashboard goes bonkers. A whisper tickles your inner ear. Marilyn Monroe speaking from the grave? Guttural and alluring and incomprehensible, although the sense of threat is plain, the voice initmates you should pull over before it’s too late. This is why the Old Woman sent you. She’d known the tricks the enemy would deploy. The other Shrikes possess a capacity for violence that dwarfs your own. You’re a thrill-seeker, not a killer. Yet, you are the only one who can access the Black Kaleidoscope, and that is the ace of spades in your back pocket.
The devil’s breath is hot in your mind, but you push the whisper aside and block the image of a giant silver figure striding across the hills to squash the car into a blob. You also block corresponding images of everyone you’ve ever loved dying hideous deaths, of the Earth blackening as a leaf blackens in a flame.
Your enemies decide there are other ways to skin a cat, obviously.
The radiator boils over. You forge ahead in a cloud of steam and smoke. The trunk springs open, then shears away and bounces on the pavement. The rear passenger door goes next. The rear passenger tire blows and you do some fancy steering to keep from wrecking. You know it’s over but for the crying.
So does Poe. The puppet moans prayers in what you guess to be Old English.
A metallic glint appears in the rearview and begins to chew the gap; it’s a black Lincoln roaring at one hundred and twenty, easy. Late ’80s model. Heavy as a tank. Intuition suggests the blonde is driving, sneering as she closes the distance.
That last high-speed pursuit in Spain is on your mind. It didn’t end well. They seldom do. You grit your teeth and spin the wheel until the other vehicle is in the bull’s-eye of your hood ornament.
You: “Guess what, bitches? I’m the last person on Earth you want to play chicken with.” You drift into the left lane and gradually press the pedal to floor. Euphoria, better than any dope, carries you away in the split instant that the enemy driver loses her nerve and tries to veer aside and your bumper annihilates everything in its path.
Hell of a crackup. The airbag does its thing, although there’s a lot of blood leaking through your pants leg and from your busted nose. Your
car lands in the ditch. It’s totaled. You escape the wreckage, Poe tucked under your arm like a football. The black sedan has flown off the road and flipped onto its roof near a deserted T intersection. Pieces of metal and glass are scattered along the road.
Poe: “Run run run.” It chants in a monotone. “Run, your sister is not far ahead.”
Flight is not an option. You’re light-headed from blood loss. You hobble to the centerline and take a stand. High noon without a six-shooter. Mace’s knife is strapped to your ankle. The thought of bending to draw the blade wearies you. You’ve misplaced your purse and the atomizer. A tiny part of you dares hope someone will drive by and report this clusterfuck to the cops. Waves of psychic static break against the bulwark you’ve raised to protect your will. Animals within the radius of that emanation are curled whimpering their burrows; any human approaching within a mile is sure to find themselves parked and missing a block of time. Whatever Bob and its bimbos are, they’ve cleared the decks to ensure this is a private affair. It’s down to you and a maimed puppet here at the crossroads.
The driver door crushes outward until it clangs wide. The blonde unfolds (you think of her as Betty) and shuffles toward you. Same routine on the other side, and here comes the brunette (Veronica). They stand shoulder to shoulder, twenty feet from where you and Poe grimly await what must transpire.
Their dresses are perfect—the blonde in black, the brunette in white, neither so much as smudged. Dresses perfect, hair un-mussed, the duet did not escape unscathed. Their sunglasses are lost. Both women are lacerated and bruised. The blonde’s left leg is shattered. Bones protrude. The brunette’s lower jaw hangs by bloody strands. She sways as her comrade sways and that gory jaw is a slow-arcing pendulum across her chest.
This should surprise and horrify you. You chuckle and maybe that’s the same.
The Brunette: Leave the puppet, Ms. Gamma. Her whisper scratches at your brain. She winks. Don’t make him come out of the car.
The Blonde: “Leave the puppet, Ms. Gamma.” Chipper as hell.
Bob (muffled): Give me the puppet, Mizz Gamma. Give. It murmurs these sweet nothings into your other ear in the blonde’s voice except accompanied by a split-second image of a thorn tree upon a blasted field beneath a carnivorous red sky. Many severed heads dangle from the tree, their many mouths dripping crimson pulp, the hideous red light of the sky reflecting in their eyes.
The offer is tempting. Hand over Poe, turn away, and limp across the tundra toward the sun that never completely sets during this time of season. Demonic smirks to the contrary, possibly the Muppet sisters are on the level and you’ll actually go free. Your mother didn’t raise a sucker and it doesn’t matter. Walking away is a fantasy. In a few seconds you’ll keel over like road kill. Suck it up, Gamma, this is your moment of truth. You’re standing in the fire.
You: “Poe, this is the end of the road, I fear.”
Poe: “Gamma, don’t. I was born in a studio in New York City in 1929. My father was a carpenter. He emigrated from Poland. He had many children and grandchildren. I was the only marionette he created. His daughter carved Bob in 1970.”
You allow Poe to slip from your hand. The puppet goes quiet. Its expression is inanimate. There is nothing of your sister nor yourself within the eroded face, nothing of life in the tangle of disjointed limbs. Still, a pang shoots through you as your boot descends on the puppet’s cranium. You stomp twice, to be certain. Murdering the final vestige of your childhood, or brutally putting it out of its misery. Either way, the act drains most of what’s left in your tank. You crumple and your pose isn’t much different from the ruined marionette.
The women exchange a glance. The blonde covers her mouth. Her grin slides past her fingers. The brunette makes claws of her gloved hands and rakes her hair. Hanks tear free and she gesticulates. She hisses and burbles. It dawns upon you that they approve of your choice.
The Blonde: “There are mistakes, then there are colossal, life-altering blunders.” She lowers her arm to reveal a cold, dead expression. “Guess which one you have made?” She gestures at her partner.
