New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  The bartender stood in the doorway of the tavern. I waved at her and the kid whose jaw I’d certainly broken chucked a loose piece of concrete at me and it caromed off my temple. I was still flattened on the ground trying to shake free of the red haze as Cougar-cap wrapped himself around Dane’s leg and bit him in the thigh. Somebody’s boot thumped my left butt cheek. Victor came swooping in and snatched up the concrete chunk and hurled it, chasing away whomever was trying to punt my ass up around my shoulders. He helped me to my feet, and in the nick of time—Glenn went to the Land Rover and rummaged around under the front seat. He came around with a shiny, tiny automatic. Me and Victor got hold of him and I took the pistol away and stuck it in my pocket. Meanwhile, Dane elbowed poor Cougar-cap (the cap had flown off long since) on the crown of his skull until the frat boy stopped gnawing his leg and curled into a fetal position. The rest—the ones still ambulatory—had fled at the appearance of the gun.

  “Jesus jumping Christ!” Victor said. “We gotta bail before the heat gets here and guns us down like dogs!”

  “Shit, where’d you get the piece? Do you even have a permit?” I said to Glenn.

  His eyes were wild. “That time those gang-bangers cornered us on the bus in Rainier,” he said. “I went to a pawn shop the next day.”

  I said, “Oh, for the love of . . . nothing happened. They were just screwing with us.” It scared and hurt me he’d gone to such an extreme and then successfully kept a secret for this long. The bus incident was two years gone and I’d not suspected it affected him so deeply. This trip was proving to be painfully educational.

  He looked away. “Not going to ever take chances again. Say what you like.”

  I wanted to grab his collar and shake some sense into him. Things were moving too fast, my emotional equilibrium, my sense of security in our private little world together, was sliding from under my feet.

  “So long, fuckers!” Dane said, vaunting as Achilles had after wreaking havoc among his foes before the walls of Troy. He stomped Cougar-cap’s splayed hand.

  We piled into the truck. I shouldn’t have been driving with what was a probable concussion and all the blood dripping into my eyes, but nobody else volunteered. I smoked rubber.

  9.

  I pulled into a Rite Aid and killed the engine. Victor was the only one of us who didn’t look as if somebody had dumped a bucket of pig’s blood over his head. He ran in and bought bandages, dental floss, cotton balls, Ibuprofen, medicinal alcohol, and two cases of Natty Ice.

  Dane draped a towel over his face and it turned red. “Now this takes me back to the good ol’ days,” he said. His voice sounded nasally because his nose was smashed to a pulp.

  “We should get to an emergency room,” Glenn said. His eye was blackened and he’d ruined his shirt on the asphalt. Otherwise, he’d escaped the battle relatively unscathed.

  He checked my scalp. The bleeding had mostly stopped. My left arm was swollen and purple from where the golf club had caught me. Sharp pains radiated from my instep. I figured it got stepped on in the confusion. “No hospital,” I said. “If the cops are looking for us, we’ll get nailed. Dane, I hope to God you didn’t pay with a credit card back there.”

  “What? No, man, I paid cash. I always pay cash if I think there’s gonna be a rumble.”

  “You thought there was going to be a fight?”

  “Actually, I knew there’d be one. I decided to beat the hell out of those punks the minute we walked in. They rubbed me the wrong way.”

  “That lady bartender probably got our plates anyhow,” Victor said. He cracked beers and handed them around. “Oh, man. Warm Natty sucks. Might as well gimme a can of watery cream corn,” Dane said.

  “Guess if you’re going to keep tangling with gangs of frat boys half your age you’d best cultivate a taste for creamed food in general, eh?” I said.

  He hissed in pain. “Yep, yep. Busted tooth. One of those assholes knocked it loose and I just swallowed the damn thing. Ha, Glenn tell you about the bikers we thrashed at a Willie Nelson concert? That’s why I’ve got so much gold in my grill.”

  “Willie Nelson?”

  “Everybody loves Willie,” Glenn said. “Vicky, are you serious? You going to stitch the Danester’s scalp with dental floss?”

  Victor poured a capful of alcohol across a needle. “I can do it. Willem says no hospital. I am confident Hagar the Horrible is with Willem on this one—right sweetie?”

  “Right,” Dane said in his rusty, honking voice. “Besides, we still got some camping to do. That park is what, an hour from here? Let’s make ourselves scarce in case Johnny Law comes round.”

  Glenn said, “Look, boys. I’m not exactly high on roughing it in the boonies at the moment. I think we should get back to Seattle and soak away our misery in the hot tub. Willem?”

  The adrenaline hadn’t completely worn off, nor the rush from the sense of admiration I’d received from my comrades. I wasn’t about to let Dane out-tough me. “I’m game for the park. Another case of beer and some ice for the cooler and we’re good to go.”

  Glenn took my face in his hands. He said in a whisper, “You look like you got hit in the head with a rock, my dear.”

  “Is that what it was?” I said.

  He kissed my nose. “You are such a Billy badass.”

  “Yee-haw!” I cheered sotto voce.

  Victor finished stitching Dane’s lacerated scalp. He washed his hands in the alcohol, then returned to the store for bags of ice and more beer.

  I drove east from Sequim along the Old Mystery Mountain Highway, a two-lane blacktop in major decline. It carried us up from the valley floor into big timber along the flank of Mystery Mountain. I dodged potholes while keeping an eye on the rearview mirror for police flashers. Occasionally, deer froze in the sweep of the headlights, eyes glittering from the brush and ferns at the road’s edge. I’d expected heavy July traffic, but there weren’t any other cars in sight.

  Glenn said, “Jeepers, kinda creepy through here, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, Fred,” Victor said. “You should paint the pimp-mobile green and slap a flower on the door.”

  “Don’t forget to recruit a hot, clueless Catholic school dropout and a not-so-hot dyke,” Dane said.

  But Glenn was right—the woods were spooky. Mist thickened and clung to the bushes. Cold air rushed across my feet. I turned on the heater. Glenn explained that this road once served as the main access for several towns. A railroad line ran parallel, lost somewhere in the dark. A lot of timber was hacked down in the days of yore, although from my vantage the wilderness had recovered and then some.

  Glenn unfolded a road atlas and studied it by flashlight. Victor told the story about the couple driving through woods—just like these!—while a radio broadcast reports the escape of inmates from a local asylum. Of course the car breaks down and the boyfriend leaves his girl locked up while he goes for help and all through the night she hears noises. She cowers on the floorboard as someone tries the door handles. The wind rises and branches scrape the roof. She wakes in broad daylight to the police rapping on the window. Upon exiting the car she glances back and witnesses her boyfriend hanging upside down from a tree limb, his bloody fingernails scratching the roof as his corpse sways in the breeze . . .

  “No asylums in these parts,” I said. “On the other hand, there might be ghouls and goblins. The Klallam spoke of demons that dwelt among the trees and in the earth. The white pioneers sure came to believe some of the tales.” I’d read about this and other eerie factoids in the guide. Victor pressed another beer into my hand. Even though I didn’t dare lift my gaze from the twisting road, I felt my companions’ attention focused on me. This convinced me Victor wasn’t kidding when he said they were all way into the supernatural during college. Were circumstances otherwise I would’ve changed the subject, but I felt like a piece of meat tenderized by a mallet; the fight had drained from me, replaced by the fatalistic urge to confess or pontificate, which was an indicator I’
d breached my alcohol threshold.

  To distract myself from the excruciating pain in my foot, arm, and skull, I dredged up my research from the pages of The Black Guide and explained how, according to local legends, diabolical spirits lurked in fissures and caverns of the mountains and the rivers and lakes and assumed the guise of loved ones, or beautiful strangers, and lured hunters and fishermen to their doom. There was even a tale of the Slango logging camp that vanished during the 1920s. The spirits seized unwary men and dragged them into the depths and feasted upon them, or worse. Victor wondered what “worse” meant. I assumed worse meant torture or transformation. The demons might lobotomize their victims and change them into something inhuman. As it was a cautionary branch of native mythology, it was doubtless left vague as storytellers couldn’t hope to match whatever horrors were conjured by the imaginations of their audiences. “Maybe the monsters enslave the ones they don’t eat,” Victor said in a half-serious manner. I flashed to dead Tom lying in an unmarked tomb and wondered if Victor was sharing that unwholesome thought. I drained my beer and gestured for another.

  “Now I really, really want to go camping,” Glenn said. “The turn should be on the right. Another three miles or so.”

  Victor screamed and I almost swerved the Land Rover into the ditch. Considering the size of the trees, we would’ve likely been squashed like a can of soup under a steamroller. Glenn and Dane yelled at Victor for almost making them pee their pants. I didn’t say anything; I glimpsed his expression in the rearview. His eyes were shiny as quarters in Glenn’s flashlight beam.

  “Dude, what was that?” Dane said. “Willem almost hit a deer? Spider climb into your shorts? What?”

  “Sorry, guys. I looked back to the storage compartment and something moved.”

  “WTF? One of those native American bogeymen of Willem’s? It have red eyes?”

  “Yeah. Bright red as the Devil. That’s why I yelled.”

  “You didn’t yell, you screamed.”

  “Because a black form moved in the back of the truck and its eyes glowed. Course I screamed. Diabolical Disney cartoon shit going down, I’m giving a shout-out. Just Glenn’s coat, though. Headlight’s reflected off the mile marker must’ve lit up the tape on the sleeves.”

  “Glad that’s solved and we aren’t parked inside one of these ginormous cedars.”

  I almost pulled over and asked Glenn to drive. Victor’s cry had shaken me and the mist was screwing with my vision, because as I considered Victor’s explanation, shadows slipped among the shrubbery a few yards ahead. Smaller than deer, and lower to the ground. I counted three of these jittery, fast-moving shapes before they melted into the greater darkness. Coyotes? Dogs? My febrile imagination powered by dopamine, a fistful of Ibuprofen, and God knew how many beers? The heavy, ponderous vehicle seemed fragile now, and I imagined how it must appear from above—a lonely speck trundling through an immense forest. Mild vertigo hit me, and the vehicle swayed just enough to cause an intake of breath from Glenn. I clamped my jaw and rallied.

  Thick branches obscured the Mystery Mountain Campground signpost, but I saw it in time and braked hard and swung into a gravel lane. I proceeded a hundred yards to the darkened ranger shack. A carved wooden sign read CAMPGROUND FULL. A few lights glimmered through the trees. A Winnebago was the closest vehicle. Its occupants, a family of four dressed in identical bright orange shirts, clustered around a meager fire roasting hotdogs. “Argh—we forgot the bloody marshmallows,” Victor said.

  “Maybe it’s for the best there’s no room at the inn,” Glenn said. “The rangers might be on the lookout for us too.” Victor said, ”Aw, who cares. What now?”

  The road forked: the paved section veered to the right and into the campground. The leftward path was unpaved and led into the boonies. If The Black Guide was accurate, this was the southern terminus of a logging road network that crisscrossed the mountains. The Kalamov Dolmen lay at the end of a footpath a few miles ahead. I said, “Two-thirds of a tank. I say we cruise up the trail and find a place to bivouac.” The others agreed and I eased the rig along the washboard lane. It climbed and climbed. Brush closed in tight and lashed the windows.

  A hillside rose steeply to my left. The hillside was covered in uprooted trees and rocks and boulders. A few of the rocks had tumbled loose and lay scattered in the path. I picked my way through them; some were the size of bowling balls. Victor and Glenn warned me to hug the left-hand side of the road as they were looking at a precipitous drop. I glanced over at the tops of trees below us, a phantom picket floating in an abyss. Erosion and debris narrowed the lane until the Land Rover had perhaps a foot to spare between its wheels and the cliff. I halted and shut off the engine and engaged the parking brake. I asked Victor to get my rucksack from behind his seat and hand me the humidor in the belly pouch.

  “Oh, snap,” Victor said. “Honduran?”

  “Nicaraguan,” I said. “Be a love and snip one for me. Glenn, that bottle of Scotch still in the glove box?” He knew better than to say a word. He rummaged through the compartment, retrieved the quarter bottle of Laphroaig, and popped the cap. I had a slug of whisky, then accepted the cigar from Victor and got it burning with Victor’s lighter. The sweet, harsh taste filled my mouth and lungs, sent a rush of energy through me. I exhaled and watched the smoke curl against the windshield. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the tick of cooling metal and Dane’s wet breathing. “I saved these for a special occasion. A wedding, a funeral, a conjugal visit. But, hell . . . no better time for Scotch and cigars than right before you roll your rusted-out Land Rover over a two-hundred foot cliff. You boys help yourselves.” Glenn and Victor lighted cigars.

  Dane said no thanks and held the towel to his face again. He said, “You up to this, Willem?”

  Glenn said, “He’s got it handled. He drove transports in the Army.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize you’d been in the military,” Dane said. “Thanks a lot, Glenn.”

  Glenn shrugged. “He doesn’t like to spread it around. So I don’t.”

  “Hell, man. Thanks for all you guys do.” Dane roused himself and leaned over and patted my shoulder. “Were you in Iraq?”

  “Yugoslavia. They stationed me in Kosovo for a year. And no, I didn’t shoot anybody. I drove transports.” We sat like that for a while. Finally, I drained the Scotch and threw the bottle on the floorboard at Glenn’s feet. I turned the key and pegged it.

  10.

  Eventually the grade leveled and swung away from the cliff. I parked in the middle of the road near a stand of fir trees. We pitched the tent by headlight beam, unrolled our sleeping bags, and collapsed.

  “Wait,” Glenn said. “We need to make a bargain.” He sounded strange, but it’d been a strange day. My heart beat faster. Dane and Victor kept quiet and that chilled me somehow, lending weight to the word bargain. These guys knew from bargains, didn’t they? Glenn said, “Look, after what happened in town . . . maybe we’ll get lucky and nobody will press charges. But, wow, Dane. You might’ve ruined a couple of those guys.”

  “I hope I smashed their guts out.”

  “Be serious.” The edge in Glenn’s voice surprised me. I wished I could see his face. “I’m not asking for anything heavy. Let’s just promise to see this through, okay? Will, I’m so proud of you. We were going to tuck our tails and go yipping home. Thanks for showing grit. The plan was to camp out a couple of nights and see the dolmen. That’s what we should do. Tommy would approve.” The mention of dead Tom gave me the creeps and it reminded me how hurt I was that Glenn still hadn’t confided the truth to me. Mostly, though, it gave me the creeps. Dane and Victor muttered acquiescence to Glenn’s rather nebulous charge and we did the hand over hand thing, like a sports team. It was all awkward and phony, yet deadly serious in a Boy Scout way, and I squirmed and went along.

  Right before we fell asleep, I pulled him close and murmured, “We’re going to talk about the gun when we get home.” He kissed me and put his cheek against my chest.
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  I dreamt horror show dreams and woke panicked, Glenn mumbling into my ear, sunlight blazing through the mesh of the tent flap. I crawled outside and vomited. My skull felt as if a football team had taken turns stomping it with cleats. I couldn’t make a fist with my left hand. From wrist to elbow, my arm was puffed like a black and purple sausage. The possibility I might have a hairline fracture further soured my mood.

  “Man alive, I thought a bear was ralphing in the blueberry bushes,” Dane said. His face resembled a bowl of mashed potatoes with the skins still on. He hunched on a log near the cold fire pit. The end of the log was charred to a point. I started to laugh and puked again. I worried my nausea might be due to a cerebral hematoma rather than a hangover, but it was pointless to follow that line of thought. Until I could find a loop, intersection, or wide spot in the road, we were committed to this rustic interlude of the vacation. No way was I man enough to back the truck down to the campground.

  Glenn and Victor emerged from the lair. Glenn didn’t look nearly as bad as Dane, but his black eye was impressive and he limped and complained about pissing blood. Dane told him pissing blood was a rite of passage (then corrected it as “pissage” to some effect). I broke out the propane camp stove and boiled water for coffee and instant oatmeal. Dane poured two fingers of Schnapps from his hip flask over his oatmeal and I almost barfed again. He grinned at us, and I saw that yes, indeed, he’d lost a tooth during the skirmish. His lip was fat and blistered and Victor tenderly dabbed it with a napkin as they huddled together and shared a mug of coffee.

  Glenn spread the Triple-A roadmap of Washington State on the ground and weighed down the corners with rocks. “We’re in this general vicinity.” He poked the map with a dead stick. “Unfortunately, the area is represented as a green blob. No roads, nothing. Green blobbiness, and more green blobbiness. Willem?”