The brunette walks to the upended car. She crouches and disappears inside. You think, how phallic, how quiet it is without Poe’s company. You wish you weren’t falling asleep. Seconds pass. The sky shifts magenta; swaths are rapidly melted through by undulating cigarette burns. Your hands are magenta and covered in amoeba shadows. Your vision grows fuzzy. You rest your head on the centerline, watch the stripe stretch into the magenta gloaming. The asphalt is as soft as that goose-down pillow you had as a kid.
You mistake the screams for a siren. Soon, the screams end and a figure slithers from the wreckage. The figure reflects the colors of this subarctic wasteland and hurts to gaze upon. It expands and contracts, dragging itself across the road to where you are pawing, too late, for the commando knife. The brunette follows closely.
Bob is missing parts; its mantle is perfect. Bob is coming for you with what it’s got. The dummy is no longer a dummy, it has evolved into something old and unspeakable to match its skinned and boiled visage. Right arm torn off in the crash, the sinuous left works fine to lever itself over your body until its sucker lips are poised near your own. You fight. The blonde and brunette step on your wrists.
The Blonde: “Inoperable isn’t an obstacle for Bob. He’ll fix you, good as new. Ever had psychic surgery, little girl? Get ready.”
Bob: “My brother iz spared the worzt. Worzt.” Fingers grip your chin and tilt your head. “Inside you iz what I really want. Want. Alwayz wanted you, Mizz Gamma. Gamma. Iz why we brought you here. Here. Away from your nest. Nest.”
Its mouth opens like an iris and a blood-slick tendril uncoils and descends and penetrates the corner of your eye. Bob licks your right eye out of the socket, crushes and devours that mashed red grape. Magenta brightens and incandesces in a blast of white phosphorous.
Your mind leaps from your thrashing self, breaching sunward. Gravity seizes you, drags you backward. Voices call to one another from the distance, Inbound, weapons hot.
—Too late, goddamnit.
—Ninety seconds. She’s alive.
—Remember, concentrated fire on the visitor. Burn him down, everybody survives.
—If the dampeners hold. If she’s alive.
—Cut the chatter. Eighty seconds.
A wave of screeching static overwhelms your fleeting escape and you plummet to earth.
The wriggling, piercing tongue burrows. The real delicacy is your faithful tumor, uprooted and teased into daylight and sucked segment by necrotic segment into an eager maw. The dummy whipsaws its head, attacking the extrusion of malignant flesh as if it were a string of saltwater taffy. At last the tumor pops free and is devoured. Bob relaxes its death grip on your jaw and your skull bounces on the pavement.
Bob: “Fear. Guilt. Pain. Ecstazy. Your strength. Your weaknez. Manifezt in cannibal organizm. Thank you, Mizz Gamma. Thank.”
You aren’t fully conscious for this experience. Unfortunately, the Black Kaleidoscope spins wildly of its own volition and you witness these horrors from multiple perspectives.
The blonde lifts Bob into her arms and cradles the dummy with mechanical tenderness. The brunette extends her index finger and examines the long, sharp nail. She smiles and leans toward you, and her torso disintegrates and the rest of her is batted away. The blonde says something to Bob. The dummy is sated and sluggish and too slow to respond.
The blonde inhales to scream. Bob’s mouth dilates. Several laser dots flicker against their bodies, then those bodies are shredded to sawdust and a mist of scorched blood.
A half-track clatters through the hills and rolls up. Sloan is on the .50 caliber gun. Norse and Lochinvar emerge. The women are clad in jumpsuits and headsets. Lochinvar carries a heavy rifle with a scope. She inspects the remains and nods with satisfaction. Apparently, this is a triple-cross. The dummy and its entourage were the targets all along—the Black Kaleidoscope confirms this, a day late and a dolla
r short, alas. You’d applaud Lochinvar’s ruthlessness if you could muster the strength to raise your voice.
Norse presses her cheek against yours. She smells of grief and adrenaline, but she hasn’t shed a tear. She says she’s got you, that it’s over. You laugh because you know the secret. It’s always only beginning, always only transforming into something worse.
Shrikes
There’s a video locked inside the Diebold gun safe. The video features various Shrike women in candid shots. An off-camera voice greets each woman by name and asks, “Why? Why have you come here? Why have you pledged yourself to Mrs. Shrike?”
You: Pale from months in the cell, scrawny, apprehensive. You wince and rub your temple. Pain radiates from your eyes. “Time is short. I want to make amends. Redemption? Yeah, sure.”
Liz Lochinvar: Surrounded by evergreens, her nose broken and bloodied. Her left forearm is slashed vertically to the crook of her elbow. Exposed metal glistens within the wound. A broadsword rests across her thighs. “Revenge. Man.”
Robin Sloan: Luxuriating in the Jacuzzi, fine as a movie starlet in her string bikini and sunglasses. She raises her left fist to reveal raw and swollen knuckles. “I pulverize cinderblocks with my bare hands. Mrs. Shrike lets me pulverize faces. Boom!”
Indra Norse: Leaning against the hood of a ’68 Mustang. Her jumpsuit is crimson. “Because there’s a war on. It’s as tiny and savage as colonies of insects going at it. I’d rather not be on the side that gets annihilated. But yeah, we’re gonna lose. Wanna fuck?”
Jessica Mace: Bruised cheek, blazing eyes, wild hair, torn jacket. A car is on fire in the background. Instead of speaking, she takes a long, insolent swig from the neck of a whiskey bottle. Her glare holds until the video cuts to black.
Acknowledgments
Many people figure into the creation of a book, and no list is ever complete. But with that in mind, I’d like to single out a few people who have helped make this book—and other Word Horde books—possible: